I didn’t know I was going to change my life forever.
I’ve been overweight my entire life. As I’ve gotten older, the weight gain has happened more rapidly. I’ve tried EVERY diet you can think of, only to fail at every one. Sometimes I’d lose 5 lbs before giving up, sometimes 50lbs. But one thing I always did was give up trying. I’d go back to not caring what I ate or drank and gain all the weight back and more. Eventually, something would motivate me to try to lose weight again. Sometimes a picture of myself, or trying to fit in clothes that had fit me before, something someone said, or something that happened that I related to my weight.
So, for a month or a few months, I would go super hard and be very strict on a diet, force myself to workout, and basically be miserable. I felt restricted and I hated working out. I would also use every ounce of willpower I had all at once, and when it ran out, that was it, my diet was over.
I would get excited for each new diet, and the prospect of ACTUALLY BEING A NORMAL WEIGHT! But the idea of it and the desire come so easily, however the results require a ton of dedication and hard work, which I always found to be too hard to stick with.
My entire life has basically been a cycle of diets.
This got me thinking about patterns in all my failures. One thing I ALWAYS felt while on a diet was restriction. Hunger, longing for delicious food. Food was never just food to me. I grew up in an Italian household. Food was life. It was comfort, happiness, celebration, anger, we ate for every emotion and every occurrence in life. And we ate GOOD food.
Try going from homemade meatballs in homemade Italian sauce, simmered all day, with a big bowl of pasta and all covered in fresh grated romano cheese with fresh rolls on the side, to a basic salad and grilled chicken. Definitely not something I wanted to do forever. Or even once for that matter. But over the years of dieting, I did develop a taste for healthier food, and discovered I love veggies.
Even though I say I failed at every diet, (and I sure felt like a failure each time) I did learn something from every failed attempt. If it weren’t for all the things that didn’t work, I would’ve never found the thing that does!
