Diet. Now there's a term that has lost all meaning. What does it mean anyway? The first words that pop into my head when I hear the term are "tough", "no fun", "bland food", "hungry", and "not anymore". That last one is my favorite - when I said to my friend that those fries probably aren't a good idea if she's on a diet, she said "oh, I'm not on a diet anymore!". With thousands of books, videos, and pills devoted to the arena of weight loss and dieting, shouldn't we have this thing licked by now? I mean goodness, if we collectively devoted the same time, attention, and money to finding a cure for AIDS, there would be so many more people alive and healthy that the food shortage would take care of the problem of over-eating by itself! I thought acupuncture was mysterious, but at least I know that when I put pins in somebody weekly, they are guaranteed to feel at least a little better. Of the dieters I know personally, the only thing I can count on is that they'll have a cupboard full of "health food" that they are so afraid to touch you'd think it had arsenic in it, and another story of losing 10 pounds only to gain it all back and more in a couple of months.
Now that I've gotten the small-minded pessimism behind us, we can talk about the larger issue. The single, immutable law behind losing weight is this: if you make it about losing weight, you're waiting to lose again. No if's, and's, or butt's about it, you can't lose weight without losing the weight of bad habit, flawed beliefs, and misplaced priorities. The first diet anyone making a foray into the realm of personal health has to go on is a diet from your mind! I like being clever, but this is serious business; so serious in fact, I'll say it again once more with feeling:
Any diet that looks at changing your body by only changing what you eat is doomed to fail. Our words, thoughts, beliefs, and actions play a much bigger role in losing weight and maintaining health than you could ever imagine.
Now that's not to say that what you put in your shopping cart doesn't matter, or that things like herbs or acupuncture can't help. They most certainly can. In fact, or the personal that has the right tools at their disposal, acupuncture and food energetics can do loads to affect total health. My experience is that they change what I'll grossly lump together as "willpower". But more on that in part 2 of this "diet against diet" campaign. The single change I will ask any client to master first before working with them on the arena of weight loss is a mastery of time and time management.
"Huh?". Yes, I know, didn't see that coming did you? In my experience, diet and exercise (yes, there will be plenty of exercise too!) plans fail not because people are not wanting to be serious about their diet or exercise, it's because they don't have the time to be serious about their diet and exercise. Take a deep breath and lock that in: in order to maximize your greatest material resource (your body), you must take control of your biggest non-material resource (your time). Time is a double sleeper too because not only must you have time for everything that goes into total health, what you spend time thinking about sets the stage for how the whole dog and pony show unfolds. Whether you're an artist, a doctor, a rapper, a janitor, a chef, a teacher, or an investment banker, you know that in order to produce top quality work and results that last, you have to put in the time. No way around it - it's a law almost as immutable as gravity.
"Okay... so now what?" you're no doubt asking. Your first assignment is this: carve out one extra hour in your day, every day. And when you carve it out, here's what I want you do to with it - nothing. That's right all-star, I want you to spend 20 minutes less at work, shave 15 minutes off of your time on the internet, turn the TV off 15 minutes early, and cut gossip hour down by 10 minutes. And after you find that everything in your life will not fall apart if you take an hour a day and do nothing with it but sit and listen to relaxing music (which will yield its own health benefits - trust me), come back and read about the next steps in Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother part 2.
