Thinking about the diet/non-diet thing again and how exercise reflects my frame of mind.

When I have my diet head on, I exercise to eat.  I see my hour on the treadmill as earning calories.  I think that attitude comes largely from Weight Watchers which does encourage exercise as “earning Points”.

But my non-diet head strives to eat to live and I want exercise to simply be part of living.  So yesterday, before I went to the gym, I ate a tablespoon of peanut butter on a ryvita and drank a small glass of milk.  Of course, I barely burnt off enough calories to cover that, but I felt great on the treadmill.

Even writing this, I’m wondering if the difference is so subtle that it doesn’t matter.  As long as you exercise, why fuss about the reason?

But I’ve always failed at maintaining weight loss because of the on-diet/off-diet attitude and exercise gets tangled up in it and disappears when I’m “off”.  So maybe I need to be strict with myself for a while and only eat to exercise because that’s the attitude I want to take with me for the rest of my life. I want to eat to fuel my body and enjoy social times without ignoring that.  I don’t want to exercise like mad because I’ve got a dinner coming up where I might want to stuff my face.

What do you think?  Do you eat to move or move to eat?