Epic Fail: "Lifestyle Change"

I hate the word “lifestyle”.  It’s a dumb word, and it’s so overused that it has become sort of hollow and empty, especially as it pertains to diet and health.  Every day we hear,  “Don’t  go on a diet.  Just change your lifestyle.”  In an effort to do that, we decide we're going to adopt a couple new habits.  We join a gym, buy a bottle of olive oil, and swear we will eat baby carrots instead of potato chips. Our lifestyle changes last for a little while.  Sometimes the lifestyle changes don't make it past the 3-day mark, especially if we are under great stress and balancing 400 other things.  Sometimes the lifestyle changes go for a very long time-- 6 months or a year, especially if we are super-motivated and all the odds stack up in our favor.  And when we can persevere for a while with our gym rat/olive oil/baby carrot regimen and we've managed to make some good things happen to our body, we breathe a sigh of relief and say, “I did it.  I changed my lifestyle.”  

And then the wheels fall off.

Because, as challenging as those changes are, they're just not enough.  A bottle of Filippo Berio in the pantry and a much-begrudged periodic visit to Bally's do not a new "lifestyle" make.  You are on a collision course with your old ways and your old problems.

How can I be so negative?  Well, firstly because it is an absolute statistical fact.  And secondly because it has happened to me all of my adult life:  “Hey, I’m a lean marathoner and I’m capable of anything” rapidly turned into “C’mon sweetie, that new HBO series is starting and I made stew.  Let’s just take it easy tonight”  You can call it recidivism, you can call it relapse, you can call it whatever you want, but the numbers out there show that most of us who start a health kick really have a hard time making it our “lifestyle” for longer than a year.

But this tendency to not change our lifestyle is not an overarching lack of discipline...it is a biological system called homeorhesis.  Basically, our body regulates itself with hormones and brainwave patterns that we have  limited control over.  This regulatory process creates for each human body its own trajectory upon which it travels through life. Even if it is not optimal, your body wants to stay on this trajectory and it has a tendency to return itself to the trajectory it was on…even when you have done the work to go a different direction. So it is long-term fight against your own unseen biology to be a success.  Think about it in terms of your car.  Let’s say you’ve knocked the old jalopy out of alignment and it wants to pull dangerously left.  Now, unless you can afford to have major alignment work done, the old car is always going to pull left.  You are going to have to work every time you are behind the wheel and fight like the devil to keep it rolling straight.  You can’t let go of that wheel, or steer with your knees, or change the radio station, or lighten your grasp, because in the split-second that you do, you are just going to wind up veering left again.  It’s that fast.   

The moral of the story is, if you think you need to solve a health problem (whether it’s being overweight, having hypertension, having diabetes, etc.) through diet and exercise, you can never ever stop.  You can't let go of the steering wheel.  You can’t coast.  You can’t cheat.  You can’t make a deal that you’ll go back to being “good” after vacation.  You have to keep pulling that misaligned vehicle straight every day or you are going to drift left and get creamed.

That is a bummer extraordinaire, is it not?  You could find it very de-motivating and wonder, why even bother?   Most people are not lazy, and they are willing to do the hard work to get healthy.  But they are not willing to create a lifelong relationship with hard work…and yet despite the high failure rate of people trying to lose weight/get healthy, there IS a 35% success rate.  Yes, some folks really CAN do it long-term!  Better yet, that successful 35% who really stick with it can, miraculously, re-set their homeorhesis trajectory.   It takes like 5+ years of constant stick-to-it-iveness,  but these people re-program their brainwaves and hormones to those of a thin person!

So this 35% who beat the odds...what's their secret?  Are they harder workers?  Do they have an allergy to everything except broccoli?  Did they make a deal with the devil?  Why are they so lucky?

I'll argue that they didn't enact a "lifestyle change project"...they just flipped a switch and changed their lives.

More specifically, the success stories do share some similarities, mechanically.  By and large, all of the people who were able to make-over their bodies and their health as it pertains to weight and weight-related issues do the following:  they religiously exercise about 60 minutes a day, they find a healthy dietary regimen they can stick to every day, they periodically write down/record what they are doing and eating to make sure they are toeing the line, they weigh themselves regularly, and they maintain consistency all week and weekend long (no self-bargaining conversations like “I’ll start in fresh first thing Monday morning”)  

I would gander, though, that socio-culturally, the success stories also share similarities.  These folks don't just adopt a couple lifestyle changes.  On the contrary, everything in their world is re-framed.  Their closets probably look different, their pantries certainly must look different, their commute and daily habits may be significantly changed, and they probably made a few new friends whose habits mirror their own or in some way support them.  They might have even changed other things like career or relationships. They discard the dysfunctional habits of their old world, and openly embrace new ways of doing things.  They see the constant work as an opportunity rather than a burden.  And I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like “I’m a different person these days.  I don’t even want to go back to the way I was before.”   Their whole LIFE changes.  That is the key to lifestyle change.  Everything has to deviate from the way it was before.

Again, some people might be disappointed or flat-out angered by this.  They like their lives just fine, thank you very much.  And who the heck is this personal chef spouting off that they need to flip their world upside down to lose a couple pounds?  How dare she?  In all fairness, this assertion is not my personal invention.  I am relaying information as studied by the National Institute of Health and a host of scholars at the Cleveland Clinic’s 8^th annual Obesity Summit.   

To really create a change, forget the weak, watered-down term “lifestyle”.  Instead, realize that to improve your weight and/or your health, you have to change your life.