by Barbara Berkeley
Successful maintainers are inevitably people who have rebuilt their dietary habits. This kind of reconstruction is obligatory. It seems to be a process that most of us intuitively discover some time during the first year of weight stabilization. In the best of all worlds, the months of weight loss would serve as a time for dietary demolition, a preparation for future rebuilding. Unfortunately, this is not what happens. The vast majority of dieters, are changing habits temporarily and are eagerly anticipating a return to some modification of their previous eating plan. This, more than any other factor, dooms them to weight regain.
As I often tell my patients, the Standard American Diet (SAD) is like a poorly built house. What most dieters do is to attempt to redecorate that house. They move the furniture around; change the pictures on the wall. That doesn’t do anything to shore up a weak and leaky structure. During the weight loss phase, dieters should be thinking about completely tearing down their house so that a new one can rise in its place. What will this new house need? It needs to be strong, healthy and livable. It also needs to offer a strong wall of protection against the temptations of the SAD.
Want another
analogy? Moving to a new, clean way of eating is like going from being a Coca
Cola drinker to a wine connoisseur. The SAD is like cola: overly sweet, fizzy,
advertised everywhere, fun and eminently consumable. It’s easy to love Coke
because it’s simply pleasurable. On the other hand, most of us can remember our
first reaction to wine. Remember when some adult offered you a sip? It was
strong, flavorless and bitter. There was nothing good about it. You even might
have wondered how grown-ups could drink the stuff. But as you experienced wine
over the years, you likely came to appreciate its nuances; its subtleties.
Enjoying wine takes more than just taste buds. It’s an adult pleasure that’s
hard to enjoy until you are, in fact, an adult.
If you are making an honest effort to rebuild your dietary house, you will undoubtedly go through a Coke to Chardonnay experience. Initially, your new diet of clean, healthy foods will seem a bit tasteless, a bit repetitious, a bit depriving. Where is that old zing? That fizz? That thrill? But slowly, over time, the pleasures to be derived from your new menu begin to assert themselves. The subtle flavors of real foods—unadorned and unfusssed with---start to speak. In time you find that you are attuned to the underlying notes, ones that—in the past--- would have been covered up by sauces, salt, or breading. It is this transition period from deprivation to enjoyment that takes time. And it is during this transition that maintainers are most vulnerable. If the old fizzy, sweet, fun flavors get into the mix at this crucial moment, they are likely to overwhelm. Once that occurs, any hope of maintenance is gone.
But many of you have progressed far past that point. For those who have crossed the dietary Rubicon, the rewards are sweet. The houses are strong. In the new land on the other side of the river, the pleasures of food have a new meaning. Wine flows and an apple sings a song both eloquent and luscious.
