Weight Loss and Will Power--An Impossible Pair

I was eating kale salad, quinoa, chicken soup and an avocado at Whole Foods on 14th Street the other day before yoga when I saw that someone had left a Men's Health Magazine out on the counter. I flipped through it to an article by Augusten Burroughs where he relates a story on how he personally lost holiday weight by "eating like a girl." In the article, he consults his good friend who has been on a perma-diet since birth (the expert?) for weight loss advice. She advises him to guzzle water before any party and to fill his plate with all the food he wants in the world, BUT only take one small bite and leave the rest. This sounds like the diet of a woman with very disordered eating habits. Her advice is like handing an alcoholic a bottle of wine and telling him/her to have one sip a day only and you'll be fine. For a person who is overweight, eating a standard American diet of refined carbs, sugars, meat, caffeine, and limited vegetables and fruit, advising this person to go through the day trying to "trick" the body with water and small bites of the same bad foods is not health: this is self-torture, not to mention obscenely wasteful. In fact, eating tiny bird bites of foods and carrying around bottles of water, diet soda are exactly the habits many anorexic/bulimic girls I knew in a treatment center in Utah spoke about in our group therapy sessions as toxic coping mechanisms that when taken to extreme took over their lives, away from their families, careers and into an obsessive-compulsive relationship with food.

Controlling food intake with willpower is a temporary, quick-fix for a gaping hole in the multidimensional, intensely personal portrait of human wellness. Coming up with a health plan that works for you involves many complex factors (and thank god for that! Human nature itself is very complex!) Here are just a few factors that go into devising a sustainable, flexible, nurturing health plan that feeds all aspects of a person: body type, metabolism, blood type, your job, if you have children, if you are single, if you are an athlete, if you work at a desk, if you have allergies, personality type, what your ancestors ate, gender. I could go on and on.

The point is that food and will-power don't mix. The will is the ego trying to control biology. It breeds imbalance. I personally eat more than any girl I know (or guy for that matter) and because I exercise, work hard, understand my hunger, my cravings, my body-type's needs, my emotional needs, do not eat artificial, chemicalized junk, but food instead, real, whole foods, I NEVER gain weight...simple as that. My body and I are friends, not foes. Everyone on earth is capable of this relationship too. It's my personal mission to advocate the important paradigm shift our culture needs to embrace in order to change how we view food, health, happiness, and success.