The Professionalism of Food
In our society of diet and weight obsessed people, we have undergone an interesting revolution. Ironically, to gain control of our weight, we’ve given up control of how and what we eat. A professional has to tell us or the food industry has the answers. No longer do we feel like we can trust ourselves and our bodies. While we don’t want to ignore science, knowledge, and expertise, our bodies are well designed to tell us what we need. Outside knowledge should enhance that design, not take away our natural autonomy and freedom.
When it comes to how we eat, so many of us live by the idea that we must have a regimented diet to have the body and life we want. We berate ourselves for not having enough will power to maintain predetermined calorie counts. Over and over, we commit to the whole maddening process to lose more weight, but it’s having the exact opposite affect.
In our attempt to lose weight by dieting and strict eating protocols, we work to ignore and subdue true, honest hunger. Because natural physical hunger is critical to our survival, we eventually give in. This leads to overeating due to deprivation, followed by psychological discouragement from perceived lack of discipline. So, we fall off the wagon again and again that we never should have gotten on in the first place. We’ve become our own worst enemies, perpetuating weight issues rather than allowing our bodies to move us to the highest level of physical and emotional functioning.
To top it all off, so many of us also blindly consume substances marketed as helpful to dieting. Again, we readily hand over our power to the professionals. Regardless of side effects or even totally unaware of side effects, we dive right in if it’s fat free, sugar free, low carb, etc. We see these products as some magical piece of the weight loss puzzle, rather than the hazard and road blocks they actually are.
The evolution of diet soft drinks is a perfect representation of this phenomenon. Here’s the story:
Obviously, huge profits await food and drink manufacturers who can produce something new at a cheaper price, with a longer shelf life than the natural alternative. So let’s say you’re a scientist, perhaps a chemist, looking to create the most lucrative food product. Where would you focus your attention? What product would you make to bring you the most profits? What characteristics must you produce to hit a home run?
First, you should target a product that is used daily, not just once in a while.
Second, it should be a product that people want to consume over and over again, even though they have just consumed it a few hours earlier.
Third, it needs to taste really good.
Fourth, if it were addictive, perhaps on more than one level, then consumption would increase.
Fifth, people need to feel good immediately when consuming this product.
Sixth, easy accessibility is integral to the success of this product.
Seventh, in consuming this product, people should believe that it will not cause them to gain weight.
Eighth, there should be a certain level of exotic features – something that people could not create on their own.
Ninth, it needs to be fun, exciting – almost sexy.
Tenth, this product should be fairly inexpensive, so the masses can consume it easily.
Hence, the blueprint for and birth of diet cola. Go back through the list of ten features above that determine the perfect food product, and you will see that diet cola fits the description perfectly. Humans need liquids more than they need food. We are okay with consuming the same type of liquid over and over again – for most of man’s existence, that liquid was simple water. Caffeine and addictive sugar substitutes cause us to crave the diet cola. Most consumers agree that it tastes good, even going so far as to demand a certain brand of diet cola over another. We typically cannot make it on our own, due to carbonation and other additives difficult to reproduce in a home environment. We also think that there is no downside to the amount of product we consume – that we will not gain weight from over indulging in our consumption. Could there be a better product for summing up the professionalism of food? The grip the product has on us is firm. And that’s the way the marketers of the food and drink products want it to be.
Now, back to your dieting efforts. You are blindly following the protocol of the latest, greatest weight program…and we know where that gets us. Of course, to that program, you have added regular consumption of your favorite diet cola…you drink it at meals, with snacks, even in between meals. So, because it is a “diet” product, because it fits into your latest eating plan, and because it does not have any calories, it’s the perfect ally. Right?
As most of us know, diet cola contains aspartame, or the technical equivalent of the brand names NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, and Equal-Measure. Aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse additive reactions reported to the FDA. To boot, it causes excitatory neuro-transmitters to be stimulated in your brain, resulting in a highly addictive environment. This “perfect” diet ally is causing us to experience addictive behavior so we will drink more diet cola. But it does not stop there. That addictive behavior translates to addictive overeating, especially with regard to satisfying our sweet tooth. Sadly, we blow all those calories we intended to save with diet cola through the overeating brought about by the diet cola. And then, we blame ourselves because we don’t have enough will power and the emotional eating kicks in. Sound familiar?
Permanent weight loss and management is not about following. It’s really about leading. Let go of destructive behaviors, let go of destructive products, and let your own body lead you to wellness. To have your best shot, you’ll need some time to restore your natural physiological balance disrupted by all the “following.” Be patient, tune in to your instincts, and focus on trusting yourself.
A Scale that Actually Helps you Lose Weight!
Plain and simple, food is fuel for your body. But, it’s not that plain and simple. Food and the reasons we consume it have become increasingly complex. People eat to celebrate, they eat for comfort, they eat just because food is there for the taking. Who said anything about actually being hungry?
The famous comedienne, Rosie O’Donnell, shared a story about having friends to her house one evening. She had baked to a guest and offered her one of the treats. The guest declined the cookie claiming she was not hungry, to which Rosie replied, “What does being hungry have to do with wanting a warm chocolate chip cookie!”
Dr. Judi Hollis, author and eating disorder counselor says, “Food is not love, God, sex or
Rock’n’roll. It has, however, come to symbolize all of these things and so much more. Other than for fuel, we commonly use food in three primary capacities:
For Enjoyment
Food is part of the human experience and we need to allow ourselves to simply enjoy some of our favorite things to eat.
For Comfort
Emotional eating serves to mask or enhance what we are feeling. It can become our best friend, our nurturer and even our punisher.
For Escape
This is harmful unconscious or binge eating that serves to medicate us so we can’t feel.
For a healthy weight and general wellness, the goal should be to receive 85-90% of our food as energy and 10-15 % from enjoyment. In order to accomplish that, it’s critical to eliminate comfort and escapism eating by reconnecting with the innate ability to feel hungry and full. Staying in close touch with these natural, basic feelings is your best bet to eat for the right reasons and maintain a healthy weight.
Tracking your eating is the most effective way to understand what is triggering comfort and escape eating as well as to reconnect with hunger and satiety. It may feel tedious at first, but it is the quickest way to reach your goal of healthy, balanced behavior. You’ll need to think about and document your eating on a daily basis for at least two weeks:
It’s imperative that you keep this record whether you are eating in a healthy or unhealthy manner. It will reveal not only what pushes you into comfort and escape eating, but also what makes it easier to eat in response to being hungry and full. Eating for energy will make you feel the best enhanced with a small amount of enjoyment eating for pleasure.
The Scientific Method for Weight Loss
There are a dizzying array of options when it comes to losing weight. Diets galore, hypnosis, group therapy, acupuncture, self-help books, videos, appetite suppressants…and the list goes on. People are constantly searching for that new solution, the quick fix, a magic bullet. We’ve all heard that sometimes what you are looking for is right in front of you. Well, if you are trying to lose weight and maintain it, that expression could not be more true.
Your very own body and mind hold the keys to success for weight loss. Look no further than your own biology and psychology to create lasting wellness and a happy, healthy relationship with food.
Our body chemistry plays a big role to help or hinder weight loss. Eating certain foods, as well as overeating in general, create biological imbalances that actually promote hunger and eating. Understanding what part your body plays in your eating patterns and the importance of restoring biological balance is critical to reaching a healthy weight.
For example, Monosodium Glutamate or MSG is used as a flavor enhancer in all types of processed, bottled, bagged, and frozen foods. It produces excitatory neuro-transmitters in our brains making it highly addictive. So even if you are committed to cutting calories, eating low fat, and counting your carbs, the addictive properties of MSG could be making your weight loss efforts significantly more difficult or even impossible. And, that’s making you crazy. Without this information and the ability to make educated eating choices, people tend to believe they simply don’t have enough will power to succeed. It’s not discipline, it’s simple biology.
Equally as important, our thoughts influence how we eat. With strategic thinking, people can develop the psychological power to change eating behaviors. New thought patterns form the foundation for freedom from weight gain. It really gets down to retraining your mind to fortify wellness.
Let’ say you tend to be an emotional eater and that is preventing you from reaching your goal weight. You’re experiencing a great deal of stress at work or home and you are a bit depressed. Unfortunately, there is a quick fix that will increase serotonin and alter dopamine to give our body the peace and balance it seeks. That immediate, but very temporary fix, is food.
Food does the trick, but your clothes still won’t fit. So let’s bring in the big guns…your most powerful weapon…your mind. Think about something you can do, something that does not involve food and will decrease your stress. Perhaps you invite a co-worker under similar pressures to take a 15 minute walk, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Maybe you research aromatherapy and have your office filled with strategic scents. Explore a chat room for the overstressed and underpaid to vent your frustration and find some camaraderie during the day.
By using your psychological gifts, non-eating behaviors can produce the same serotonin and dopamine reactions you achieved with food. You’ll find same relief without derailing your weight loss efforts. And, amazingly, after you employ this new non-eating activity to relieve stress, you will form new neuropathways in your brain that will ultimately create non-eating coping habits. At first it takes practice, but eventually it becomes who you are and how you think. Pretty powerful resource, huh?
Once you have a biological understanding of what may prevent you from losing weight, you have the tools to identify problems and obstacles…obstacles you may not have even been aware of. To compliment the biology, new psychological insights serve to identify the right solutions and behaviors for weight loss. Instead of fighting your body and your mind, listen, learn and find lasting weight loss the way nature intended it. The answers really are right in front of you.
See Emotional Eating in a New Light to Lose Weight
Emotional eating is defined as the practice of consuming large quantities of food -- usually "comfort" or junk foods -- in response to feelings instead of hunger. As Dr. Phil says, “Now let’s get real” with our definition:
Your mother just called and pushed your buttons, so you retaliate with a fridge full of leftovers.
There’s a stressful deadline at work, but you pull through after 6 stealthy trips to the vending machine.
The dress you were supposed to wear this weekend won’t zip and you find yourself at the Mall food court instead of shopping a larger size.
Plain and simple, life really is an emotional rollercoaster. And, if you happen to be an emotional eater, that ride is going to throw you sometimes. It’s an inevitability. Despite your best intentions to eat a healthy, balanced diet, you’re in line at the Krispy Kreme drive thru. You are experiencing an all too common emotional eating dip. According to author, Seth Godin, the good news is that if you learn to look at your dips as an opportunity rather than a shortcoming, they can actually lead you to long-term weight loss.
Dips are normal part of everything we do. You have a dip every day, in every project or goal, you even have dips within dips. According to Seth Godin in his book “The Dip,” there are 3 primary forms of dipping: 1.) the cliff, 2.) the cul-de-sac, and 3.)the dip. Here is how each of those forms apply to the phenomenon of emotional eating:
The cliff: a dramatic dip when you respond to your daily struggles by falling off the deep end with all or nothing thoughts. This is when that one episode of binge eating sends you into days or weeks of constant emotional eating.
The cul-de-sac: a vicious cycle like going round and round in a cul-de-sac. Let’s say you binge on Monday, then go to diet extremes on Tuesday, which leads to another binge on Wednesday, followed by excessive exercise on Thursday. You get trapped in a pattern riddled with negative mind chatter about your inability to move forward.
The dip: a slight dip that we react to with calm, kindness to ourselves, and a rational means of moving forward. We perceive these dips as an opportunity for learning something meaningful about our eating behavior rather than a failure. You come out of them quickly and on higher ground with a stronger foundation for the next inevitable dip.
Knowing that emotional eating dips are coming is the best way to manage them. Successful dippers see them in advance and plan for them. They also understand that dips are not failures to berate ourselves about. Cliffs and cul-de-sacs keep us trapped in bad patterns, negative thinking, and obsession about food. However, each well navigated emotional eating dip takes us one step closer to a more consistent life of balanced eating and wellness.
The best plan for emotional eating dips is to determine non-eating strategies in response to particular emotions. Just like the food creates a physiological response in your brain to give you relief, so too can an appropriate non-eating behavior. Approach your emotional eating dips with a sense of curiosity, respect and anticipation. Remember, they are not a sign of failure. If you manage them correctly, they are actually the key to a healthy weight and life of wellness.
Diets are not the Answer
A new survey from Consumer Reports shows that about 41 percent of Americans are on a diet, and the average weight they want to lose is 37 pounds. About 23 percent of female and 15 percent of male dieters want to lose more than 50 pounds, and most dieters have hope that they will be successful, even if they have failed in the past. Ten percent of dieters use drugs or supplements, and about $37 billion was spent in the last year by those surveyed on weight-loss programs, books, pills, and other tools.
So, with about 300 million Americans, that means over 100 million people are dieting. It also means that 100 million of us are at war with our own bodies.
In this country, what we have come to know as diets are really a form of starvation. Diets trigger that ancient response to protect us from famine and starvation. Our body immediately begins to wonder when our next meal will arrive. Dieting exerts a form of control on our food intake, often ending in rebellion. Restricting food makes no sense to our brain chemistry, to our metabolic system, and to our body as a complete biological system. A change in eating habits toward starvation triggers the natural responses our bodies use to preserve us, to save us. Our bodies do exactly the opposite of what we want when we diet. Simply put, people cannot stick to a diet, not because they lack willpower and discipline, but because our bodies are designed to make us fail at dieting!
Minnesota Starvation Experiment: During WWII, the US needed information on how to help famine sufferers during periods of starvation in Nazi concentration camps. They chose 32 men for their superior mental and physical stamina, and simulated a period of semi-starvation. Caloric intake was cut in half, which mirrors the symptoms of chronic dieting. The study group experienced:
Weight loss ranging from 19-28%
Metabolic rate decreases of 40%
Heightened cravings and food obsession
Changed eating styles from gulping to stalling for a prolonged dining experience
Episodes of bulimia
Personality changes including apathy, irritability, moodiness, and depression
An average of 5 months of post-experiment overeating and weight gain until eating patterns normalized.
Our bodies are powerful and will fight mightily to protect us and return us to balance. The men in this experiment seemed unable to control their bodies. The urges, binging, cravings, and irritability seemed to happen in stark contrast to their normal behavior. Our bodies hate to be out of balance. During times of starvation, we will feel such things as tiredness, a fixation on appetite, muscle soreness, irritability, apathy, noise sensitivity, hunger pangs, and a large rise in the neurotic triad of hypochondriasis, depression, and hysteria. Furthermore, we can also experience a decrease in drive for activity and libido, along with marked personality changes. Typically, most people who go through a period of starvation report that they have not returned to normal after a three-month recovery period. Some of the participants in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment reported taking up to two years to recover. They also recorded grossly overeating and putting on fat after the experiment due to the urge to eat.
Obviously, dieting is not our answer to lifelong wellness…it is the enemy to lifelong wellness. There is a missing piece in our pursuit of a healthy lifestyle – a lifestyle that is not overweight. Everyone knows the weight loss formula of eating less and exercising more. But if America, as an educated and enlightened society knows this simple formula, why don’t we just lose weight? Why are we fatter than ever? It is because our society focuses on food and depriving our bodies of this very abundant fuel. Diets run counter to homeostasis; they ruin our balance, and they put us emotionally and physically in a state of panic.
While they may produce a short term weight loss, consider the various detrimental effects of diets:
Pre-diet binge, or the Last Supper effect. We don’t know if there are statistics on how many binges take place on Sunday night, the typical night before the next diet begins, but we can imagine it to be an astronomical amount. We gain unnecessarily every time we “start over.”
Post-diet binge. Your body refuses to be starved and deprived. In the end, it will demand food. It asks not for willpower; it demands balance. By saying, “I shouldn’t eat,” your body reacts by demanding more food once the restriction on food is lifted.
Feeling undeserving. Many dieters feel defeated when dieting fails to remove the desired weight. Feelings of not being good enough, of being unattractive, or of being a failure are quite common. Failing at a diet transcends to other areas of our lives, making us feel we are undeserving of many more things, because we cannot control our eating. This destructive mind-chatter is common among chronic dieters, and it destroys lives.
Shorter diets than planned. All too often, our bodies fight starvation and we quit a diet sooner than intended. Homeostasis pushes us back into balance. The result is often a feeling of defeat which can lead to binge eating for solace. This binge reaction creates a greater accumulation of weight than when we started the diet.
Social Withdrawal. No one wants to be seen at his or her perceived worst, so it’s much easier to withdraw socially during a diet. People also feel the need to avoid social activities with food temptations. Personal, social, and professional relationships become strained when making plans for the future becomes contingent on reaching some self-imposed goal weight.
Slowed Metabolism. An effect of chronic dieting is a slower rate of metabolism. Reduced food intake triggers survival mechanisms in the body to preserve energy for vital organs and functions. With a slower metabolism, you must restrict food more drastically in order to lose additional weight.
Reliance on caffeine. When metabolism slows due to dieting, caffeine can provide a counter attack by raising heart rate and blood pressure. It is not surprising that the food industry has caught on to our addiction to get going with caffeine.
Eating Disorders. Obsession with dieting has led to diseases that were virtually unknown to prior generations. Bulimia, anorexia nervosa, binging, etc. are part of our overall obsession with food, our bodies, and our appearance.
Diets trap you. The cage may look different from diet to diet, but if you want freedom from food, obsessive thinking, and depression from weight gain, you must give your body what it needs. If you have been overeating and then starving yourself, you have created hormone resistance, which simply means your body no longer feels hungry or full signals, or worse, it simply ignores the signals. You can restore these messages and retrain your body and mind to produce them, hear them, listen to them, and respond appropriately to them. You must honor the biology of your mind and body. Your body is equipped with hormones designed to make you feel full and to signal when you are hungry. Your body is designed to move you to your highest functioning capabilities, both emotionally and physically.
By dieting, Americans work so hard to achieve what they consider to be wellness and end up doing more harm than good. So what’s missing? The missing piece is peace…peace in the form of balance as opposed to war in the form of diets. Our bodies want balance. They want peace. We must give our bodies what they want. If we do not, balance is interrupted, and there will be no peace for us. Diets only create issues; they never address the real issues. They never allow for your biological make up to help you eat and satisfy what you need physically and emotionally. The recovery to a position of balance could take years, so diets are not the answer.
Finding your missing peace is the key to long term, sustainable health.
Confessions of an Overeater
People who fight overeating and battle with weight typically do it for years of their lives. It becomes their way of life. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Overeating is a complex issue, however, it can be understood, managed and conquered. In support of anyone who is fighting the good fight, here is a compilation of journal excerpts meant to inspire you and maybe even help you. The women who authored them can proudly say they’ve made peace with food, reached a healthy weight, and solved overeating once and for all.
Learning To Love Your Wagon
“Every time I would fall off the diet wagon, it was the end of the world. I hated myself, thought I was weak and convinced myself I could never lose weight. I had no willpower whatsoever! Then the punishment would begin with some crazy diet or extra workouts because I’d failed. And, where did that get me? Right back to falling off the wagon again. Well, it’s taken a lot of work, but I've actually learned to love my wagon. When I lose control and binge eat, my new goal is to study it, understand it and learn from it. Instead of punishing myself, I respect that there was an important reason why I was overeating. Now, I embrace these failures rather than run from them to the next diet. They used to hold me hostage and now they help me succeed.”
Don’t Wait On Your Weight
“I feel like I have been getting ready to start what I call my “real life” forever. I know what I want it to look like, how I will feel, and all the things I will do, like ballroom dancing. There's a class every Wednesday and Friday night, but I convinced myself I couldn't go until I lost some weight. What would I wear?! That was six years ago and still no dancing. When my personal coach had me write down everything that makes up my real life, what she called my, “Life of Wellness,” I put dancing on the list. We talked a lot about what I hoped would become my wellness routines, activities, and even feelings. But, we didn't just talk about all of it. She had me choose one thing from my life of wellness every week and actually do it. It was amazing. I was waiting on my weight to start living. Now, it’s starting to live that’s helping me lose weight and I love my dance class!”
Losing Weight Is Not About Willpower
“I never understood that so many of the foods I ate actually changed my hormones and made me want even more! It was always just my lack of willpower and I would blame myself for failing over and over again. So much of why we eat has to do with our brain chemistry and when you understand why you are eating, you have the secret weapon to change how you are eating.”
I’ll Get Him…I’ll Get Fat!
“I went grocery shopping with my husband on Saturday night. While we were in the store we got into an argument…of course I can't remember what it was about. I was so mad at him that I bought a whole cheese cake started eating it as soon as we got in the car. I actually ate most of that cake before I went to bed. I felt so sick and couldn’t sleep, so I got up and just sat in the kitchen. I was thinking about the argument, and realized that this was much more than emotional eating. I was actually trying to punish my husband by eating something fattening. I’ll get him, I’ll get fat so he’ll have a fat wife. It hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was hurting myself while I was trying to hurt him. How insane was that? So, I started practicing doing something other than eating when he made me mad. I’d walk around the block or pick up my knitting or call a friend to vent. Come to find out, most of these things made me feel better than the food did! After a while, knitting became my fallback and now I don’t even have to think about it. We fight, I knit and no more cheese cake.”
As you can see by these personal examples, truly understanding why you eat is the key to changing how you eat. Remember these mantras that sum up the successes of the women above and apply them to your daily life.
· Failures can become our friends;
· Loving life can help you lose;
· You’re not to blame, it’s your brain; and
· Fighting can make you fat.
With a little hope and a lot of practice, you will be well on your way to your own life of wellness. Don’t wait to begin your journey to end overeating.
Most individuals in the United States believe that we need to exercise to either manage our weight or to lose weight. Although exercise does help with weight management, it’s not the reason we need to move our bodies. Simple, natural, joyful movement and its real purpose is being lost. The truth is, everything in your body depends movement. It’s the key to energy, activity and life.
What does energy mean? Energy is your capacity to work. Energy determines if you will be capable of working efficiently and effectively, both emotionally and physically in every activity. Just like food, exercise and movement produce energy. If you don’t move you lose energy.
How It Works
1. Movement contracts and strengthens muscles.
2. Muscles pump blood throughout your body.
3. Blood is the catalyst carrying your glucose and oxygen.
4. Glucose and Oxygen give you energy, vitality and increase hormone
production.
What Happens When You Don’t Move
1. Muscles don’t pump blood though your body.
2. Blood circulation decreases.
3. The movement of glucose and oxygen slow down in your body.
4. Brain ability slows resulting in sluggishness and decreased carbon monoxide excretion.
Exercise has become as large an industry as the diet industry. The very thought of exercise has become cumbersome. People avoid it and exprience yet another defeat in the weight loss battle. The best solution is getting back to basics. We may all be better off thinking of exercise simply as movement. Movement is just that- getting up and moving. It doesn’t have to be any harder than putting on your shoes and walking around the block. Make movement part of your life, not another “have to” in your daily routine.
Why Can’t I Stop Eating?
The world famous company, Lay’s Potato Chips, may have coined the phrase, “No one can eat just one,” but the words apply to many of the foods we eat and love in America today. How often do we promise, “to only eat one,” soon to find the entire container of candy, chips, or ice cream entirely devoured? Our best intentions go flying out the window as soon as that first bite is chewed and swallowed. Many of us simply have a weak moment or may be responding to true hunger. However, for the vast majority, it is much more than a lack of will power...it’s a powerful reaction to an addictive substance designed so that, “No one can eat just one.”
Research shows that certain foods and food additives trigger an endorphin or opiate-like reaction in the addictive region of the brain called the amygdala. Once triggered, your brain feels so good it demands more by initiating obsessive thinking and cravings. You literally can’t stop thinking about the food. If you feel full and still can’t seem to stop eating, chances are your food contains an ingredient that has triggered the amygdala.
The solution to managing this phenomenon is to pay careful attention to ingredients. Each time you overeat, feel in a fog while you’re eating, or obsess about eating a certain food, check the ingredients and begin looking for common patterns. You’ll soon find that the addictive foods all have a common substance in the top five ingredients listed on the label.
How to Make Health a top Priority
Let’s face it, keeping goals to create the lives we so desperately want to live is just plain difficult. Christians and non-Christians can both identify with the frustration of Paul found in Romans 7, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Why can it be so difficult to mesh what we want with our actions?
Self-sabotage is all too common in the world of goals and especially prevalent for weight loss. Making health a top priority must begin with a good look at our behavior and responses to goals. To fight the fight, we have to know what we are doing to sabotage ourselves. Can you identify 4 ways that you defeat yourself on a regular basis and write them down? Perhaps you procrastinate or are easily discouraged. Do you prioritize your life based on an unhealthy belief that everyone else's needs are more important than yours? Do you allow the least tiny excuse to be exaggerated or debilitating? Think these issues through and write your answers down.
After you’ve documented your self-sabotaging behavior, ask yourself, "Do I lack a skill, knowledge, a true desire, or motivation to accomplish this goal?” Be brutally honest and become aware of what is really holding you back. List beside each defeating behavior why you are not completing the goal. Perhaps you want to cook healthy meals but don’t know how. Or perhaps you think you want to be really thin, but it is actually your spouse who wants you to be really thin, not you.
Complete the above exercise and then make a plan to beat your self-sabotaging behavior. Create a strategy to overcome each defeating behavior. Find a friend or a coach to hold you accountable to your new process or mode of operation. Make your plan manageable and remember that change is a process and often takes more time then we think that it should.
When facing longer-term health and weight loss projects, many of us give up because we expect bigger results faster. How long does it take to really overcome something, to really change a behavior, to really make lasting change?
What a great questions! Don't we ultimately give up because we think it is taking too long, or progress is too slow? Research has shown that in order to master a skill or a talent, it takes 10,000 hours of practice. This number seems like a lot of hours, but when they calculate the practice hours of concert pianists, professional baseball players, computer wizards, or anyone who is an expert at a talent or skill, the numbers all matched up: 10,000 hours. So how does this concept apply to overeating and healthy living?
If you have an unhealthy lifestyle or are overweight, you have probably put in your 10,000 hours creating bad habits, bad thought processes, bad eating patterns, negative self-talk…counterproductive everything about your body and how you treat it. What will it take to make all of those patterns positive? A lot of hours. Your mind is not going to reverse without 10,000 more hours. Those detrimental thoughts and patterns create grooves in your brain along your neural pathways. You have to take your thoughts literally out of the ruts and through practice, make new pathways. Well, this re-training is easy as long as you don’t give up. The time will pass. Each day, use your strategy to incorporate healthy living, knowing that each moment you put in is one more moment towards your 10,000 hours. Fortunately, you do have some good habits already banked – it is rare that someone doesn’t have any healthy habits. Build on the good. Don't berate yourself because you think your progress is too slow. It's not. It's normal. It just takes time.
Making healthy living a top priority involves identifying your defeating behaviors, strategizing to overcome them, and putting in the hours to change your thoughts and patterns of acting. It is difficult and it does take time, but it can be done. Most importantly, it is well worth the effort!
How Feeling Hungry Can Help You Lose Weight!
I’m hungry, I’m full, I’m hungry, I’m full. All day, everyday your body is sending signals about being hungry or full to help regulate the amount of food you eat. Staying in tune with those signals is critical to having a positive relationship with food and a healthy weight. However, if you live in a place where food is abundant, such as the United States, you may have become completely desensitized to these natural messages. It’s the American way to eat whenever it is convenient or appealing, not according to our bodily needs. Unfortunately, this desensitization leads to overeating, weight gain and in some cases, obesity. If you’ve lost touch with your true appetite, fear not. There are two key changes you can make to reconnect and win the battle of the bulge.
Making a change to honor your body’s hunger and satiety all starts with your brain. To repair lost or resistant signals, you must begin by understanding how the brain affects the body so that you can reengage the systems.
The Hypothalmas is the center of the brain which controls temperature, metabolism, sex drive, appetite and many other functions. Two important signals are sent to the hypothalmas that control being hungry and full. The full signal comes from the intestine when the hormone Leptin is released. The hungry signal comes from the stomach when the body needs energy and the hormone Grehlin is released.
Leptin is produced in the intestines as we become full from eating. Leptin signals the brain to stimulate a chemical called CART (cocaine-amphetamine-regulatory transcript) in the hypothalamus. CART immediatley reduces appetite and increases insulin to deliver the needed energy to the body’s cells. Unfortunately, if you have regularly dieted or binged, your body no longer responds to the signals from Leptin. Eventually what is directing your eating is the Pleasure Center of your brain instead of the messages created by Leptin.
Ghrelin is produced in the stomach when it’s empty. Ghrelin signals the brain to produce a chemical called NYP (neuropeptide Y) to decrease metabolism and increase appetite. If you regularly deprive yourself of food and nutrients by dieting, your body will increase the secretions of Ghrelin. This in turn drives NPY up causing an insatiable desire for carbohydrates, often in the form of a binge.
The good news is Leptin works long term and overrides Ghrelin. The key to repairing Leptin and Ghrelin sensitivity is to incorporate highly nutrient dense foods into your diet and begin listening to your body. When you eat calories from healthy sources, your desire to eat is inhibited by the production of NPY and CART. So if you’ve lost touch with hungry and full, get your normal, balanced appetite back by increasing those nutrient filled foods and honoring the natural signals from your body. Dieting and overeating creat hormone resistance so avoid extremes. Treat your body with good food, at good intervals and listen to the signals. Reconnect with your body, enjoy your appetite and lose weight naturally.
How Do I Fight Food Cravings and Overeating?
In order to stop food cravings, you must understand the "why" of cravings, hunger and satiety (feeling full). Many weight management programs and diets completely ignore the "why" to overeating. They simply demand strict compliance to their designed food protocol, claiming that treating the symptom (eating) will solve the problem (cravings). It’s barbaric. Treating cravings with diets is similar to treating malaria with blood-letting or witchcraft when the actual problem resides in the small mosquito carrying the deadly parasite. The solution lies in the "why" which allows you to then carefully select a suitable and effective “how.”
There are three main causes for food cravings. Each cause has a physical component and a psychological component. If the physical and psychological components are not fully understood and resolved, then resisting or managing the craving will be extremely difficult.
Physical Hunger
The first craving seems obvious enough…physical hunger. However, in our attempt to lose weight by dieting and strict eating protocols, we attempt to ignore and subdue true, honest hunger. Hunger is a basic need. It is not about anything more than our body’s need for energy and nutrients to sustain life. So, while depriving your body may meet some diet regimen, it will also trigger the survival mechanism in your body. The result is that cravings will build and build until your body receives the nutrients and energy it needs from food. Often, these cravings will be nutrient specific for things like salt, carbohydrates for energy, potassium, or protein. Other times, your body will be indiscriminate by demanding the quickest food available. The psychological role in this craving is created when someone gets discouraged from wanting to eat and working so hard not to eat. Because normal, natural physical cravings are so strong, we eventually give in, eat and feel like a failure for not adhering to a diet. This leads to overeating anything and everything due to some period of physical deprivation, followed by the psychological discouragement of “falling off the diet wagon.”
THE ANSWER: listen to your body and absolutely give it what it needs in the form of real food and real nutrients.
Addictive Cravings
With the industrialization of the food industry, ingredients which are not intended for high consumption have become extremely accessible and addictive. Brain mapping has shown that while eating simple carbohydrates, dopamine levels raise 160%. Dopamine, the pleasure hormone released in the brain, is a key element in addiction whether drug, alcohol or food. Other proven addictive substances are high fructose corn syrup, sugar, caffeine, and many preservatives. Have you ever had one bite and couldn't stop? That is because you really couldn't stop. Your brain enjoys the addictive ingredient so much that it literally creates an obsessive mind process so you can't stop thinking about the food until you have eaten the whole thing.
THE ANSWER: learn and experiment with ingredients that can trigger addictive cravings and avoid the ones that affect you.
Emotional Cravings
Much like addictive cravings, brain mapping has proven that food alters brain chemistAry which in turn alters how we feel. Emotional cravings begin when we feel sad, angry, anxious, or even happy and turn to food to mask or enhance the feelings. Food will alter the brain chemistry, however, only for a few seconds or minutes at best. After the initial relief from the mood-altering food, serotonin, dopamine and other hormones immediately drop lower than the initial pre-food level. This creates a horrible cycle of eating more, feeling better, feeling worse and eating more to perpetuate the process. Soon, the eating becomes its own problem. Emotional cravings are both physical and psychological and are difficult to conquer unless the feelings prior to the emotions are he mostaddressed.
THE ANSWER: learn to recognize what you are feeling emotionally, what hormones have altered and use non-food activities to change the hormones naturally.
Commit to not eating until you know the "why" to your craving and then give yourself what your body truly needs. Do not be fooled by cravings or discouraged because you feel them. Use them to learn and improve your health by simply asking "why?"
Are You Sleeping Enough?
Are you sleeping enough? Enough? What does that mean? Are you sleeping enough that you're not tired anymore? I know what you are thinking, "You have got to be kidding! I have such a busy schedule with work, family, volunteering…I can't even squeeze in exercise! And now I’m supposed to be getting enough sleep.... this is crazy!"
Sociologist Max Weber believes that the dominant cultural model of the United States follows the protestant ethic, which is based upon minimizing pleasure and maximizing work. This work ethic has taken us past the point of good health. We are so busy, we have no time and something has to give. Let's stay up an hour later or get up an hour earlier. Soon, we are so tired that our adrenal glands are fatigued resulting in off the charts cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone associated with chronic stress and the inability to lose belly fat around our middle. We may be productive by maximizing work, the consequences to our health can spiral quickly out of control.
Sleep plays a significant role in the way your stomach functions. If you want to eat less, get more sleep. When you don't sleep enough, more ghrelin (your hunger hormone) is secreted and less leptin (your feel full hormone) is released. You can truly set yourself up for failure without the proper amount of rest.
Think about our ancestors. What were their sleep patterns before electricity? Go to bed with the sun, and get up with the sun. They had no choice. If you persist in overdoing without rest, you make yourself vulnerable to illness, overeating, and immune failure ranging from colds to cancer.
Take a cat nap. A cat nap is 15 minutes which can be just enough time to let you rejuvenate without feeling groggy from a deep sleep. Get caught up on your sleep this weekend, and than if you can't get everything done in a day, perhaps you have too much to do. Don't cut back on sleep. Cut back on stress.
Just as a lack of sleep will play a role in our weight management, so will too much sleep. Excess sleep can cause the body to act in much the same way that hibernation acts for a host of animals. Reduced activity, caused by excess sleep or lethargy, will cause the body to minimize its caloric requirements. If you keep your caloric intake the same while increasing your sleep beyond what the body would typically need, your body will store excess energy in places that you may not want to have it stored. For women, it will typically be in the hips and thighs. For men, it will generally show up in the stomach, apron, or omentum.
Sleep matters. Make sure that you get enough while avoiding excess. Careful regulation of this important element will ensure better weight management.