Why Every Diet I Tried Was an Epic Fail!
I like to try new things. Whether it’s food, skin care devices or exercise programs, odds are I’ve given it a try. So, when a new diet fad rolled around, I was there for it. After all, what could it hurt?
Does anyone remember the green bean diet? Yep, I did that one. It’s been probably 30 years ago, and the concept was to eat only green beans for at least 2 meals a day and then eat a ‘balanced’ meal at the end of the day. Of course, the balanced meal was whatever you wanted, so by then, I was starving and cleaned out the fridge. I don’t remember losing an ounce and came to really hate green beans. My grandmother prepared green beans with a big helping of creamed potatoes with mayonnaise and butter, garden tomatoes and fresh, hot cornbread. That’s how green beans were meant to be eaten, not alone as a full meal. I think I lasted about 5 days of the recommended 10 and was miserable.
It was about 10 years ago that another diet craze rolled around, and I think it was the Superfood diet, although I’m not certain of the name. I was all in and bought the book. It involved only eating specific foods that were labeled as superfoods, so it had to be good. It involved acai berries, algae powder, Camu, goji berries, maca and hemp seeds – all ingredients I had never heard of, much less tasted. I recall searching health food stores for all these ingredients, not to mention various root vegetables and fruits that aren’t typical for our area. It was so expensive. I remember laying all these ingredients out on the kitchen bar and preparing to make special recipes that I had never made before with ingredients I didn’t know the first thing about. Lanny just looked at it and knew it was going to be a rough week. I prepared it all. I could have just as easily eaten grass clippings. Most of it ended up in the trash and I was left feeling hungry and bloated.
There were many others that I tried but nothing worked well, and any weight lost came right back. Often, I felt worse, spent a lot of money and ended up with a spice cabinet filled with ingredients that I never used again. I learned that it takes time to develop a taste for different types of foods and it takes time to learn how to cook new foods properly.
My takeaway was that I needed to learn how to cook the foods that Lanny and I both enjoyed in a healthier way. My grandmother was the cook in our family, and she knew how to fry everything. Back in those days she was cooking with homegrown and raised foods and clean oils. We don’t have that same luxury today so how we cook and what we cook with is critical to a healthy meal. It also seemed that our bodies didn’t respond well to dramatic changes in the way we were eating. I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure that out.
Looking back, I don’t think the diets failed because they were all terrible. They failed because I was looking for one food, one rule or one plan to solve a much bigger problem. Real health turned out to be much less dramatic. It came from learning to enjoy ordinary foods, preparing them well, eating reasonable portions and building habits that I could actually live with.
Now my goal is to eat the healthiest foods that are available to us, prepare them in the healthiest way I can, eat smaller portions than we typically see in the American diet and to eat within a shorter eating window. I had started practicing this quite some time ago but learned much more about intermittent fasting and eating windows when I participated in the Summer Shred at our doctor’s office. The biggest surprise wasn’t that I finally found the “right” diet. It was realizing I no longer needed one.
The Summer Shred wasn’t another diet. It became an opportunity to strengthen habits that I hope will stay with me for the rest of my life. If you’d like to follow that journey, you’ll find the series in the Experiments section. There I share what I learned, what worked, what didn’t and what I hope will stay with me for the rest of my life.
— Jamie Harrington
Curious explorer of living well in the second half of life
PS – This photo is Lanny’s tomato garden. 😊
