So the holidays destroyed my oh-so-intensely-motivated efforts of working out for an hour and a half everyday and eating only 1200 calories. Then, once the holidays were over, I fell to another age-old dieter’s trap.
This is what I like to call the “Tomorrow-is-Always-Another-Day Diet” or if you prefer, the “Last Meal Diet”. I get it in my mind that tomorrow will begin my new intense regimen… “I will eat according to a strict and well-mapped out plan beginning tomorrow, so I’m going to enjoy today!” Today, I think I need to get all my junk-food cravings out of my system so I can stand going without for a ridiculous length of time.
But somehow tomorrow never comes. When I wake up each morning, it is always still today...
And looking back, I have realized something else.
I don’t lose weight effectively during the winter months. I just don’t. I have no motivation to get out to the gym when it is dark and cold, and I crave warm, savory, and frequently calorie dense comfort foods. It’s a classic seasonal-effective situation. Plus, the “blah” of winter leaves me feeling more insecure about my appearance, making me more obsessive and depressive over my failures.
So I have made a decision to hopefully combat both of these situations…
I’m not going to try to lose weight. Not during this weather...this awful, miserable, cold season. No, ladies and gents…I am not going to TRY to lose weight.
I have resolved with myself that I am ok at the moment. My biggest fears come from gaining more weight than what I already have, so instead of losing weight, my efforts will merely be focused on maintaining where I am currently, and not getting myself in any deeper. And I think this was a great decision that could over a slower period of time than first hoped for, actually bring about some weight loss I’m not trying for.
Since altering my mindset, choosing moderation has become much easier! I would suppose that it is because I don’t think I will have to go without any junk food, so now I am feeling ok with choosing healthier options today. My “Tomorrow-is-Always-Another Day” outlook has been reversed and I think, “I should have some veggies for lunch today. I can always have greasy pizza tomorrow...” Let’s hope this motivation will be the motivation that keeps me truckin’.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Another Article From MSN.com
Is Your Diet Making You Gain?
by Karen Ansel, R.D., Prevention
Prevention
If you're trying to slim down, you've probably amassed a menu full of calorie-cutting tips and tricks. So it may come as a shock to learn that many of the ones you've sworn by are actually keeping you fat. "In their quest to lose weight, many women unknowingly sabotage themselves," says Elisa Zied, R.D., an American Dietetic Association spokesperson and author of Feed Your Family Right! (Wiley, 2007). Here, six well-intentioned approaches to weight loss that can go awry, and the expert and research-proven ways to drop pounds for good.
You save your calories for a big dinner
Yes, cutting total calories leads to weight loss. But bank most of those calories for the end of the day and your hunger hormones will go haywire, making you eat more. Middle-aged men and women who ate their daily number of calories in one supersize supper produced more ghrelin, a hormone that causes hunger, than when they ate the same number of calories in three square meals, found researchers at the National Institute on Aging.
Smarter move: Front-load your calories. Overeating at night keeps you from being hungry in the morning, setting off a vicious cycle in which you're never interested in breakfast but always starving by dinner. The key is to rebalance your day so you don't set yourself up for an evening binge. To get your appetite back in the morning, cut your evening meal in half. Then eat a breakfast of about 450 calories, such as a scrambled egg with low-fat cheese on a whole wheat English muffin with an 8-ounce glass of juice—an amount that should keep you satisfied until lunch, says George L. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School and author of Break Through Your Set Point (Collins Living, 2008). Once your appetite adjusts, don't go more than five hours without another meal of roughly the same size.
You graze instead of eating regularly scheduled meals
Trouble is, eating in this manner may contribute to weight gain, according to a 2005 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study. When researchers asked women to eat at regular, fixed times or to break their usual amount of food into unscheduled meals throughout the day, they made a startling discovery: The women actually burned more calories in the 3 hours after eating the regular meals than they did after the unplanned meals. They produced less insulin, too, potentially lowering their odds of insulin resistance, which is linked to weight gain and obesity. What's more, grazing instead of planning ahead can set you up to eat mindlessly, says Zied. In the end, we rarely realize how many calories all those little nibbles and noshes really add up to.
Smarter move: Figure out how many times a day you need to eat—everybody is different—and then stick to a schedule. "It's not great to feel starved, but it is okay to feel slightly hungry," says Zied. You can home in on your body's internal cues with a food diary. It's so effective that earlier this year, researchers at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research found that dieters who kept a food journal lost twice as much weight as those who didn't record what they ate.
You assume calories from healthy, natural foods are low
People consistently underestimate the calories in nutritious items such as yogurt, fish, and baked chicken, found researchers at Bowling Green State University who quizzed students on calorie counts. "Just because a food is healthy doesn't mean you can eat big portions," says D. Milton Stokes, M.P.H., R.D., owner of One Source Nutrition in Stamford, Conn. "A handful of nuts can be 200 calories or more. And if you add that without cutting back elsewhere, it could be the reason you're not losing weight."
Smarter move: Count all calories. Once you learn that 1/2 cup of cereal can have as much as 200 calories or that there are about 220 calories in that "single-serving" bottle of OJ, you'll be more prudent about how much you use.
You eat like a bird for the month leading up to a big event such as a class reunion
Slashing significant calories might sound like the fast track to weight loss, but it's likely to backfire. In fact, nutrition experts recommend you don't dip below 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day. "If you crash diet for more than two weeks or so, your metabolism will temporarily slow down," says Blackburn. "So the same exact dieting effort results in less and less weight loss." The reason: Your body is conserving energy to keep you from losing weight too quickly. And that's not all. When you drastically cut calories, you lose muscle along with fat—especially if you haven't been exercising. Because muscle is your body's calorie-burning furnace, this can slow down your metabolism, even long after your crash diet is done.
Smarter move: Aim to shed about a pound a week—the slow, steady weight loss ensures you lose fat, not muscle. "If you want to drop 10 pounds, get started 10 weeks before your goal, not four," says Blackburn. "You'll have a better chance of actually taking off the weight permanently." To drop a pound a week, shave 250 calories from your diet and burn an extra 250 calories through exercise each day. Visit prevention.com/myhealthtrackers to log your progress.
You set short-term weight-loss goals
The National Weight Control Registry estimates that only 20 percent of dieters successfully keep off lost weight for more than a year. That's because after we reach our goal, we let old eating habits creep back in. But people who win at weight loss consistently eat the same way even after they've slimmed down. In fact, the NWCR found that dieters who maintain their healthy eating habits every single day are 1 1/2 times more likely to maintain their weight loss in the long run than those who relax their diets on the weekends.
Smarter move: Think of healthy eating as a work in progress, not as a "diet" with a beginning and an end. The key: making small changes you can maintain so they become long-term habits. Start by creating a list of problem areas in your diet, then tackle them one at a time. For example, if you snack on a heaping handful of Oreos every night before bed, set a goal of having two instead of six, and cut back by one a day. Once you've made that a habit, pat yourself on the back and move on to your next goal.
Your splurge foods are "low-fat" and "sugar-free"
Research suggests that when a food is described as a diet food, we're subconsciously primed to eat more—even if it's actually as caloric as regular food. When Cornell University researchers offered the same M&M's candies labeled either regular or low-fat to visitors at a university open house, visitors ate 28 percent more of the "low-fat" snacks. While less fat does not mean fewer calories, people make the assumption that it does, setting them up to overeat, say scientists.
Smarter move: First, check food labels: So-called diet foods frequently don't save you calories. Take low-fat chocolate chip cookies—because they've been infused with extra carbs to add flavor, you save only 3 calories per cookie. Once you have that reality check, follow the golden rule for any food: Keep close tabs on portions. Limit yourself to two small cookies, for example, or trade in a bowl of frozen yogurt for a kid's-size scoop; measure out condiments such as low-fat sour cream or low-fat ranch dressing. And remember—if you prefer the flavor of full-fat foods, you'll still lose weight if you watch your portion sizes.
by Karen Ansel, R.D., Prevention
Prevention
If you're trying to slim down, you've probably amassed a menu full of calorie-cutting tips and tricks. So it may come as a shock to learn that many of the ones you've sworn by are actually keeping you fat. "In their quest to lose weight, many women unknowingly sabotage themselves," says Elisa Zied, R.D., an American Dietetic Association spokesperson and author of Feed Your Family Right! (Wiley, 2007). Here, six well-intentioned approaches to weight loss that can go awry, and the expert and research-proven ways to drop pounds for good.
You save your calories for a big dinner
Yes, cutting total calories leads to weight loss. But bank most of those calories for the end of the day and your hunger hormones will go haywire, making you eat more. Middle-aged men and women who ate their daily number of calories in one supersize supper produced more ghrelin, a hormone that causes hunger, than when they ate the same number of calories in three square meals, found researchers at the National Institute on Aging.
Smarter move: Front-load your calories. Overeating at night keeps you from being hungry in the morning, setting off a vicious cycle in which you're never interested in breakfast but always starving by dinner. The key is to rebalance your day so you don't set yourself up for an evening binge. To get your appetite back in the morning, cut your evening meal in half. Then eat a breakfast of about 450 calories, such as a scrambled egg with low-fat cheese on a whole wheat English muffin with an 8-ounce glass of juice—an amount that should keep you satisfied until lunch, says George L. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School and author of Break Through Your Set Point (Collins Living, 2008). Once your appetite adjusts, don't go more than five hours without another meal of roughly the same size.
You graze instead of eating regularly scheduled meals
Trouble is, eating in this manner may contribute to weight gain, according to a 2005 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study. When researchers asked women to eat at regular, fixed times or to break their usual amount of food into unscheduled meals throughout the day, they made a startling discovery: The women actually burned more calories in the 3 hours after eating the regular meals than they did after the unplanned meals. They produced less insulin, too, potentially lowering their odds of insulin resistance, which is linked to weight gain and obesity. What's more, grazing instead of planning ahead can set you up to eat mindlessly, says Zied. In the end, we rarely realize how many calories all those little nibbles and noshes really add up to.
Smarter move: Figure out how many times a day you need to eat—everybody is different—and then stick to a schedule. "It's not great to feel starved, but it is okay to feel slightly hungry," says Zied. You can home in on your body's internal cues with a food diary. It's so effective that earlier this year, researchers at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research found that dieters who kept a food journal lost twice as much weight as those who didn't record what they ate.
You assume calories from healthy, natural foods are low
People consistently underestimate the calories in nutritious items such as yogurt, fish, and baked chicken, found researchers at Bowling Green State University who quizzed students on calorie counts. "Just because a food is healthy doesn't mean you can eat big portions," says D. Milton Stokes, M.P.H., R.D., owner of One Source Nutrition in Stamford, Conn. "A handful of nuts can be 200 calories or more. And if you add that without cutting back elsewhere, it could be the reason you're not losing weight."
Smarter move: Count all calories. Once you learn that 1/2 cup of cereal can have as much as 200 calories or that there are about 220 calories in that "single-serving" bottle of OJ, you'll be more prudent about how much you use.
You eat like a bird for the month leading up to a big event such as a class reunion
Slashing significant calories might sound like the fast track to weight loss, but it's likely to backfire. In fact, nutrition experts recommend you don't dip below 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day. "If you crash diet for more than two weeks or so, your metabolism will temporarily slow down," says Blackburn. "So the same exact dieting effort results in less and less weight loss." The reason: Your body is conserving energy to keep you from losing weight too quickly. And that's not all. When you drastically cut calories, you lose muscle along with fat—especially if you haven't been exercising. Because muscle is your body's calorie-burning furnace, this can slow down your metabolism, even long after your crash diet is done.
Smarter move: Aim to shed about a pound a week—the slow, steady weight loss ensures you lose fat, not muscle. "If you want to drop 10 pounds, get started 10 weeks before your goal, not four," says Blackburn. "You'll have a better chance of actually taking off the weight permanently." To drop a pound a week, shave 250 calories from your diet and burn an extra 250 calories through exercise each day. Visit prevention.com/myhealthtrackers to log your progress.
You set short-term weight-loss goals
The National Weight Control Registry estimates that only 20 percent of dieters successfully keep off lost weight for more than a year. That's because after we reach our goal, we let old eating habits creep back in. But people who win at weight loss consistently eat the same way even after they've slimmed down. In fact, the NWCR found that dieters who maintain their healthy eating habits every single day are 1 1/2 times more likely to maintain their weight loss in the long run than those who relax their diets on the weekends.
Smarter move: Think of healthy eating as a work in progress, not as a "diet" with a beginning and an end. The key: making small changes you can maintain so they become long-term habits. Start by creating a list of problem areas in your diet, then tackle them one at a time. For example, if you snack on a heaping handful of Oreos every night before bed, set a goal of having two instead of six, and cut back by one a day. Once you've made that a habit, pat yourself on the back and move on to your next goal.
Your splurge foods are "low-fat" and "sugar-free"
Research suggests that when a food is described as a diet food, we're subconsciously primed to eat more—even if it's actually as caloric as regular food. When Cornell University researchers offered the same M&M's candies labeled either regular or low-fat to visitors at a university open house, visitors ate 28 percent more of the "low-fat" snacks. While less fat does not mean fewer calories, people make the assumption that it does, setting them up to overeat, say scientists.
Smarter move: First, check food labels: So-called diet foods frequently don't save you calories. Take low-fat chocolate chip cookies—because they've been infused with extra carbs to add flavor, you save only 3 calories per cookie. Once you have that reality check, follow the golden rule for any food: Keep close tabs on portions. Limit yourself to two small cookies, for example, or trade in a bowl of frozen yogurt for a kid's-size scoop; measure out condiments such as low-fat sour cream or low-fat ranch dressing. And remember—if you prefer the flavor of full-fat foods, you'll still lose weight if you watch your portion sizes.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Well, I said I would be real, so here goes...
My first planned cheat day turned into closer to a cheat week.
Yeah, it's Christmas time and its not easy to turn down all of the goodies around me. Motivation is a hard fish to catch sometimes, but it is really the key. I wish I know the magic formula to get and maintain motivation. We all know what works in weight loss--exercise and eating a reduced calorie diet with the proper nutrition. But actually doing those things unless you naturally crave celery 90% of the time (which I do NOT!) or have a job that keeps you moving all day (again which I do not...) takes a little something extra. When it hits, its great! Especially when it actually sticks around for longer than a day, but I'm never totally sure how I get there.
I remember being really angry with my ex when our relationship went south, and I looked at me losing weight as a means to get back at him and make him regret being such a skeeze. That worked like magic. And I know at least a dozen other girls that lost their excess fat on the break-up diet. So yeah...that is a very effective trigger for motivation. But it's really not the most emotionally healthy way to go either.
Now I want to get in shape for myself, so that I can feel confident enough on the outside to let Me show through. I'm a singer, and I love to perform, but it is diminishing to me to look in the mirror and see all of my flaws before I get on stage and then worry if that is what people are seeing, rather than hearing my voice.
Not that I would mind hearing a "Wow you look amazing!" from the boyfriend, either...
With that said, I have been back on track for about a week now. I have stuck between 1200 and 1600 calories every day and worked out for 1 to 1 1/2 hours everyday as well. Last time I weighed in, which was about 2 days ago, the scale showed 144. Since it had crept up to 150 during my previous week of debauchery, that means 6 pounds down! I'm sure a lot of it is water weight, but if I keep this up I will get past that and see that number begin to drop consistently.
I have not yet followed through on my promise of pictures and measurments...sorry. I'll dig my tri pod out soon, wherever it is :)
My first planned cheat day turned into closer to a cheat week.
Yeah, it's Christmas time and its not easy to turn down all of the goodies around me. Motivation is a hard fish to catch sometimes, but it is really the key. I wish I know the magic formula to get and maintain motivation. We all know what works in weight loss--exercise and eating a reduced calorie diet with the proper nutrition. But actually doing those things unless you naturally crave celery 90% of the time (which I do NOT!) or have a job that keeps you moving all day (again which I do not...) takes a little something extra. When it hits, its great! Especially when it actually sticks around for longer than a day, but I'm never totally sure how I get there.
I remember being really angry with my ex when our relationship went south, and I looked at me losing weight as a means to get back at him and make him regret being such a skeeze. That worked like magic. And I know at least a dozen other girls that lost their excess fat on the break-up diet. So yeah...that is a very effective trigger for motivation. But it's really not the most emotionally healthy way to go either.
Now I want to get in shape for myself, so that I can feel confident enough on the outside to let Me show through. I'm a singer, and I love to perform, but it is diminishing to me to look in the mirror and see all of my flaws before I get on stage and then worry if that is what people are seeing, rather than hearing my voice.
Not that I would mind hearing a "Wow you look amazing!" from the boyfriend, either...
With that said, I have been back on track for about a week now. I have stuck between 1200 and 1600 calories every day and worked out for 1 to 1 1/2 hours everyday as well. Last time I weighed in, which was about 2 days ago, the scale showed 144. Since it had crept up to 150 during my previous week of debauchery, that means 6 pounds down! I'm sure a lot of it is water weight, but if I keep this up I will get past that and see that number begin to drop consistently.
I have not yet followed through on my promise of pictures and measurments...sorry. I'll dig my tri pod out soon, wherever it is :)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Reposting of a Great Article From MSN.com Today
Let Your Heart Break
By Geneen Roth
When you accept that hurting and healing are part of living, you can give up the fantasy that being thin controls your happiness, and your resilient heart will enable you to love the life you have right now.
His name was David, and I was crazy in love with him. The way his shiny dark hair curled around his collar, and how his long fingers waved oh so eloquently in the air as he talked. Every breath he took, every word he uttered seemed as if it was designed to crack my heart open. I wanted to spend my life with him, grow old with him, have more children than Angelina Jolie with him. The only teensy problem was that he didn't feel the same way about me. "I'm not attracted to you," he said. "It's not the same for me as it is for you!" he exclaimed.
Picky, picky, picky, I thought.
I was certain I could persuade him to love me, that he wasn't seeing clearly, that it was my job to show him that we were meant for each other. I was also certain that when I finally lost the 10 pounds I'd been losing and gaining for a hundred years, he'd be smitten.
And so I pulled out all the stops. I developed a sudden fascination for 18th-century architecture (his field), I baked coconut layer cake (his favorite), I dyed my hair blond (his preferred color). And most of all, I starved myself. I ate nothing but Grape-Nuts without milk for six weeks (don't ask). I chipped a few teeth, leached most of the calcium out of my bones, and probably depleted my muscle mass by half, but I did finally lose those 10 pounds. A few months into Project David, he fell in love with a size 16 brunette and moved 3,000 miles away.
Most of the people who come to my retreats and workshops believe in Control-of-Life-and-Death-by-Weight. They are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn't love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.
But as you probably have already guessed (or experienced firsthand), when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh.
Talk about busting childhood myths. As children, we all believed that it was in our power to make our parents happy. If our mother was depressed, if our father was absent, if our parents fought incessantly, we were convinced that it was in our power to make things better. It wasn't. But how we self-medicated those hurts with food was, and still is.
Listening to me say this, one woman in my workshop said, "But wait a minute! The problem is that I'm not in control of what I put in my mouth. If I were, I wouldn't be here!"
I responded, "If there is one thing about which we are in absolute and irrevocable control, it's what we put in our mouths. I understand that you don't feel that's true. I understand that you feel at the mercy of potato chips and pizza, but truly — it's only you who lifts your fork or fingers and puts the food in your mouth. It's completely up to you.
"And," I continued, "if there is one thing about which you are not in control, it's who loves you, stays with you, gets ill, or leaves you."
As long as you are saying, "Well, I may not be in a relationship now, but when I get thin, I will find the perfect partner," you give yourself the illusion that you're in control. You may not be happy now, you tell yourself, but someday soon you will make a change and Prince Charming will suddenly show up at your door. You fool yourself into thinking that you have total control over when your unhappiness will end and perfect happiness will begin. And it has something to do with your weight.
Yesterday I received a letter from a woman who weighs 350 pounds. She wrote, "I have always believed deep in my heart that if I would just lose this weight, my parents would love me. They would also stop yelling, stop drinking, stop leaving. My husband would pay more attention to me. My money problems would vanish. My house would be clean. What if I lose the weight and those things don't happen?"
Losing weight does bring a feeling of lightness; more freedom to move; it puts less pressure on your joints. But it doesn't pay the bills, clean the house, or prevent people from getting sick or leaving or dying.
Before my father died, I tried everything to keep him alive. I bought him athletic shoes and exercised with him. I made sure he ate well. Part of my motivation, besides wanting him to be healthy, was that I was positive I couldn't live without him. But when he died, I grieved, I cried, and then life went on. When my cat, Blanche, died, I thought life was over. And then it wasn't. My best friend, Isabel, moved to Australia a few months ago, and I thought I'd never have another close friend. And then I did. Seems as if I've been wrong about quite a few things. But the thing I've been most wrong about is that having a broken heart is something to avoid at all costs.
It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.
The hard part of emotional and compulsive eating is that in trying to avoid big heartbreaks, we break our own hearts every day. We eat more than our bodies want, we binge on foods that make us sick, we carry weight that makes it hard to move around. We tell ourselves mean stories about our thighs, our arms, our bellies. The cost of having the "when I am thin, everything will be fine" fantasy is that we end up trading the heartbreak of being alive for the heartbreak we cause ourselves.
And it's all to avoid something that can't be avoided. While we are postponing our joy for a future time when everything will be perfect, life is going on with or without our consent — and we are missing it. People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
Hearts are made to be resilient. Think about it: Is there one thing that's happened to you that you haven't survived? Here you are, right now, reading this article despite all the heartache you've had in your life. Something in you is still awake, alive, eager to learn, ready to be moved.
And once you know that your heart is resilient, once you accept that part of being here on earth is, as a friend of mine says, living among the brokenhearted, then you can take in the huge streaks of delight, joy, and happiness as well. Once you understand that everything will end, you can finally let your life — the one you already have, not the one you imagine you'll someday lose enough weight to deserve — begin.
Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
By Geneen Roth
When you accept that hurting and healing are part of living, you can give up the fantasy that being thin controls your happiness, and your resilient heart will enable you to love the life you have right now.
His name was David, and I was crazy in love with him. The way his shiny dark hair curled around his collar, and how his long fingers waved oh so eloquently in the air as he talked. Every breath he took, every word he uttered seemed as if it was designed to crack my heart open. I wanted to spend my life with him, grow old with him, have more children than Angelina Jolie with him. The only teensy problem was that he didn't feel the same way about me. "I'm not attracted to you," he said. "It's not the same for me as it is for you!" he exclaimed.
Picky, picky, picky, I thought.
I was certain I could persuade him to love me, that he wasn't seeing clearly, that it was my job to show him that we were meant for each other. I was also certain that when I finally lost the 10 pounds I'd been losing and gaining for a hundred years, he'd be smitten.
And so I pulled out all the stops. I developed a sudden fascination for 18th-century architecture (his field), I baked coconut layer cake (his favorite), I dyed my hair blond (his preferred color). And most of all, I starved myself. I ate nothing but Grape-Nuts without milk for six weeks (don't ask). I chipped a few teeth, leached most of the calcium out of my bones, and probably depleted my muscle mass by half, but I did finally lose those 10 pounds. A few months into Project David, he fell in love with a size 16 brunette and moved 3,000 miles away.
Most of the people who come to my retreats and workshops believe in Control-of-Life-and-Death-by-Weight. They are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn't love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.
But as you probably have already guessed (or experienced firsthand), when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh.
Talk about busting childhood myths. As children, we all believed that it was in our power to make our parents happy. If our mother was depressed, if our father was absent, if our parents fought incessantly, we were convinced that it was in our power to make things better. It wasn't. But how we self-medicated those hurts with food was, and still is.
Listening to me say this, one woman in my workshop said, "But wait a minute! The problem is that I'm not in control of what I put in my mouth. If I were, I wouldn't be here!"
I responded, "If there is one thing about which we are in absolute and irrevocable control, it's what we put in our mouths. I understand that you don't feel that's true. I understand that you feel at the mercy of potato chips and pizza, but truly — it's only you who lifts your fork or fingers and puts the food in your mouth. It's completely up to you.
"And," I continued, "if there is one thing about which you are not in control, it's who loves you, stays with you, gets ill, or leaves you."
As long as you are saying, "Well, I may not be in a relationship now, but when I get thin, I will find the perfect partner," you give yourself the illusion that you're in control. You may not be happy now, you tell yourself, but someday soon you will make a change and Prince Charming will suddenly show up at your door. You fool yourself into thinking that you have total control over when your unhappiness will end and perfect happiness will begin. And it has something to do with your weight.
Yesterday I received a letter from a woman who weighs 350 pounds. She wrote, "I have always believed deep in my heart that if I would just lose this weight, my parents would love me. They would also stop yelling, stop drinking, stop leaving. My husband would pay more attention to me. My money problems would vanish. My house would be clean. What if I lose the weight and those things don't happen?"
Losing weight does bring a feeling of lightness; more freedom to move; it puts less pressure on your joints. But it doesn't pay the bills, clean the house, or prevent people from getting sick or leaving or dying.
Before my father died, I tried everything to keep him alive. I bought him athletic shoes and exercised with him. I made sure he ate well. Part of my motivation, besides wanting him to be healthy, was that I was positive I couldn't live without him. But when he died, I grieved, I cried, and then life went on. When my cat, Blanche, died, I thought life was over. And then it wasn't. My best friend, Isabel, moved to Australia a few months ago, and I thought I'd never have another close friend. And then I did. Seems as if I've been wrong about quite a few things. But the thing I've been most wrong about is that having a broken heart is something to avoid at all costs.
It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.
The hard part of emotional and compulsive eating is that in trying to avoid big heartbreaks, we break our own hearts every day. We eat more than our bodies want, we binge on foods that make us sick, we carry weight that makes it hard to move around. We tell ourselves mean stories about our thighs, our arms, our bellies. The cost of having the "when I am thin, everything will be fine" fantasy is that we end up trading the heartbreak of being alive for the heartbreak we cause ourselves.
And it's all to avoid something that can't be avoided. While we are postponing our joy for a future time when everything will be perfect, life is going on with or without our consent — and we are missing it. People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.
Hearts are made to be resilient. Think about it: Is there one thing that's happened to you that you haven't survived? Here you are, right now, reading this article despite all the heartache you've had in your life. Something in you is still awake, alive, eager to learn, ready to be moved.
And once you know that your heart is resilient, once you accept that part of being here on earth is, as a friend of mine says, living among the brokenhearted, then you can take in the huge streaks of delight, joy, and happiness as well. Once you understand that everything will end, you can finally let your life — the one you already have, not the one you imagine you'll someday lose enough weight to deserve — begin.
Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
Monday, December 8, 2008
How Have I Tried To Lose You? Let Me Count the Ways…
I grew up living with my grandmother who was, as the stereotypical grandmother should be, an excellent cook. This woman could make cookies that filled your mouth with pure bliss and absolute comfort…all the things a child needs! I was destined from the beginning to be a chunk…
I can’t remember the exact moment the idea that I was fat came in to my mind, but somehow I was always aware that I wasn’t exactly cheerleader material. No, I would have to settle for Girl Scouts. Which worked out better for me anyways. Ya, know…cookies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of expendable income back then and the hand-me-down Brownie uniform that my mother bought for me at a yard sale was a little too snug, so I had to wear a t-shirt with my merit badge sash…
I think I was 8 years old the summer I went to visit my mother and found her stash of diet pills in the kitchen cupboard. I assumed these were just magic pills that would make me suddenly pretty and skinny like the cute little princesses from school that I envied so much. Lucky for me, the pills were just a cheap herbal supplement without much potency at all, so I was never harmed from the few that I tried.
However, I was sure my days were numbered when my brother found them in my jewelry box and told our mom. Surprisingly though, she sat me down, concerned but not upset—instead it seemed she sympathized with my desire to be one of the skinny girls… She’d known that feeling all of her life too. I seemed I had inherited this battle.
This began my first attempt at a diet. My mother was no nutritional genius, so with her advice, I basically ate all the same junk as usual that summer, but the low-fat versions. And let me tell you, low-fat food in the early 90’s was no where near even the caliber that it is today, so this still wasn’t pleasant. But I don’t remember it working much.
The next year, I think I took my first stab at the Slimfast diet. Again, in my young naiveté, I assumed, not that these plans would make you lose weight because you were so freaking hungry, but because there was something magical about these shakes. And again it didn’t work…
A few years later when I was around 12 years old, my mom had some weight loss success on the fen-phen diet. She even let me try a few of the little orange appetite suppressant pills which she assumed to be safer than the 2nd pill that increased energy. But we all know how that drug will go down in history… And ironically, it was the appetite suppressant that was banned in the U.S. not long after my experimentation with it.
I got lucky when puberty hit and naturally slimmed down some, though I still seemed so much bigger than all of my petite friends, so I continued my weight loss efforts. Some of the girls in my middle school saw it as a blatant sin to be seen eating lunch, so I started skipping meals on a frequent basis. Anorexia and Bulimia had become major topics for cheesy, made-for-TV movies, so my friends and I quickly caught onto the idea of starving ourselves and binging and purging. I wonder if the producers of those movies ever realized that rather than keeping young girls from developing eating disorders, they were teaching us how?
When I was in the 7th grade, I started abusing laxatives to keep from gaining weight when I could no longer stand to starve myself. I never became emaciated, but I did later develop some other medical issues which could definitely be related to my unhealthy practices. The cycles of gaining weight and then starving to lose the weight continued on into my early adulthood.
Once I hit college, things really went haywire. First I gained the Freshman 15. Then I think there must be another incident called the Sophomore 30, because by the time I was 19, I had gone from weighting about 140 pounds in high school to almost 190 pounds. I enjoyed all of the eating and freedom that came with adulthood so much that I didn’t even realize how big my butt had become…
But once I realized the difference in my mirror, I began to struggle yet again with a whole array of diets. Atkins was popular around this time, followed by Carb Addicts, the Lemon Juice Detox, the MonoDiet (a horrible diet where as the name suggests you only get to eat one type of food per day, the first day of which consisted of eating 15 oranges... Ick.), and the South Beach Diet. I even went to a few Weight Watcher’s meetings and joined a gym.
Then finally one day, a light clicked on. I realized that there was no quick fix and that if I wanted to lose weight it would take a long time and a lot of work…
But I decided it was worth it.
I can’t remember the exact moment the idea that I was fat came in to my mind, but somehow I was always aware that I wasn’t exactly cheerleader material. No, I would have to settle for Girl Scouts. Which worked out better for me anyways. Ya, know…cookies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lot of expendable income back then and the hand-me-down Brownie uniform that my mother bought for me at a yard sale was a little too snug, so I had to wear a t-shirt with my merit badge sash…
I think I was 8 years old the summer I went to visit my mother and found her stash of diet pills in the kitchen cupboard. I assumed these were just magic pills that would make me suddenly pretty and skinny like the cute little princesses from school that I envied so much. Lucky for me, the pills were just a cheap herbal supplement without much potency at all, so I was never harmed from the few that I tried.
However, I was sure my days were numbered when my brother found them in my jewelry box and told our mom. Surprisingly though, she sat me down, concerned but not upset—instead it seemed she sympathized with my desire to be one of the skinny girls… She’d known that feeling all of her life too. I seemed I had inherited this battle.
This began my first attempt at a diet. My mother was no nutritional genius, so with her advice, I basically ate all the same junk as usual that summer, but the low-fat versions. And let me tell you, low-fat food in the early 90’s was no where near even the caliber that it is today, so this still wasn’t pleasant. But I don’t remember it working much.
The next year, I think I took my first stab at the Slimfast diet. Again, in my young naiveté, I assumed, not that these plans would make you lose weight because you were so freaking hungry, but because there was something magical about these shakes. And again it didn’t work…
A few years later when I was around 12 years old, my mom had some weight loss success on the fen-phen diet. She even let me try a few of the little orange appetite suppressant pills which she assumed to be safer than the 2nd pill that increased energy. But we all know how that drug will go down in history… And ironically, it was the appetite suppressant that was banned in the U.S. not long after my experimentation with it.
I got lucky when puberty hit and naturally slimmed down some, though I still seemed so much bigger than all of my petite friends, so I continued my weight loss efforts. Some of the girls in my middle school saw it as a blatant sin to be seen eating lunch, so I started skipping meals on a frequent basis. Anorexia and Bulimia had become major topics for cheesy, made-for-TV movies, so my friends and I quickly caught onto the idea of starving ourselves and binging and purging. I wonder if the producers of those movies ever realized that rather than keeping young girls from developing eating disorders, they were teaching us how?
When I was in the 7th grade, I started abusing laxatives to keep from gaining weight when I could no longer stand to starve myself. I never became emaciated, but I did later develop some other medical issues which could definitely be related to my unhealthy practices. The cycles of gaining weight and then starving to lose the weight continued on into my early adulthood.
Once I hit college, things really went haywire. First I gained the Freshman 15. Then I think there must be another incident called the Sophomore 30, because by the time I was 19, I had gone from weighting about 140 pounds in high school to almost 190 pounds. I enjoyed all of the eating and freedom that came with adulthood so much that I didn’t even realize how big my butt had become…
But once I realized the difference in my mirror, I began to struggle yet again with a whole array of diets. Atkins was popular around this time, followed by Carb Addicts, the Lemon Juice Detox, the MonoDiet (a horrible diet where as the name suggests you only get to eat one type of food per day, the first day of which consisted of eating 15 oranges... Ick.), and the South Beach Diet. I even went to a few Weight Watcher’s meetings and joined a gym.
Then finally one day, a light clicked on. I realized that there was no quick fix and that if I wanted to lose weight it would take a long time and a lot of work…
But I decided it was worth it.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Writing it down...
The first three days have gone fairly well. My intake stayed right around 1300-1400 calories per day and I exceeded my goals of a minimum 1 hour of physical activity. I haven’t weighed myself since before I began Tuesday morning, but I do hope to already see a few pounds gone by the end of the week. Typically, I can expect to lose 3-5 pounds my first week of a diet by shedding the first bit of water weight. After that, I tend to slow down to no more that 1 or 2 pounds per week which isn’t enough to keep me motivated, and I then have to turn my attention to my workout goals rather than the number on the scale.
Weight is one of the least reliable measures of whether or not weight-loss efforts are having a positive effect. This weekend, I will post my measurements and take some current pictures so that I can compare in a few weeks.
I have decided to give myself one pre-planned cheat day per week. Most diets recommend this for 2 reasons—first, you don’t feel so deprived and are therefore less likely to quit altogether. Studies have shown that people who allow themselves a chance to indulge without guilt are able to stick to their plan and have a better chance at seeing long term results. Second, when you eat right, you feel better. Your body functions more properly, and if you pay attention to your body after those days of indulgence, you’ll notice that you feel sluggish and bloated, thus hopefully motivating you to eat right more often.
Even on my cheat day, I intend to write down what I eat. Keeping a food journal has always been the most important factor in keeping me on track. I have noticed that the days I decide to be lazy and not write down my foods and calories are the days I start to sway and get off track. It is like not keeping track of your finances. If you don’t write down what you are spending, it is likely your account will end up overdrawn.
My friend and I have even begun sending our food journals to each other via email. Even if she never read my food journals, it provides me with sense of accountability. The idea is that if I know I have to tell someone that I ate an entire bag of Oreos, hopefully it will make me think twice about doing so.
Also, by reading someone else’s meal plan, I can discover new foods to add into my own diet. Mixing it up and keeping things from becoming too boring is very important. Also, keeping my kitchen stocked up with plenty of figure-friendly and easily accessible foods helps me to stay on track. If I get into a pinch and find myself ravenously hungry, I need to have some quick and healthy snacks on hand, or I will go strait for the ice cream or the drive-thru window…sometimes both.
Weight is one of the least reliable measures of whether or not weight-loss efforts are having a positive effect. This weekend, I will post my measurements and take some current pictures so that I can compare in a few weeks.
I have decided to give myself one pre-planned cheat day per week. Most diets recommend this for 2 reasons—first, you don’t feel so deprived and are therefore less likely to quit altogether. Studies have shown that people who allow themselves a chance to indulge without guilt are able to stick to their plan and have a better chance at seeing long term results. Second, when you eat right, you feel better. Your body functions more properly, and if you pay attention to your body after those days of indulgence, you’ll notice that you feel sluggish and bloated, thus hopefully motivating you to eat right more often.
Even on my cheat day, I intend to write down what I eat. Keeping a food journal has always been the most important factor in keeping me on track. I have noticed that the days I decide to be lazy and not write down my foods and calories are the days I start to sway and get off track. It is like not keeping track of your finances. If you don’t write down what you are spending, it is likely your account will end up overdrawn.
My friend and I have even begun sending our food journals to each other via email. Even if she never read my food journals, it provides me with sense of accountability. The idea is that if I know I have to tell someone that I ate an entire bag of Oreos, hopefully it will make me think twice about doing so.
Also, by reading someone else’s meal plan, I can discover new foods to add into my own diet. Mixing it up and keeping things from becoming too boring is very important. Also, keeping my kitchen stocked up with plenty of figure-friendly and easily accessible foods helps me to stay on track. If I get into a pinch and find myself ravenously hungry, I need to have some quick and healthy snacks on hand, or I will go strait for the ice cream or the drive-thru window…sometimes both.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Setting Goals
The issue of scheduling time to work out is really an issue of commitment. I can make time, I just don’t like to. It feels so nice to go home after work and just lounge around until bed time…especially during the winter, because I am not at all a cold weather person. Being cold just makes me want to curl up in my electric blanket and sleep. Not to mention that darkness at 5pm makes the idea seem more acceptable. I would never go to bed at 9pm in the summer time, and going to work out at 7pm would be no problem.
I need to establish some fitness goals in order to have something more achievable to work towards than just a lower number on the scale. I did this when I lost the bulk of my weight initially and just got out of the habit.
For me, running was my goal. I have had asthma since I was 5 years old, mostly brought on by physical exertion or allergies, so I have never been very athletic and NEVER liked to run. However, because it was something I needed to work for and had to be diligent with in order to make any progress, I was able to stick with it for a long time and I saw major results. I began very slow, just pushing myself to run intervals. The first day, I would run for sprints of 30 seconds at 5.0 mph and then walk for 90 seconds at 3.8-4.0mph for a total of 30-45 minutes. This might not sound like much for an experienced runner, but since I was new at it…this was hard! (I should add that when I began, I had been walking for at least an hour a day for over a month so my legs and calves were already in slightly better condition. Others might want to progress more slowly to prevent injuries like shin splints which will interrupt your work out plans for a long time.) Each week that I ran, I tried to either increase the time I was running or decrease the seconds that I spent recovering at a walking speed. By week 4 or 5 I was running up to 10 minutes at a time before slowing to recover, and by 8 weeks, got up to 20 minutes! For me, this was a major feat! Again, I unfortunately got out of the habit so now I think my limits are somewhere around a 2 minute running interval again, but my hope is to stick to a plan and increase that to 10 minutes again by New Years. After New Years, I have a friend who is encouraging me to sign up to run a 5K with her in the spring. I think this could make a very good goal for me to strive for. If I could run consistently for 30 minutes strait at my 5.0mph pace, I could expect to finish the 5K in about 38 minutes.
Even if it comes down to just walking or strenuous housework, I have set a goal to get at least 1 hour of extra physical activity in EVERYDAY, though at least 3-5 days a week, I would like this to be a more intensive workout at the gym with my running and some weight and strength training.
I have gone over my schedule and I should be able to fit this time in. If not I am just making excuses for myself to be lazy. To start with, I am able to take walks on my 30 minute lunch breaks. If I do this, I only need to take another 30 minutes out of my afternoon schedule. Knowing my usual habits, if I get all the way to my gym which isn’t all that conveniently located, I will spend at least an hour there anyway so I can hope to exceed my goals.
I need to establish some fitness goals in order to have something more achievable to work towards than just a lower number on the scale. I did this when I lost the bulk of my weight initially and just got out of the habit.
For me, running was my goal. I have had asthma since I was 5 years old, mostly brought on by physical exertion or allergies, so I have never been very athletic and NEVER liked to run. However, because it was something I needed to work for and had to be diligent with in order to make any progress, I was able to stick with it for a long time and I saw major results. I began very slow, just pushing myself to run intervals. The first day, I would run for sprints of 30 seconds at 5.0 mph and then walk for 90 seconds at 3.8-4.0mph for a total of 30-45 minutes. This might not sound like much for an experienced runner, but since I was new at it…this was hard! (I should add that when I began, I had been walking for at least an hour a day for over a month so my legs and calves were already in slightly better condition. Others might want to progress more slowly to prevent injuries like shin splints which will interrupt your work out plans for a long time.) Each week that I ran, I tried to either increase the time I was running or decrease the seconds that I spent recovering at a walking speed. By week 4 or 5 I was running up to 10 minutes at a time before slowing to recover, and by 8 weeks, got up to 20 minutes! For me, this was a major feat! Again, I unfortunately got out of the habit so now I think my limits are somewhere around a 2 minute running interval again, but my hope is to stick to a plan and increase that to 10 minutes again by New Years. After New Years, I have a friend who is encouraging me to sign up to run a 5K with her in the spring. I think this could make a very good goal for me to strive for. If I could run consistently for 30 minutes strait at my 5.0mph pace, I could expect to finish the 5K in about 38 minutes.
Even if it comes down to just walking or strenuous housework, I have set a goal to get at least 1 hour of extra physical activity in EVERYDAY, though at least 3-5 days a week, I would like this to be a more intensive workout at the gym with my running and some weight and strength training.
I have gone over my schedule and I should be able to fit this time in. If not I am just making excuses for myself to be lazy. To start with, I am able to take walks on my 30 minute lunch breaks. If I do this, I only need to take another 30 minutes out of my afternoon schedule. Knowing my usual habits, if I get all the way to my gym which isn’t all that conveniently located, I will spend at least an hour there anyway so I can hope to exceed my goals.
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