Diets don't work

That’s hardly a profound statement. Even one of the biggest diet industry giants of all time uses that phrase in their commercials. As if they could convince us that counting the “points” in every bite we take isn’t a diet!

Before finding that British lifesaver otherwise known as Paul McKenna, I was caught in one of the cruelest Catch-22’s imaginable. I had been on enough diets to know they didn’t work, at least for me. And yet, I thought the only way to lose weight was to diet.

So I had simply given up.

I had even resigned myself to the probability of an early death, and that is a sad thing to admit. I ached everywhere. I knew I was digging myself an early grave with my fork, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

I went on my first real diet when I was 14. Between my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I dropped maybe 10 or 15 pounds, and went from being fairly chubby to just a little chubby. I had not even darkened the threshold of obesity then, but I was a teenage girl, and just a few extra pounds were enough to cause me great distress.

I kept that weight off, miraculously, throughout high school, and graduated wearing a size 12 or 14, back when those sizes really meant something – before the days when the fashion industry decided to make us all feel better about our expanding waist sizes and increased the dimensions on the clothes they produced.

No I wasn’t a size six, but I wasn’t fat either, and if I had stayed that weight I would be a healthy, normal-weight woman right now.

But instead I dieted my way up to a size 24.

Here’s what I’d do: I’d pick a date somewhere in the near (but not too near) future.

Always a Monday.

Usually the first Monday of the month.

If January 1 fell on a Monday, that was an omen. That was God’s designated day to start The Diet, wasn’t it?

So I’d have this future date in mind. D-Day. It would be a week or a month or several months in the future, and it would be looming.

On that day, I’d begin eating cardboard in the form of rice cakes, dried out chicken breasts, and lots of unseasoned veggies.

Facing that, there was only one way to handle the intervening time: Eat like there was no tomorrow.

So with D-Day in mind, I’d go on a binge. If it wasn’t nailed down, I’d eat it.


After D-Day, I'd tell myself, I’ll never eat another potato chip in my life, so I’d better sit here and devour this whole bag now. Cookies will be banished forever, so I need to finish this batch immediately.

D-Day would arrive, and I’d get up resolved to once and for all diet my way to a reasonable size. I’d eat some tasteless breakfast, write down the calories or points or carbs, depending on the Diet of the Day, and set forth into the world.

By 10 a.m., I’d be ravenous enough to eat the paint off my office walls. When someone came by and announced a co-worker had baked a cake and put it in the break room, I’d grit my teeth and say, in my best martyr’s voice, “Oh, no, I can’t eat that. I’m on a diet.”

Maybe I’d make it through lunch, eating a dry salad.

Maybe.

But by the end of the day, some of that cake would be in my belly.

I’d decide at that moment that I had messed up, and would say, “oh what the heck!” and abandon the diet then and there.

There was always such glee and freedom in that moment when I realized I was not going to be eating rabbit food for the rest of my life after all.

So then I’d go on my merry way, eating whatever I wanted to eat. But I always knew that another D-Day was coming.

This story varied from time to time. There were periods when I did manage to stay on some restrictive program for a significant amount of time and lose weight, but I eventually always slid back up the scale. But most of my “diets” were of the one-day or half-day variety. I cannot count the number of times I did this.

Is it any wonder I got fatter and fatter? I was always eating in anticipation, or reaction to, a Big Diet that usually never even got off the ground.

So about three years ago, I just gave up. I just ate, whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.
Still, in the back of my mind, I knew I was eventually going to have to do something.

In a way, it was the same as all the times I’d set a D-Day date in the past, except I wasn’t even going through the formality of setting a date anymore.

All of that seems like a nightmare now. I was like the mouse stuck in a maze who kept bumping his head against the same wall, when if he’d only turned around and gone the opposite way, he would have been free.

To get free, I had to turn around and go the opposite way.

I had to turn my back on the whole diet mentality that had worked such a number on me for so many years, and face the light.

I had to acknowledge that no one else – certainly no dieting guru – could tell me what I should eat and when I should eat it. I had to realize that the answer was within me all the time, and that to be free of it all – diets and excess weight and the whole tragic rollercoaster – I only had to tune into what I really wanted and needed.

It was a revolutionary idea! Could I really depend on myself to know what I needed to eat and when I needed to eat it? Could I trust myself around all the so-called “trigger foods” that had plagued me in the past?

For so long, I’d been told I needed some “expert” to tell me what to eat if I wanted to lose weight. I believed that, but at the same time, I resented the heck of that so-called “expert”. So I repelled. Time and time again.

Now that I’ve started following Paul McKenna’s Four Golden Rules, I’ve developed a whole new relationship with myself. I do know what’s best for me, and I can trust myself to do what needs to be done.

The other day, someone offered one of my co-workers (the low-carb queen who yo-yos with amazing regularity) some watermelon.

“Oh, no,” she said, in her best martyr voice. “I can’t eat that yet. That’s added on week four of my diet.”

Watermelon! How restrictive would a diet have to be to deny you fibrous water?

I could start an office pool. We could bet on how long she’ll be doing this. She’s more stoic that I could ever be, so it may be awhile. But sooner or later, she’ll get tired of being told what and when to eat, and she’ll throw it to the winds.

And then she’ll inflate like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.

And I’ll still be listening to the only expert that really matters when it comes to losing weight:

Me.