You Have to Be Selfish
A powerful woman is actively engaged in creating a life that is authentic for her.
Marilyn Graman and Maureen Walsh, The Female Power Within
If you are going on a diet, your motivations must be entirely self-serving. Otherwise, you will not have the drive to adhere to your diet or maintain the results for life.
The self-serving questions that you need to ask yourself are:
- Why do I desire to change the way I appear to myself and to others?
What am I going to get out of this? - Is it worth it?
- How will I know that I’ve attained my goal? Forget the number on the scale. How will your actions tell you that you’ve succeeded?
Why Do You Want to Diet?
Many women do not feel that they control the dieting process. They feel as if they are following some regime that promises results. This perception of lack of control arises because a woman has not clearly established why she wants to diet. This permits self-doubt to sink in along with concerns about whether or not she is succumbing to social pressure.
In Women and Desire Polly Young-Eisendrath tells us that to have personal sovereignty, you must know all of your desires. You do not have to diet. All you need to know is why you desire the results of the diet. Uncovering this desire will give you the tools for dieting success.
As psychologists Tom Rusk and Randy Read reveal in I Want to Change But I Don’t Know How!, “When you’re living to please others, it’s easy to get confused or stuck. When you give yourself
permission to satisfy yourself first, ideas and plans can grow overnight.” In short, if you are not selfish in your decision to diet, you will get flustered, forget why you wanted to diet in the first place, and give the whole idea up.
Selfishness is not always evil. When used strategically, selfishness can guide you to sanely fulfill your goals. “Intelligent selfishness,” as Nathaniel Branden terms it in A Women’s Self-Esteem, means standing up for your needs, values and legitimate interests. If you want your diet to work, you have to act and think selfishly.
To use selfishness as a dieting tool, put it in perspective. Is it selfish to go to work at the same time everyday so that you can receive a paycheck at the end of the week? No. A paycheck is self-serving and you receive numerous benefits from working. So, how can devoting one to two hours a day to exercise and meal planning get labeled as “selfish?” This is why:
As women, we are only considered selfish when we are not doing what someone else thinks we ought to be doing.
Frequently, when professional figure model and personal trainer Janet Bannowsky picks up her daughter after school, other mothers curiously approach her and ask, “How do you stay in such great shape”? For Bannowsky, there is no mystery to managing to stay in shape while providing a loving home for your family. Some women presume, “Oh, she’s a personal trainer.
That’s how she stays in such great shape while raising a family.” If this is your consolation and justification for not dieting, visit some gyms. You may be surprised to see overweight personal trainers. Janet Bannowsky makes time for herself, and she makes time for her family. That is how she maintains her goals.
Is it selfish to devote six hours a day to your child to ensure that she has all of the soccer practice, piano lessons and social experiences she needs to develop into a model citizen? Why do women feed their babies better than they feed themselves? Why do they make such great efforts to give their kids time for physical activities but not themselves?
Children deserve this nurturing, but mothers need not become short-order martyrs while raising their children. In Reclaiming Desire Andrew Goldstein and Marianne Brandon tell us, “When girls are taught to care for others before themselves, they learn to make themselves a low priority.” As women, it is time to make ourselves priority number one.
For a diet to work, we need to make time for it. The diet must be somewhere on our priority list. If the diet is not on the priority list, it slips from a goal to a wish to a fantasy. In the end, nothing changes. So make your diet a self-serving priority if you want to “get” this dieting thing.