The week before, my friend and nutritionist Rodolfo Peres asked me to send him my diet journal.<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, the day I created the journal spreadsheet and started recording data, my eating habits changed dramatically and very soon I noticed I had lost weight. I did not measure it, but probably mostly fat tissue \u2013 the squat belt doesn\u2019t lie. I still think it\u2019s the best adipometer for athletes. Squat belt on the third hole, legs thicker \u2013 that can only mean less useless tissue, right?<\/p>\n
What was my diet before the journal? I haven\u2019t the foggiest idea. Will never have.<\/p>\n
So I came across this very interesting article about the phenomenon called by the authors \u201cself DDD\u201d or self-deception, self-delusion and self-denial. The three concepts describe a harmful and potentially pathological behavior of rationalizing an explanation for a certain negative behavior or occurrence against all empirical evidence (Lawley & Tompkins 2004).<\/p>\n
The examples offered by the authors are serious: women who fail to accept that their partner\u2019s violent behavior hasn\u2019t, isn\u2019t and will probably not change; people who fail to acknowledge that they are not actually following a diet plan and that this is the reason they are not losing weight; people who go bankrupt and yet explain it away as bad luck, unable to face their own bad financial management.<\/p>\n
I guess Rodolfo must have such cases in his clinic almost every day. Or not, I\u2019m not sure: maybe the people who end up at a nutritionist office are the ones who have escaped the grip of self-DDD.<\/p>\n
In this short very auto-critical note, I argue in favor of a fourth category: the conscious cheater. That\u2019s me. Plus a number of other athletes I know. It\u2019s the end of the year, Holiday season, we kindly put our super-ego to sleep and go wildly partying with the rest of our brain (or mind?), especially the most primitive, pleasure seeking areas.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we did have a plan not to extend our super-ego hibernation for so long. We made this decision, most probably, during a pre-contest period, when we realized we would be much better off with a more appropriate body composition to work with.<\/p>\n
People like us are much easier to handle: just rub our cheating faces on hard data and we immediately fix our behavior.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it so?<\/p>\n
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Reference<\/p>\n