It’s true diets don’t work. The data shows that most of dieters fail to keep their weight off and most gain even more weight after six months. Worse, dieting, especially the kind that starves the body, short-circuits metabolisms so that they’re slower than before resulting in weight gain. My quest to embrace 3,000 Calories a Day therefore should not be looked upon as a diet. For one it does not involve the deprivation one associates with a diet. Deprivation is a relative term. A man who eats 4-5,000 calories a day may feel deprived if he must cut down his intake by 30-40%, but he is simply raging against the loss of indulging his infantile appetites. In fact, 3,000 calories is a generous allotment of food. Most diets are less than 2,000 calories and feel punitive. Secondly, exercising control over one’s desires is not some futile activity, but normal, healthy human behavior. As we grow from childhood to adulthood, our maturity is defined by our ability to put aside our short-term gratification and excess for our long-term goals. Our parents teach us this lesson by giving us a weekly allowance. We’re given a certain amount of money and we spend it little by little or all at once. We spend it recklessly or we save it and spend it on things we’ve decided we really want or need or both. We learn how to achieve a goal or indulge our whims and whine when we have no money left to go to the movies with friends. A lot of diets employ this type of responsibility exercise. People get a deck of cards worth a certain amount of points and every time they eat they are spending money, so to speak. A big-ticket item would be a slice of pecan pie, which is around 500 calories while a celery stalk is about two. Eating sensibly requires the same responsibility of budgeting wisely. No one says it’s impossible to learn to budget one’s money in a responsible manner. Therefore, no one should claim that responsible eating, represented by my limiting myself to 3,000 calories a day, is an impossibility. Usually, people who are responsible in one area are responsible in other areas as well since the character trait of responsibility isn’t something one can usually compartmentalize. Rather, it is a personality trait that pervades all of one’s activities. The inverse is also true. People who spend recklessly eat recklessly. However, irresponsible people often play tricks in which they reward good behavior by trading it for bad behavior. Some people, for example, diet severely and compensate by spending too much. Other people spend too much and being surrounding by their consumer goods curbs their appetite for food. Finding escape in one indulgence in order to act responsibly in another is not what I’m trying to achieve by keeping my boundary at 3,000 calories. Exercising restraint in the matter of food intake should strengthen me to exercise restraint in all of my behavior. This is my goal in pursuing my 3,000-Calorie Quest.
Post a comment
Your Information
(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)
dude, i'm blowing it... haven't been writing down what i eat and have been eating a ton... was losing a few pounds, now going straight up the other way. definitely a direct correlation...
Posted by: kr | August 29, 2008 at 09:56 AM
I failed to keep at or below 3,000 my first 12 days. It gets easier.
Posted by: jeffrey McMahon | August 29, 2008 at 10:02 AM