One of the things that I realized on Easter Morning was that I’m done with my diet. I’ve changed the way I look at food, increased my understanding about eating healthy for my own individual body, and faced some painful and ugly assumptions that had gone long unlooked-at. I’ve also created some excellent habits concerning movement, and rhythmic eating. And so now, it’s time to shift.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll recall that I’ve been attempting the Dukan Diet for about a year, now. I say ‘about’ a year, because I lost about a third of the weight [33 lbs] I’d been shooting for (just in time for my wedding last July, an unplanned bonus), and then shifted it into the long-term gear in the diet, the place you go to consolidate your weight loss. And for the last two months, I’ve been trying to shift it back into the low-gear, but it’s been just one long, ugly plateau. Meanwhile, the diet has had some difficult side-effects – mainly, for two out of four weeks of the month, I can’t actually be on it and stay upright, due to menstruation and my tricky vascular issue. Also, it’s a harsh, harsh diet. It works, yes, but that came for me at the price of eating so much of a food that I actually couldn’t stand it anymore.

And so from here the rule is this: all things in moderation- including moderation. Here’s what have I learned from being on a diet, and the Dukan diet in particular, that I want to keep and continue:

• I had no idea I was having such an intemperate love affair with carbohydrates. I really was. It was sort of obscene. It’s over now. I’m introducing carbs back into my life, and that’s well and good, but I have no intention to eat the vast quantity of them that I had been before.
• It never really sunk in how much I wasn’t moving in my life, how sedentary I’d become, and how much effect can be had by simply introducing more movement, and making it regular and habitual.
• I had no idea protein was so darn good for me. Yay, protein! I’m keeping the protein days (a part of the long-term, rest-of-your-life plan of the Dukan Diet), and throwing in the occasional religious fast, and extra protein day because I still have the other 2/3 of the weight to lose. But, as I didn’t gain all those pounds in a single year, I’m kind of okay taking longer than one year to lose them.
• I was well aware of my propensity to eat in quantity when emotionally fragile, and aware that it was unhelpful. I had no idea that I also felt guilty eating in celebration – feast days, birthdays, congratulatory meals, etc. I had somehow connected this with the former, and it took some doing to disconnect the two.
• The joy of realizing that I can actually lose weight! 33 pounds down, and my rear end is a completely different shape. This is incredibly hopeful. And if I go for too long without any slight decrease in my weight, or increase in muscle tone and stamina, then I feel really comfortable hopping back on the Dukan Diet for a bit to restart that weight loss. Thanks to Dukan, I have a reasonable goal weight in mind, and I know what I’m aiming at.