Who is the Real Problem Here?

Listen up Nutri-System, Jenny Craig, and all you other Buy-Your-Meals-With-Us-To-Lose-Tons-of-Weight shysters: I DON’T WANT YOUR SNAKE OIL! Pack it up and get off my TiVo and out of my mailbox. I’m not buying your food or your lines – so I want you OUT!

Every night on TV, I am constantly bombarded with that stupid diet commercials where people show their “Before and After” photos declaring that this is the best they’ve felt in years and they’ll never look like the fat blob in their photos EVER AGAIN! And why? Because of the meals they purchased from their plan.

I have a question for you, Miss New Six 6: How does it feel being stuck eating someone else’s food for the rest of your life?

When I first decided to become serious about getting healthier/losing weight, I thought about buying into one those programs. But the reality of the situation always gets me. Okay, fine. So it worked for those people. But the thing that irks me the most about these things is that it only addresses the problem at hand. You lost the weight and you look good…great. But what happens AFTER you meet you ideal weight? How do you possibly go back to eating food in the “real world?”

For better or worse – life outside of the Jenny Craig box is still filled with tasty temptations like tiramisu, loaded baked potatoes, and 400-calorie Starbucks coffee drinks. With that in mind, I don’t see how someone on Nutri-System can regulate their new body when they decide to get off the program. You don’t have that safety net of someone deciding what you should eat. In the real world, that’s all YOU.

It’s pretty much curing the symptoms but not fully beating the illness.

Look, there isn’t this magical invisible hand that comes down and force feeds me my meal. As far as I know, the Hostess snack aisle at the grocery store isn’t filled with muffled voices from behind cellophane wrappers that say “Pick me! Eat 4 of me!” I didn’t come out of the womb addicted and begging for candy bars. No… I’m the one putting food in my mouth! This is behavior that has developed over time.

Humans like good things to eat! The world around us isn’t going to stop making 4-cheese quiches with bacon. Why? BECAUSE IT TASTES GOOD! Humans don’t like eating things that taste bad. So it makes complete sense when Paula Deen and Emeril Legasse receive applause for their pork enhanced, butter rendered concoctions. Bottom Line: Food is good and we should never feel guilty about enjoying it.

So why deny ourselves the pleasures of it? Is it the food’s fault that you can’t control yourself?

I have made so many concessions in the last two years of trying to be healthier. But the one thing I am unbending on is my food. Whatever slow gains I have made have been through no diet other than of my making. When I started, I made the decision that I had to live with the food around me. If anything was going to change for the better – it had to be me and it had to be by me alone.

And it hasn’t been easy. I’ve stumbled…a lot. But I’ve found that it is true what some experts say. To keep it off longer, you’ve got to change your mindset and your lifestyle. If you take the time to learn how much to eat and what to eat on a regular basis, it helps you cope in the end. Man oh man; I’d kill for results RIGHT NOW…but I’d just be shooting myself in the foot doing a diet. It’s so frustrating at times when everyone else seems to be getting better results. But I’ve decided that I have to live with the world around me and not create an artificial world that I have to maintain the rest of my life.

It has meant examining what I put into my body on a daily basis. It meant counting my calories for three months. It means cutting my portions in half and adding more fruits and veggies and less meat and fat. It means learning that a lighter dinner of fruit and cheese is just as nourishing as a burger.

Most importantly: It’s meant eating right, but also being secure enough to let yourself slip and enjoy from time to time. Food isn’t evil. It’s not the enemy. Your own mindset is! So I hope you’ll forgive my vehemence as I watch new and improved bodies cross my TV screen.

It’s not that I hate you for your success…it’s just that I want to be able to choose what I eat!