Zen and the Art of Dieting

So far, 2009 has been a year like no other. Obama’s inauguration, the plummeting economy, sixty degree weather in February… the list goes on and on.

All historic events aside, most impressive to me is the fact that most of my resolution-making friends have diligently stuck to their Jan. 1 diet plans well into 2009.

I personally made no such resolution but I can’t help but happily bask in the glow of my friends’ healthy choices. Their dieting means a few things for me. 1) I am rarely lacking for a sushi date. 2) My award-winning chili is in high demand*. And 3) I guiltily and secretly consume at least one Pop-Tart in a given week.

I like to say I subscribe to a steady healthy eating philosophy, peppered with a few days where I eat nothing but cookie dough and tortilla chips (everyone has a bad spell, okay?). Despite my present Whole Foods-supplied hipster lifestyle, I’ll admit that I reached this point through a long series of diet crashes followed by Dorito-fueled burns.

Hailing from a long line of dieters as I do, you can’t help but pick up on a few quick fixes to force those skinny jeans onto your (ahem) curvaceous hips. Sometimes, these crash plans worked like the two-day charm they were intended to be but most times they failed me. Either way, the degree of creativity it took to plan and execute most of these eating schemes is noteworthy at the very least. So, for your own meal planning, waistline trimming pleasure, I present to you, some of the finest:

Post-It Solution:
In college, I stuck Post-It notes to 85% of the surfaces in my dorm room. The notes read something like ‘Goldfish crackers are full of mold’ or ‘If you eat another grilled cheese today, your house will catch on fire and your parents will die’. Creative, but the melodramatic and implausible nature of the messages made cheating a given.

WeightWatchers Food Diary:
I eat, therefore I write. That philosophy didn’t quite pan out for me given that I have a list-keeping attention span of .025 seconds and that I get hung up on details such whether to buy the tiny notebook with a picture of a bird or an artistic rendering of a piece of cherry pie (insert fat joke here). Needless to say, my food diary turned into a notebook used for shopping lists, lists that coincidentally include things like Velveeta and cinnamon rolls.

The SpecialK Challenged:
Before I discovered Kashi GoLean Crunch, I hated cereal with a burning and an uncharacteristically angry passion. But when Kellogg’s started advertising their ‘SpecialK Challenge’ on Comedy Central, I thought that maybe I could stand a week or two substituting cereal for two thirds of my meals. Guess what. If you eat SpecialK AND all the other food you’d normally eat, the weight doesn’t exactly fall off. Your hatred for cereal also deepens into a mild rage.

Personal(ality) Training:
I think I’ve made it pretty clear how I feel about the gym. Despite my strong misgivings about the concept of ‘bending iron’ and classes set to the beat of Britney Spears, I couldn’t pass up the one free Personal Training session I received when I joined. The session came complete with the expected exercise, sales pitch, and an ill-attempted attitude adjustment for the trainee**. I also received some simple food choice advice. Given that it was a free session, I probably shouldn’t have taken the ‘tuna and cottage cheese’ recommendation so literally. Three days of mixing the two together was all I could handle.

‘Everything here is disgusting’:
Getting sick is only marginally fun. On one hand, I do usually manage to drop 7% of my body weight in less than two weeks. But on the other hand, my post-infirmity runs to Chipotle usually take care of that 7% plus some.


* If I haven’t told you how my healthy chili won an award, please ask me about it.
** Sarcasm really has no place in the gym.