The Mindset Shift You Have To Make to Stay Lean

I’m going to tell you a story.

It’s a story of chicken, ice cream, a bad date, and a dose of shame.

This story perfectly demonstrates the biggest hurdle I had to overcome in my fitness journey.

And if you struggle to maintain a lean physique that provides you with energy and confidence, you’ll have to overcome this hurdle too.

My story begins with Chicken Karage.

Well, technically, my story begins with Clara.

I met Clara through doing functional fitness classes at a gym in downtown Vancouver.

Clara is hot.

She’s cool.

She’s fit.

And she loooooves to eat.

A full-blown foodie.

Naturally, it’s love at first sight (for me, definitely not Clara.)

Fast forward a few weeks, and I somehow manage to find myself on a date with Clara.

We’re at a Japanese Izakaya restaurant — one of the best (Vancouver has dope Asian Cuisine).

There are lots of healthy choices on an Izakaya menu.

We didn’t even look at them.

We went straight for the mega-sized Chicken Karage (the server warned us).

Chicken Karage is basically Japanese KFC.

We washed that down with a mushroom-cheese Bibimbap (a hot-stone rice bowl) and some Ebi-Mayo (deep-fried prawns with mayonnaise…)

The date was fine, but not great because a couple of hours later, I was walking back home to my roommates (alone).

On my walk home, I get an uncontrollable craving for ice cream.

I fail to ignore it, so a couple of hours after being on a date in a cool joint with a hot foodie, I now find myself in bed watching Netflix on my laptop, armed with a pint of Ben and Jerries.

There are a couple of terms for what happened here.

It’s sometimes called the fuck it moment.

I call it Cheat Day Mentality.

It’s impossible to have a healthy relationship with food and be lean if you are vulnerable to Cheat Day Mentality.

Cheat Day Mentality can only exist when you make food choices moral.

If you see food as good and bad, you see yourself as bad when you eat a bad food.

If you see your “bad food choice” as a moral lapse, you’ll fall for this mindset and tell yourself:

You see this as a moment to take advantage of your lapse — to have a spontaneous “cheat day.”

Instead of looking at the chicken karage and deep-fried prawns as a fun high-calorie meal that is no big deal in the long run, I saw it as a moral lapse.

I had sinned.

I saw this moment as an opportunity to take advantage of being a sinner, and I added the ice cream.

Spending years binge-eating your way out of your progress is possible when you view food as moral.

Many people try to adopt a perfectionist standard of eating purely “healthy” food, and then they hate themselves when they inevitably slip up.

But the real damage comes in if you view this slip-up as a ticket to eat like a moron for the rest of the day, week, or vacation.

So what can you do about this?

How can you prevent Cheat Day Mentality from making you feel guilty about food and sabotaging your progress?

Stop “eating clean.”

Stop categorizing food as “healthy” and “unhealthy.”

The way out of this mindset is to look at food in a more nuanced way.

Food is not moral. 

It’s a combination of energy and nutrients.

Meals that you typically consider “healthy” are packages that contain a lot of nutrients with less energy.

Meals you consider unhealthy contain fewer nutrients with a lot of energy.

When you look at food this way, you understand why that salmon-kale salad is considered healthy, and the double bacon cheeseburger isn’t.

But seeing the underlying reason makes all the difference.

Having one high-calorie meal doesn’t have to be a big deal.

It’s just a few more calories than you needed — not the end of the world.

But if you see it with the perspective that you’re bad, or you’ve failed, you turn it into damaging behavior.

If you love food, you cannot deprive yourself of what you love to eat forever.

If you love to eat things you see as “bad foods,” this will turn into destructive behavior when you inevitably have some.

Having Chicken Karage does not make you bad.

Look at food objectively as a combination of energy and nutrients, and stop letting your moral perception of food cause damaging behavior.