In my 48 years on this earth, the vast majority of them spent overweight, I’ve bounced around to various diets. Lots of them.  In fact, it’s probably a pretty obscene number of them.

I remember being roughly 14 or 15 and convincing myself that I needed to lose weight.  In retrospect, I didn’t, but self-perception when you’re that age is pretty awful, usually.  I decided that my diet should consist of Tab.  Yeah, anyone remember Tab?  Horrible stuff.  That’s all I consumed, and I did lose weight; of course! I wasn’t really eating anything.  I don’t remember how much I lost, but I was on my special Tab Only Diet long enough that my body objected and it made my cycle go off kilter.  Mom took me to the doctor. (I can only imagine what she was thinking!)  I finally told the doc about my awesome diet plan, and he told me to stop it, that I’d made myself anemic.  Wonderful.

In my late teens, I tried lots of stupid crap, which probably contributed to crappy metabolism later in life.  I lost 30 pounds when I was 19 and looked pretty good.  I won’t say how I lost it, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t a good thing in the least, and likely not quite legal. Backing up a couple years, I remember secretly sending cash in the mail to get some diet pill that I hoped would work, and it never showed up.  Someone probably tucked that very hard-earned money in their pocket.

I tried low fat 51,903 times.  The most I could ever lose while eating low fat was 40 pounds.  I tried the tuna fish diet, and the friend who suggested it called me within a week to tell me to stop it, because it made her horribly sick and she didn’t want the same thing to happen to me.  I did Weight Watchers, the really old version.  I remember doing diet shake substitution for real meals.  I tried SlimFast.  I tried… oh, heck, I don’t remember how many more I tried, but if you look back over the last few paragraphs, you can easily see that each time I tried something, I gained back the weight I lost, and more.

My most successful weight loss effort was with Atkins, but I didn’t do it right.  I stayed in the induction phase so long that I believe my body adapted, and I couldn’t break through that adaptation.  I gained back weight despite continuing on low carb and exercising, usually two hours a day minimum.  Knee problems cut back on the exercise drastically, and then — yeah, I’ll admit it — I lost my mojo.  It seemed so grossly unfair that I should have to do cardio and weight training for a minimum of two hours, just to maintain my weight, which was still 60 pounds above my goal.  Some would say that perhaps I should have increased my strength training or cardio, but I was to the point of hurting myself.  I was 45 years old and doing 350 lb. squats, and embarrassing many of the young studs in the gym. I walked for over an hour a day.  I felt like I was in training for the Olympics.

Fast-forward to last night, the end of my first full day back doing low carb.  We were at a restaurant with a bunch of friends, and all but one of the women was on a diet.  One was starting phentermine.  Two others are doing the HCG diet.  Now, should my friends ever happen to read this, please understand that I love you, but my first thought as I was watching one put homeopathic HCG under her tongue before ordering dinner, another opening a Walmart bag to pull out things to put on her plain lettuce and grilled chicken salad so it would taste better, and the final one who asked how much meat was actually on her pizza… was that none of these methods are sustainable in the long run.

That’s my real quest: to find something that gets me healthy, and that I can live with for the rest of my life, without having to resort to dragging extra stuff into a restaurant to make food that I’m paying cash-money for palatable, without having to analyze every last thing that goes into my mouth, and yeah, without having to take hours out of my day for exercise just to maintain.  Eventually, all of those systems fail.  This time around, I am determined to pay closer attention to the signs; the ones that indicate that I need to make a change in what I’m doing before my body counteracts me.  That’s what the human body is designed to do: to protect itself and adapt to its environment, so if you stay in one environment for too long, what worked before no longer works.  Exercise physiology also shows that exercise routines must be changed up for maximum benefit, for the same reasons: the body adapts.

A couple of my friends are well-meaning and they know I am frustrated with my weight.  They’ve suggested a few of the trendy diets.  They might work to lose 20 pounds, but certainly not 200.   They are not sustainable in the long run, not only because it would be pretty tough to stay on them for the length of time required to lose 200 pounds, but it also doesn’t get to the bottom of why a person is overweight.  Unless there are real changes made, especially in the fat that’s between a person’s ears, it won’t work.  I’m convinced of that.

Oh, last night?  I ate dinner before I went to the restaurant.  We were there for an activity that had nothing to do with eating, so I did my eating early, didn’t worry about what was on the menu that would work for me, and drank several Diet Cokes.  No pressure.