I was reviewing the very interesting comments over on Diet Blog’s What is the Best Diet? thread.

I came across a neat blog called The “Duh” Diet, written by Edward O’Neill. After scanning his rules, I realized he could pretty much be describing what I do (except I don’t eat so many snacks…maybe just a late night snack if I’m inclined).

But what caught my eye was this, deep in a discussion about will power and higher power (emphasis his):

Oddly, I began to eat healthfully when I realized that I would never simply want to.

Well, I agree that it isn’t simple, but I’d argue that you probably should never say never!

A bit of a backstory first. When I was growing up, I had a third grandmother of sorts who lived with my grandmother after my grandfather died. Her name was Marcella, but we called her Sis.

What used to amaze me as a kid was that Sis typically didn’t eat sweets. More often than not, she’d simply pass dessert up, or maybe opt for fruit instead.

I couldn’t believe it. And I remember thinking in high school “gee, what would it be like if you wanted to eat like that?”

Fast forward about thirty years, and I’m now pushing 400 lbs. I have had some good successes losing weight: about 75 lbs in college on a low-carb NutraSystem plan, about 125 lbs on a liquid fast in the early 1990s.

But the new millenium was proving to be much more difficult. Part of it was losing my mom in 1994 (she was 58, and died of cardiac arrest three months after recovering from a heart attack). And part of it was just that the worse off you are, the harder it is to turn things around…and the easier it is to just keep on doing what got you into the place you are.

Anyways, I think I’ve mentioned that my “bottom” was having to back out of a work trip in the fall of 2004. I was scheduled to work the exhibit hall of a convention of Vegas, and besides the hassle of flying (two seats required), I would have had to do way more walking and standing than I was capable of.

Prior to that point, my weight was really, really interfering with my life. But I was really doing some kind of denial thing, like no one really noticed or something.

Having to back out of that Vegas trip snapped me out of that quick.

So I started doing some therapy. In fact, I looked for someone with expertise in EMDR (more about that later). But what was different this time from all the other times was that I went into therapy with a very clear goal.

I didn’t want help with losing weight. I wanted help to want to lose weight.

To me, this seemed like an important difference. I mean, I looked at Dr. Phil’s keys to weight loss and while I don’t think any are bad, it just seemed like way too much damned work to me, especially at the time.

And I’ve read so many books (the diet book section in my apartment rivals Barnes & Noble’s :). Most of them either give lip service to emotional eating (if I read “learn to sit with your feelings” one more time, I’ll you-know-what) or make it all about emotions and nothing about the physiology.

The reality is that I could sit with my damn emotions all day, and if I’m eating stuff that throws my bio-chemistry out of whack, I’m still going to overeat.

But my core issue was overeating, and I rationalized that if I could stop that, I couldn’t help but lose weight. And I believed that what was critical to this was to eat a healthy diet to keep physical cravings to a minimum. And so, my key to stop overeating was to work on wanting to eat in a healthy fashion.

Here’s what I wrote back in September:

What I discovered over the last seven months or so of practicing was that I experienced what Lincoln wrote about years ago:

          When I do good, I feel good;
          when I do bad, I feel bad.

At some point over the recent months, I really did have the “a ha” where I realized that I had a lot more control over how I felt than I had ever really appreciated. Once that happened, making good food choices really did become easier.

Now I suppose this sounds like a catch-22. And I can’t exactly provide a step-by-step “recipe” to help people do what I did. But I think it boils down to making the connection: “gee, when I eat nutritious foods, I feel a hell of a lot better!”

What that happens, and you really feel it, shocker, you can find yourself wanting to eat that way more often. And what I’ve found is that the peace of mind you get from not struggling with food choices all the time is very reinforcing. Heck, I love me some Big Mac and fries…but I just can do without feeling gross and depressed after I eat it.

So Edward, never say never :).

I’m not perfect by any stretch. In fact, I’m hoping to give up Diet Coke this weekend, again :).

And it’s not like it wasn’t any work. Hell, I haven’t met a fatty, sugary carb I don’t like. Or wouldn’t inhale if given the opportunity.

I also aspire to get to be where Wayne Dyer is…to the point where you never (or very rarely) ingest stuff that’s harmful. For now, I’m back to “social” feasting…the routine is pretty healthy, but I don’t worry so much on vacations and special occasions. But then again, I’d really like to be like Dyer, or Sis, and not want to do something that’s less than optimal.

But maybe it’s like getting a kid to give up a binky…baby steps :). I’m doing better today than I was a year ago. In another year, who knows?