Diet Doubts

I'm questioning the helpfulness of maintaining a diet log on this site. On the one hand, it helps keep me on track. Sometimes when I'm faced with the temptation of eating some ghastly sweet treat - like, say, icing, without the cake - I can ask myself, "do you really want to put that in your blog?", and my fear of public humiliation usually helps me refrain from indulging. On the other hand, the issues that come up for me include: (a) privacy: for me, keeping a list of everything I put in my body seems like a remarkably intimate thing to make public; (b) helpfulness: I question how helpful it is to other people interested in losing weight to see a detailed account of what I'm eating day in and day out and whether that's been working for me, considering how differently each person responds to any given diet; and, (c) focus: am I losing focus in this blog by concentrating on diet when, really, the intention was to document my bike-commuting efforts with the hope that weight loss would be one of the benefits of trading in my car for a bike?

Here's what I'm thinking - I felt fine documenting my diet during the week when my diet was relatively predictable, but I suddenly felt a bit self-conscious documenting my weekend eating habits because for whatever reason that felt like more of an invasion of privacy. Perhaps because so much of eating is social, and on the weekends I do most of my eating with my daughter and/or with friends, rather than my weekday eating which is more likely to be either alone or with co-workers at the office, and because of that it started feeling a bit weird.

Further, having been a long-time consumer of diet literature/culture/fads/whatever you want to call it (I've tried vegetarian, vegan, Atkins, South Beach, and everything in between!), I know from my own experience that a diet that might work for one person may be a train wreck for another. For instance, a friend of mine had a great deal of success with the Dr. Bernstein diet, though it was an absolute gong-show for me. When I tried it several years ago, I constantly felt like I was starving (the whole "you don't even feel hungry!" line was complete bullshit to me), within days I grew grey and sallow, and I developed insomnia that has continued to plague me on and off to this day. While weight loss is supposed to be pretty fast and constant on that diet, I lost a bunch of water weight in the first few days and immediately stopped losng weight after that - most likely my body going into starvation mode and holding on to everything it had for dear life. I stuck with it for another week just to be sure, but I didn't lose any more weight, and when I finally did give up on the diet I was so physically and mentally worn out by it I developed what I would later discover was a diagnosable eating disorder (it lasted less than a year but precipitated the remarkable weight gain I've experienced pretty well ever since going off that diet). Clearly, what had worked for my friend was a terrible dieting experience for me that had far-reaching, years-long (maybe even permanent?) consequences.

Hence my fear of documenting the details of my current eating habits. I'm afraid that others may want to try what I'm doing and find that it doesn't help them lose weight, or they can't stick to it because it's unreasonable for them, or that it causes some horrible unforseen consequences like my experience with the Dr. Bernstein diet. The people who profit from the diet industry make their money on convincing people that the diet works, and if it doesn't work for you then you failed somehow, and since I find that sales pitch to be an abhorrent lie, I really don't want to throw my hat into that ring. I will leave you with this advice, though: a healthy diet will never make you feel like you're starving, make you feel guilty for eating certain foods, or leave you craving food groups you are no longer "allowed" to eat. Find what works for you - your body, your likes and your dislikes - and be patient. Nothing will work unless it's something you can stick to over a long period of time - ideally, the rest of your life - and if you can't stick to it, it means the diet failed, not you. And give the ol' one-finger salute to anyone and everyone who tells you otherwise!

Lastly, I really don't want to distract from the reason I started this blog - to track my bike-commuting efforts - and I'm afraid that getting into details about diet will shift the blog more towards a weight-loss story than a bike-commuting story. I believe proper eating is important for maintaining my ability to bike-commute and I imagine eating habits will inevitably come up often enough even if I don't track them daily. However, I think it will be a mistake to let them steal the focus away from the biggest change I'm making - the addition of an hour or more of exercise 5 days a week into my life through bike-commuting.

So, I think it's settled - I'm going to drop the daily diet tracking. As I said, I'm sure diet issues will come up pretty often throughout the next year and I will talk about those in the blog, but I'm afraid that giving a detailed account of my eating habits is too intimate, too distracting, and ultimately unhelpful.

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