The No-Fad Diet

Our biggest dietary problem has little to do with fat, sugar, FritoLay, or Dr. Oz (although all of those players do contribute in one way or another). No, our most significant obstacle to eating better is human nature. All of us dream of something easy and quick, which requires little thought or effort and doesn’t take much money or sacrifice. And that’s why diet books will always have a place on the year’s best seller list. But that’s also why very few of them will have much of an impact on any of us.

That’s not to say there isn’t much good information in these diet books, as well as healthy recipes—there is. It’s the problem with most fitness plans we initially discussed that keeps cropping up: These books give you a single path to redemption, thus implying you should feel like a miserable sinner when you can’t make their vision work successfully. Maybe eventually there will be enough books so every person in the world can find an exact fit which will lead to an Eden of ripped humans frolicking to a lithe old age with all of their faculties intact.

But for now at least, it doesn’t work that way: Most of us won’t be able to make the grapefruit cleanse, non-carb, gluten-free, paleo, green coffee bean diet work as well and certainly not as easily as our friendly celebrity authors or talk show hosts would have us believe. We’ll tire of the procedures, the lack of choices, the taste, the hassle, the expense, and/or the extra time our new regime requires. We’ll lapse for a day and then wonder why we even started this self-inflicted pain in the first place. Even if we can do relatively well for a time, there will always be Circes lurking outside our doors, waiting for us to leave the house.

America’s highways and byways are teeming with fast-food places, and they’re always coming up with a new angle to lure you in. Panera, Subway, Chipotle, and Starbucks all do provide ways to eat pretty well if you navigate their menus with the frenzy of a downhill skier who knows he’s a second behind halfway down the mountain—it can be done, but odds are you’re going down. For every well-thought out choice you will have to fight off about a thousand (conservative estimate) urges to go for the wonderfully awful choice that would taste so good. Many times, you won’t be able to tell for sure exactly what you’re getting, be it calories, sodium, fat, and/or sugar content. But, what the hell, you’re only eating out this one meal today—who’s to know?

Plus the delicious junk food in the grocery store has never been cheaper, either. Enter most Aldis in the area, and you will be assaulted by ridiculously inexpensive yet by no means horrible-tasting varieties of pure nutritional nihilism. I would argue that for sheer greasy, fake-cheesy, salty, artery-clogging taste thrills, it’s tough to beat the 99-cent wonder that is Clancy’s Cheese Puffs. You can spend three…four times as much and not feel any guiltier when you’ve inhaled the last one. And if Aldi’s cut-rate prices and quality mouth feel weren’t bad enough, you have to run the gauntlet of these temptresses (on your left in my Aldi) immediately upon entering the store, and then one more time in large economy sizes in the last aisle you go down before checking out (right across from the glass doors of the frozen section). One trip for some cheap canned pineapple can destroy even the most ardent dieter’s will.

Then there are co-workers. If you work in an office with multiple desks in it, ala The Office, Dilbert, or just about any school departments’ offices (where I labored for thirty-three years), you will inevitably have various holidays and celebrations (from birthdays to birth days) that will necessitate the dreaded office table spread. Not only will there be things that are bad for you but taste delicious (some of it homemade, for the love of God), but you will have to walk by it every time you move around or leave the office. Of course, it’s all easily grabbed to be either hoarded on your desk for later or chowed on as you walk to your next destination.

So recognize right now that “diet” is what we eat, not for weeks or months, but forever. You will have to figure out a way to have a diet which incorporates some of the unhealthy food you will have every once in a while. Maybe you can lengthen the time between your splurges, but to think that you will never again have sugar cookies or Big Macs or kettle-cooked potato chips or Awesome Blossoms, or linguine alfredo or Twinkies or bacon or…I’d better stop lest I be accused of food pornography and you have to get a cloth to wipe the drool off your computer screen. Every month or so, I’m going to need some chip-like snack on which I gorge myself for a couple of days. But despite such grievous sins, all I have to do is be the best person I can be. Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!

Oops, sorry, my inner-Stuart emerged for a minute. But you will have to be willing to forgive yourself without letting yourself off the hook. Accept the need, acknowledge that it won’t be happening as often as it did before, and do better tomorrow. You need to eat, and sometimes you will eat things simply for taste and fun, health and fitness be damned. Strive for balance, not perfection. We should be able to recognize the difference between the ideal and the practical, once we’ve reached a certain experience level. Getting to that understanding before our ids kill us might be one of the better definitions of maturity I’ve come across. So what if you eat way too much at your friend’s birthday party, your co-workers’ Friday night out, or your family’s Thanksgiving extravaganza? Use the knowledge of when those splurges will occur to seek a higher will-power the day(s) before and after them. The worst part of trying to adjust your lifestyle for the better is using all that resolve to make yourself feel horrible as you eat something you normally enjoy eating immensely. Yeah, nobody ever said humans aren’t really interesting creatures, especially in the way we can make anything a guilty pleasure. (Or is that pleasurable guilt?)

So decide you will do better when you lapse, and deal with the problem as if you were an outside nutritionist, flatly analyzing another client who needs some concrete advice. “Clearly, eight donut holes will not help you toward fitness, my Lord of the Squats. So, next time, stop at two…okay, four. But buck up and be realistic—all those times you ate like the Mongol Horde might have contributed to the spread under which your legs now wobble; however, the truth is that no matter how little you eat in the next twenty-four hours, you can’t lose (or gain, for that matter) forty-five pounds in a day. So stop the useless guilt and either enjoy your splurge for which you will atone tomorrow, or put the pie down gently, and slowly back away from the table.” Yeah, for some people (like me), it helps to be sarcastic when you’re self-talking.

But it’s not being overly optimistic to remind yourself that every day is another opportunity. Whether it’s to succeed or to fail, there will be a new opportunity every damn day. That’s the hard part—that it will never end. But that’s also the good part—hey, it’s only one freaking day, so there’s no point getting too charged up about it one way or another. Acknowledge that you did well when you do, but understand that you want that kind of behavior to become the new norm, not a note-worthy event every time. If it’s commonplace that you’re acting in fit ways, you’ve won, my brother and sister! Enjoy your rut, live long, and prosper.

And eventually your lapses will come at such irregular intervals that you won’t worry about them because you’ll have the last weeks or months as incontrovertible evidence that you can do well, that this one day won’t become four or fourteen in a row. You can even look forward to and plan those “fun” days. It’s not rewarding yourself so much as simply another holiday where the regular routine doesn’t apply. Of course it will tomorrow—just as you resume your normal life after Fourth of July. Nobody really wants to drink beer, eat cheeseburgers, and watch fireworks every night of the year. Well, maybe that’s a bad example for some of us, but you get the idea.

Your diet is what you eat every day, which probably will include some stuff no nutritionist would ever recommend. Recognize that every day is a chance to eat well, eat poorly, or a little of both. As long as that first category continues to garner more and more of the percentage each month, you will be making progress. Drop the melodrama by no longer determining your value as a person based on your success or failure at eating only good foods. Recognize your personal areas of weakness and strategize to control how often you succumb to their charms. Both how often and how much you treat yourself can be adjusted to your health’s favor. Not today? No biggie—Enjoy! It’ll be tomorrow soon enough.