Sheri’s Rants # 26: Diet Head in Debt

When planning purchases, especially major ones, life is much easier if you’ve saved up for them, isn’t it?  If you haven’t, then you end up in debt – and once you’re in debt you’re accruing interest rates, and now you owe even MORE money, right?  And the pain of payment is stretched out over time; in other words what was a simple transaction becomes much longer, expensive and more involved.  We are all familiar with this simple math.

So many of us are so used to the above math – that simple transactions become more complicated and expensive over time – that we apply it to our physical process of health.  How?  Like this:

“I can’t exercise like this the rest of my life.  It’s boring.  Why do this now when I know I can’t keep it up?”

“It’s ridiculous to think I can spend the rest of my life not eating bread.  This is way too rigid for me.  I can’t do it.”

“There is no way I am going to journal my food forever.  So why get good at it now?”

On and on; ad nauseum.  You get me, here, I know you do.

Here’s the Diet Head in this transaction:  you’re assuming that because you’re working hard today to get to where you want to be, that maintaining and taking care of your body in the future is always going to be ‘this hard’, so why even put all your effort into it now, because DUH – you’re not going to keep up this pace.  Who in their right mind would?

Here’s the sanity piece: In REALITY – you’re dealing with a body that you have not taken care of or have simply trashed over the years through dieting and starving and fasting and cleansing and over or under exercising and perhaps you’ve even began accruing the natural results of self abuse which include the diseases we see as a result of stuffing our pieholes with crap and expecting our engines to run, anyway, and usually at breakneck speeds and fueled by sugar and caffeine:  high blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid issues (yes, I’m saying it – it’s your FOOD not your DNA), blood sugar disturbances, on and on.  So that’s where you are.

Now, when you have a broke down vehicle, and your mechanic keeps it in the shop for 3 weeks and does a major engine overhaul and then hands it back to you all running sweetly and freshly washed & waxed, do you expect to keep that vehicle in the shop with all that work going on all the time?  (If so, I’ve got the number of a mechanic for you…)  You don’t, do you?  No.  You expect to be able to get back to your regular maintenance schedule (here’s a thought – with a good maintenance schedule would your vehicle have broken down?  Probably not.),  add good fuel and go.  Right?

YOUR BODY WORKS THE SAME WAY.  This Transformation work is the BEGINNING.  You are repairing, restoring, fueling and healing your body so that you can get it back to where it was SUPPOSED to be to begin with, before you started trying to drive long distances with water in your gas tank.  Before you started dumping crap into your pie hole.  Before you decided that a donut cured stress.  Before your alcohol consumption made your liver throw up it’s little hands and start relying on fat storage because it can’t process all the crap you’re handing it.  Before your body started burning muscle tissue for fuel and jacking your cholesterol around.  Before your blood sugar rides ruled your moods and relationships.  Before your entire system began relying on burning carbohydrates to try to function.  Before the diets, fasts, cleanses, starving, and disease.  You with me?

Get it in your head.  The initial Transformation takes work because you are doing WORK on your body – you are restoring it.  Once that is done, the ride gets MUCH easier.  So easy, in fact, that you can back down on exercise and have a bit more freedom in your eating.  But you have to get all that inflammation off your body, you have to get your body to TRUST you, you have to turn off that famine response solidly, and more importantly you have to develop a strong level of SELF RESPECT.  You have to treat yourself nice, forever.  That doesn’t mean tons of cardio and living on chicken breast and lettuce, friends.  It means when your vehicle is repaired you only have to learn how to maintain it with regular care.  Now if you want to add some extras – some symmetry to your muscles, some increased endurance and strength – I mean, you can do ANYTHING from that healed state.  New chrome pipes, paint job, shiny rims, whatever.  Your fitness level (because now you’ll have one) can continually improve – and there’s all sorts of new things you can do that you may or may not consider ‘hard’.   But those are options.

Okay.  So I recently posted a youtube video on epigenetics that clearly states that our current understanding of biology is that we are not, in fact, machines – but energy.  I buy into this, due to what I have seen with humans and the miracles I’ve seen humans do with their bodies.  Energy.  If I come at this from that standpoint, I’d say the same thing:  You have to put more attention into your self care NOW because of all the neglect you need to catch up on.  Once you’re ‘there’ – it requires less attention to keep your body functioning highly.   The truth is that in Diet Head you are having VERY high expectations of how fast your body should change given the small amount of time you’ve spent giving it attention.  I mean, please.  Be realistic.  How long did you keep your body in the negative for?  Do THAT math.

YOU WILL YOUTH.  You can literally turn it ALL around.  Think about your body as a vehicle if that makes sense to you, or think about it in terms of energy – either way, understand that the repair work has to be done at a higher level of attention for a while.  Then it gets easier.  You’ll have more self respect and won’t look at simple self maintenance as a pain in the ass.