Your Keto Journey - Day 85

Day 85 – 

It was another extremely crazy busy day. After grabbing some coffee I quickly packed a lunch and headed out to work. 

I packed some pecans, a couple cheese sticks and a quick salad with some spinach and pumpkin seeds. It wasn’t exciting but it was edible and it was enough to get me through the day.

When I got home I grabbed the leftover salmon and re-heated it and it was just right. 

Peter called and I met him at the Verizon store to upgrade my phone. That took awhile and I headed straight from there to a meeting I had, which of course lasted longer than I expected. 

When I got home I was exhausted and Peter made a comment about how he wised he could have a big glass of milk, but he can’t. Then he said he can’t ever have milk again and I had a meltdown. It was all just too much for me today. I know it was because I was tired, but I came a bit unglued, letting him know that when he says things like that it will cause me to fail on this diet. If I believe that I cant EVER have chips, or milk, or whatever I know that will be too hard for me and it will cause me to fail. 

I made this commitment to 100 days and so far I have been able to keep it, but I am really at the point where I am frustrated at not losing more and getting really tired of the deprivation I feel. This is the greatest challenge with any diet. According to sharecare.com “Diets fail for the very same psychological reasons that cause us to overeat. They are dependent on an unhealthy relationship with eating. In one case we over eat to excess not to meet the physical needs of hunger but to meet the emotional demands of life.”

Obsessing over food is the problem. Either obsessing over it and eating too much or obsessing over it and restricting are both still a problem because it is an unhealthy relationship with food. Research shows that even after losing weight, people often will struggle to keep that weight off. 

There is a great deal of information on why and how diets don’t work. This article in Self magazine was very good. https://www.self.com/story/why-diets-fail

I don’t want everyone to think I am sabotaging my diet or giving up, quite the contrary. I know that when I focus on unhealthy attitudes like restriction of foods, especially when I make fatalistic statements like I can ‘Never have that again” that I am making choices that will absolutely lead to failure. 

I made a commitment to do a “diet” for 100 days and I have just over two weeks left in that commitment, but I still have a lot of weight to lose and more importantly I still need to work on improving my health and fitness level. Once my 100 days are finished I will still need to “incorporate lots of physical activity, be extremely mindful of my diet and hunger cues, and manage stress without relying on food”, as the author of the Self article indicated.  I still do believe that diets do not work, but a commitment to health and choosing healthy practices can work.  Reframing my language and self-talk is the key to success.