I meant to make a note of the Chinese New Year yesterday. This is the Year of the Dog. According to the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco:

People born in the Year of the Dog possess the best traits of human nature. They have a deep sense of loyalty, are honest, and inspire other people’s confidence because they know how to keep secrets. But Dog People are somewhat selfish, terribly stubborn, and eccentric. They care little for wealth, yet somehow always seem to have money. They can be cold emotionally and sometimes distant at parties. They can find fault with many things and are noted for their sharp tongues. Dog people make good leaders.

Who me? Terribly stubborn? Eccentric? Well, I guess I can find fault with many things (ref: this comment thread :).

I had another one of those conversations today. The one where someone who has some weight to lose wants to hear what the heck I’ve been doing, since they can tell I’ve lost quite a bit. Today I said something along the lines of “you don’t want to know…it’s mostly that I’m eating healthy.”

But I did add a little bit more, and I said “what I’m learning is that the more processed food I eat, the more I want.” What I haven’t yet figured out is where the line is. My old diet was all crap and very little nutrition. The new diet is very little crap, and mostly nutritious foods.

What seems to happen for me in the times I’ve really slipped is that some emotional thing will get me started. For me, that’s been a “oh, I don’t want to go out for dinner while on vacation and deprive myself.” A couple of days of this, and I’m right back to “well, I’ll get back on plan tomorrow, since it’s a Monday” (or the next day because it’s the first of the month, or the day after that because it’s a week after I went off track, and so on and so on.

Appropos of Chinese New Year, I think there’s a yin yang thing going on with healthy eating. It seems to me that healthy eating is supported by ensuring that the diet is full of sufficient nutrients: the macronutrients (protein, carb, fats), the micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), and the phytonutrients. And there may be more that we haven’t even discovered yet, which is why living off fortified, processed foods (even my favorite bars), which is so tempting, may be the worst thing to do.

If a nutritious diet is the yin, then emotional well-being is the yang. And while some of that may involve tools for dealing with emotional reasons for eating, I think a lot of it is bigger than that, and involves finding a positive answer to Einstein’s question: is the universe friendly?

Anyways, what I find on most days is that if I eat healthy and do some positive caretaking, staying on my healthy eating plan is not a struggle. If I do a little too much unhealthy eating, or I don’t do enough caretaking, slip sliding into old patterns results.

And what seems true for me is this: finding your balance from a place of imbalance is much harder than staying in balance.

Hmmm, Chinese philosophy (yin yang) meets the laws of physics (inertia). Maybe there’s a clue here?