DIETS DON'T FAIL: Finding your inner path to health

By Jascha Fishburn

A diet has never failed anyone; however, many people fail diets, again and again every day. So how do we find success on our health journey? This book takes a fundamental but forward-thinking look at why people struggle to stay focused on their health endeavors. Understanding why you have failed the diets you have previously chosen is the core o

• Language: English
• Publisher: William & Madison Media
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218214197

Jascha Fishburn

Looking to help people get healthier through self-discovery.

Book preview

Prologue

Why?

Why am I the way that I am? Why do I do the things that I do? Why do I allow myself certain things and not others? Why do I get depressed about certain aspects of my life over which I have complete control and can change at any time but don't? Why do I start strong but then falter and fade out before achieving my goals?

These questions lead to realizing that a diet NEVER fails you, whether you succeed in achieving your goals or not. However, when the goals we set as we start on a new health journey are so specifically invested and focused on someone else's idea of losing weight and becoming healthy, we neglect to integrate these goals throughout all aspects of our lives and ourselves. Hopefully, I will show you that you can do much more to fortify what you do consistently to help you achieve your daily, weekly, or monthly goals.

I have no formal education in writing, nor do I hold any degrees or certifications for nutrition, physical training, phycological training, or any type of metaphysical study or research other than what I have read personally, and I primarily draw from my own experience throughout my life and the people and world around me. The information in this book should never be substituted for medical advice from a doctor, physical therapist, personal trainer, therapist, or otherwise.

Many of the concepts and suggestions I discuss in this book, if put into action, might help you to think about things differently – which is the fundamental focus of what I'm hoping you will understand upon finishing this book. For example, suppose you choose to and are willing to alter your thinking, feeling, and understanding and decide to push yourself to mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical places of self-discovery. In that case, you might better understand who you are and how you can actively take much more control of your life in the future.

Ultimately, I feel that we as a species have evolved to the point that not one person on this planet should have any misunderstandings about how to take control of any aspect of their lives, and if you can accept, or at least understand that to an extent, then you may find this book helpful.

We are all on our individual journeys, and most of us have probably endured a certain amount of trauma at some point in our lives, to which the ego created self-defense mechanisms to help us interpret, understand, and deal with this trauma. Unfortunately, we often allow these self-defense mechanisms to become the framework of the paradigms of our perception of who we are. As a result, we may have accepted certain things about ourselves that, with a slight shift of focus, can significantly impact our lives and the experiences we want from them.

The good and the bad are that the information is out there, but so is misinformation. There are people out there who genuinely want the best for you, but there are people who do not. Therefore, you must take ownership of your objective research and how to use that information to turn your desires into reality.

Only you are in control, well, part of you anyway. Therefore, control is one of the main concepts I discuss in this book. This shift is the re-focusing of how you look at specific aspects of you and your life that will help your true self to make decisions with much less emotion and have a more critical and logical design behind your choices and actions.

This book will challenge you to not only flex your physical muscle and stamina but also exercise the non-tangibles - the ideas about who you are and how you work mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and how these intangible concepts, if corrected and cultivated correctly, naturally work together to have a direct impact in creating, building, and manifesting your desired physical body; one with which you will ultimately find peace and happiness.

This book is not intended to be an instructional or how-to book as such. I endorse no unique or particular way of losing weight, specifically or generally. Instead, I want to appeal to the simplest, yet at the same time, for many of us, the most challenging way of finding balance in our daily lives so that we can all foster and pursue the path of self-discovery and make genuinely positive changes in our lives for a more enriching and happy existence. Who knows, the positive changes you might realize from this book could have a massive impact on the lives of your friends, loved ones, and people you may not even know – and that's how we change the world.

1

Just Another Diet Hack

What is a diet? The term diet has been loosely thrown around, molded, shaped, and made to fit the boundaries of certain concepts. Still, it is masquerading as something it is not.

According to the Mirriam-Webster dictionary, the primary definition of the word diet is food and drink regularly provided or consumed.

My point here is that everything you eat is a diet. You could have a diet high in fruits or vegetables, a diet that is way too high in sugar, a very healthy diet, or one specific to the consumers' desires, such as being a vegetarian, vegan, or pescatarian, and so on. You also may be on a restricted diet due to your faith or culture. Everything that you eat is part of your diet.

Now that has been cleared up, there are different considerations of diets you may choose for one reason or another. If you are an athlete, you may require a specific diet with a surplus of calories so that your body will have enough energy to perform the needed physical tasks. If you are not an athlete but are active, your desired diet will be much different from that of a bodybuilder. If you are overweight and do not get much exercise, then your approach to your diet may be quite different as well. If you think about it, the concept of a diet, while clearly defined, can and does take a very dynamic role in our lives, depending on our goals. Our goals depend on our current state of being, which includes not only the physical but also the mental, emotional, and spiritual states of being, whether healthy or not.

Clearly, we all have different needs based on our goals and state of being, and the way we look at our state of being and evaluate our goals and how we go about attempting to reach them is the fundamental core of self-improvement. We will go deeper into how to set up your goals in chapter five, but for now, let's continue with figuring out what the word diet means to YOU.

Now that we know what the concept of a diet means in a general sense, let's dive deeper into what the mainstream ideas of a diet are, which are all right. So many times, we hear or say the phrase I gotta get back on my diet or Have you tried this diet? The word diet in these phrases is based on some truth, as far as a way of making a conscious effort to monitor the intake of food specifically for a healthier physical result. While these diets are unique in many ways, the ironic aspect they share is that they all lead to the same place.

The only way to lose weight naturally is to burn more calories than you consume. Therefore, understanding how many calories you consume, as opposed to how many you burn, is the primary tool you will use to lose, maintain, or gain weight, whatever your goals are. I call this tool the Primary Ratio because it is the primary control you should/will use for any and all changes in your physical being.

Shifting focus to the Primary Ratio is usually not the first thing people do when trying to get healthier. Usually, a person feels the need first to turn to exercise to conjure up some good health, which is not a bad thing, but usually ends up in a negative state of being due to hitting your physical program hard, making a bit of progress, then going even harder only to injure yourself and end up not exercising at all. Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar scenario, which may contain a certain amount of unconscious self-sabotage that always seems to be at the end of a physical regimen due to injury or any other justification, physical or otherwise. The sooner we accept that focusing on the Primary Ratio is the QUICKEST way to achieve your goals, be it to lose weight, maintain a healthy lifestyle, or gain weight, the sooner we realize that the Primary Ratio is the epicenter of making fundamentally sound physical changes in your life.

I can't tell you how many times I have set my focus on making some serious progress in the gym, or walking/jogging, or racquetball, or weightlifting, only to push it too hard and strain a muscle, twist my knee, roll my ankle, and my favorite: tear a tendon when I was weightlifting. Unfortunately, these things happen all too often and can keep us in a perpetual state of effort, success, failure, and guilt.

Controlling the Primary Ratio and seeing its results is an empowering exercise, and just like most all worthwhile achievements, filled with discipline and reward. Becoming healthier by using the fundamentals like eating less, drinking less alcohol, and moving more, sounds like it takes a long time, right? However, if you decided to use the Primary Ratio and stuck with it as much as you stick with a different approach or different approaches, you would likely make quicker progress by using the Primary Ratio. You would also be investing in your future by developing daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly habits that affect your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health that will continue to serve you throughout your life. We often take an approach that we pick up for a week to a month and make progress but then quit because we feel good about our achievements. Then the goals fall through the cracks again, and we find ourselves back where you started six months later, needing to start again.

Again, the ironic thing is that ALL of the different diet approaches lead back to one place – The Primary Ratio of burning more calories than you consume. No matter how, if you are in generally good health and losing weight, you are burning more calories than you consume – that is the long and the short of it.

So why do we have so many different diet approaches to lose weight?

First, let's start calling them what they are: DIET HACKS. In diagraming how they work, they are all shortcuts to losing weight by seeming to get initial results more rapidly. Basically, you hack the Primary Ratio to see more immediate results than you would if you just worked with the Primary Ratio.

Are these hacks bad? Well, that depends on how you look at it. So many diet hacks are out there, and some have worked very well for A LOT of people. However, we only hear about the people that it worked for in the beginning, but after so long, things seem to have gone back to normal, and you are yet again at the same weight you started.

I feel that diet hacks so often eventually fade is because it appears that most people trying to lose weight generally focus too much on the diet hack itself instead of a more holistic approach of their weight loss journey. We all know a friend, co-worker, or even a family member that gets hyper-focused on a specific diet hack and becomes entirely consumed by this concept so much that they rarely speak of much else – hell, I've done it! If we hang all of the responsibility on our chosen diet, it gives us a scapegoat when we slowly become less focused and start slacking off and stop losing weight, claiming that the diet no longer worked for us. This time-honored tradition of quitting diets provides a built-in quit button, which we can use when we don't feel accountable for our actions or inactions.

It is so much easier to find fault in something other than yourself.

To circumvent this issue, you must first realize that it was you. It was you