Day #134 - Technique or Resolve

Today I got back to my healthy eating ways.  I stuck to my eating plan, got my gallon of water in, and went a for a nice walk at lunchtime.  More importantly, today I felt like eating healthy, an important component that I've been lacking.

Yesterday I wrote about my trip to Virginia Beach.  I love riding in the car, it gives me time to think.  Mrs. FogDog and I talked about getting back at it and how we should approach it.  Should we go back to counting calories?  Measure everything out again?  Abandon carb cycling and go to something more balanced each day?  As we were having that conversation it just suddenly hit me and I said to Mrs. FogDog "It really doesn't matter!"  Of course she looked at me a bit puzzled so I went on to explain...

I had a friend in college that weighed over 300 pounds in high school.  Before he got to college, he managed to lose 100 pounds in 10 months.  When I asked him how he did it he told me that he decided that he didn't want to go away to college as the same fat person he had been.  So he decided to lose weight, but his technique was a bit peculiar.  Every day he drank almost 6 liters of diet soda and he ran or walked at least 3 miles a day.  Obviously he tried to eat healthier, but the diet soda and the running/walking were his primary plan. 

He told me that because he drank so much soda, he was never really all that hungry anymore.  I remember telling him that it was the worst diet I had ever heard of and his response was "It worked didn't it?"  It's nearly 20 years later and he's still thin.

I thought about my friend yesterday when we were driving in the car.  It wasn't his technique that got the weight off, it was his resolve to lose the weight before going away to college.  It was then that I had that realization that if you have resolve to lose weight, the technique doesn't really matter.  Conversely, even if you had the miracle weight loss cure, it would do you absolutely no good if you didn't first have the resolve to lose weight.

I'm convinced that if you have the resolve to lose weight, any technique will work for you.  Some might not be the most healthy, and some might cause you to take a little longer, but with resolve you will eventually lose weight.

On the other side of the coin, there are plenty of people out there who have had gastric bypass surgery to reduce the size of their stomach so they can't physically eat too much food.  This surgery is highly effective, but yet somehow some people manage to gain back their weight.  When I first read stories about people who regained after surgery I was astounded.  How was it even possible?  The truth is, without resolve any plan is doomed to fail no matter how good it is. 

I explained my thoughts to Mrs. FogDog and she understood.  Instead of focusing on our technique, we need to keep focusing on our mental state; we need to maintain our resolve or it just wouldn't matter. 

Of course this doesn't mean that we have no plan, we still continue to focus on eating healthy, unprocessed foods as much as possible.  We still have an unrestricted day at the end of the week and we still try to drink plenty of water and get some exercise.  However, what's more important is that we keep supporting each and try to maintain our resolve to be healthier because without that it doesn't matter what we put in our mouths.

Stay Strong!