First you eat. Then everything else.

If only losing weight were as simple as food choices. Or not eating at all. Have you ever felt that way?

You know, of course, that dieting works. Until it doesn’t. If you are like most of us, we have been on a gazillion diets. We lose weight. Then, oops, we gain it back. It’s enough to give you a serious case of blahs.

That is why this time of year is so difficult. Resolutions we’ve made to ourselves has us on another proverbial diet. The big advertised ones are not cheap. Coming right after Christmas and a New Year party, January (or February for that matter) are not kind on our tapped-out wallets. But tradition says this is diet season, so we figure out a way to budget it, and go for it. Maybe this time you shouldn’t.

When I was asked to join with The UnDiet Project when they were designing it a year ago, it was a welcome new approach. It’s not a diet. It begins by helping you take care of yourself first. Because if you have things pulling your motivation down, no diet is going to last for long. And you wasted a lot of scarce money on yet another failed attempt to lose weight.

I’ll let The UnDiet Project, (with its daily Life Affirmations, Slimming Family Recipes, and New Views), speak for itself. Go here. But, if like me you are tired of re-gaining lost weight after dieting, you need a new approach, too.

Here is an excerpt…

THE UNDIET PROJECT

The Place for Daily Inspiration.

A daily dose of nourishing information to lift your spirit and control your weight.

In addition to its Slimming Family Recipes and New View articles from authors with unique and personal perspectives on lasting weight loss, The UnDiet Project sends you Daily Life Affirmations. Here is one of them…

LIFE AFFIRMATION 13

Eating is the First Step

“First we eat, then we do everything else.”
(M.F.K. Fischer: America’s pre-eminent food writer, who believed that eating was one of the arts of life — Wikipedia)

What if we lived a different reality? What if food wasn’t where we begin our daily dip into existence, but rather an option?

If food were only a pleasure, not a necessity, what would we eat? Would nothing change in our taste preferences? If you could go three days without eating (and without hunger, in this alternative universe), what would you eat first? What would you never eat, that you eat frequently now? Pause, and think about that for a minute or two, before reading further.

The gap between what we eat to live, and what we actually eat each day, is measured by our weight.

Do you KNOW when you are hungry? Do you KNOW when you’ve reached your daily calorie limit? Do you continue eating past when it’s fully pleasurable? Do you ask yourself, “Am I hungry,” and eat anyway?

Food is survival. Food is love. Food is pleasure. Food is compelling. Food is first, and we build our entire day around it. Some days we hate food (especially when we are on a restrictive diet). Most days, most meals, we just eat out of habit, the choices based on old preferences. We don’t challenge our palate to try new foods because we already know what we like. We are driven to eat what is easily available.

What gets us in trouble, weight wise, is the accumulation of our taste preferences and our daily eating habits. They are killing us with too many extra pounds. So, if we want to change our weight, and do so for the rest of our life, we have to look closely at those habits, those preferences, and honestly see that if we don’t change them in fundamental ways — not in a short term diet, but fundamentally and permanently — it will lead to our early demise (and those last years won’t be much fun).

To change our bodily fate, we need to toss our eating habits in the air, jumble them up, and figure them all out again. We need to jostle our food preferences, and teach our palettes that thin tastes good. We need to experiment. Write down new tastes, new recipes, new meals.

We need to equate right-eating with the joy of living. We don’t need to change it all at once, small changes over time accumulate into success. But we do need to change those two fundamental things: Eating habits, and food preferences. There are other things we need to change to get to a healthy weight, but if we don’t start there, with those two, nothing else will matter.

Or to paraphrase: “First we need to eat right, then we do everything else.”

(Find new, daily inspiring Life Affirmations, plus Daily Fresh Views, and Slimming Family Recipes, with The UnDiet Project.)

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