Finding What Works for You
On Thanksgiving, I found myself having a conversation about diet and dieting with my wife’s parents while she was in the kitchen cooking. I know oftentimes, people will try to connect with me through exercise and diet because of my job and it’s a large part of who I am.
They mentioned a book/website that they’d found to help them lose weight and manage blood sugar levels. One of them developed Type 2 Diabetes and has been working on that for a few years. They were describing the diet and all of its amazing features, including surprisingly delicious recipes. Facets of it they found hard to hear about but actually pretty easy to do in practice.
Common Themes in Diets
Honestly, the diet sounded like any diet you’d find on the bookshelf. They really all are the same thing:
- Eat more protein
- Eat less overall
- Eat more vegetables/colors (to fill up the space missed by the former excess calories)
- Drink water
- Move more
- Eat healthy fats
Reflecting on Dieting Trends
I found myself thinking of a book I read over the last summer, “Just Eat” by Barry Estabrook. A quick synopsis of it is this: there are three main kinds of diets—low/no fat, low/no carb, and calorie restricted. That’s it! It blows my mind really when I think about it. Everything else is just the paint on top—the marketing that attracts people.
Marketing and Cynicism
Of course, these two things (thinking of my in-laws’ diet and the book I read) set my cynical fire going. A part of me was incensed that people will fall for any fancy-sounding title with neat pictures and some lean person smiling on the cover. Another part of me was jealous that I haven’t been able to do something similar, that I haven’t been able to market some kind of program and make money off of it. Then the defensive part of me saying I’m more pure than that lit up and on and on it went (I didn’t say any of this out loud, of course—it hasn’t been long enough for me to go full-fledged redneck in-law yet).
Realization and Acceptance
But later, as we were finishing up Emily’s pumpkin pie, I realized something. Her parents were happy with what they were doing. It worked for them and blessedly they were able to stick to it. All these other types of diets were for different people. Each person needs their own way to go about it and that’s okay. So what if it’s just the same thing packaged differently? Isn’t that what personal training is? Exercise marketed and delivered uniquely from one person to another? Exercise is just exercise. Dieting is just diet. So it clicked—they had found the perfect diet. The perfect diet for them.
If you find a diet that fits you perfectly and it works, then awesome. Don’t let it go! The perfect diet is just like the perfect partner—it’s hard to find and you have to make it work. If you don’t know where to start, though, just follow the same simple advice they all have that I listed above. Paint your own colors and marketing from there and you’ll be set!