What to Eat? Hell, I Don't Know

Honestly, I have no idea, when it comes to eating right. Sometimes, when talking about fitness and nutrition, that's where I feel most at sea.

The reason is simple--in my late 20s I lost 60 or 70 pounds and the truth is, I did it the wrong way. I placed a much stronger emphasis on cutting calories than I did on exercise and I think the error in my ways showed in how I quickly shot back up over the 210 mark after briefly reaching an ideal weight of 175. I didn't make a lifestyle change, I just met a goal. When I realized what I'd done, I had to admit I might not be too smart about eating right.

Have I done better this time around? Yes, in that I've focused closely on exercise, made that the primary way to drop weight. Cardio and strength training combined set up a metabolic engine that burns more calories even at rest than merely eating less.

With nutrition I've played things by ear, sometimes to my detriment.

To make things brief I will volunteer a few key things I have learned in the last couple of years that do seem to work, figuring if this helps even one person it's worth the bother. At least these things have worked for me:

- Don't fast. To many people this seems like good sense, but to an equal number (I bet), fasting may seem crucial to dropping El Bees. I don't think so. Fasting seems to set up a cycle of want that eventually rebounds, causing binge eating. Yes, to lose weight you have to reduce your intake. There's no getting around that. Going without food entirely, however, will only work against your ultimate goal, as it can eventually put the body into emergency mode and lead to plateaus or if you exercise, weakness and worse, like severe blood sugar drops. Those are not fun, I do not recommend them.

- Don't self-torture with gross or bland food. Seriously, I don't know where I got the idea at some point that changing your eating habits meant you had to suffer terrible-tasting or tasteless food, but I sure had that in my head for years and one thing I did right this time was make a conscious decision to eat stuff I like, when I do eat. Luckily I do like some healthy foods a great deal, like yogurt, oatmeal, seafood and a well-made salad. Not all together. I also have a ferocious sweet tooth and deep and abiding love of starchy, grabby food, just like nearly every person I've ever met who struggled with their own weight. That leads to the next point.

- Pay some goddamned attention to labels. Nutrition labels tell you everything you need to know, especially for those beloved grabby foods. I feel like a tool counting out x number of sundried tomato wheat thins till I hit the 140 calorie count for a serving size, but once I've done it I've got my beloved wheat thins and had an appropriate-sized snack, too.

- Eat breakfast. There are, honestly, meals we need to skip, for various reasons. A ton of people skip breakfast. I think it's the worst meal of the day to skip. It fuels you up, gets your motor running, just makes you feel better. My breakfast habits are so consistent you'd think I have OCD but I really just eat what I like and never feel bad about it (Greek yogurt, something oatmeal-based, either oatmeal itself or any number of products made with it, coffee).

- Always recover with something after exercise. A shake, a bowl of ice cream, whatever. For a long time my treat after running more than 6 miles was a "retro" Mountain Dew (so-called because it was made with real sugar, not high fructose corn syrup). Mountain Dew NEVER tasted so good, believe me. There's a caveat here, though. A lot of people go to town after cardio and quickly put twice the calories they just burned right back in their body. Then they wonder why they're running and running and hardly losing weight at all. Recovery after exercise is crucial, good for your heart and helping your muscles heal and grow, but even then, it has to be moderated.

And maybe that's the only advice I could give, based on personal experience. It's just as trite as hell, but some things become cliches because they are true, people notice that and they feel compelled to repeat themselves.

Thing is, "everything in moderation" is so much easier to say than do.

I had to recognize that the root of my overeating was ultimately plain old compulsion. The same thing that drove one relative to do drugs, another to drink. No one can just quit eating cold turkey, though, so of the compulsive behaviors that cause so many people so much grief, eating is the one thing that can't one day be left behind.

That's perhaps the root of my lifestyle change; I admitted the problem and then just accepted that since quitting completely wasn't an option, maintaining full consciousness of what I was doing as much as possible was the best alternative.

To some degree, so far, this has worked for me. I still overeat sometimes. I do think of that as falling off the wagon. But after I do it, I admit it and I just get back up and start again. As much as feeling compelled to eat to make myself feel better is a lifelong, learned behavior, I've also made re-tracking and getting my eating habits back under control a newly learned behavior.

A disclaimer is probably a good idea here--I'm just an ADD-afflicted writer who got tired of being fat and feeling sick and old before my time and I buckled down and did something about it. What I did, what has worked for me, is peculiar to me. Sometimes, it might even be peculiar.

In blogging about it I'm trying to help by giving some idea of one guy's process. When it comes to eating habits, I still feel like a dumbass, making it up as I go along. I do basic things like counting calories and notching way back on sugar intake. I pay attention to what's almost universally accepted as good for you--oatmeal, protein, green salad, vegetables--and I try to concentrate on the good stuff. But I still buy sodas, I still eat Reese's Pieces sometimes and I can't ever leave a Friendly's without having blown the day's calorie count on some sort of peanut butter and ice-cream gut bomb.

When I do these things I just start over again, because the one thing I know I can't do is give up.

I might have begun my efforts to drop all that weight and improve my health feeling kind of self-destructive, but since then I've realized I keep doing these things because, well, I guess I may want to stick around for a while, after all.