On New Year’s Day, my husband and I were driving to the ski slopes and he said “I think I’m going to do an experiment with my diet every month.” “What do you mean?” I asked. And he said, “Like, one month do paleo, one month do something else… I’d do Whole30 but it is so cliche.” “I’d do Whole30 with you,” I gamely said. And that was that. We are four days in. How is it going?
We have all been told that — contrary to conventional wisdom — it is really hard to lose weight while training for a marathon. In fact, a lot of people gain weight when they up their training mileage. Personally, after 21 marathon training cycles, I know these struggles all too well. (There may be people out there who start running and watch the pounds melt off; I am not one of them.) But I also think it is pretty unhelpful to say “It can’t be done,” and as I recently learned while completing a cut on the RP diet and simultaneously training for a BQ-pace marathon, it can be done.
I believe that “diet” is a bad word. I believe that there’s a lot of evil happening at the hands of the diet industry and their co-conspirators (looking at you, women’s mags). I believe that our society has done a shamefully good job of teaching girls and women that they should always be “trying to lose weight” and should never be happy with their bodies. I believe that men need to speak about women differently. I believe that women need to speak about themselves and each other differently. I believe that girls need to be raised differently — including but not limited to changes to shape of their toys and the appearance of their Disney characters. I hope my kids never go on diets, and I don’t plan to use that word in front of them.
I set this all up to say — I’m going on a diet. A real one. With rules. And Excel charts. It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not “eating by intuition.” It’s actually the opposite of how I’ve been peacefully but unsuccessfully “trying to lose weight” for the past several years. Which is exactly why I chose it.
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