The diet isn’t the solution.

I have worn many identities that were intertwined with some diet that was popular at the time. Keto, Low-Carb, Paleo, Macrobiotic, Eating Clean (lol), Blood Type… and on and on. This identity would take over a lot of my thought process and consume me to a degree. I’d want to tell people what they were eating that was wrong and explain how they should be eating.

What left my consciousness was that the reason I was eating this way was entirely because I wanted to lose weight. Whether this aspect of the diet was working or not would eventually be forgotten and my worldview would get shaped around “how you should eat.”
A lot of the benefits of these various diets that I’d been sold on, had nothing to do with fat loss, some of them can even produce weight loss on a scale without achieving fat loss, but I was unaware of this at the time.

I would cling to this identity until it either became so obviously wrong or the next shiny new diet with good marketing came along.
The truth is, if you’ve got plenty of excess fat, any of these diets will achieve some weight loss. If you’re more interested in inflammation, or have some moral issue with eating animals, or you’re really just concerned with your blood lipids, or whatever your goal might be that’s not fat loss, maybe it would be better to get very specific about which diet you do. Diets tend to work when adhered to, for a while at least. The trouble with the “eat anything” from this category or list of foods, is that after you lose some of the weight you’d like to lose, the amount you’re eating may be enough to sustain your now lower but still over, weight.

I don’t think the diet is the solution.

Diet has two definitions, first is just how you eat, second is a restrictive version of how you eat with some goal in mind, typically fat loss. I don’t know about you, but when I thought about going on a diet, I wasn’t thinking about the rest of my life. Especially if I was being totally honest about my goal, fat loss. If you lose fat forever, eventually your body will start consuming lean tissue, and then organs, and you die. That's NOT ideal! It’s a short term thing, it’s a moment, it’s not forever.

So how do I confront forever? Because forever is what’s left after the diet? Unless I’m resigned to cycling on and off difficult diets from here on? I was at one point, after so many relapses, I was ready to just spend half my life dieting, and it really didn’t matter which one. This was also not ideal.

I had to take into account that the way I was living my life, outside of dieting, contributed to or allowed me to be very overly fat.

I think of a diet as a tool, some are very precise and some are not, but none is the solution to my life.

The solution has been a total overhaul, the way I think about food, how I interact with it, what I allow it to do for me, and what I stay away from allowing it to do for me. The solution has been plotting out my life in a realistic way that will allow me to eat, with the correct amount of restraint for me, and getting myself more physically active. The solution has been some effort every day to become a version of myself that I like more than the old me.

The solution requires many tools, and is an ever ongoing process.

I wish you luck in finding your solution.