M2M Day 98: I can’t believe I’m cutting this out of my diet
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For February, my goal is to land a backflip.
Backflipping is the first of three fitness-related challenges I’m taking on during my Month to Master year. So, I figured I’d use it as an excuse to make a major change to my diet.
Typically, with changes like these, I exhibit fairly strong internal discipline. In fact, for nearly six years now, I haven’t consumed any coffee, alcohol, soda, desserts, sweets, or junk foods. Instead, my diet mostly consists of chicken breast, turkey meatballs, salmon, spinach, string beans, quinoa, and potatoes.
Healthy, right? Well, not quite…
My dietary weakness
While my daily meals are quite healthy, my in-between-meal snacking is off the charts. Particularly, I have an unquenchable craving for sugary, dry breakfast cereals, and it’s definitely a problem.
In one typical cereal session, I consume half the box. Sometimes, the entire box. I’m not even sure how I manage this, but, somehow, all the cereal seems to disappear.
Here’s some incriminating evidence of my problem…
Clearly, this love affair with cereal isn’t a good dietary choice. In fact, because I fill myself up with cereal, during actual mealtime, I typically consume much smaller portions of the good stuff I listed above.
This is especially bad, since I’m working out much more regularly now: My body needs fuel (not sugary oats) to build muscle.
The solution
As of February 1, when I started “backflip month”, I decided to just stop buying cereal.
Instead, every time I have the craving to snack, rather than breaking out a box of cereal, I just munch on these…
I’m not the biggest fan of carrots, but that’s sort of the point. By redirecting my cravings to a less-filling, less-desired snack, I’m able to maintain my appetite for my actual, healthy meals.
So far, it’s been about a week since I went cold turkey on the cereal, and, honestly, it hasn’t been a big deal at all.
Why suffer?
“Why force yourself to suffer like this? You know you only get one life, right? You should try to enjoy it”.
In the short-term, I’m barely suffering (for me, the thrill of gamification overpowers the cravings). And, in the long-term, I’m definitely not suffering (based on my other dietary experiments, the cravings completely disappears after about a month).
Anyway, I’ll continue this experiment through the end of February, and see how I feel then.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
