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Is diet and exercise really the answer?
Transferred from my blog at http://ebombardi.spaces.live.com
I have been enjoying summer and celebrating the forty pounds I have lost fairly easily over the past months, so I figured I'd share a few thoughts about dieting. Although there are obvious similarities in the way people's bodies process certain foods, increase and decrease metabolic rates, burn calories, so on and so forth, each person remains unique when looked at from a holistic perspective. Diets that ignore this fact when evaluated in the long term will work for some people, but even then they seem a much harder and likely temporary way of dealing with what, for many, only appears to be the problem. If one tries to truly understand the root cause of the problem, one invariably finds that making poor diet choices, overeating, or whatever the cause for excessive weight might be (or other apparent problems for that matter) is nothing but a symptom of other issues and challenges. In an era where information overload is becoming a key challenge and health is a topic of much discussion, many of us intellectually know what the right and wrong choices to make are. Many of us that are fortunate enough to have an abundance of food to choose from also have a fairly good idea about the healthier foods types to eat, the ones we should avoid, understand that we should exercise regularly, so on and so forth. When talking about different types of foods, I'm not talking about knowing the details of which fruit or nut to eat to have more of certain types of vitamins or antioxidants. I'm talking about knowing that eating deep fried steak will certainly have a different impact to your health then eating a fresh salad, or that choosing the fried potato skins with bacon and sour cream over the baked potato with salt might not be the best pick if you're trying to loose weight. I'm pretty sure you get the idea. It is also common knowledge that balance is a key to nature and life. Many times making poor diet (or other) choices is a way of consciously or unconsciously coping with the real issue and trying to bring balance back to our lives, as odd as that might sound. When someone is significantly overweight, one or more things are likely throwing their balance off, and their conscious or unconscious reaction to that is to try coping and reestablishing that balance. A simple example I've seen way too many times is the chronically sleep deprived person that consumes loads of carbs, sugar and caffeine during the day in an attempt to have enough energy to make it through the day, and does it day-in day-out. Now, balance can also be very unexciting and "uncool". Making the choices we need to get certain result we want might go against social or peer pressure, in a way that it becomes easier to continue making the old choices rather then the new ones we need to make. Every so often we're put in a position to make those choices and often we need to choose between doing what will take us towards the results we want versus staying course and par with the mainstream or peer choices. In some other cases however, such as the sleep deprived person, bringing balance back might be a real challenge as life might not allow for as many options. Still then, I like to think there are almost always options to be chosen from if we look hard enough. Many times we also choose not to make any choices, or simply can't take the pressure of making a conscious choice as we want to relax and go with the flow while coping with stress and other aspects of our lives, as I have briefly suggested in my Awareness and Centeredness post. Many of the regular diets seem to me as "brute force attacks" against the symptoms, without dealing with the root cause. I've done that myself a few times and speak from experiences I've learned from. I'm not even going to discuss the miracle pills and systems, but even when you consider programs done with doctors and nutritionists, unfortunately many of them resist in looking past the symptoms. That's not to say they are all bad. Some people gain momentum with these diets and are able to find a path back into balance on the other side before the pendulum swings back and they regain the weight, but it does seem to be a really hard path to follow. Some people have to start there immediately for medical reasons for example, but even then I'd say it would be much better to look for that balance point at the same time. It is not easy to find the motivation to diet and exercise properly while out of balance as you're constantly fighting against that "whole" that is left by the real issue. Simply plowing through and ignoring that whole takes an immense amount of will power and determination, which makes it, in my opinion, a key part of the reason so many diets fail. Finding what is throwing the balance off and working on it seems to me as a much more direct way of rooting out the problem and its symptoms. I'm not suggesting that it is always easy, although sometimes it can be, but I do believe the end results are likely to be much better and long lasting. If you enjoyed this article you might also like my "Awareness and Centeredness" (http://ebombardi.spaces.live.com/blo...95CD!534.entry) post where I describe what I found to be the keys to implementing positive change in our lives. Be well, BlissCoach |
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