Tatsuya Ishida, much like Scott Adams, is apparently spying on me.
I’ll come clean — I’ve actually eaten the meal depicted here and enjoyed it, at least when it’s made with that vaguely meatlike form of tofu that does a pretty good job of approximating the texture of chicken. However, I can totally sympathize with ‘Nique here in the realm of, “I am so sick of being good; I want to be very, very bad.” Heck, the first time I had organic blue corn tortilla chips, they were so aggressively healthy, they made me physically unwell. They didn’t quite turn me into a newt, but I did get better. These days, if I go too crazy with the Cheez Whiz, the same thing happens. The mouth still loves Cool Ranch Doritos, but gone are the days when knocking off an entire 10 or 14 ounce bag of them was “dinner.”
While it’s unlikely that you’ll need to stage a Ben & Jerry’s intervention after your first day on a healthier eating regimen, there are a lot of different things conspiring to get you off that healthy bandwagon.
The first, and most obvious, is plain, old, insidious addiction. Caffeine is one of the biggest monkeys we’ve probably got adding to our dietary encumbrance. Withdrawal from it is nobody’s idea of a good time, unless you’re selling headache remedies. Going cold turkey might work for some folks, but it’s probably going to be easier to ramp down slowly over the course of a few days or weeks, depending on how big your jones is. You could start cutting back by a cup of coffee (or a can of your preferred soft drink) for a week; replace them with something less-caffeinated, or caffeine-free (water is always a good option, but for folks who want something a little more interesting, everything from milk to fruit juice to tea are all viable options — go with what works for you).
This same approach can be applied to other not-so-great foods — substituting healthy snacks for chips, for instance. Eventually, you’ll reach for the healthier stuff by habit and choice, and maybe even find your eyes drawn to that page early in the restaurant menu subtitled “Salads.” Yes, many of us, Yours Truly included, believe that “salad is what the food eats.” We don’t make too big a show of enjoying a burger or something when we go out to dinner with Scott (well, most of the time, anyway), but there are a lot of very tasty, nutritionally-balanced options on the Page O’ Greens. Salads with a bit of grilled chicken, seared tuna, or hard-boiled eggs — whatever floats your boat — are usually available, and darn tasty.
The whole idea is to circumvent those craving spikes that want to wipe the raid derail our efforts and progress. Even folks who’ve normally got an iron will can sometimes give in to the temptation:
I have an old friend from my days studying at an intensive foreign language institute who struggled through the last week of prep for a bodybuilding contest, then walked into a pizza parlor and ate three pizzas. It had an effect on his body, if you’re looking for an understatement. His fogged out brain just simply demanded mounds of carbs and salt.
- Dan John, at T-Nation
Three pizzas is a bit of overkill. Three slices? Not so much. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but none of us are trying to be. Basically, if we go into a mode where we’re completely denying ourselves something, we’ll eventually snap and overdo it on the rebound; having a little bit every so often keeps that particular wolf away from our door.
As the T-shirt says, “Not all who wander are lost.” The trick, of course, is not eating all your bread crumbs, so you can find your way back when you do wander.
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