Slaughterhouse 43

START TIME: 9:30 PM
END TIME: 10:34 PM
WORD COUNT: 520

“If someone were starting a diet, what advice would you give them?”

(I have some background in this; if you’re not aware of my back story, I’ve lost 120 pounds over the last four years. Check out jameslyden.com for further details.)

I’m going to take the liberty of addressing this individual directly.

The good news is, you’ve decided to make a choice today that’s going to make the rest of your life better. The bad news is, you’ve chosen something that has a 95 percent failure rate. The good news is, there’s one simple secret that you need to follow, and it’s something that you already know.

What is it?

You’re a human being. This means that you are prone to making mistakes, prone to making unbelievably stupid decisions, stopping on a dime and quitting after putting in days or weeks or months of work. You are a fallible creature. And as long as you accept this part – that there’s going to be a time where you’re going to screw up and eat the slice of birthday cake at the party, or want the peanut butter, or would rather participate in a chicken fight with sumo wrestler Akebono riding on your shoulders than eat another salad.

I get that. I’ve been there myself. Dieting is not about making every right choice every single time; it’s about making the best choice a solid majority of the time. In your case, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and you, like any other person who can wear the mantel of humanity can attest, are not perfect.

Maybe you’re expecting you will be. Maybe you think that’s the only way through this entire situation, to eat only what’s on one sheet of paper, or stick with something like NutriSystem or Jenny Craig or SlimFast and swear off Actual Real Live Food forever and ever until you’re at a certain number, one worth all kinds of culinary sacrifice and suffering.

No. You’ll fail. Without question.

You’re not going on a diet, which reminds me of the scene in Trainspotting where Mark Renton’s trying to kick heroin. He nails the door shut with two by fours and prepares to go cold turkey. He allots himself nothing but cans of soup for nutrition and buckets for facilities. He fails miserably. The difference between heroin and food is, strictly speaking, you can live without heroin. If you find yourself addicted to smack, and you break the addiction and move on, and even if your days consist of shuffling down the street mumbling to yourself, “no heroin today…no heroin today…” you’ll still need to eat. But if you mismanage food, you’ll feel just as miserable.

So what you’re going to do is, eat the ice cream when it’s starting to follow you around the room, not just because you need a snack while you’re watching people exercise on “The Biggest Loser.” If the temptation for something grows overwhelming, have a manageable portion of it and move along. You aren’t looking to be perfect; you’re just looking for small improvements, stop the bleeding, make a few small repairs. Baby steps. You’ll be fine.