The Diet Mentality
How many times have you heard someone talk about how they need to do a bit of exercise to work off a cookie or soda that they ate? If you’re trying to lose weight, be very wary of this mentality. If you find yourself in a position where you’re bartering with yourself, you’ve already lost the war. Your bargaining has turned healthy exercise into a form of punishment by which you can somehow absolve yourself of dietary sins. This notion of temporary suffering leads to thinking of dietary change as a temporary change. In order to maintain weight loss and—even more importantly—be healthy, you’ll need to make consistent healthy choices for the rest of your life.
With the notion of “extra exercise”, you’ve developed a convenient loophole for making consistent unhealthy choices. Making a series of individual unhealthy choices over time is what caused you to become overweight in the first place. If you have a loophole in place, you will likely take it at the first sign of stress or difficulty because that’s what you’ve always done. Habit energy can easily turn your unhealthy loophole right back into an unhealthy and fattening lifestyle.
You also run the risk of falling prey to the deprivation mentality. Good choices don’t somehow earn the ability to make corresponding bad choices. In this regard, the very notion of a “diet” is a broken concept from the start. By setting up a mental state of scarcity and forced deprivation, you create a corresponding expectation of a glorious time when you’ll be able to indulge your neglected desires. It’s okay to eat a cookie or a soda every now and again. For that matter, you could even build a daily cookie into the amount of calories that you allow yourself. Just make sure that you account for it.
Heroic effort is not a sustainable plan. Both weight loss and weight gain are products born out of consistency. Statistically speaking, one data point doesn’t matter. One cheese-laden hamburger doesn’t make you fat, so there’s no direct way to counteract it. One extra burst of exercise won’t tame your waistline. In fact, you’re likely to make yourself so sore and so miserable that you’re that much more likely to skip your regular exercise session in favor of a chocolate shake with whipped cream. Slow and steady does in fact win the race.
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