Guilt-Free Diet

Guilt. It's pervasive in the life of a many a person looking to lose weight. Guilt over what you've eaten. Guilt over what you didn't eat. (Are you wasting food? Don't you remember those starving children in China your mother mentioned when you didn't clean your plate?) Guilt over skipping exercise. Even guilt over "wasting" the last X years of your life by not watching your weight. If only you had been more vigilant before, you wouldn't be in this situation. Guilt, guilt, guilt!

All that guilt is enough to make you fat. Really.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, guilt is one of the most useless emotions there is. Guilt is all about living the in the past. It's about feeling bad over something you cannot control. By it's very nature, it tends to debilitate sufferers by moving the focus from NOW--where you have some power to change and impact your destiny—to then: a place where you can only replay unhappy scenarios that make you feel inferior and ineffective.

I'm not saying that you should never evaluate your direction and make changes. I mean, duh. That's obvious. You ignore your own history, you will be repeating it. Correcting your course brings you closer to your goals. Of course that has to be done, if you want to make progress. What I'm saying is simple: stop feeling bad that you haven't already reached your goals! That's just silly, frankly.

When you play your guilt tapes, what do you hear? "I'm not good enough. I'm not strong enough. I messed up. I'm just hopeless. I don't have what it takes." You pound it over and over in your head: I can't make it! Your brain starts to believe, "I can't make it." You reinforce the image of yourself as unsuccessful. Over and over and over again, you tell yourself you just don't have the right stuff.

How in the name of God's Green Earth do you expect this kind of nonsense to be helpful and motivating? You are simply sending your subconscious the message loud and clear: you don't have what it takes. It's a huge amount of struggle to even tread water. It takes fight, fight, fight to break even. This is deadly to your reach for improvements, man. You're convincing yourself you aren't even capable of it without trying!

I'm suggesting something maybe a little radical, especially if you're one of those folks who posts your fat pictures on the refrigerator as "motivation"—let go of the guilt. When you camp out in the past, you sign off all of your power. You put yourself in a negative, can't-do frame of mind. You give yourself mental pictures of failure, which you replay over and over and over again.

What's the point of that?

Fact is, none of us seem to pop out of the womb fully developed in every aspect of our lives. And you know what? I wouldn't want to. This is not just about attaining perfection, after all. Life isn't about attaining perfection. It's about the journey. The journey is actually what you have. The goals? They're just checkpoints along the way. A place to slow down, take a deep breath, and appreciate. If you think about it and you discounted the journey, what would you have left? Milestones and death? I dunno. But I do know I live almost all of my life in the journey. If I don't get my satisfaction from the journey, I'm going to be pretty darned unhappy 99% of the time. Goddess is not into unhappiness.

Much as I love the feeling of reaching a goal, the very reason it's sweet is because it's an accomplishment. It's a stretch I made. I worked for it, and I enjoy the fruit of my labors. I am the beneficiary of my experiences--both where I went "right" and where I went "wrong"--which I can also share with others, to help them along the way, perhaps. I feel good about it because I learned and grew along the journey.

People who are guilt-oriented (and thereby often believe that motivating oneself comes from stronger, sterner castigations) are in for a difficult struggle. The journey? It's a list of your failings, replayed over and over and over. Ow. For me, that approach would make me want to throw my hands up, declare the situation hopeless simply to stop the pain, and pretend the whole thing never happened. I simply can't imagine how filling your brain with disgust and self-loathing could possible become "motivation" for making self-improvement.

It's true, sometimes an incident, a comment, a situation or a photograph may serve as a somewhat rude wakeup call. Smack! "Oh...I didn't know I looked like that in my bathing suit. Eeek! This weight thing is way out of control." This is good, insofar as you cannot address that which you have not acknowledged. It hurts for a minute, but it makes you aware, in the present! Our layers of denial can be tough to penetrate, and sometimes the Universe has to smack you to get your attention. Ok, I can go along with that. But once your attention is focused on dealing with your weight or health, then what? Do you root yourself in the past and the (completely irrelevant) how could you possible so slack as to let yourself get there to begin with? Or do you use this realization, in the NOW, to learn about your path and make the changes you need to make?

There's the little truism that comes into play at this point: it's called the Law of Radiation and Attraction. Put simply, you get what you focus on. The vibes you put out return to you. You see it in action all the time. The rich get richer, right? People who are terrified about problems often end up with the very problems they obsess over. Negative people have negative friends, and negative things abound in their lives. What you believe about yourself and your world is reinforced with your reality.

Moving into the weight context: If you believe yourself to be weak, undisciplined, unsuccessful and unmotivated, I can promise you without hesitation that is EXACTLY what you will experience. If you call yourself fat, lazy, and gluttonous, that is exactly what you will become. After all, if you believe you just stink a task, you tend to avoid it. If you feel like you're really moving forward and are getting a payoff for your work, it becomes more exciting and you want to continue.

I don't know why people fail to acknowledge this in their own self-concept. Perhaps it has to do with internalizing some of society's harsh judgements regarding overweight people. Expand a little bit, and you'll see the truth.

Loving parents understand this instinctively about their children. You don't label a child as stupid, lazy, incompetent or unsuccessful in any way, regardless of any momentary difficulty—or even not-so-momentary difficulty—the child is having. That doesn't help! It only gives the issues root in the child's self-concept and guarantees long-term issues. You praise the child's efforts. You focus on successes, and build on them. You acknowledge the progress, focus on the progress, and help the child feel successful and happy about progress. Then, you'll continue to see the progress. We've all got a vulnerable part of ourselves that need nurturing, every bit as much as any child ever did.

Are you giving your self-image a black eye with guilt?

Here's what I want you to do: Reframe the past as a very important learning experience. That's the true power of past issues: information for future success! If you've been overweight 5 months, 5 years, or 50 years, doesn't matter. You can learn! You can USE your experiences to build upon for future success. You know that parties are tough times for you to manage your eating? Well, that plan out alternative approaches, for goodness sakes! Rather than feeling guilty over that huge lunch you ate out with your coworkers, ask yourself, "What could I do differently next time, to make good choices easier for me?"

It's not about stoicism, folks! There is not some bizarre sort of point system where you get moral extra-credit by making things harder on yourself. Guilt does not equal "getting real" or "getting serious" or any other such noteworthy endeavors. Guilt equals punishment!

If you struggle with your weight, you already have experienced the consequences of your weight-related behaviors.You have experienced the pain, the emotional fallout, the health limitations, and the hit to your self-esteem that comes from being overweight. Why people sometimes choose to continue slapping themselves when they are already hurting, I have no clue. Personally, I think the natural consequences of excess weight are plenty enough. I am not big on punishment, self or otherwise. People don't make good choices out of fear of punishment--or if they do, the better choices are hardly internalized. Good choices come from wanting to make good choices, and wanting to experience the convinces of those good choices.

Self-improvement takes work. It takes time to adjust your thinking. It can be uncomfortable to change ingrained habits. In order to maintain the energy and focus to carry you thorough, believing you can do it helps tremendously. Feeling good about yourself helps tremendously. If ever you are tempted to give up, caring about yourself, loving yourself, and wanting to make the best choices possible for yourself is what will get you through to the other side and ultimate success. Not force-feeding yourself guilt.

You know what? I've tried it both ways. I have had exercise sessions as a perverse sort of "punishment" for poor eating choices, or even thought of it as just "what I got" for being fat. You just have to do that, as a fat penance or something. You have any idea how much that sucks? And hey, it's not to hard to guess: punishing yourself doesnt' go far towards helping you develop of love of exercise, or the other good habits you will need to make part of your life for long-term success.

I'm not saying you have to be proud of every decision you've ever made. We're human, and there are times when we look back on a turn we've made and realize it's made the journey longer or harder. That's ok. Now you know what's down that road, you can mark it on your map. You'll know next time, it doesn't go where you want to go (and it probably didn't satisfy the drive that caused you to take that direction to begin with, for that matter). When you feel you've made a mistake in any area of your life, OK. Acknowledge it. See what the experience has to tell you. But then, for God's sakes, move on! Don't sit and wallow in it, forcing it down your own throat repeatedly. Make whatever amends you feel are appropriate--but don't go nuts. (Start by considering what you'd expect from your dearest friend in a similar situation. We are so much more loving towards our friends than ourselves, usually.)

Every mistake, every wrong turn, every issue we struggle with serves one ultimate purpose: to inform us of areas for progress and growth. That's it. Every potential guilt trigger is actually an opportunity to move ahead and make more of ourselves. It's like a roadmap for success. You are being handed a point-by-point primer for success when you experience setbacks of any kind. Frankly, you have a better opportunity for success than the person we may consider "lucky" who has very few setbacks. If you haven't learned your hotspots and how to rise above and beyond them, you get totally thrown when you do hit the inevitable roadblock. On the other hand, if you've studied your mistakes--just long enough to extract the needed information, mind you--you know exactly how to proceed. You know you can weather the storm and get back to clear weather, and you have important reminders of what is helpful to you, and what is not helpful.

If you can learn to transmute potentially guilty situations into success class, then there really is no stopping you. You know that, right?

Let your slips serve as an education to you. Me? I have a PhD in how to be fat! But that's not a bad thing. Because if I clearly understand how I got and stayed fat, I also understand how to avoid it. But looking at my behaviors and missteps without the self-denigration, I can remain objective enough to extract the lessons there for me. I know I created that reality, and that's fine. I'm glad I've had the experience set I've had. It's part of who I am.

Truth be known, I don't actually believe in the concept of mistakes. (I know there are some folks who may argue otherwise, especially when talking about ex's!) But hear me out: every time I've gone down the "wrong" path, there has been a reason. I wouldn't have made the choices I did if I had mastered those lessons, right? If I'd mastered the lessons about how to be healthy sooner, I'd never have been fat. Which would be nice I guess, but we all have our lessons we need to learn. There would have been others.

And the big bonus for me: having had gone through Fat School, I'm now able to share some of my experiences to help others who are ready to graduate themselves. That's something I take a lot of pride in and feel very good about. It makes the pain and struggle that I experienced at times during those years count for more, and make the road for others just a tiny bit easier, I think. And that boggles my mind sometimes. How cool, you know? How cool is that? Yes, I had those experiences and dealt with what life is like for a fat person. And now, I can make those experiences worth much more, not only to me, but to others as well. Plus, I know I don't have to ever be fat again, so long as a choose. I know all about it, and it's only a matter of deciding what I want. What a wonderful gift those "mistakes" have given me!

Forget the guilt, man! Enjoy the ride. It's a beautiful journey, if you are open to seeing it.