"But it's not my conscience/That hates to be untrue/I asked of my reflection/Tell me what is there to do?/Tempted by the [food] of another." Squeeze, "Tempted" (Parenthetical courtesy of me)
Nothing is worse than a diet saboteur. I don't care if they do it consciously or subconsciously. I don't care how they do it...they harass you about your lifestyle choices, they needle you about your favorite treat that you can't have anymore (for me, it's a Dunkin' Donuts Coffee Coolatta, with hazelnut, thank you very much), etc. It's flipping hard enough to lose weight and eat healthier without this sort of tomfoolery ensuing.
So imagine how hard it is when a parental unit does it to you?
We're currently staying in tony Boca Raton, FL with my biological father. It's an annual retreat we make to simultaneously visit him and run screaming from winter (Steve and I hate, hate, hate snow and ice). It's in the 70s every day we're here, and the skies are pool blue and the palm trees and grass are a lovely bright green. There's no Seasonal Affective Disorder here and you can work out every day...outside! Steve and I are dropping weight an inches as we walk, swim and work out on our Wii Fit Plus (OK, the latter is indoors, but still....).
The first day we get in from New York, Bio-Dad wants to take us out to dinner. Our choices: an all-you-can-eat experience, or a place with normal portions. We choose the latter and explain why: we're losing weight, we're trying to make better lifestyle choices, blah blah blah. I guess that's all he heard: blah blah blah. Because, well, while he honored our original decision and we ate normal portions that night, without dessert or any extras (with vegetable sides and not french fries, baked beans drowning in syrup, and so on), he's pretty much tone deaf to our weight loss now.
Every day he comes in with food that he bought just for us that he thinks we'll just love...diet-friendly options like pecan pie, "midnight fantasy fudge," chocolate chip cookies and white flour bagels.
Oh, I'm so not making any of this up, including the freaking "midnight fantasy fudge."
ARE YOU SERIOUS?
So we try to explain to him that it's no good to bring in things like that. Doesn't he see what we stuffed in the refrigerator from our bouts of food shopping? Things like organic carrots, organic celery, five grain bread, zucchini squash...you name it. We have no desserts, no typical snack food (if we snack, it's low calorie yogurt and fruit). I mean, what he keeps buying is the antichrist of what we're trying to do. He laughs. "Oh, come on, seriously? You're on vacation!"
We ask him to take the food away (he's staying over his girlfriend's house while we stay over at his home) but he declines. "Enjoy it!" he insists.
The garbage will have to enjoy it, while we fake having eaten it. I hate throwing food away, but we have no choice. We each have our goals to reach, and Steve and I want to look tan, slender and fabulous when we return to New York by March. We're not going to do that if we shellac our thighs with the goddamn midnight fantasy fudge.
The question you have to ask yourself today is this: Who is your fitness/health saboteur? Who's the culprit whenever you make your best effort, for the millionth goddamn time to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and get on the right path to a longer, higher-quality life that doesn't include measurements that you're convinced belong to a Goodyear blimp? You know you don't want to be ashamed of yourself. You know you're tired of looking at pictures of yourself and wincing because you are a distorted reflection of the fly child you used to be. Is it someone external to yourself...a partner? A friend? A co-worker? A family member? Or worse yet...is it YOU? Do YOU make a point of caving in and buying things you know will cause you to backslide? Are YOU the one who tells yourself, it's OK to skip a daily workout, because you'll catch up tomorrow...but tomorrow never comes? Either way, the saboteur's ass needs to be kicked, and you need to tell them that there's a new sheriff in town, and that's that. Otherwise, the cycle of losing continues, and we're not talking losing weight, we're talking about losing the Game of Life.
I promised that I'd get into my supplements today, but dude, you'll have to read about them tomorrow. If I keep going right now, this becomes a book chapter and not a blog. I'm already a quarter of the way done with a book. Wha??? Oh, just stay tuned! ;)
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