By Dina Aldabbagh

The more I understand, the more I know that everything in life is nothing but the way you look at it — the narrative you have around it. How you frame something is what takes a bad thing and makes it a good thing, and vice versa. In regards to holding yourself back from eating certain things, how do you look at that? Do you see it as a punishment? Because you’re so bad and need to be disciplined? Or do you see it as a virtuous act, that’s getting you closer to who you want to be? 

Restriction says, “I can’t have that,” while restraint says, “I’m choosing not to have that.” One oppresses you and the other empowers you — thus why you feel such anguish around doing a thing that makes other people feel good when they do it. Telling yourself, “I can’t have this thing because I want to be like this” (fill in your blanks), is working against yourself. It’s doing something that’s being done unto you. You’re trying to hate yourself into someone you love by exerting force, by withholding from yourself. Instead, telling yourself, “I’m not going to have that because I want to be healthy and I want to be someone who has self-control,” tells a very different story. The latter is a decision. Restriction feels like someone is forcing you into a corner — keeping something away from you — of course you feel like fighting back. Yet restraint is a practice, a decision that you make, that you have power over, and that you do for yourself. Restraint is an act of goodness and care towards yourself. It’s this conviction that who you want to be and the life you want to live is not worth being at the mercy of whatever around you. To decide to deny yourself from something you want that isn’t in your best interest is to properly love yourself. To withhold and to forbear basically have the same effect: you don’t interact with some thing, but they produce vastly different emotional experiences in the body. So you can hate yourself into the person you want to be, or you can love yourself into that person. The difference is that between holding back versus withholding. 

The truth at hand is that if you want to change the way you act around food — if you lack self-control — you’re going to need to tighten up on your behavior. If you have some pounds of fat that you’d like to lose, that’s going to happen as a result of your dietary habits changing. So, the reality is that you’re going to need to practice restraint. But will you call it restraint or restriction? Will you see it as a thing that’s stopping you from living the life you want to live or giving you the life you want to live? I think at the core of us all, we just want freedom. So this is where you have to ask yourself, “What does freedom mean to me?” Does freedom to you mean that you get to eat whatever you want and just take how you look and feel in and about your body off a pedestal? Or does freedom to you mean not being controlled by external things, but instead being the ruler over your life, and becoming the person that your heart secretly cries out to you to be? It’s okay if answers differ. I can say what my own answer and what I believe the majority of people would want for themselves is, but everyone’s different, you have to choose which group you fall into. If you’re reading my blog, I already know which group you’re in, so I’m talking to you. 

Restraint is much more a mental game that leads to spiritual benefits than anything else. Every opportunity that arises where you choose to forgo a momentary desire fortifies you. I believe a lot of the restriction mentality comes from this place of, ‘If I make this decision right now, that means I’m committing to this forever,’ meaning no more of your favorite things. While restraint comes from this place: In this instance, I’m choosing to forgo this thing. In reality, you only ever have enough willpower for the moment you’re in. If you’re trying to have enough willpower for the next 30 years in this present moment, you’re going to fail. You can only ever take things moment by moment, day by day, thought by thought. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to bet money on myself that I’d exercise everyday, but when I began, I just took it day by day. I wasn’t thinking about how if I commit today then I must commit for the next year because if I don’t, then I’ll really be disappointed with myself if I stop. Instead, as every day came, and my tank of energy and willpower reset, so I started over as well. Don’t let today be the day you give up. Are you going to let today be the day you give up? I’m not talking about tomorrow or next month or next year, I’m talking about today. 

There’s a thought that circled in my mind during my first marathon training and I was reaching new mileage that I’ve never done, and was about to find out if I could do: maybe you can’t run another 10 miles, but can you take another step? I don’t always have more miles in me, but I pretty much always have another step in me. Even more helpful was telling myself to run the mile that I’m in. Maybe I can’t run 20 miles, but I know I can run one mile, so let me just focus on completing this mile. You don’t have to get through all the future pain at this moment, you just have to get through the day. Eventually in my workout journey, I realized that it didn’t matter if I faltered a day here or there, I knew in a year I would continue working out, and in 3..5..10..20 years. Eventually it just became a part of who I was; I was in love with it and who it made me, and more importantly, I didn’t doubt my future commitment to it. You don’t run a marathon by deciding one day and just turning around and doing it; you run a marathon by battling the thousands of moments that are there to stop you along the way, and pushing through. 

So, no, deciding to forgo this one croissant, this one extra serving of dinner tonight, this one larger size of coffee doesn’t mean by any means that you have to go without it for the rest of your life. As long as you live, that thing will be there, available to you. By making the one current decision of restraint mean so much more in your head, you’re punishing yourself. You’re worrying and conjuring up anxiety that for the rest of your life, you won’t be able to live in the freedom of eating whatever you want. That’s not true. This is just one decision. The huge secret to success is not perfection, but building a mountain of ‘one-time’ decisions. You create the empire of yourself by choosing to go on one walk, by choosing to eat one proper portion, by choosing to sleep an hour earlier, or by choosing to swap the Doordash for a home cooked meal one time. While, yes, doing something once isn’t going to change your life, choosing to do a specific thing one time here and one time there — with likely increasing frequency — will change your life. I’m talking about exponential growth that comes from the slow changing of your habits. And the frequency will increase, because you’ll realize how good you feel after having done the thing, that you’ll want that feeling again. 

Restraint is freedom. You have in your mind the version of yourself that you’d like to be. I can tell you that we never have to restrain ourselves from things that are good for us; we happily welcome them in. Therefore, we only ever need to practice restraint with things that we know are working against us. Now, that thing as a whole may not be bad for you, but perhaps the amount you consume of it, the amount you partake in it, or the amount you think about it, is bad for you. Restraint is only ever practiced to maintain a balance. You want to feel at equilibrium in your life; that means daily balance. You’ve certainly heard, “everything in moderation, even moderation itself” — when you live a life of balance, you still get to have these days where you go a bit off the deep end. Say you practice going to bed every night at 10 pm, then maybe ten times a year you have these crazy late, 6 am nights where you’re up talking forever with a loved one, partying with friends, or pulling an all-nighter on a project — that’s balance. And what makes those nights beautiful is that they are rare, because on the flip side, if you’re going to sleep at 6 am every night, you will truly be in a state of suffering. All practicing restraint is doing for you is bringing you closer to the version of yourself that you’d love to live a day of the life in — your ideal self.

I say, life is too short to never know what it’s like to walk in that person’s shoes. You may not get all the experiences you want out of life — because that’s not always in your control — but what you can control is being a person that you truly love to be. And being who you want to be is the single life experience that tops all else. Don’t let the outer things control you, take hold of your life and let it be ruled by the inner workings of your mind and soul of your choosing.