I have tried most every style of weight loss diet out there. I’m 41 years old, and I’ve been on “diets” since I was, if I remember correctly, 12. Ironically, I was a fairly skinny child, but no matter, my mother’s obsession with weight loss bled over into my life in a lot of unhealthy ways. I honestly consider myself lucky to have avoided an eating disorder such as bulimia, such as I believe Mother suffered from.
But of course, you know the other half of this story: the diets always failed. Or, more accurately, I always went off the diets and gained the weight back plus some. This resulted in tons of guilt for me for failing, backed up by society’s constant admonition that I wouldn’t be fat if I didn’t eat so much. Just stop eating! is the message, so really, how can anyone be surprised that eating disorders are so prevalent? Don’t be ignorant.
But my guilt, I’ve discovered, was misplaced. I did not fail those diets because of lack of willpower, I failed them because I was fucking hungry.
Now, in case you don’t know, being hungry is a message our bodies give us when it needs fuel. Being hungry is not some kind of disorder, nor is it is erroneous information to be ignored. It is, in fact, very serious: it is how our bodies keep us from dying. We did not evolve to exist in a constant state of hunger; that doesn’t even make sense biologically speaking. Even sharks get full and don’t eat for days.
Short version: if you are constantly hungry and then start eating a lot, that’s not failure, that’s natural. It has nothing to do with lack of willpower, and everything to do with biological necessity.
So what I have discovered living by the Paleolithic diet paradigm is that I have a lot of willpower. Grains? GONE. Legumes? GONE. Refined sugar? GONE.
And I don’t mind that. It doesn’t bother me much at all, not in the way I used to get obsessed about foods I couldn’t have or could only have in extremely small portions on “reasonable” low calorie/restrictive diets. Admittedly I’m one of the 80/20 people, so on occasion (SUSHI!) I’ll eat rice, or if a friend fixes something with chickpeas in the soup I’ll dig in like a grateful guest. But the beautiful simplicity here is that I eat until I’m full then stop eating until I get hungry again.
I’ve improved my health and lost 50 pounds by not being hungry.
There was a time I would have considered that impossible, or at least a miracle. Now, though, I see it as natural. My willpower is easy to master when I am cutting out the foods that make me unhealthy, irritable, insomniac and overweight. Those might not be the same foods you need to cut out (if you need to cut any out at all), but for me that was the “magic ticket.” Since I’m rarely hungry, I don’t crave buckets of pasta or endless pizza slices. I rarely crave anything, point of fact.
The solution to health and weight loss isn’t to under-eat for the rest of your life. The solution might be as simple as cutting out something like grains or dairy. You won’t know until you try. And for some reason, I think I can confidently state that most anyone reading this who is overweight has, at one time or a hundred, tried simply “cutting back” as a weight control method…and failed. Because they got hungry, which is not a failure but the body’s natural reaction to being starved.
Why not try something new? Why keep doing the same thing over and over when you know for a plain fact it does not work? Maybe paleo/primal isn’t your answer as it is mine, but I can tell you that “low calorie” diets are not only not the solution, they are part of the problem.
To put it simply: Sustained, constant hunger isn’t healthy, which FFS should not be news to anyone. Willpower isn’t about fighting natural* urges, it is about doing what you need to do to improve and maintain your body and mind.
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*There are, of course, a lot of things that contribute to “food issues” other than hunger, such as depression, mental illness, physical illness, crazy mothers, batshit family members, and an FDA that is completely enslaved to Big Agro and the Diet Industry, but suffice to say, I’m talking about the simple and natural urge to eat when you are hungry.
