I stopped my diet. So What?
How a diet dies
There is a particular moment in every diet when you just know – “meh, this is not working”.You know because you have just eaten something that isn’t on the plan, and you didn’t even feel guilty about it. Then afterwards, instead of thinking, “Oh well, that was a mistake,” you think, “Well, that’s that then.” And that is how a diet dies; not with a bang, but with a whimper.
One day you’re following the rules. The next day you waver. Then you waver again. This time it’s easier; there’s less determination to recover and less guilt. Before long, the diet has become one of those things you used to do, like learning French or owning a rowing machine.
But let’s back up a bit and ask the question, “why did I stop?”
- Was I simply being lazy?
- Was I procrastinating?
- Was I making excuses?
- Or had something actually happened that made sticking to the diet genuinely difficult?
Whichever it was, how on earth do you tell the difference? The main problem is that the person conducting the investigation is also the chief suspect.
Let’s imagine, for example, that I say:
“I’ve had a lot going on.”
This is an extraordinarily useful sentence.
It can mean:
- Something genuinely catastrophic has happened and eating properly is currently about as important as polishing the chrome on a submarine.
Or it can mean: - I couldn’t be bothered.
The problem is that both explanations sound remarkably similar when you’re standing in front of the refrigerator at eleven o’clock at night and there is no little man in a white coat at the fridge door. He doesn’t arrive carrying a clipboard and say:
“I’m sorry, Peter. Your excuse has been rejected. You are merely procrastinating.”
If only. Instead, we have to work it out ourselves, and this is surprisingly difficult.
Did something happen, or was it a convenient excuse?
I think there is an important distinction between something happening and using something that happened as an excuse.
Life really does occasionally throw a brick through the window of your plans, and Murphy’s Law of Dieting states that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.
- People get ill.
- Relationships go wrong.
- Money becomes a problem.
- Work becomes chaotic.
- Families have crises.
- Sleep disappears.
Your head fills with things that seem much more urgent than whether you should have chicken or cheesecake for dinner.
These things are real, and when something genuinely disruptive happens, pretending that you should carry on exactly as though nothing has happened can be a bit pointless.
A diet is not a military operation. Nobody is going to court-martial you because you had a difficult week. But there is a trap here, because a genuine problem can become a very comfortable excuse long after it has stopped being a genuine problem. This is where things get murky. You can start with a perfectly legitimate reason for stopping and eventually find yourself using that same reason to explain why you haven’t restarted three weeks later.
The original problem may have lasted three days.
The excuse has now been promoted to a permanent employee. In fact, this is what happened to me – my procrastination period lasted for about 6 months.
So perhaps the question isn’t:
“Was my reason for stopping legitimate?”
That’s almost impossible to answer objectively. Perhaps the better question is:
“Is that reason still relevant now?”
That’s much harder to wriggle out of. I may genuinely have had a rotten time. I may genuinely have been under enormous pressure. I may genuinely have needed to take my foot off the diet pedal for a while.
Fine.
But that doesn’t automatically mean I need to leave my foot off the pedal forever. Perversely, it also doesn’t mean I should try to get back to my diet prematurely.
Beware of Failure
This is where I think we need to be rather careful about the word failure. I don’t particularly like it. If the plan was designed by me, the rules were created by me and the circumstances changed in ways I didn’t anticipate, then calling the whole thing a failure is a rather simplistic analysis.
Something happened. The system responded to it. The diet stopped. That’s what happened. It doesn’t tell me whether stopping was sensible, stupid, unavoidable, avoidable, temporary or permanent.
It merely tells me that I stopped, and that is actually quite useful information.
There is another uncomfortable possibility. Perhaps I didn’t have a crisis at all; perhaps I just didn’t fancy doing it anymore.
This happens. We don’t need to invent a psychological thesis every time we eat a doughnut.
- Sometimes a doughnut is just a doughnut.
- Sometimes you’re tired.
- Sometimes you’re bored.
- Sometimes the food in front of you looks fantastic and the diet suddenly looks like an administrative error.
- And sometimes you simply think: “Bugger this.”
That’s not necessarily a crisis, but neither is it necessarily a character defect. It is simply a decision. I think there is considerable value in admitting that, because once you’ve admitted what happened, you can actually deal with it.
If I say, “I stopped because my circumstances became bloody difficult,” that’s one thing.
If I say, “I stopped because I couldn’t be bothered,” that’s another.
But if I say, “I stopped because of a terrible situation,” when what I really mean is “I had one bad day and then spent the next fortnight eating as though I’d been released from prison,” I’m not helping myself.
I’m merely producing paperwork for the prosecution.
Perhaps the fairest approach is to stop trying to decide whether I’m a good dieter or a bad dieter.
Instead, ask what actually happened.
- What changed?
- What was I dealing with?
- What did I do?
- What happened afterwards?
- And, crucially: When did the genuine problem end?
Because that may be the point at which the explanation quietly becomes an excuse. Not always. But sometimes, and being honest about that doesn’t require self-flagellation.
It requires observation.
If my car breaks down, I don’t stand beside it shouting, “I’m a terrible motorist.” I look under the bonnet and try to find out what has broken.
- If the alternator has failed, I replace the alternator.
- If I’ve run out of petrol because I forgot to fill the tank, I put petrol in it.
Neither diagnosis requires me to lie down in the road and declare myself a failure.
A diet deserves roughly the same level of engineering analysis.
So where does that leave me?
I stopped. That much is undeniable. There were things happening in my life that made maintaining the diet difficult. There were also probably moments when I could have done better.
Those two statements can happily exist together. I don’t need to decide that one of them is the official explanation. Life is rarely that tidy and perhaps that’s the most useful thing I’ve learned from dropping the diet.
I don’t need to prosecute myself for what happened.
I don’t need to manufacture an excuse either.
I just need to be honest.
I stopped.
- Maybe there was a bloody good reason.
- Maybe there was a mediocre reason.
- Maybe there was no particularly good reason at all.
But the fact is that I did stop and once I stop arguing with myself about whether I was entitled to stop, I can finally ask the much more interesting question:
- What happens next?
But that is another story. For the moment, let’s leave it where we started.
I stopped.
So what?
