Honesty IS The Best Policy

Straight Talk And No Nonsense

Webster’s defines honesty as “the state or quality of being honest; specifically refraining from lying, cheating and stealing, being truthful, trustworthy or upright, sincere, fair, straightforward.” The original meaning of the word was akin to the word honor.

I have had an experience lately in how honesty helps me lose weight.

I had been struggling in maintenance this last year. After two relatively easy years maintaining within a 5-pound range of my goal weight, the third year was not so good. Every month I would gain 3 or 4 pounds with my monthly cycle, and then lose 2 or 3 pounds afterward. Obviously, this resulted in a slow upward creep, and I wasn’t happy about it.

I suspected perimenopausal hormones from interfering with my ability to take the weight off. I suspected a reduced exercise regimen was also partially to blame. I feared new intolerances to previously safe foods.

During the first two years on maintenance there were several higher carb foods I could eat occasionally without weight gain or negative health symptoms. Now, apparently, I could no longer get away with them, but it was hard to stay off of foods that had previously been fine for me and which added variety to my diet.

During the course of a personal correspondence, one of my long distance low carbing friends and I began an accountability pact. We had both crept back up a little in weight, and were both having trouble staying on stringent ways of eating long enough to take it back off, or at least long enough to diagnose what our problem was.

We’ve been doing this for about a month now. My weight has been dropping slowly, but not steadily. I tell her every day what I will eat that day and then I tell her every day whether I stuck to that. She does the same, and is finally shaving a little bit of weight back off herself.

This is working for one reason and one reason only: it would never occur to either one of us not to tell each other the truth.

When we first discover low carb, especially for those of us young enough to not remember it from the sixties and seventies, it is very easy to get angry at the government. They lied to us! All those years of pushing the food pyramid at us, and they were seemingly in the pockets of the big grain and cereal companies. We get angry at our doctors, the FDA, and everyone who every put an ad on television telling us that eating their cereal in the morning is the way to be thin. How dare they lie?

Clearly, that advice was simply wrong. I don’t know whether it was a lie, a government conspiracy, or simply well meant advice based on faulty research, and frankly, I don’t care. Because what difference does it make how long or how badly they lied to us? We know the truth now, and at any rate, the lies others tell us pale in comparison to the lies we can tell ourselves.

Denial is a very powerful force. And it is, at it’s root, a form of lying. Typically, in denial, we’re only hurting ourselves, but still, that matters!

One of two things was happening with me. In this last year, either I had been eating exactly as I had before and it was no longer working, or I was eating more of the higher carb foods that I was admitting. I didn’t want to accept that as my body changed with menopause, what I had eaten and maintained on even a year before would no longer work. I didn’t want to accept that I wasn’t being aware and open with myself about quantities, either. So I rolled along, slowly gaining, alternately suspecting this or that, but never being straightforward enough with myself to find out – until I’d finally had enough and reached out for some help. I didn’t want to know the truth, and in avoidance, I accepted a slow weight gain, until it finally reached my threshold of unacceptability.

I suppose on a subconscious level I knew that I can deceive myself. Therein lies the value of the accountability pact. I didn’t think I would lie to my friend about things as basic as whether or not I had iced tea or water, and I was right.

Even still, there is a powerful element of denial. Many times I’ll have to get up in the morning and fire off a quick note to her that I “forgot” to mention some late night snack, however low carb it may have been.

As a result I have been able to see what is happening with me. I can discern the subtle changes in my cycle of weight loss and gain as my menstrual cycle is changing. I can see that my monthly window of opportunity for losing weight has shrunk, just as I suspected. I can also see that, contrary to my earlier, unresearched belief, it does matter what I eat in those few days every month in which I gain regardless of what I eat. I can see that those 3 and 4 pound “water” gains from an indulgences do not come right back off, like they used to.

I have also been able to see subtle signs of a reoccurrence of candida in my system. I didn’t see it before because my symptoms were different from those I had noticed and treated several years ago. But by finally being accountable to stay only on the purest of pure food choices, I can now see this and treat it.

Many people are able to do this for themselves through scrupulous self-honesty. They record their intake and exercise. They monitor the effects of every supplement, every change in diet through careful record keeping. Some people even post these on line and then make their records available to the world to see. There is less denial there, at least in theory.

But even then we can still delude ourselves through our explanations. We can choose what we believe the causes are of every change up or down the scale. And of course, we can always lie about what we record, and what we choose to omit. We need only look to Enron to see what selective record keeping will do for us.

I see now that for a long time I might really have not wanted to know what the cause of my slow weight gain was. Of course, once I knew the causes of my slow weight gain, I would have to do something to correct it. There was a part of me that just didn’t want to accept that responsibility, that wanted to blame “menopause” as though it were a sentient being with its own moral responsibility not to do these things to me.

I see this in many beginning low carbers. We are not all straightforward in accepting the truth of our situation. At an extreme, many of us refused to get on the scales because we simply didn’t want to know how bad it was. We won’t even try on that dress we wore last year because we know it won’t fit and we don’t want to face that. The trouble is, when we don’t accept the unhappy truth, we can’t change the unhappy reality.

There is another subtle form of self deception, which is believing that what was true last year, or what is true for someone else, must be true for us. We lost just fine last year on cheese, we know someone who lost a 100 pounds without ever having to give up cheese, and so we believe that it must therefore be true that we can eat cheese and lose weight. Believing this, we deny the evidence before us that our weight gains come the same days we are scrubbing out the fondue pot, and look everywhere else for the cause of our stall. Our bodies are not simple, static objects, but dynamic, ever-changing complex mechanisms, if we don’t accept the truth that things change, sooner or later we will be lying to ourselves.

Of course we also lie about why we go off plan with our foods. It may not feel like a lie to say, “I just thought, what the heck, it wasn’t worth telling the waiter to take this back to the kitchen; the menu said nothing about corn in this salad.” One of my personal favorites was from a woman who wasn’t feeling well and her young daughter brought her a cookie saying, “Here mommy, this will make you feel better.” She didn’t want to hurt the girl’s feelings, so she ate it.

Where the lie is there is in telling ourselves that the only way to accomplish our goal of not hurting the girl’s feelings, or of finishing the business lunch without drawing our client’s attentions to our diet, is to eat the carbs. When we are not searching in our analysis of our choices and motivations, then we may be telling the truth, but not the whole truth, and we miss important opportunities to make the changes that will bring us success.

Anything we tell ourselves that does not take the whole truth into account is, in part, a lie.

If I look at Webster’s definition, I realize that honesty must be about more than the absence of lying, cheating, and stealing. It is about embracing the truth. It is about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me, God.

It may seem hard to lay ourselves out naked before even our own scrutiny. It can hurt to see our own shortcomings, our own failures. But I think we must do that if we are ever going to change.

It may seem even more difficult to be completely open with other people. But I have found in many ways that that is actually easier. A trusted friend who understands our journey will be able to see what our denial has been hiding. It can also help to hear that what we consider shameful in ourselves, our friend considers to be a common failing, perhaps it’s even one they share.

Perhaps we are afraid of what the truth is.

Perhaps we do not want to know why we are still fat and sick, even after trying low carb, and we do not want to know what further we need to change to get thin and healthy. If that is the case, then we need to be honest with ourselves and with those around us, and admit that we do not want to lose weight, not at that price. If our fear is greater than our motivation to change our diet, then we will always sabotage ourselves anyway. Why not save the wear and tear on our bodies, our pocketbooks and our relationships and just admit it?

But what are we afraid of? What do we believe about the truth? Do we believe that the truth will destroy us, or will wound us irreparably? Do we believe that the world is such a cruel, unloving place that it is not safe to see it as it is?

Or do we believe that the truth will set us free?