Posts Tagged ‘extreme dieting’

This post is dedicated to Cindy, my girlfriend who forces herself to eat breakfast because of the prevailing dieter’s wisdom.

I am a good American girl.  I eat breakfast every day.  My mother would not let us walk out of the house without breakfast and I make sure that all of my kids get breakfast every day, too.  And, I’m smart and pay attention in school and perform well on tests.  AND, I’m overweight and three of my four kids are all fighting weight issues, too.  My husband drinks coffee for breakfast and my skinny 18 year old prefers not to eat breakfast.  I also know people who force themselves to eat breakfast because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do.  And, EVERY diet I have ever been on starts with “don’t skip breakfast” or “here’s what you eat for breakfast”.  Well, I’m trying something new - new for me anyway.  I’m skipping breakfast.  Seriously, now that I think about it, breakfast is a joke.  Bacon and eggs with toast and butter or a bowl of cereal with milk.  I think we can all agree that is not a good formula for maintaining a healthy weight.  So, let’s look at my “diet breakfast”.  I’ve done everything from bagels (loved the “fat free” days in the 80s), bacon and eggs (thank you Atkins), steel cut oats with fruit, nuts and flax seed oil, fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, protein shakes, etc.  Oh, it makes me hungry to think about.  Hungry.  What an interesting idea.  It’s after 10 am and I am just now thinking that I might possibly be getting hungry.  I was not hungry at 6:30, 7:30 or 8:30 when breakfast is what is supposed to happen.  And when I do eat breakfast, I am generally hungry mid-morning.  And, then I have a whole new food conversation about snacks.  It’s exhausting and it’s no wonder I am behind in the laundry.  I eat (and feed my kids) so that I won’t get hungry later.  I’m running from my fear of hunger.  I don’t think I’ve been hungry except for maybe a handful of times in the past 20 years.  I would venture to say that most of us don’t even know what hungry feels like.

So, I’m experimenting with giving up breakfast.  I figure it can’t hurt.  I know all the sane dieter’s wisdom says that skipping breakfast sets me up to be ravenous at lunch and doesn’t give my metabolism a chance to start working and all that.  Well, let’s see what happens.  So far, so good.

Weight loss is hard.  Right?  This is the perpective that I’ve always had.  Anytime I’ve lost weight in the past, it was hard.  The plan was hard, the exercise was hard and sticking to the plan was hard.  I was of the “no pain, no gain” school of thought.  It had to be hard in order to work.  Partly because of that and partly due to my desperation to lose weight, my diets kept getting harder and more extreme.  And so did my workouts.  And I could do it - for a while any way.  But, generally, it became too hard and I would find an excuse to stop.  I would either get injured - hurting my back or pulling a hamstring or something or I would find some reason that I couldn’t follow a diet any more.  I would generally abandon my diet in favor of “healthy eating”.  I would say, “No carbs is crazy.  People don’t eat like that.  You’ve gotta live.  Skinny people eat carbs.  I just need to eat healthy.  I just need to use moderation.  I don’t need this crazy diet.”  You can substitute raw foods, whole foods, sugar, fat, points, fasting, juicing, shakes, conscious eating or whatever into the previous idea to see my way out.  The general theme all along was that weight loss was hard, too hard and that IT just isn’t fair.  Why can other people eat what they want, whenever they want and not weigh 200 pounds?  It’s because they don’t!  That’s why!

I started studying how “normal people” eat and maintain their weight.  The first challenge is to find a “normal person”.  People have all kinds of crazy ways they do food, exercise and weight management.  I have a couple of people that I consider healthy, normal eaters who have healthy, normal (even desirable) bodies.  I was thinking that I shouldn’t name them, but it’s a list I’d love to be on, so here they are:  Erika (my best friend), Jeanne (my sister-in-law), Nathan (my son) and my Dad. I’ve excluded my trainer, Tracey, from this list even though she is a relatively sane eater who has taught me a lot about how to eat and how to separate eating and emotions.  I don’t include her because she exercises for 2-8 hours every day and that is not something I ever aspire to do.  Talk about hard!

So, here is what my unofficial, un-scientific study has taught me:

• Maintaining my weight can be easy.  Yes, EASY!  None of my “subjects” is over-concerned with their weight or their diet.
• Exercise for fitness and health, not for weight management.
• There is no such thing as deprivation.  I can have whatever I want whenever I want it.  It’s only when I think I can’t that I start over indulging regularly.
• Eat well, regularly.  It’s the daily habits that make a difference.
• Portions matter.  One cookie won’t make you fat, a dozen will.  One bite actually tastes better than the whole container.
• Over-eating and binge eating is emotional, not physical.

There are many more lessons to be learned and that I am learning on the way.  But, the biggest lesson is that it’s easy!  Really, it is.  When it starts getting hard, I need to start looking at my feelings, my emotions and my meanings.  THAT is what starts getting hard.  The food is easy.  100% is easy.

Saltines!

Salty
Allowed
Lickable
Tasty
Indulgence
Nibble
Enjoyable
Snack

Saltines make my plan work. They are salty, crunchy, tasty, carb-y and satisfying. This may seem weird to some of you, but not to any of you who have ever followed a low carb diet. On Atkins, the plan is to eat less than 20 grams of carbs per day. But, you can eat as much bacon, eggs and butter as you want. And, there are those bars that have allowable “net carbs”. Okay, I admit to being fond of funny math, but the “net carb” math never really made sense to me. I could have a bar full of protein, fat and chemicals so long as the carbohydrates were indigestible and wouldn’t contribute to my daily carb count. Yep, this sounds like Frankenstein kind of thinking to me. I’ve tried other low carb plans that actually allowed a little fruit, but never any bread or bread-like products and especially not crackers. Again, the bars were allowed. Crazy stuff, those fake food bars. And, what I noticed is that the low carb plan works while you can stick to it, which isn’t normally that long. But, as soon as you go off of it and start eating carbs again, you blow up like a balloon. Maybe this is an argument for giving up carbs for good. Maybe there is something inherently wrong with the plan. I don’t know. All I know is that I could never work it for very long and the weight loss wasn’t maintainable for me.

What I understand about the addition of fruit and crackers into my diet is that it keeps this problem from happening. My friends who have successfully reached their goal weight have also successfully maintained their weight. I only know two people who have followed this plan before me, but they have both lost significant amounts of weight and maintained it for over six months and over a year. This is the kind of math I’m looking for.

There’s an article in the paper today discussing the research that is being done that links calorie restriction and longevity.  I guess they used worms first, then mice and now monkeys.  They conclude that calorie restriction does indeed increase life span and long term health and decreases “age-related” illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.  I’d argue that this research may actually indicate that these “age related” illnesses may actually be food related.  But, I guess they aren’t doing that study.  Anyhow, I read the whole article because food, calorie and health related research is fascinating to me.  You do have to read the whole article to get the bottom line.  The bottom line is that calorie restriction does increase longevity.  What I think is more interesting, though, are the fine points.  For calorie restriction to be beneficial, the research recommends that you determine how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight and then eat 10-30 % less than that.  That doesn’t sound so hard.  Instead of eating 2000 calories, you eat 1400 - 1800 calories.  They don’t discuss the quality of the food or the quality of the diet, which I imagine would be a significant factor.  They go on to say that the test subjects actually seemed more irritable and less content while on calorie restriction - the mice didn’t like to be handled and bit people.  No duh!  I get cranky when I don’t get enough to eat, too.  Okay, here’s the kicker.  They extrapolate all their research (monkey math - my favorite) to calculate the implications for humans.  They estimate that following a colorie restricted diet (essentially being on a diet) for your whole life will yield you a whopping TWO extra years.  Is is worth it?  Not for most of us.  What might be worth it is the quality of those last years.  I’d rather die peacefully in my sleep than to fight cancer, heart disease or diabetes for ten or twenty years.  I’d also rather live in a body that I am happy in than a body that I am ashamed of.  I want to be able to chase my grandkids around Disneyland and the beach.  So, my bottom line…  longevity isn’t my goal, quality of life is.  I’m on this journey to improve the quality of my life NOW and to improve the quality of my life as I move into my best years.

One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is what motivates people to do what they do, especially what motivates people to overcome obstacles that they’ve been wrestling with for any significant amount of time.  What is the “straw that breaks the camel’s back”?  When is “enough, finally enough”?  As a coach and as a student of the Philosophy of Success (I just made that up), I have been unofficially studying what the factors are that come together to finally inspire someone to take charge of their lives.

Tony Robbins is the loudest teacher of the “pleasure vs pain” principle.  People move toward pleasure and away from pain.  By and large, people will do far more to avoid pain than to acheive pleasure.  A typical example of this principle in action is dad dies of a heart attack and his son gets serious about taking care of himself.  Or a wife finds her marriage in jeopardy and loses weight overnight, the same weight she has been struggling with and committed to losing for years.  These are snap decisions, made in a moment, accompanied by absolute commitment.  Well, I have been trying to figure out how to make a clear decision and get totally committed to it using internal motivation rather than external motivation.

Being internally motivated to lose weight has actually happened for me twice and I am really curious about it.  The first time was after Tony Robbins’ Life Mastery program.  And the second time is now.  I am looking for the patterns so that I can access this motivation and commitment in my life any time I want to.  I simply decided that now was the time and that I will do whatever it takes to reach my goal.  What made me decide?  I’m not sure.  I remember one moment at Life Mastery where I was moved to tears because I really got in touch with how much pain I was experiencing in my life because of my weight and my eating habits.  That seems like the moment of decision.  This time, I don’t know.  I just decided.  I started taking action and some of the action didn’t work.  I went on the Master Cleanse for 10 days.  I used to love the Master Cleanse.  Not so much any more.  I knew this wasn’t the answer, but it definitely led me to my answer.  I think part of my shift to internal motivation began with actually talking about my weight with other women and admitting that I have a weight problem with my clients and friends.  I’ve mentioned that it’s something I’ve been trying to hide, mostly from myself.  This seems like an important shift.  I also spent some time journaling about why I want to lose weight.  I wrote out a litany of reasons why I must lose weight now, why I want to lose weight now and what it will give me to live at my ideal weight.  This is good work.  It’s not super pretty, some of it is petty.  But, it works.  I didn’t just write a list, I wrote three or four pages in my journal.  Finally, it really comes down to deciding, making a committed decision.  Committing to 100% no matter what.  No excuses, no justifications.  Just do it!