Eating Healthy is Just Like Trying to Quit Smoking!

So I have decided that eating healthy is just as hard as quitting smoking.

I smoked regularly from age 13 until age 24 (I’m 27.5 now). Up until about the age of 22 I enjoyed it all the time and never thought twice about quitting…. well, I say I enjoyed it; I was in denial about it! I guess I refused to accept that I didn’t want to quit because I knew it would be tough. Plus back then didn’t really care about my health.

When I was 22 I wanted to quit every single day. I remember waking up and telling myself “this is the day, no more, I’m never going to smoke again”. At best I would last about 5 days, at worst a few hours and on average it would have been about a day or two each time. I found the longer I stopped for the more I smoked again when I took it back up.

I am finding a similar challenge with food. It’s so easy to keep tucking into whatever you want rather than what you know you should be eating. I find it particularly easy because of my almost constant athletic frame. I may look healthy but behind closed doors I do shift some absolute crap through my body. Most crap apart from animal based crap, alcohol and drugs (these things are long gone from my body now).

All in all I find myself being very sensible about the whole thing…. most the time. I do make most meals from scratch even unhealthy ones. Compared with most of what I see in other peoples shopping trolly’s we buy very good foods. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of room for improvement though. I read labels and avoid heavily poison processed foods. Then other times I gorge myself on unhealthy meals, for everything I eat that day. After I have done this I know I wont put on weight but I feel rotten. I can feel it clinging onto my body, and mentally I feel even worse. I start to think about all the great athletes of the world and perhaps what their diet is like. I think of my role models. I feel ashamed.

Sometimes when I am told “it’s ok in moderation, it’s just a treat”. How is this even possible? Since I quit smoking completely I would never just have the odd one or two and say “it’s fine it’s just a treat”. I know how bad it is for my body. Yet when it comes to food, cakes and sweets we have this idea that it’s fine just once or twice? This doesn’t seem to sit right with me.

Me and my husband recently tried going 80:10:10 (fruitarian, raw, Vegan) which is 80% of your calories in carbs, 10% in protein and 10% in fat. We had planned to do this for a month and managed 7 days as a detox. After this we slipped into old ways again. It’s now been about a week since we finished this detox. We keep talking about how we miss it.

We are in Turkey on holiday for 3 weeks soon and we are most likely going to eat a lot of fruit in the day and maybe one cooked meal in the evening. Once we return we have been discussing gradually making the change to 80:10:10 on a more permanent basis. There may be some slight modifications throughout the colder months though with an emphasis on hot soups and stews packed with veges.

Who knows where things will go but I need to make better choices RE my diet, and I must work out a way to sustain it properly. I am now starting to find myself in a situation where I was when trying to quit smoking. Every day trying to quit bad foods and diet habits and it’s driving me bonkers 😉

I’m hoping much like quitting smoking, and quitting drinking that with continuous persistence eventually the bad foods will just slip away and the desire to eat them will too. I think a fruitarian diet is perfect and with this upcoming holiday I can’t think of any easier way to eat. Almost everywhere can provide fruit 😉

Anyway rant over
Lots of peace and love
-ScottyRunner