I've seen a whole lot of people completely freaking out about bread crumbs
and string cheese lately. Here's my take on Body for Life, Eating for Life, and challenges in general. Too many people treat
Body for Life like just another strict diet instead of a way of life. They forget the whole "for life" part of the equation
and start thinking up ways to best torture themselves for 12 weeks. The problem is that diets in general don't work.
If your whole approach centers around a strict diet that you're either "on" of "off" of then you're screwed
- completely, utterly, hopelessly screwed. :-) It will never become an easy way of life for people who treat it like
that. They're either living on chicken breasts and broccoli or they're surrounded by a pile of candy wrappers. If you don't
find middle ground then you're doomed to bounce back and forth, always losing and regaining the same weight with every 12-week
challenge.
Eating for Life is the middle ground. It's a healthy and realistic.
You can reach all your goals and still have your favorite foods like pizza and enchiladas and cheesecake. Getting really
lean doesn't have to be some bland thing where you can't wait to snap the final photo and inhale everything in sight.
If you do it right, the gap really narrows between the way you eat to get lean and the way you eat when you're not giving
it much thought. You don't want there to be a Grand Canyon sized gap between how you normally eat and how you eat
when you look great. They have to start to merge if you're going to be walking around in a fit body forever. Eating
for Life does that for you. That's what's brilliant about it!
I've never officially entered a challenge. I don't really like goals either.
For awhile I was threatening to get a t-shirt that said "Challenges suck. Goals are icky." Sounds weird coming from the moderator
of a huge Body for Life club, but I see SO many people starting over, and over, and over... They're counting challenges. They're
re-starting challenges. They're dropping out of challenges. They might start again on Monday. They're on the wagon. They're
off the wagon. They've been hit by the wagon. They're being dragged along behind the wagon. They're expending
this colossal amount of energy on planning and rationalizing and registering and calculating and re-thinking. They're
so consumed by the logistics of it all that they never actually DO what's most important, which is making it
a way of life.
...and (in my best Forest Gump voice) that's all I have to say about that.
