Sunday, May 20, 2012
Do I want to live a long life and be miserably hungry, or would I rather eat whatever I want and be fat and happy and enjoy whatever few years I have left? I say that this is NOT the choice we face.
Life, they rightly tell us, is about tradeoffs. We give up one thing to get another thing, and hopefully increase our overall wellbeing in the exchange. Is there pleasure in filling my belly with junk? You betcha. We evolved during a time when calories were scarce, so our bodies are very good at finding, consuming and storing as many as we can. This used to be a good thing, but in our modern day world, it makes us obese. Because of our evolution, when we smell and taste and consume massive amounts of calories we don't need, we get a big dose of chemicals released into our bloodstream that make us feel rewarded. It feels great!
But that good feeling is short-lived and, as we have all experienced, ends up departing the scene and being replaced by bad feelings. Fatigue, dullness, heaviness, guilt, are all going to come, and later still, physical discomfort from carrying far too much fat on our bodies, emotional discomfort about our deteriorating physical attractiveness, and inexorably, the enormous costs arising from bad health, are the longer-term consequences. Fat and happy? Maybe for some, but not for me.
What about lean and hungry? First, let's define "hungry." Let's understand, there's hungry (the physical sensation of running a caloric deficit) and there's HUNGRY (intense feelings of need for food, physical weakness and even pain due to the need to eat). The first one is unavoidable if you want to lose weight because you have to run a deficit, i.e. burn more than you take in, to make your body raid its fat storehouses for the energy it needs. I can tell when this is my situation, although it's difficult to describe the sensation. The key here is, it really doesn't feel bad! I'll obviously get to a point where I don't need to run a deficit anymore, when I'm lean and hard, but my point is, I can live like this for a looooong time. For me, it's a good feeling because I'm reminded that I'm losing fat and getting closer to my goal, I have more energy, and every day I'm feeling the benefits of better health and fitness.
On the other hand, there's HUNGRY, and the fact is, you can't keep feeling this kind of hunger for very long before you will eat. No amount of willpower, except the kind that Gandhi had perhaps, will keep your body away from food for any appreciable length of time. And when you surrender to the urge, you will surrender in a big way by eating the things that are the very worst for you. This is why almost every person who goes on a diet ends up regaining everything they lost and more.
So what's the solution? Find a way of eating and exercising that you can enjoy, not that you have to endure. If you can't stand the method you're trying, you likely won't succeed at it. But if you can enjoy it, it will last and you'll be able to achieve and maintain your goal.
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