Why Quick Fixes Don’t Work Either – For Lasting Weight Loss…

NOTE: Last week I wrote about why the advice “Eat in Moderation” didn’t work for me. Let me talk about why quick fatloss tricks are troublesome if you’re struggling to lose weight.

I have been on a health journey for the past 7 years. The reality, it’s been my entire life.

As a kid in the 80s and 90s I did not eat the healthiest of foods.

In fact, I ate a pretty terrible diet of:

• Sugary cereals, sugar-laden instant oatmeal, or Pop-Tarts for breakfast
• Canned pasta, frozen burritos, or PB&Js on white bread for lunch
• Some kind of homemade meal that was heavy on starches and light on the protein for dinner or maybe a frozen, ready-to-heat TV dinner
• I snacked on chips, candy, cakes, pies, rolls, and any other carb-laden, ultra-processed foods I could find in my house
• My beverages of choice were some kind of juice from concentrate, Kool-Aid, hot chocolate, or soda.
• I drank very little water, and when I did some kind of sporting activity, I drank Gatorade.

My environment shaped my concepts of what was healthy.

It’s what I saw on TV, in shows, and on commercials, and what my parents told me was healthy.

My parents, for the record, eat terribly. Even now, with my dad having Type 2 diabetes and my mom diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they refuse to change how they eat.

My parents refuse to believe that grains and sugars are bad for them right now, even though both have conditions that are directly linked to their bodies’ inability to process sugars effectively.

They refuse to increase the amount of animal protein that they eat. 

They believe that salt is bad for them, and they need to avoid it.

They believe the best animal protein is chicken or lean fish because there’s not a lot of fat, and they believe that nuts, beans, soy, and whole grains are a better way to get their protein in.

This was the environment I grew up in. 

It shaped my first views of what I should and shouldn’t eat. 

It’s what has had a monumental impact on my health and how I see the nutritional world.

The way we’ve come to eat today is not working.

Even as a teenager, I struggled with my weight and my overall body image.

This was not helped by my parents or relatives at all, especially my Korean side of the family.

Culturally, they saw no issue with calling a kid or adult fat. They considered it normal to poke at their bellies and pinch the fat at their sides.

And for them, and as a result, for me, it was all about the numbers on the scale.

I remember all those things happening regularly for me as a kid in Jr. High and High School.

I experienced it even as an adult on the few occasions that I did see them after college.

I remember my mom gasping in horror when I said that I was 150 pounds at the start of one of my high school swim seasons.

I would do whatever I could to drop the weight as quickly as possible, which meant working out as hard as possible in practice and eating as little as possible.

But, that “success” didn’t last.

It worked because I was young and had a pretty solid metabolism at the time, but the practice was damaging physically, emotionally, and mentally. And I carried that thought process into college and most of my adult life.

As a college student, Naval Officer, and working mom/adult, my cycle of quick fixes to lose weight continued but with less and less success.

In college, to “make weight” for the Marine Corps I went on an all-orange juice diet for 1 full week and worked out on cardio machines non-stop.

I “made weight” but again, it didn’t last.

As I got older, I kept trying to do the quick fixes that I did in the past, but they became harder and harder and then, they just stopped working.

The more I failed at losing weight and making the numbers on the scale smaller, the worse I felt both physically and emotionally.

I tried basically every quick-fix diet under the sun, but they never lasted because I never fixed how I saw food, exercise, or true health.

When I say I tried everything under the sun, it’s hyperbole, but I did try a lot, including:

•  Nutrisystem
• Low/no fat and low calorie
• Only salads
• Eat 6 times a day focusing on low fat protein and high fiber carbs
• Prescribed gestational diabetes diet
• Atkins diet 
• Plant-based, low fat, low calorie

You can’t make true, lasting changes to your health without understanding what being healthy means and accept that finding true health means making life-long sacrifices.

Quick fixes don’t work primarily because that’s all they are, a quick fix.

They are not lasting lifestyle changes, and they won’t work to get you there.

It has taken me the last 7 years of focused effort to realize this truth:

I can only improve my long-term health by understanding that I must make long-term choices.

I had to completely humble myself and come to the realization that I didn’t know anything about what was healthy.

I had to accept that what I believed for so long was completely wrong and I had to relearn everything about what it meant to eat healthily.

I also had to make choices, long-term choices, about what I ate and how I viewed food.

I had to accept that I didn’t have the capacity to moderate my intake of sugar or carbs, so I needed to accept that to get healthier, I would have to abstain from those foods because they weren’t helping me.

Most importantly, health isn’t necessarily determined by what numbers are reflected on the scale.

My health was so much more than the numbers. 

My health had to do with:

• Strength
• Endurance
• Emotional well-being
• The absence of depression and anxiety
• Gut-health
• reduced stress
• Improved body composition
• Increased lean muscle mass.

Those things are difficult to see in the numbers on the scale but are so much more important.

I had to make those hard choices. Do I pick something that tastes sweet and is a nutritional train wreck or do I choose the foods I know will help me?

Now I choose the food that helps me and heals me.

I choose to lift weights and work out even though it’s exhausting and never gets easier.

I choose my long-term health over the quick fix because that’s what’s important to me.

I want to be an active mother and wife. I want to be able to walk up and down stairs without running out of breath. I want to be able to physically build a home with my husband and live there for the rest of my, hopefully, longer life.

I frequently get asked if I get bored with my way of eating or miss eating things like bread, sugar, chips, and sweets.

No, I don’t.

Feeling stronger, fitter, and resilient is so much more satisfying than a quick high from junk food.

At the end of the day, I choose to abstain from foods that do nothing but make me sick so that I can live a life that is healthy and fulfilled by my activities with God and my family. 

Those are the things that are worth it to me.

The more you think about what is truly worthwhile to you, the easier those hard, life-long choices will become.