Baby Steps

The reason why many diets don’t work is because the diet authors try to incorporate too many steps in too short of a period of time.  For example, Candida diets begin by offering you a bullet point list of foods, mainly vegetables and protein, and a list of supplements and then they send you on your way.  Diet books and programs make it seem easy to go from being a chain smoking, junk food mowing, fast food frequenting, binge drinking American to some vegetarian monk who runs triathlons in a little less than a week.  Well, I’m here to tell you from personal experience that healing your body doesn’t work that way—at least it didn’t for me.

See, I tried all those diets to get my health shifted in order and I found epic fail every time.  I’d always begin my diet when I went to the grocery store.  I’d see all the pretty colors in the produce section and I would ecstatically pile up my cart.  Now that I look back, I wonder what the cashier was thinking, probably wondering how much I would actually eat before it all went bad and created a petri dish in my refrigerator.  And she would have been right, because all of it always did go bad, every time.

See, the true way to achieve good health is to start out small.  Maybe you are a heavy smoker and you want to quit. Try cutting out one cigarette per day, and be dedicated to eliminating that one cigarette for the rest of the month.  Don’t worry about cutting out more than that. Instead, begin thinking about the reasons why you started smoking in the first place.  Chances are you smoke because it is a coping mechanism for stress.

Stress comes in a variety of packages:  work, school, family, health, breakups, relationships, infidelity, sexuality, infertility, low self confidence, cancer, death, trauma, war, money, lonliness, abuse, and the list goes on and on.  Nobody is exempt from stress, even if they pretend to be.  That’s why addiction is an ever rampant problem.  People turn to addiction in any of its forms to combat the stress from the past and the stress they face each day.

When combating poor health and addiction to substances like sugar, it is absolutely necessary to deal with things that happened in the past.  Once you begin to address your addiction, you won’t be able to use it as a crutch anymore to deal with past stress and new stress.  Bring those emotions to the foreground and identify the problem. Give the problem a name, research it on the internet, think about it, talk to loved ones about it, try to find answers, make choices.  Take some alone time to deal with it, even if it is just an hour each day.  Breathe. Go through every emotion: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.  It is only after you reach acceptance that you will be able to make positive changes in your life.