Flexitarian

One of our favorite clients turned me on to a book called VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health … for Good, by Mark Bittman. Truthfully, I haven’t read it yet. I’m one of the world’s slowest readers and am reading another get healthy book — Womancode by Alisa Vitti — so it’ll be 2015 by the time I get to this one. But the premise of VB6 is kind of a big “Duh!” and goes with our entire Pixie ethos. Do what works for you. If eating healthy 24/7 forever seems so impossible you think, “Why even bother,” stop thinking of how to be healthier in terms of, “What you should do,” and instead, “What you could do.”  

VB6 is about a food writer who eats Vegan or no dairy, no meat but vegetables, whole grains and fruits throughout the day but come 6pm eats anything. Mind you the guy isn’t going out to Shop Rite, buying a sheet cake and devouring it at 6pm. He simply enjoys delicious healthy food without going insane. And he’s also not starving himself waiting until dinner time. He’s eating very nutritious food throughout the day. He offers Vegan recipes as well as good no-Vegan yet healthy recipes for after 6pm.

The main nugget is that he found a way to get healthy and stick with it because he found a way to incorporate being healthy into his existing life — not change his entire life. That’s the trick, don’t find some new diet that you think you should do but one you think would help your health and you could stick with forever. Often this means tailoring any diet you like or have to do to who you are — the real you, not the pretend you — and the world you live in, which likely involves sheet cakes and roast turkeys with all of the trimmings at Thanksgiving. It reminds me of why the book Body for Life by Bill Phillips worked for me in my early 30s when my finance desk job caught up with my slowing metabolism. I had to eat healthy for 6 days and do the prescribed exercise but one day a week the diet allowed you to eat anything. An-Y-THING.

After a somewhat unsatisfying meal one week night, I remember watching a Long John Silver commercial and thinking, “Oh yeah man, I’m going to have THAT for lunch on Sunday. The works.”And I did. Knowing I could eat anything I wanted for three meals a week was enough to make sure I ate properly the rest of the week. When I was maintaining the weight I lost, I expanded this An-Y-THING to the whole weekend. What’s funny was I ended up craving some healthy food in between Long John Silvers, buffalo chicken wings, waffle fries and light beer. In addition, it helped me over the past 10 years to have a much more nutritious diet. It’s probably why Weight Watchers is so successful for many people — it’s a diet but it’s flexible.

Some personality types have an easier time sticking with our notion of “will power” — noteably Classics (SJ), Smart Structures (NTJ), Funs (SP), and Organic Structures (NFJ). But, when it comes to being healthy, there are so many more factors at play than our personality types — lifestyle (past and present), upbringing, stage of life, job, level of vanity etc. Many of the above mentioned personality types do not eat healthy. Many would find Weight Watchers too tedious over a lifetime — most noteably Organics (NF) and Smarts (NT). When we say do what works for you, we mean both in terms of results and what you could do forever. If you love to have a glass of wine every night or cookies then a diet that eliminates wine or cookies forever, assuming you’re not an alcoholic or a diabetic, is a really dumb idea. Life is short, we should enjoy it and if a glass of wine brings you that much pleasure, don’t eliminate it (or whatever your daily “glass of wine” is). Find a way to introduce healthy foods into your regular diet in a way that could work for you. The easiest first step is to think of adding something rather than subtracting.