Formosa Fitness

A week ago, I took my little boy to a great local indpendent hamburger joint and had a cheeseburger, fries, and a root beer (that's hard to find in Taiwan). We thoroughly enjoyed it and I didn't feel an ounce of guilt.

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about nutrition is that if they start eating healthy, they can never again eat their favorite foods. Since they know they can never give it up completely, they feel they will fail so why even try. So then they say, "What the hell. Pass the bag of potato chips." That's not how it works.

You don't have to give any food up completely. It just isn't necessary. You simply have to stop abusing the priviledge of eating fast or heavy foods.

How to do that? Learn to eat according to a healthy nutrition plan like Precision Nutrition and stick to it 90% of the time. That means you can indulge somewhat for 10% of your meals each week.

But right here is where people run into trouble. They're usually glad to know they can indulge once in a while, but then they immediately rebel against the idea of eating healthy 90% of the time. If you eat healthy 90% of the time and you eat 5 small meals a day, that means you get to splurge for about four meals a week. Oh no, doesn't sound so fun now.

Two things:

One, unless someone learns to stop emotional eating, gain control of their life and eating habits, and learn to DELAY gratification, then they will NEVER get fit. NEVER.

Now this can be a process, it can take a long time, you can make small changes slowly as a kind of fitness and nutrition on-ramp, etc. But eventually someone is going to have to look at a bag of Doritoes and say "no." It's going to have to happen sometime. So expect it. The gain is delayed gratification in the form of weight loss and looking great. You trade that little pleasure of stuffing your face today for looking great naked later. There, I said it.

Second, you'd be surpsrised how good a well-prepared burger is when you don't eat them all the time. These foods become pleasure foods again, not staples, as they were intended to be. There's no way you should be eating at Burger King everyday if you're overweight. You probably don't even taste it any more if you it every day. Have it once a week at most and learn to savor it.

So remember, you don't have to give it up permanently. You just have to let it have it's proper place in your overall diet.