Avoiding A Big Fat Thanksgiving Day Binge

Here we go.  Here come the holidays.  Winter is oozing up under my skin and into my psyche.  I'm suddenly hungry and grumpy for no reason, and my clients are too.  Thanksgiving is next week.  It's a beautiful thing to be with friends and family and give thanks, blah-di-blah.  Yes, it's a good thing, but it's also stressful and a big, fat excuse to binge on Thursday, Friday, and however many more days it takes to plow through the left overs.  Then come Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's, and football season.  Cookies, cocktails, and cheese wheels appear out of nowhere, but it's okay to indulge, right?!  It's the holidays!!!  Wheeeeeee!

No.  Not okay.  Mostly because you'll feel like ass the next day or the next week, and you'll definitely feel like ass when the sun comes up on New Year's day and you weigh seven pounds more than you did the day before Thanksgiving.

Why do we take beautiful, celebratory moments and turn them into excuses to abuse our bodies? Why would we want to make a warm occasion sad and uncomfortable by stuffing ourselves until our insides ache?

This year, I am going to be thankful for a body that treats me pretty well most of the time, and I'm going to do my best to treat it well right back.  I'll savor the dishes that bring me back to my childhood, but I won't eat so much that it makes me feel old.  That's my big plan... eat it all but not too much, take a walk, and take a minute to look around at the people I came to see.  It's about us, not about the food.

Now I just have to remember that - when a second, giant serving of buttery mashed potatoes is calling my name.  Mmmmm.

It Matters

The east coast just got clobbered by a massive storm.
My Grandma's beloved kitty, Lydia, died today.
We have a painfully important election next week.

It matters.

I'm feeling philosophical as a year has passed since Elvin disappeared, my baby boy is turning one, the city I lived in and still have many friends living in is under water, a president I adore is fighting for his political life and my family's right to see a doctor, and winter is closing in.  I have to ask myself what matters, and I have to ask my clients what matters to them.

Does weight loss matter?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  If it's a quality of life issue, do something about it.  Fight like hell to make a change because it matters to you.  Don't wait until New Year's Eve, and don't set goals that are so big they are destined to fail.  Do something small.

Take a walk.
Take care of your friends and neighbors.
Love your pets.
Vote.

It matters.

"Be Healthy" - From Your Friends at Groupon

I just got an email from Groupon entitled "Be Healthy".  The deals listed are as follows:

Botox

Laser Photofacials

Lipotropic Weight-loss Injections

Body Contouring Treatments

Microdermabrasion

Facials

Not an exercise or nutrition deal among them.  And WTF are "lipotropic weight-loss injections"?!  If this is what people think constitutes healthy living, we have bigger problems than I thought.  Happy Friday from Groupon!  Now go get your face scraped off.

A Birthday Without Cupcakes?!

Today is my birthday, and for the first time I can remember, the festivities aren't all wrapped up in food.  It's a strange feeling, almost annoying.

In birthdays past, I would have used the entire day as a giant excuse to gorge myself.  I have had a long-standing tradition of eating Long John Silvers for lunch on my birthday.  It was reminiscent of childhood memories of driving to Grandma's house in Virginia and stopping at LJS as a special treat.  I always ordered the two-piece fish and chips with a double order of hush puppies and drenched the whole thing in ketchup.  Then, of course, Ken would get me some cupcakes from Cupcake Collection to munch on for a couple of days, and we would go out for a fancy dinner with wine and some kind of decadent, molten chocolate dessert.  I could easily have eaten 6000 calories in one day, all in the name of "celebration".

I've been off of wheat now for ten months, and the few times I have indulged have led to nausea, bloating, and mild depression.  Of course, not eating wheat rules out fried fish, hushpuppies, and cupcakes, but the strange thing is that I woke up this morning and didn't want any of those things.  It kind of pissed me off because I would have happily broken my own rule for my birthday.  But I want to feel good today.  I don't want to feel sick and bloated.  It's a shift, and I'm not sure what to make of it.

I guess I'll just spend the day celebrating the 36 years I've been on the planet, the friends and family who make life entertaining and worth while, my amazing husband and baby boy, and the mini pit bull who likes to sleep on my feet.

I'd rather feel good than eat cupcakes, and that's some kind of sick, twisted logic.  I'll let you know when the aliens return me to my right mind.

We Are Getting Fatter. Anybody Give a Damn?

44% of Americans will be obese by 2030

63% of Tennesseans will be obese by 2030

  (Study by Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation*)

This is not a joke.  Something has got to give.  Clearly the diet and fitness industry is not doing its job.  In fact, it would seem that the more diets we go on, the more fitness crazes we try out, the more school gym classes we cancel, the more cheap convenience food we eat... the higher the obesity rate climbs.

We need to walk more, go outside more, eat more food that doesn't come in a bag or a box, build playgrounds, and fund our schools' food and athletics programs.  It's about small daily changes.  That is the ONLY way this trend is going to reverse itself.  We have to do an about face and start moving in the right direction.  There are no quick fixes. There. Are. No. Quick. Fixes.

"There are no magic solutions.  Our belief in magic

solutions that may happen some day in the future

keeps us from doing what we really need to do 

right here and right now."

                                                   - Brad Warner - Zen Monk, Writer, Bass Player

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/us-obesity-2030-americans-obese_n_1893578.html#slide=1537757

Water for Sky

My little man, Sky, recently started drinking water from a sippy cup.

I would have expected this to be a really small thing, but for his unsuspecting, uninitiated mom, this has been the biggest of things.

When I want to give my son clean water, I walk over to the filter in the door of my refrigerator, press a cup against a lever, screw on the sippy top, and help him as he learns to tip it back to drink.  His pleasure is palpable, and the satisfaction I feel as I watch him swallow and then blissfully gasp for air seems to harken back to some sort of ancient survival instinct.  It's elemental.

I cannot imagine living in a circumstance where I do not have access to clean water for my baby boy.  I'm not sure if I was insensitive before or just dull, but every time I give Sky his sippy cup, my awareness of people who go without is sharpened.

Hurricane Isaac ripped through Haiti this weekend pounding the same population that endured the earthquake two years ago.  I don't usually do this, but if you have five bucks or ten, a few organizations who are helping get clean water to people who need it are:

UNICEF

Charity : Water

The Water Project

If You Are Stuck - Banish Your Trigger Food

It’s an old and infuriating story.  You are trying to lose weight.  It seems like you have always been trying to lose weight.  You’ve been trying for a year or five years or three decades.  You are bored to tears of your own internal monologue rambling on over-and-over again, “Someday, somehow I’ll lose the weight.”  

Something isn't adding up.  You are exhausted by your efforts, and one of the following statements may be true:

A. You are stuck and always have been stuck

B. You lost some weight but now you are definitely stuck

C. You are killing yourself at the gym and are still very, very stuck

If the fat you are trying to lose is actually fat and not just skin that you are irrationally fixating on… if you are carrying an extra 10 pounds or more… if you are getting exercise on an almost-daily basis… if you are doing everything right and you still can’t lose weight, it’s your diet. 

It is almost impossible to maintain weight loss without exercise, but it is even more impossible to lose weight in the first place without changing your eating habits for the better.  Unfortunately, trying to transform your whole diet, measuring every meal - calories in vs. calories out - can be both daunting and confusing.  Pause, take a breath, and consider whether you are truly prepared to make a tangible change in order to impact your body positively.  If you are, consider leaving the bulk of your diet alone and taking a simpler tactic.

It is much easier to choose one unhealthy ingredient and cut it out entirely than it is to overhaul your whole diet.  Find the thing that you know sets you off and sends you careening down the rabbit hole of a late-night binge.  Find it and banish it.  If you can do it for two weeks, you will lose weight.  If you can do it for three months, you will keep the weight off and begin to wonder why you were so married to it in the first place.  You are looking for your trigger food. 

Here are a few common culprits to consider:

1.  Sugar – This is the demon that haunts you in the night.  It is the number one trigger for most women.  We know it, and we love it.  It’s everywhere, and you can cut it out to varying degrees.  First option: simply stop eating dessert.  For some people, this is enough, but if you want to go further, look for added sugar in cereal, salad dressing, juice, bread, and just about everything else that comes in a bag, box, or bottle.  Seek it out and shut it down.

* Soda, sweetened tea, energy drinks, and other sugared beverages, of course, fall under this category too.  If you drink these everyday and stop cold turkey, you’ll cut thousands of calories a week from your diet.

2.  Wheat – Go gluten-free or at least wheat-free.  This will automatically remove from your diet the following: bread, crackers, pasta, cookies, cake, brownies, Twix bars… did I say that out loud?  Yes, Twix bars.  I have a problem.  Give me sugar and wheat flour mixed together (ex. cake and cookies), and I am powerless, howling at the moon for another, and another.

* You can always find rice bread or rice pasta, but they are not nearly as available or as tempting.  It’s unlikely you would eat them frequently enough to replace all of the calories lost by cutting out wheat.  I’m not talking about a low-carb diet.  There are many healthy carbs in the world, but wheat flour is so prevalent that cutting it out almost guarantees weight loss success.

3.  Alcohol – Sadly, alcohol has lots of calories, lots of empty, pointless calories.  Most of my clients have no interest in quitting drinking, so another, less extreme option is to go alcohol-free during the week, Sunday through Thursday nights.  If that means you are skipping one drink per night, five nights per week, you’ll create a calorie-deficit of 1000 calories per week.  You’d lose a pound in three to four weeks.  Also, alcohol tends to lower your resolve for cutting other things out (like fat and sugar), so if you avoid the alcohol, you might do a better job turning down the other crack-like substances in your life.

Other culprits include fried food, cheese, smoothies, and chips.  Any food that is dense with calories – sugar, fat, or salt - that you eat a lot of on a regular basis is a great place to start, especially if it is a food that triggers you to eat even more.

I speak from experience.  I have been stuck for years at a time.  I have worked out consistently, watched my diet and wondered how I would ever break through.  Finally, I cut out wheat and got incredible results.  Then I hit another plateau and had to decide if I was happy there or if I wanted to take it a step further.  I was still eating dark chocolate and miniature York peppermint patties every day (no wheat, damn it!).  I cut out the sweets and, within a week, went sailing past that very stubborn plateau with very little effort.  Since then, I have been able to put dark chocolate back in my diet without regaining any weight.

After avoiding wheat for months and sugar for several weeks, I went on a trip and ate bread and dessert again.  I couldn’t believe how awful I felt.  I’m talking nausea and headaches, lethargy and depression.  I knew these foods were addictive before I quit, but I didn’t realize how much they were dragging me down.

I still crave brownies after dinner.  I don’t know if that will ever go away, but I have found that if I can get through an hour without giving in, I can make it through the night.  If I really need something sweet, usually applesauce, grapes, or a small square of dark chocolate will do the trick.  I might be grumpy about it in the moment, but the payoff is priceless.

If you are stuck and unhappy, be honest with yourself.  Find the one food that is most problematic in your diet, cut it out for one month, and watch what happens.  At the very least, you will learn that you are not a slave to your cravings.  At best, you’ll see results and get inspired to radically un-stick other parts of your life.

If you are stuck and content to stay that way, proceed with your stuckness.  Own it!  Don’t waste your energy wishing things were different if you aren’t actually prepared to do something about it.  Go forth and be happy just the way you are.  Stay stuck and be proud.

I Did It. Seventeen Pounds Down and At The Beach.

On December 31, 2011, I posted a blog called New Year's Cliché - I Have Seventeen Pounds to Lose. I planned to lose the weight in four months.  This week - seven and a half months later - on my way out the door for my summer vacation, I stepped on the scale and saw that I had finally done it.

I lost it all.  It may have taken twice as long as I hoped, but I set a goal at the beginning of the year and achieved it.  I can't say that I have ever succeeded in anything quite like this before.  I always gave up or got distracted.  To refresh... nine of the seventeen pounds were left over from my pregnancy and eight more were persistent, stubborn, bitchy, annoying pounds that I was not able to shed before getting pregnant.

The body I have taken to the beach this week is the body I want to live in.  I've learned what kind of choices I need to make to live here.  I've learned how my body responds to specific food and exercise habits.  I've learned what kind of mindset I need to maintain in order to be happy inside of those choices.  And I've learned that, apart from injury or illness, the state of my body is under my control.  I have no excuse anymore for living inside of a body that makes me uncomfortable.

Most importantly, I learned that forgiveness, patience, and unyielding persistence are absolutely crucial.  They are far more important than willpower.  Willpower will walk you through a day or two.  It will carry you right up to the moment that a colleague takes credit for your brilliant idea at work or your beloved boyfriend suddenly decides he's voting Romney/Paul.  It will carry you through lunch and dinner but not through the darkest hours of the night.

If there is a bad night or a bad week, you have two choices: forgive yourself and move on or give in to the badness.  It's your own glorious choice to make, and this is where the strength of your motivation comes in.  How much does it matter?  Why are you trying to lose this weight?  You better have a damn good reason or you will slip hard and fast.

I wanted to lose mine because I felt like this first year of new-momhood had the potential to define me for the rest of my life.  Change is always possible, but, for me, this moment allowed me to perceive a turning point and project into the future.  It allowed me the luxury of redefinition.  When I had a bad night, I moved on.  I didn't want to live inside of the badness going forward.

Patience was a new one for me.  I had to breathe as time slipped through my fingers this summer.  I couldn't hold on to arbitrary deadlines.  If I didn't get there, I didn't get there.  I had to move the goalpost back and be persistent.  It took me seven and half months instead of four.  I got stuck countless times.  I hung out in the stuck places for weeks-on-end and allowed myself that time guilt-free.  I could tell when I wasn't ready to push through.  My body was tired or my mind was panicked.  If I felt resistance on either front - mental or physical, I pulled back and changed the goal to temporary maintenance.  Pushing forward before I was ready would have destroyed my confidence and upended my focus.  I waited, keeping a steady eye on the goal, not allowing the bullshit in my head to trick me into giving up.

I wrote in the New Year's post that I would have counseled a client that four months was a reasonable time frame to lose seventeen pounds.  That would have been a mistake.  In all likelihood, the client would not have reached the goal and would have given up.  Fortunately, I was my own lab rat in this case.  The time didn't matter.  Plateaus didn't matter.  All that mattered was that I was consistently moving in the right direction.

I'm reading a book right now called Ada's Rules, a brilliant, funny, fictional account of an African American preacher's wife who sets 53 rules for herself over the course of a year in pursuit of life-altering weight loss.  Her motivations range from setting an example for her grown daughters to impressing, and possibly bedding, her long-lost first love.  The rules range from "Walk 30 minutes a day, everyday" to "Get better hair down there".  It's a manifesto for how to take better care of yourself one step at a time.  The rule that meant the most to me was "Don't stop short of your goal".

As this last month floated by and I hovered two pounds over my goal, I could easily have given in and decided that was good enough.  But it wasn't.  I needed to finish.  I needed to see the number on the scale.  I know now that I can achieve this body, and I took the time necessary to achieve it with peace in my heart.  I'm seventeen pounds down and calm... which is more than I even knew to hope for.  Now the work of long-term maintenance begins, and I'm looking forward to it.

I hate it when people post pictures of themselves in skimpy outfits online.  Tacky.

But this is cause for celebration.  I did it.  And now I'm at the beach.

As Requested... Snack Ideas!

Okay, you all have been asking for healthy snack ideas and ways to incorporate more fruits and vegetables in your diets.  Lisa Leake's blog, 100 Days of Real Food, is full of all kinds of great recipes.  I, for one, plan to spend all day there, soaking my brain in her good ideas.

Check out her post 85 Snack Ideas for Kids (and Adults).  You can also search her blog for more recipes for lunch and beyond.  I hope this helps.  Snack on!

Time for Yoga

Seven months into my post-baby weight loss adventure, I am two pounds away from my goal.  I have learned along the way to take the time to let my brain catch up to my body, waiting for my mind to recognize the new body weight as normal before proceeding to lose more.  It has taken longer than I hoped, but just about as long as I expected.  I'm proud of myself for the work done so far.

I'm also tired, achy, and vaguely bored.  I've taught myself dozens of new exercises and pounded away on the treadmill.  I've walked miles and miles outside each day that the heat index stayed below 105 degrees.  The workouts have been effective and empowering, but now I'm ready for quieter strength.  I'm yearning for somebody else to guide me for 90 minutes, to stretch and breathe and find muscles I never knew I had.

I'll keep at it in the gym, and the walks outdoors are invaluable... but in every physical and emotional transformation, there is a time to add and subtract.  I am coming full circle to the yoga that pulled me out of depression in my early-20s and the yoga that cushioned my pregnancy this past year.  I'm excited to see what happens when I approach that work from a place of light instead of darkness.

I am so thankful for the studio two blocks from my home and for my many yoga-loving friends who remind me - by their own example - how much strength there is in stillness.