Try the I love to eat diet

I love eating. It’s my favorite thing to do. Eating is good. People who love to eat are normal. I don’t get along very well with people who don’t like eating. I don’t think they’re trustworthy!

There is no need to apologize for loving to eat. There’s no need to apologize for loving rich foods with butter and sugar. In short, eating is a healthy habit. Eating is necessary to sustain life, thus making it the among the healthiest of all habits.

There can be one, small problem with loving to eat and that’s not balancing the love to eat with the love to move. Too much eating and too little moving usually results in too much body fat.

One way to remove the excess body fat is to eat less so that it’s commensurate with the physical activity you’re getting (or that you aren’t getting). Depending on how sedentary you might be that could be eating just a little less (or a lot less). Eating a little less can be managed by monitoring what and how much you eat and tracking.

If you love to eat and live a sedentary lifestyle, trying to reduce your eating to the point where you create a calorie deficit necessary for weight loss, might present an insurmountable challenge.

If you spend most of your time sitting at a desk or in an automobile you might live a sedentary lifestyle. If you spend most of the day sitting and your leisure time activities and forms of entertainment are also enjoyed sitting, it’s for sure you live a sedentary lifestyle. If you sit for work and play and have somebody to do your cooking, cleaning your house and caring for your yard you live a very sedentary lifestyle.

If you want to know for sure get a pedometer and count your steps for a week. If you average fewer than 2300 a day – yup – that’s a sedentary lifestyle. It would explain your propensity to gain weight. If you’ve been trying to lose weight by reducing your calories and just can’t stick with such a calorie-restricted diet, it’s not because you’re weak or lacking discipline or willpower. You’re fighting nature.

My job as general manager of Weight Watchers of Maine is a sedentary job. I’m sitting in the office doing “general managing” or I’m driving to some meeting hours away to see how things are going with field staff and members.

I think one reason why so many people are unsuccessful at weight management is because their approach is analogous to trying to stop waves from coming to shore. It can’t be done, but we can learn how to surf. Surfing is less frustrating and a lot more fun than trying to stop waves from coming to shore! In other words, they can’t reduce their food intake sufficiently to make up for burning too few calories in a day.

The I love to eat diet focus isn’t on what you’re eating, it’s paying attention to burning the calories that you’re getting from your food.

So let’s talk about how enjoy moving more. I am never going to love working out in a gym. I love what working out does for my body but the reality is that I hate gyms. I hate exercise equipment so much that even though I’d like the results I see on my body, I don’t keep it up. The results weren’t even enough to make me do what I find loathsome.

I just can’t shut and train.

Working in gyms with trainers can yield fantastic results. Some people get hooked on both the workouts and the results. It becomes a part of their life for which they make time to keep it up. Others, and that would be me, would do it for a while until desired results were achieved and slowly find more excuses and less time to get to the gym. If that’s you too, it would be better to a way that the activity is so fun you want to do it often just for the sheer pleasure.

I am always looking for things that make me move and things I have fun doing. Having fun moving will give my body the same degree of fitness that doing something loathsome will give me. The idea that it can’t be good for you if you have fun is wrong.

I like to ride horses. Don’t think that horses do all the work. If you have ever ridden a horse you know it takes work to balance and stay on. If you ride competitively you and your horse work together as a team and both of you are sweating within a matter of minutes.

I like to play with grandchildren. I walk my dog and even if I don’t like to, it’s unavoidable. He needs exercise and he needs to go out and I live on a busy road that’s not fenced in. Therefore, rain or shine, heat or cold, we go for daily walks.Screen Shot 2014-04-30 at 10.26.30 AM

I like to paddle my kayak and I like to sail. Sailing a sunfish is not just sitting in a boat. There is a lot of activity from launching it, to rigging it, to actually working the sheet, hanging on, counterbalancing the sail and jumping out of the way of the boom before getting smacked in the head! And then there’s the swimming and flipping it back into an upright position when it tips over!

Launched, rigged and the sail is unfurled and ready to sail!

If you think sailing a sunfish is a matter of just sitting there, you’ll quickly discover that you are constantly moving. Sometime you’re in the water flipping the boat over.

Find ways to move that you love so much you want to move. Find ways to move that you love so much that you’ll make time to move. The more you love to move, the more you’ll be able to love to eat and the more you’ll love how you feel and look!

Jackie Conn

About Jackie Conn

Jackie Conn is married and has four grown daughters and four grandchildren. She is a Weight Watchers success story. She's a weight loss expert with 25 years of experience guiding women and men to their weight-related goals. Her articles on weight management have been published in health, family and women's magazines. She has been a regular guest on Channel 5 WABI news, FOX network morning program Good Day Maine and 207 on WCSH.