National Nutrition Month –

The month of March is National Nutrition Month sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. This year’s theme is “Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day”. These are my thoughts exactly, especially when it comes to a personality approach to losing weight.

If you’ve been on more than one diet in your life then you haven’t been losing weight “your way”. If it had been your way, you wouldn’t have gained the weight back. Okay, so you have to lose weight. Why can’t you lose it in a way that is comfortable for your personality type so it’s not a diet but a way of life?

Not everyone should be keeping a food diary. Yes, it’s a marvelous way to keep track of what you’re eating and to keep you focused. But it’s a very structured approach to weight loss and, from a personality point-of-view, not everyone is that structured. From the perspective of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), someone who is a Judger (has a “J” in his type name) can maintain a food diary for far longer than a Perceiver (or “P”). The Perceiver wants to leave options open, something that is very hard when you have a prescriptive diet to follow.

Then there are the Sensors (“S”) and the iNtuitives (“N”). Sensors live in the here-and-now, whereas iNtuitives live in the what-might-be. With that, an S starts the diet today versus an N who might say “I’ll start the diet on Monday morning.” Don’t ask an S to put a picture on the refrigerator of what she would like to look like in six months. She saw the truth in the mirror this morning. On the other hand, the N would gladly put the picture on the refrigerator because, with living in the what-might-be, that picture is worth a thousand words.

People who try the newest fad diet are chasing after the dream not the reality. Diets are rarely judged by whether they fit with one’s personality type. The headline grabbing “Lose 10 pounds in a week” suck people in. When you want to lose weight, who wouldn’t want to get it done in as short a time as possible? I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that no matter how many pounds you lose on a particular plan, if you can’t continue on that plan for the rest of your life (probably because it is either so restrictive or too difficult to incorporate in your style of living), you’re going to gain the weight back!

THE ANSWER: find a plan that fits with your personality type because your type isn’t going to change.