Diet With An Attitude

10 Days to Permanent Weight Loss, Day 9

2006-11-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

How much weight can you lose on your program? How much do you want to lose? Keep going until you are where you want to be.

Now what?

Well, you have a choice. You can throw caution to the winds, discard your intermittent feeding program, and eat your way back to your old self, or you can opt for maintenance.

If you'd like to stay at your goal weight, you'll need to experiment a little, always with a keen eye on your trusty scales. If you settled at 3 days of stringent dieting a week, drop back to two and see what happens. If you're still maintaining, drop back to 1. If you've really cut down on your portions and streamlined your intake, you may be able to return to eating 7 days a week. But keep that hawk's eye on the scales and immediately add back a day of deprivation if you gain 2 pounds or more.

Also experiment now with the different quickie diets you've become familiar with. Some will be more effective for you than others so stick with the ones that give you the most bang for your buck.

Next: The final takeaway.

Virginia Bola http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com/index2.html

10 Days to Permanent Weight Loss, Day # 8

2006-09-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

We've talked about what a large selection of foods you have for your diet days, those 1 to 3 minimal intake days a week when your weight loss spurts. What to eat on your "off" non-dieting days?

Again, it's all up to you. Initially, you may want to eat whatever you normally eat (no playing "catch-up" for your day of deprivation success, mind you!). As you progress through your program, you will start to find yourself unconsciously lowering your intake because your old portions now seem too big. If you're strictly dieting 3 days a week, you've cut your overall weekly caloric intake by up to 43% so naturally your body no longer craves the amount of food it demanded in the past.

If you want to be even more virtuous, you may elect to concentrate on highly nutritious but low calorie foods on your "off" days also - fish, poultry, vegetables, rice, fruit. The important thing is to eat things you like on those "off" days. The thought that gets you through the painful diet days is that "this is only for a day, 2 days, 3 days." If you don't have fun "off" days to look forward to, you're back to the old endless deprivation mindset, you'll get sick of the whole thing, and relapse stares you in the face.

Next: Making it last.

For more information:

http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com/index2.html

10 Days to Permanent Weight Control # 7

2006-08-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

You may wonder if the diet you pick makes a difference. Not for this program. There are literally thousands of "quickie" diets ranging from a minimum of 6 or 8 hours to as long as 7 to 10 days. Some are obviously more nutritionally balanced than others. Canned formula programs or mix-up shakes are usually quite complete while tomatoes and cottage cheese or cabbage soup routines may be deficient in many nutrients.

However, this is not a lifetime eating plan - you are eating unnaturally for only a few days at a time. Your body and digestive system can survive almost anything, including the complete absence of any nutrients, for a few days. What is important is that the diet be a true fad diet - stringent, Spartan, a minimum in calories of any kind.

The most effective approach is to mix and match. One week you might drink fruit juices for a day, then go on straight protein for a day, and lettuce and tomatoes for the third day. The frequent changes keep your body off balance and head off that dreaded "famine coming, famine coming" reaction which slows your metabolism to a crawl so your body can hang on to its dearly beloved fat stores.

Find new fad diets wherever you can. There are hundreds on the Internet, books and pamphlets galore, and every woman's magazine hosts its diet o'the month. You can try a total fast if you'd like but it's better to either limit that to 24 hours or to occasionally extend to 4-5 days as the second and third days are really tough while by the fourth and fifth days, any sense of hunger has completely gone. Don't go any longer than about 5 days unless you're an experienced faster or under expert supervision.

Pick whatever you like and what works within your food budget: buttermilk, cottage cheese and grapefruit, eggs and tomatoes, fish only, milk and bananas, yogurt, rice, raw food - there is a fad diet for almost anything you can imagine.

Keep trying new things to maintain your interest.

Next: Handling the non-dieting days.

More info: http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com/index2.html

10 Days To Weight Loss # 6

2006-08-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

You know what you're capable of handling and what is just not acceptable. Use your personal level of tolerance for discomfort to determine how you combine your eating and dieting days.

To minimize the chance of relapse, start off a little more slowly that you think you can handle. You can adjust your program at any time and, in fact, after the initial success, you are likely to keep raising the bar as your belief in yourself blossoms and a kernel of pride starts to germinate.

For the first week, for example, you may select one day in which you will observe an extremely stringent fad diet for 24 hours. You survive that one day of deprivation because you know it's only one day and you have had the opportunity to plan it out ahead of time to minimize distractions and temptations.

For the few days after your 1 day diet, feel the glow. You may, or may not, have actually lost weight - it is the feeling of success that we are seeking and you need to relish that feeling for all it's worth.

If you believe you can do it, stretch the one day to 48 hours the next week (or stay at the 24 hour per 7 day schedule for a little while, constantly building your ability to do this). It's up to you whether you want to set it up for 48 straight hours or make it 2 sessions a few days apart.

Make sure you give yourself credit for what you are doing. It may not show immediately on the scale but you have actually cut your food intake by initially 14% and now 29%!

When you know you're ready, and only when you know you're ready, move up to 3 days per week! Again, it's up to you whether you pick a 3 day diet or intersperse 3 different dieting days throughout the week.

Next: which of the diets shall I pick?

http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com/index2.html

10 Days to Weight Loss #5

2006-07-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

We can repeat the short bursts of pain from stringent food restriction in a well-organized long range program.

We know the quick "fad" diets work because they have worked for us - in the short term. The problem is that we then return to our old eating habits and those ugly, temporarily jettisoned, pounds pop right back.

If our goal is permanent weight control, we need to map out a campaign that combines short bursts of progress with longer periods of regular intake.

If you remember, our memories of pain fade quickly so a return to a short period of deprivation is no more difficult than the initial jolt.

It is this seesaw between tough days and satisfying days that lets us stay with the program and maintains both our momentum and our motivation.

Next: Mapping out your schedule.

http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com

10 Days To Weight Loss - Day 4

2006-06-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

We can keep the pain of dieting sharp but short. We find it
much easier to handle even intense pain if the duration is
limited. We'll accept the sharp pain of lancing a boil or a
blister, knowing that it will be over in an instant and will
resolve that dull discomfort that has existed for days.

Likewise in dieting, we find it easier to be strict, even
tyrannical, on our food intake for a very limited period of
time. It is far easier to accept fasting, or a liquid diet,
or a single food item only regimen, if it is just for a few
days. That is the basis of the continued popularity of the 3
day - 7 pound "Hollywood" and "Celebrity" diets. It is the
reason people go to fat farms or fasting spas for a week.

We can deny ourselves almost anything for a few days. It is
the long-term denial, even of only a few items, that saps
our energy and destroys our resolve. The long, slow, weight
loss programs so loudly recommended lead, for this reason,
to inevitable relapse.

Ten Days To Permanent Weight Control - Day 3

2006-04-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

We can't avoid some pain, at some point, in our journey to lifetime thin-dom. Those pictures of happy, laughing dieters are a myth! If the diet is as easy, tasty, and fun as it's cracked up to be, it won't work.

Let's face it. You will never get the same thrilling shiver of delight from a celery stalk that you get from a box of Godiva chocolates. You will never salivate for hours at the thought of a broiled veggie burger as you may at the prospect of a perfect Chateaubriand or an enormous lobster tail. Wake up and smell the decaf - denying ourselves pleasure is tough. And repetitive denial just gets tougher.

So what can we do?

We can manage the pain by planning our attack in several different ways.

Next: Relief is on the way.

This is a section of a 10 mini-course outlining a plan to lose weight rapidly and permanently. For more information, visit: http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/index2.html

Ten Days To Permanent Weight Control - Day 2

2006-04-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

At some time in our lives, we have all suffered pain. There is the dull, throbbing ache of a migraine or a stubbed toe. There is the sudden sharp pain of a pulled muscle or cracked rib. There is the breath-stopping severe pain of childbirth or a herniated disc. There is the miserable, unrelenting pain of severe injury or deliberate torture.

Astonishingly, we manage to survive whatever our body dishes out. Even more surprisingly, our memory of pain fades rapidly. If we accurately recalled our experience of pain, we would thread our way through life with undue caution and a smidgeon of paranoia, desperately seeking to avoid injury of any kind. We would never return to the dental chair or the operating room. No woman would give birth to a second child.

Why this rather gruesome discussion of pain?

Because losing weight is painful!

It stresses our bodies to have their comfortable routine upset. It stresses our minds to accept the negative changes we have to make. It stresses our emotions to refuse what we so dearly crave. It stresses our self-esteem when we have to confront what we have let ourselves become.

Next: Managing the pain of dieting.

This is a section of a 10 mini-course outlining a plan to lose weight rapidly and permanently. For more information, visit: http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/index2.html

Ten Days To Permanent Weight Control - Day 1

2006-03-21T02:39:00.000-08:00

We are overweight because we eat too much and move too little. It therefore logically follows that if we eat less and move more, we'll lose weight. Those are the simple and accurate recommendations of the professional experts: dieticians, nutritionists, fitness trainers, and doctors. It sounds so simple and so "right."

But we don't do it!

Why?

Because . . . it means changing our comfortable lifestyle. It means enormous personal effort for an agonizingly slow loss of pounds. It means changing routines and getting sweaty and fatigued. It means a lifetime commitment when we can barely concentrate on anything beyond next month. It means a boring life of counting calories and measuring walking distances. It means never having your diet end so you can finally eat what you've been craving for weeks.

It presents as an unappealing future, much like starting a long series of dental treatments that will involve a certain degree of pain and discomfort, at regular intervals, over weeks, months, even years.

A forbidding prospect, isn't it?

Next: How to make an end run on the pain of losing weight.

This is one section of a 10 day mini-course outlining a plan to lose weight rapidly and permanently. For more information, visit: http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/index2.html

Is Losing Weight Worth The Trouble?

2006-03-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Every day, in newspapers, magazines, television, and online, we are exhorted to lose weight. Alarming statistics about our national overweight and obesity rates are regularly revisited and the dangers of carrying too many pounds are trumpeted by dietitians, nutritionists, medical specialists, and the weight loss gurus on their talk show tours.

They don't have to keep trying to convince us that ideal weight is healthier; we know that. No one has to point out that life is more fun when our activities are not hampered by fifty pounds of excess fat; we know that. The joy of accepting that we look attractive and slim doesn't have to be hammered into our brains; we know it already!

We know the problem. We try to solve it by starting one of the thousand of diets floating through the media. We shell out our money for supplements, pills, support meetings, and online weight clubs. We know what we need to do and desperately try to follow through.

None of us start a diet intending to fail. The money and time we spend is part of a genuine effort to lose, not merely throwing away excess funds to assuage our conscience. But why is the problem getting bigger all the time when millions of us are following the advise we're being given?

Losing weight is terribly hard. Even more difficult is keeping it off. So we yo-yo our way through life, eagerly embracing every new program that comes along, believing the promises and testimonials we read, and waiting impatiently for the silver bullet we pray will appear.

After years of recurrent failure, we start to feel hopeless. Our dreams are repetitively battered on the rocks of dozens of unsuccessful diet attempts. We begin to wonder if all the effort is worthwhile. Before we throw in the towel and surrender ourselves to a lifetime of fat, let's look at the process of weight control and see if it's worth giving it one more shot.

"I want to lose forty five pounds." A statement like that is usual at the start of a diet. We are willing to take whatever action is needed to get started on our quest. We may try a particular program or a pill or a general cutback in food intake. Whichever approach we take, we are focused on our need to lose forty five pounds.

The first week we lose three to five pounds and we are ecstatic, smiling down at our scale as if it were an ancient genie oozing out of its magical bottle. The second and third week, the loss continues although at a slower pace. We're still happy and enthusiastic; it is all working as it should.

Somewhere around the fourth to eighth week, we hit the first major hump. We are following our program religiously, resisting the temptation to cheat even when alone, and keeping our eye firmly fixed on that forty five pound goal. One or two weeks go by and the weight loss stops. We tinker with our program, cut our intake to the bone, force ourselves to exercise. Nothing works - the scale mockingly reflects the same numbers we've been staring at for three weeks.

The weeks of deprivation, physical pangs, and unfulfilled emotional cravings appear to be worthless. A little voice starts babbling inside our head: what's the point of the physical and mental pain if it's not getting us where we want to go? Maybe it's not the right time or the right diet. Maybe we're destined to be overweight and nothing we do is going to change that. Maybe our body's quirks will thwart any diet we try.

We're on the skids, ready to fall off the straight and narrow. Feeling desperately sorry for ourselves, we allow one little treat to ease the disappointment. One treat leads to another, and another, and another.

Suddenly, we're back where we started, with another two to three pounds to boot. Frustrated, angry, and overwhelmingly guilty, we look at ourselves in the mirror and bemoan our apparent destiny: to spend the rest of our lives fat.

What happened? We started out with such high hopes and strong motivation. We played by the rules but the rules didn't work. We tried, terribly hard, but our bodies sabotaged our strongest efforts. We feel worse about ourselves than when we started. Is another try even worth it?

Yes! It's always worth trying again if we really want to succeed. It is the sum of our efforts that counts if we are to reach our goal.

Remember that goal of losing forty five pounds? We still want to do it but we need to modify our mental approach. Let's put everything into a new perspective. Let's restate our goal as wanting to lose five pounds per month. That equates to sixty pounds per year - fifteen pounds beyond our original goal!

Once our goal has been reframed, it lifts the pressure of "I've got to keep losing" and reduces the burden to a mere five pounds per month, manageable by almost all of us. Depending upon the kind of person you are, you can dive right in, jump on the diet of your choosing, and lose five pounds the first ten days. Then you just have to maintain for three weeks until the first of the next month. If you're a procrastinator as I usually am, don't worry about anything until the 20th of the month. Then take stringent measures to make sure you attain that five pound loss before a new month dawns.

What typically happens is that you grow impatient with this rate of loss. You decide to keep going and lose more. If that happens, so much the better, but limit the mental pressure to that magical five pounds a month. If you end up losing six or eight pounds over the month, don't fret if the scale needle starts to stick because you've already exceeded your goal by 20% to 60%! Celebrate your victory with an ego-building (non-edible) treat.

The reframing of your weight loss objectives in this fashion has unbelievable psychological rewards. You are no longer mentally beating up on yourself for not moving fast enough towards that forty five pound loss elephant, but are feeling so good about yourself for meeting, or even exceeding, that five pound goal that you feel like bubbling over.

And make no mistake about it, feeling good about yourself is absolutely critical in weight loss. We who constantly wage the battle of the bulge are famous for our poor self-image and diminished self-esteem. We hate every roll of fat that pokes over our too-tight waistbands. We wince when the mirror reflects flabby arms and saddlebag thighs. We suck in our tummies until we can no longer breathe, turn sideways, and are still uncomfortably aware that the image we project bears little resemblance to the image in our minds.

We need, desperately, to increase our self-respect and our sense of self-worth. We need to nurture our self-image and self-appreciation. We need to enjoy some continuing successes that can rebuild our battered egos and keep that constant guilt and self-reproach at bay.

Changing the syntax of your weight loss goals can lead not only to a more successful weight loss campaign, but can restore your self-belief and heal the psychological damage caused by too many diet failures over too many years.

The Psychology Of Diet Preparation - Part 3

2006-02-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

Here is the conclusion of the article I wrote for an unnamed publication. I hope you enjoy it.

3. Our sense of self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology to describe an individual's belief that any action they take will have an effect on the outcome. It is not self-confidence, nor a belief that one is competent to do something, although it may involve both. It reflects our inner expectation that what we do will effect the results we want.

If I lack this belief, then I fear that whatever I do will not bring about my desired goal. Bordering on helplessness, it leads to self-defeating thoughts:

"No matter how carefully I diet, I don't lose weight . . ." "I could work out every day but I'll never get rid of these thunder thighs . . ." "I try to eat healthier foods but my hips just keep on spreading . . ." "No matter what techniques I try, nothing is going to keep the wrinkles away. . ."

If I have a strong sense of self-efficacy, my belief system and thought patterns will sound like:

"All I have to do is get motivated and I can whip my body into shape in a few weeks . . ." "I just need to pick a date to start my diet and I'll be on my way . . ." "I may have neglected myself for a while but some hard work will bring me back . . ."

Whether or not we start a diet, decide to get in shape, or start taking better care of ourselves is, ultimately, a personal decision which may, or may not, be made as we have planned. The difference lies in the expectation of success and it is always easier to set out on a journey we anticipate will be successful than it is to drag ourselves toward a goal where failure is the most likely outcome.

How can we combine these concepts to work for us in our desire to become slim, fit, and attractive?

We begin by examining our self-image and how we appear to others. Merely asking others "Do you think I'm getting too heavy?" doesn't work unless you have a brutally honest friend or you ask someone who dislikes you. Most of us are culturally trained to spare others' feelings so responses to such a question are more likely to be polite than true.

Concentrating on specifics can produce better feedback. Tell everyone that you're completing a survey for a class you're taking. Hand out a brief one page questionnaire requiring that each friend or coworker list three adjectives to describe different aspects of your physical appearance. Complete one of the sheets yourself. Make sure that the answers are anonymous by requesting that no names be used and having someone else collect the completed sheets.

Once you have the responses back, compare them to your own answers and see where the descriptions diverge. You may find yourself becoming a little defensive: "My hips aren't that big . . . my clothes do too make me look slim." This isn't an exercise to make you feel bad about yourself nor for you to gloat over the unexpected complimentary remarks you received. It is an organized effort to help you identify where your self-image and your image-in-the-world move apart. Those areas of divergence are a place to start in the effort to make the two images overlap.

Once the areas where work is needed have been identified, it is time to call on the immeasurable strength of our wonderful mind to start imposing the structure and organization we are going to need to effect the desired changes. Our mind can only get us where we want to go if it is supported by a belief in our ability to bring about a successful conclusion. Now is the time to dismiss any expectations of failure. There may have been many unsuccessful dieting and fitness attempts in the past. Leave them in the past. We are not somehow doomed to continue unproductive behaviors forever. We possess that jewel of evolution, the human mind, which is capable of just about anything. If we set our mind to any task, it will accomplish it, if our doubts and misgivings don't get in its way.

We build up our positive expectations by exploring our memories to pile up a long list of prior successes. There may be major benchmarks such as bringing about a promotion we wanted, orchestrating a fantastic event, or working ourselves into an intensely satisfying relationship. However, the small personal triumphs count the most but are usually quickly forgotten or discounted as unimportant.

Studying hard and obtaining a good grade in a difficult class clearly demonstrates your ability to bring about the results you want. Go for quantity: the day you smiled at someone across a smoky room and ended up with a brief but lovely affair; the report you brought in on time which no one expected; the night you mastered a spin on ice skates. Keep going: making the drill team, shooting a stolen basket, making your own prom dress, dying your hair a wonderful color in your own bathroom, catching a fly ball, figuring out new software on your computer, burning your first CD. The list can be endless and will be, as you keep remembering snippets of the past that you had long buried under more important things.

Keep this list close by and read it regularly. It is your personal self-efficacy pep squad.

You now know the areas you are going to work on and are developing a belief in the effectiveness of your own efforts. Now you need to identify the internal rewards that successful weight loss will bring. Feeling good about yourself, enjoying stepping on a scale, and easily zipping up your clothes are easy starters. Unselfconsciously walking to the pool in a brief suit is a reinforcement to dream about. Making a sales presentation with the confidence that you are looking your absolute best is an image to relish as you fall asleep. Seeing someone you love watch you admiringly, or seeing your competitive coworker jealous, underscores your resolve and keeps you going through the discomfort of dieting and the demands of boring exercise routines.

You know where you're going, you know what it's going to take, and you know you're going to be successful. Your mind is fully prepared, simply awaiting your day of decision. You'll make that decision whenever you choose because you are now in control.

The Psychology Of Dieting Part 2

2006-02-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

This is another in a series of articles I wrote for a magazine. It was rather long so I have split it into distinct parts. This is part two. I hope you like it.

Body versus Mind dominance.

We all wage a lifelong internal battle between our body and our mind. Each is dominant at different stages of development. As infants, we are little more than a collection of sensations. We explore the exciting new world around us through touching everything within reach, tasting everything we can put into our mouths, watching the movements of everything around us, and listening to all the sounds we hear until we eventually learn to imitate them.

As we move into our early school years, we start to concentrate on our minds. We voraciously devour immense amounts of information. We learn to read and our world expands its boundaries by a thousand percent. We learn to use the Internet and a limitless universe is at our fingertips.

Then we move into puberty and, overnight, our appearance becomes the dominating factor in our everyday lives. We navigate the pitfalls and pleasures of adolescence where popularity and being cool are so much more vital than mere learning or mental development. We spend an inordinate amount of time on our bodies. We try new clothes, new hairstyles, and new makeup. We have body parts pierced and undergo the pain of a tattoo because it will make us stand out. We primp, and groom, and force ourselves into the styles our peers have judged as “in.”

As we mature, we seek to balance our mental and physical selves. While our bodies reign supreme in the attract-a-mate environment, we need to exercise our minds to advance our careers and to develop deep relationships that move far beyond mere physical attraction.

It is when we settle down, and start to build the good life we want, that our efforts and energies turn towards things outside ourselves: children, significant others, friends, family, and work pursuits. We have so much happening around us and so much to do that we lose touch with both our bodies and our minds. We slip into our own comfort zone where so many of our needs are fulfilled by food. It eases our anxiety, relieves our frequent frustrations, and makes periodic bouts of the blues bearable. It oils our social interactions. It becomes a vital cog in how we demonstrate affection for those we love. We continue to see ourselves as we have always been and ignore the love handles and pockets of fat that attach themselves to parts of our body we resolutely ignore. Our bodies, and our internal image of our bodies, become more and more discordant.

*****

I'll continue with the rest of the article later. See you then!

No Show Apology

2006-02-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Sorry, everyone. I have not been to my blog in a month,
courtesy of the IRS who pulled a field audit on me and
caused me to lose all sense of focus for a while.

I'll be back shortly.

The Psychology Of Dieting Part 1

2006-01-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

This is another in a series of articles I wrote for a magazine. It was rather long so I have split it into distinct parts. This is part one. I hope you like it.

The Psychology Of Diet Preparation I

We decide to lose weight because of any number of reasons: we don't like the way we look, our clothes don't fit, our health is in danger, our significant other is wandering, our job is at risk, or our kids are embarrassed. We tend to think of weight loss as something that involves only our body; surely no one ever decided to lose weight because of a fat brain or a bloated mind.

Yet "we decide" is a mental function. When and why we make such a decision depends on our mind, not our body. We may make the decision when we are five pounds heavier than we would like, or after passing the two hundred pound mark and entering true medical obesity. The actual size of the body does not trigger the decision to lose weight, such a choice in made in the brain.

Since the start (and the continuation) of a diet program is a mental process, it would seem to be worthwhile to explore what factors might trigger such a decision.

1. Self-Image.

Each of us has a dual image: the face we turn to the world and our internal idea of how we appear. Although we dress and groom ourselves in an effort to be seen as attractive by others, we are far less influenced by others than by our satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, with ourselves.

Explore this concept by observing yourself and others over the course of the next week. You will notice that you often receive compliments on clothes you wear that, to you, don't feel "quite right." Wear a favorite outfit that fits perfectly, that you think looks outstanding, and that makes you feel especially dashing - and no one notices! The same phenomenon occurs with a hairstyle. One morning, rushed for time, you can't get your hair to do anything so you angrily pull it back with clips and hope that no one important sees you looking so awful. Voila! Three people comment that they like what you've done with your hair.

There is the same disconnect when it comes to our weight. If we look good in our mind's eye, we don't feel fat, even if friends and coworkers are whispering about our steady weight gain. However, if we see ourselves as overweight, no amount of reassurance from those around us is going to make us feel less fat. Carried to the extreme, this mental picture of our body size can lead to the eating disorder anorexia nervosa in which painfully thin individuals continue to dangerously restrict their caloric intake because they consistently see themselves as too heavy.

We decide to go on a diet, therefore, in response to our internal self-image. Some of the benefits we envision that go along with being slim and fit do take others into account: I will be more attractive to the opposite sex; I'll be noticed at work when it's time for a promotion; my family and friends will be jealous and will have to re-evaluate me as a stronger person than they had thought. But the real payoff for getting in shape is what it does for us personally. It is the desire to feel great about ourselves that carries us through the pain and monotony of diet and exercise. It is the future vision of ourselves in our mind that spurs us toward our goal.

Losing that vision, or concluding that we won't feel that much better about ourselves, are the reasons we give up and fall back into the relative comfort of settling for just "okay."

*****

I'll continue with the rest of the article later. See you then!

Lifestyle Under Construction

2005-12-17T08:25:00.000-08:00

Good morning, everyone. Here's another article that was designed for the same magazine as the last post. I hope you like it!

Weight Loss: Tweaking Your Lifestyle

Despite our national propensity to overeat, under-exercise, and grow steadily heavier and more out of shape, we all yearn to be slender, fit, and attractive. Our culture rewards the thin and the beautiful; look at how we devour celebrity gossip, mesmerized by the looks and energy of our current favorites.

Why the discrepancy between our aspirations and our reality? There are a plethora of reasons, most of which can be traced to the simple fact that life gets in the way.

"I'd love to cut back on my food intake," we think, "But I have to attend all these work functions and have little control over the meals that are served." "I would really like to get in shape," we complain, "But there's no free time and I can't afford a personal trainer like the movie stars I see." "I really want to take care of my skin and my body," we wail, "But I'm so busy that a quick shower and a slap of moisturizer is all I can fit into my schedule."

It would be so wonderful to have loads of free time: to plan our days; to cook low calorie, healthy meals; to exercise without time constraints; to be able to pamper ourselves without the pressure of deadlines. Unfortunately, our lives are too hectic for that to happen in the foreseeable future. We can throw up our hands in frustration and join the legions of the overweight and the unfit, or we can work out a personal plan that fits within our lifestyle, taking us where we want to go, albeit not quite as quickly or completely as we would prefer.

Your life, your time, the demands and responsibilities you face, vary on an individual basis. You will need to calculate what works for you, and what cannot be realistically accommodated. Here are some ideas to consider:

1. Diet

Eating on the run, at your desk, or on the rubber chicken circuit, wreaks havoc with even the best-laid diet plans. If you weigh even a pound more than you'd like, try to identify where you are going astray.

If fast food on your way to an appointment is your downfall, look at what you order. Almost all drive-thrus these days offer salads. The problems with those salads can be minimized by throwing away the little bag of croutons (fried) and omitting the packaged dressings (loaded with fat). Carry your own individual container of low calorie dressing, opt for (unsweetened) ice tea, black coffee, or a diet soda, and avoid those sugar-laden colas like the plagues they are.

If you lunch at your desk, ask yourself what are you eating? If it's takeout, by all means have a cheeseburger or a sandwich. Just discard the bread or bun and eat with a plastic knife and fork, cut into raisin-sized pieces that will fill you up fast. French fries and onion rings? You just don't want to go there.

Is your office always filled with snacks and treats (as most of them seem to be these days)? When the snacks come by, go to the bathroom or, better yet, take a brisk walk around the building to beef up your "won't" power and clear the vision of goodies from your head.

If business lunches, dinners, or those awful meeting banquets are your obstacles, plan ahead. Lunch is relatively easy: salad (with your own dressing, of course) or fish and cottage cheese are available almost anywhere. For dinner, try two low calorie appetizers instead of an entrée. Best of all is something that you have to work at - crab legs, unpeeled shrimp, an artichoke (hold the hollandaise) - it will take a lot of time and no one will notice how little you are actually eating.

Banquets are particularly difficult because a plate is plunked in front of you, filled with food you would never order by choice. Cut whatever protein and vegetables there are into little pieces and chew slowly. Spread the rest out over your plate and play with it to delay the onset of a syrupy dessert. Get a cup of black coffee and place it squarely in front of you to thwart that eager-beaver waiter who keeps trying to slide a plate of pie onto your table.

Entertaining in the home creates a different set of problems because usually you know the hostess and want to avoid creating any bad feelings. Fall back on allergies as no one wants to see you break out in hives in the middle of their party. Carry a club soda or mineral water with you and no one will notice that you're not drinking.

Over a period of time, these little changes can have a significant impact on your weight. If you're hungry when you get home, make sure that you have some liquid protein or a health shake available to complete your daily nutritional needs.

2. Exercise.

With the best of intentions, millions of us purchase gym memberships. If we all actually used them on a regular basis, as we promise ourselves we will, there would be waiting lines spilling into the streets. Health clubs can keep signing up more and more members because they know that the number of regulars will stay about the same as the new enrollees will show up in a burst of initial enthusiasm but within a few short weeks will gradually fade away.

Unless you have a job with very regular hours, something few of us enjoy these days, it's difficult to commit to going somewhere on a regular basis. We mean to go but then an important meeting comes up, our significant other asks us to do something, or the kids pester us to drive them somewhere.

Our high demand lives almost force us to obtain our exercise at home. Television is replete with home equipment that promises to flatten our abs, define our pects, and re-sculpt our entire bodies. Despite their assurances that the equipment easily folds away, we know our apartments can never accommodate a Bowflex or a Nordic Track. Where do those buyers live? In the suburbs, we suspect, where the expensive equipment is soon relegated to the basement or the garage to gather dust until some future yard sale comes along. Equipment, except for minimal contraptions such as elastic bands and hand weights, are just too much trouble, and setting them up takes too much time.

Slipping exercise into your schedule is most easily handled (and therefore more likely to be regularly repeated) by pursuing activities that can be initiated without any preparation time, special clothes, or long periods free of interruption. The old standbys of pushups, situps, stretches with weights, yoga, and calisthenics have stood the test of time for a reason. They can be inserted into your crowded schedule at odd moments of the day and require no preparation except a short warm-up. Some of the newer programs: callanetics, pilates (some), killer exercises, and video workouts also fit these requirements.

When you unexpectedly find a secret half hour free, take a walk and, if you can, magnify its benefits with an occasional bout of sprinting.

Such a plan may not make you into a Mr. or Ms. Universe but it will keep you limber and semi-fit while avoiding that energy-devouring guilt you develop when you set your sights too high and then fail to follow through.

3. Taking care of yourself.

We have all read the accounts of Cleopatra bathing in asses' milk to bleach and smooth her skin. But she was a Queen, for heaven's sake! She didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn to fight the traffic into the office. She didn't have to take care of a husband, a house, or a child. You'd have the time to leisurely bathe if it weren't for cleaning the house, washing the clothes, finishing that report for the office, helping the kids with their homework, cooking dinner, and picking up Aunt Mildred at the airport.

We know we need to take care of ourselves. We want to perform the routines that will stave off the signs of age that wait just around the corner. We would love to take a long daily bath or shower, polish our skin to perfection with a loofah and scrubbing powders, envelop ourselves in skin softeners and lotions, and pamper our face and hair with special cleansers, masques, and skin brighteners.

Again, our lives get in the way. We work out a minimal routine of makeup remover, toner, and moisturizer. We shampoo our hair when we can and occasionally find the time for a special oil treatment or facial. It is hard to be fully motivated when the signs of age are brief and fleeting. When I have more time, we tell ourselves, I'll work on it. Twenty years later, the wrinkles have set in, the jowls have puffed out, and our skin carries the scars of sun, wind, and gravity. Then we bemoan our lack of care through the years and try to minimize the ravages of time already indelibly imprinted on our looks.

By all means, stick to your rapid daily routine. Sure, you could get up earlier in the morning and have time for more self-care but you're already, like most working-age Americans, sleep-deprived.

One solution is to identify one period a week when you can steal a couple of hours for yourself. Women, especially, shortchange themselves, too busy taking care of everyone else and ignoring themselves. Stake out your claim to that two hour window as if your life depended on it. Use it only for you. Use it to take deep treatments for your face or your hair. Use it to practice relaxation, listen to music, or walk in the rain. Use it to pamper every part of your body and spirit. Use it to think about yourself, and your goals, and your dreams. Use it to appreciate yourself and the good things life has brought you. Use it to lay plans for future self-development and use it to become your own best friend and confidant.

Our lives are so filled up with what we have to do that our wants and internal needs are often unmet. In even the busiest and most demanding schedule, there are moments we can carve out for ourselves, but only if we absolutely insist on it. Right now is the time to become assertive about your own self. You too deserve a brief moment in the sun.

********************************************************

If you're making plans for New Year weight loss, start with a diet blitz and greet Spring with a lot less poundage! Free weight loss program: The Fat Lady Sings. Download your copy at: http://dietwithanattitude.com/DietReportSignUp.html

Dieting: The Harsh Reality

2005-12-11T09:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote some articles with a particular magazine in mind but apparently they aren't interested enough to respond to my query! Licking my wounded pride, I'm sharing them here. I hope you enjoy them - let me know, would you?

Here's the first one:

Life Is One Damn Diet After Another

A common expression is that we’re “going on a diet.” The phrase suggests that, like a vacation trip, there is a beginning and an end. We dream of the day we will reach our weight goal and how wonderful it will be when we don’t have to lead a life of painful deprivation.

In the back of our minds, there is a comforting little tape playing, promising us that when our weight loss campaign is over, we’ll be able to stop counting calories, carbohydrates, or fats. We long for the day when we no longer have to clench our teeth as we refuse a favorite dish that always causes us to salivate in our sleep. We reach for the carrot and celery sticks without anticipation or enthusiasm while torturing ourselves with visions of the special treats we’ll enjoy when the diet is over.

Uh, hello?

Allowing ourselves to think of a diet as a delineated, restricted period within our total life span is a sure avenue back to tent city (that refers to what we wear, not where we live). To have any hope of attaining permanent weight control, we must approach it as a lifelong effort, watching our intake day after day, week after week, year after year.

You feel your heart sinking in your chest. You think “If I have to live like this all the time, it’s just not worth it!” That little voice promises you that you are different. You can relax because now you know how to lose weight, you can do it anytime you want. Gain five pounds and you’ll go back on your diet and be back to goal in no time at all.

But you won’t! Think back over your chequered weight history. We all believe that once our weight is down, it will be so easy to go on a short diet if we gain back a few pounds. It doesn’t work that way, though, does it? We start gaining a pound here and a pound there, but then there are some special events coming up and a diet would be so inconvenient. We don’t go back “on” our diet until we’ve gained enough weight to develop the self-disgust that warrants a new period of serious deprivation. We have become a full-fledged member of the yo-yo club, that vast majority of dieters who cannot keep the weight off for more than a few weeks.

The reasons we go “on” and “off” diets are numerous: they are boring, depressing, and very uncomfortable. They set us apart from friends, family, and coworkers who continue to snack, to feast, and to celebrate. We resent how diets make us feel and how they impact our daily lives.

Let’s look at the whole picture from a different perspective for a minute.

Instead of “a diet” envision a way of eating that involves living on a diet for the rest of your life. While the prospect may appall you, don’t say you can’t do it just yet.

First, consider another wide-spread concept many of us accept. To lose substantial weight in a relatively short time, we need to select the diet that seems to fit us and then stay with it, religiously, until we’ve reached our goal.

Let’s now take these two concepts, squish them together, and then turn them upside down.

We are not “going on a diet.” We are starting our diet-for-life. We then pick a diet, any diet at all, and make the commitment to stick with that diet for one week, and one week only. At the end of the week, we are going to pick an entirely different diet to which again we only commit for a one week period. This continues for virtually the rest of our lives with selected diets changing on a weekly basis.

What does this accomplish? A whole bunch of things:

1.

By selecting a different diet each week, it removes those common misgivings that maybe we should have gone in a different direction. We worry that we’re not getting the right nutrients or that we’re going to get sick or develop a rare disease. We read the diet ratings and panic at the warnings posted for all the popular programs. With our new approach, you don’t have to fret about if you made a good or bad choice because you’ll be making a new choice in a week.

2.

If there are particularly painful “No-Nos” in this week’s diet, resolve to try something next week that allows a currently forbidden fruit. For example, a primarily protein regimen has been found successful for many participants who often lose five or ten pounds in a week. However, they miss the vegetables and salad they enjoy. The next week could then be a vegetables and salad only routine, also successful for rapid weight loss but a bit lean on the protein you body needs for self-repair.

You may then find yourself craving some good bread so you switch to the Subway diet for a week until your craving is satisfied. Move on to something completely different – the cabbage soup diet or liquid shakes. Since there are literally thousands of diets, a few are bound to include the food you crave.

You are never more than a week away from having what you feel you absolutely must have in order to keep going. You can include spartan fad diets that move fat quickly and you can include calorie counting or Weight Watcher diets that allow almost anything so long as you adjust your intake to stay within the totals specified.

3.

The frequent changes in your eating patterns keep your body off-balance. Give the body enough time and advance notice and it will adapt to anything, turning protein into carbohydrates and storing even low calorie carbohydrates as little pockets of fat. By totally changing what you eat on a regular basis, the body gives up trying to figure out how to thwart you and spends its time efficiently processing what you give it. You are effectively using your smart little mind to outmaneuver your smart not-so-little body.

4.

The constant changes force you to buy food in smaller packages. It’s pointless and wasteful to buy those family packs of anything. That will help you with overall portion reduction, a must for any serious dieter. Your shopping goal is only to purchase items that you can consume within a week. If you see something that you particularly want but is not on your allowed list, make a mental note to find a diet for next week that can accommodate it.

5.

The need for a new diet each week requires that you read and research a lot of diets. The reading acts as reinforcement for your goals and will assure your continuing education on nutrition and fitness. When you see something that intrigues you or just makes a lot of sense, try it out. Perhaps one week will involve barely restricted eating but require a lot of exercise. Go for it – it’s only a week.

6.

You are in the happy position of having wide choices available but also the needed structure of an organized plan to follow. The regimented eating is within each week’s diet; the power of choice is operative when you decide what the next week’s program will be.

7.

Can you stay on a diet permanently? Yes, you can, because you’re not restricting yourself from anything for life, just for a week at a time. Should you stay on a diet for the rest of your life? Yes, you probably should as long as you are getting a balance of foods from an intelligent mixing of alternative diet plans. If you like one diet more than another, or if one particular program works exceptionally well for you, by all means cycle that diet into your routine on a regular basis. Just make sure you don’t use the same plan more than once a month or your body is going to be ready for it and Zap! you find it no longer works so well.

8.

Can you over-diet? We have all seen (although they seem to be harder to find these days) overly thin, cadaverous dieters with sunken cheeks and loose skin. That can be avoided by making your selected diets very diverse so you are never without needed nutrients for very long. For example, many retirement homes and assisted living co-ops produce thin seniors with pallid skin and protruding abdomens. Replace their mushy, high starch meals with any of the myriad high protein and vegetable-fruit diets and their color will improve, their energy increase, and their tummies fade.

9.

Can you ever be too thin? Visit an eating disorder facility and you will see the results of anorexia nervosa, not a pretty sight and highly dangerous from a medical standpoint. If you have a history of overweight, you may tell yourself that being too thin will never be in the cards for you. However, there are not infrequent cases of the perennial heavy who becomes anorexic through dieting too much with resulting anxiety about gaining back even an ounce of the flesh so painfully discarded. If you have a distorted body image, and reliable friends are concerned about your being too thin, get professional help.

10.

It all comes down to using your brain intelligently. When you are at your heaviest, with the most to lose, the logical choice is a rather spartan program that will get the fat moving quickly. As you lose, more moderate programs can be interspersed so that your skin and cheeks have a chance to adjust and fill in as your weight stores become redistributed. If a particular part of your body is resistant to reduction, exercise may become a more important part of your plan than simply a dietary approach. Once you are hovering at your ideal weight, simple calorie counting or support group involvement may be all you need.

The secret is to be rational about it all and use that wonderful mind of yours to set the program for your not-so-intelligent body with its insatiable appetite and poundage conservation cravings. Don’t try to cheat unless you want to cheat yourself and then be honest and admit that, for whatever reason there is, you want to avoid further weight loss. When you want and need to lose fifty pounds, an ice cream and chocolate diet is not rational. When you are at ideal weight or below, a stringent fad diet makes no sense.

Will all this mixing of diets result in consistent weight loss? There is never consistency in weight loss because there are just too many factors involved: water retention, digestive inefficiencies, the amount of energy expended, and individual body quirks. Over time, you will lose steadily but there will always be some ups and downs along the way.

Once the concept of “going on a diet” has been discarded, a lifelong eating plan can be embraced, guaranteed to leave you in control of your weight for the rest of your long slender life.

P.S. If you think you're up to the harsh reality of real weight loss, try my free mini-course at: mailto:10dayminicourse@aweber.com or jump feet first into the diet wars with http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/index2.html

Creating Choices

2005-12-01T06:04:00.000-08:00

It's 11:30 AM. You've been up since 5 o'clock and the hunger meter is on high. "What to eat?" you think to yourself.

You pore over the menu for the deli downstairs but nothing you can allow yourself looks that good. Sure, you could go out for fast food but there's a meeting coming up and you don't really want to move your car and then have to find a new parking spot when you return.

So you decide not to go out. That leaves eating in.

You look at your choices, wishing you'd had the foresight to bring something from home. There's the vending machine in the break room, filled with plastic-wrapped, rubber-textured sandwiches, bagels, muffins and Danish. Ugh, you keep spinning the carousels, hoping that by some miracle, there will be a vegetable snack plate or something half-way decent. You narrow down your choices to a cup of noodle soup or a chicken breast sandwich.

Now you have another choice: eat something to take the edge off or power through the minutes of temptation until you are sitting in your meeting and eating is out of the question. After an hour of dreary, repetitive discussions, your hunger may have calmed down.

How you handle it each day, depends on your mood. Often, if we can get through that one tempting half hour, we're set for the afternoon and can easily wait for our well-planned light dinner. On other days, you know in your heart that if you don't eat something, you won't be able to concentrate on your work because all you can think about is food while you try to conceal the embarrassment of a gurgling stomach.

On those days, take the chicken sandwich, remove the bun, and microwave the miniscule piece of chicken provided. Then cut it into tiny pieces and eat slowly with a plastic knife and fork. If you can make the pea-sized pieces last for 15 or 20 minutes, you'll feel like you've actually eaten an entire meal and be on your way to a pleasant non-food-focused afternoon on a very limited caloric intake.

If you truly want to control your weight, you can do it anywhere. The key is never to eat until you've had a lengthy internal dialog with yourself that forces you into a full awareness of your food intake and then select the lesser of all evils and consume it as slowly as you can manage.

Even trapped in the office with nothing more than a killer vending machine, you can turn bleak choices into a self-esteem building triumph.

Weight: The Thanksgiving Hangover

2005-11-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

The feasting is over. The turkey has disappeared: roasted and hot, microwaved leftovers, then cold sandwiches and eventually croquettes or thrown into soup.

You climb on the scale with trepidation and breathe a long sigh of relief when the dreaded poundage fails to appear. Before you relax and think you got away with it, remember that your sneaky little body is playing its usual tricks. Two or three days of Spartan eating will make you feel virtuous again -until you step on the scale and find you've gained 5 pounds. "Fraud" you shriek. "I've been so good!"

Remember the holiday feast? It has finally caught up with you as you knew, deep down, that it would.

What to do?

We all need brief periods of self-indulgence - it's part of the human condition. Expect a setback on your weight loss goals and let that knowledge mitigate your disappointment. Then continue on your diet with the assurance that a special occasion blip doesn't define your future. Enjoy the memories of a family gathering while carefully planning your next week's intake.

Appreciate what you have accomplished so far and avoid loading yourself down with guilt and self-reproach.

Get back on your program as quickly as possible because (sorry to bring this up now)Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat.

Eating Outside The Box.

2005-11-16T06:41:00.000-08:00

So often our daily menus are repetitive and predictable. We eat certain foods for breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, cereal. Lunch is often fast food, cafeteria meals, or sandwiches. Dinner consists of either microwaved ethnic specialties or the more traditional protein entrée, some kind of potatoes, a helping of vegetables, possibly soup or salad, topped off with a sweet dessert. Even when we go out for dinner, the routine is similar although the choices may have more variety.

Try shaking up your standard routine to inject some novelty into your life and to totally confuse your body. Keeping your digestive system in a state of confusion may lessen its efficiency and prevent it from noticing that you're losing weight, thereby bypassing its usual goal of maintaining your fat stores at all costs.

Have eggs for dinner. Skip the dripping fats of bacon and sausage in favor of a vegetable omelet. If you enjoy chicken or seafood for dinner, try them in the early morning with fruit and cottage cheese. Lose the fast food and sandwiches at lunch and have a bowl of cereal with yogurt or a helping of appetizers. Totally break out of the mold by trading in the pizzas for rice bowls, the pasta for sushi, burgers for noodle soup, and French fries for a plain baked potato.

Eliminate desserts from every meal by topping off your repast with a totally different flavor that will not encourage your sweet tooth to take control. Try coleslaw as a crispy final course, a handful of sweet cherry tomatoes, a few ounces of nuts or sunflower seeds, or a crisp sour pickle and you'll find them strangely satisfying and pleasant.

Ice Cream In The Break Room At 3 PM.

2005-11-06T18:42:00.000-08:00

The e-mail comes out at noon. "To celebrate your hard work this week, there is cake and ice cream in the big kitchen at 3 today. Be there!"

The universal reward for hard work always seems to be food: cake and ice cream, a catered lunch for in-service training sessions, pizza for the overtime crew, bagels and cream cheese to brighten up a bleak Monday morning.

Food seems to be the perennial favorite for any kind of work reward because it is universally accepted. Some of us (we hard core dieters) may pass on the sweet stuff but usually find something allowable. In a world where two thirds of us are overweight or obese, is there nothing else available as a gift that cuts across our individual interests?

Recently, we had a whole week at my company devoted to employee appreciation. The primary rewards were, of course, food but other things were added: a company baseball cap, a hiking water container, a lunch bag, and a handwritten note of thanks to every employee from their supervisor. The cap was a bust for those of us with any modicum of fashion sense; the insulated flask and bag were food related, and the handwritten notes were superfluous - good supervisors show their appreciation of hard work constantly while a handwritten note from a harsh supervisor, no matter the "thanks" stated, means diddly squat to a resentful employee.

There HAS to be something else, doesn't there? We human beings have few things totally in common and eating is the primary universal. Other shared bodily activities such as urination and defecation are not easily translatable into some kind of reward system. We are all involved in physical activity, to some degree, but that is often more a chore than a delight.

When it comes to our other senses, we all differ so much that one person's pleasure is another person's pain: music, perfume, pictures, or massages are differential tastes rather than general givens.

Money is almost always acceptable but the small amounts that would be individually generated to replace a free dessert or snack would be so minimal that their reward value would be insignificant.

So what can those of us on a permanent diet, and alarmed about our coworkers' increased girth, suggest?

How about plants? Small individual pots or a larger department shrub would save our waistlines while adding to the health and esthetics of our environment. I calculate, just within my call center, that if a plant had been given to each department, instead of an edible goodie, for celebrations over the past 5 years, that I would now be working in a lush rain forest of exotic plants where the stale re-processed air conditioned air would be purer, more humid, and a thousand times fresher. Morale booster and health benefits in one fell swoop!

How about the gift of time? In our overly busy pressured lives, who would not be immensely grateful for a free hour here or there. Rotate it through each department, letting one or two people leave early on a Friday afternoon. That would means something and would carry no cost so upper management should be ecstatic.

Instead of a handwritten note, how about getting Supervisors to perform their subordinates' work duties for an hour or so, once in a while? Can you imagine the morale boost for an employee to get off the telephone, or the machine, or the computer, and shoot the breeze with friends for an hour while their duties are performed by their supervisors? And if mistakes are made - so much the better. It creates a sense of equality and inter-relationship between workers and supervisors that is generally lacking in a corporate environment.

How about free "Get out of jail" cards for every line worker? Each person gets one free card and additional cards can be given by supervisors for outstanding work, ensuring that the better workers have more cards. The cards can then be used as excuses for small transgressions - coming in a little late, leaving early, making minor mistakes. With the use of the card, a worker avoids verbal coaching, warnings, or being put on report. And let employees donate their cards to coworkers who need them - think of the teambuilding that would accomplish!

Flexibility of hours, assignments and days, is another area where workers will universally respond: not to money, or food, but to accommodation of individual needs. Give each employee a wish card and then allow them to use it to get something they need.

What does all of this accomplish? It allows for employee rewards without fats and carbohydrates. Now isn't that worthwhile?

P. S. I'm recommending this to my company. I'll let you know if they buy it!

The Diet Bore.

2005-10-30T07:08:00.000-08:00

You probably know a diet bore: there's at least one in every office, every group, and at every get-together. It's almost always female - men lose weight too but don't seem to feel the same compulsion to convert the entire world. Blame it on our innate female need to change everyone else.

The diet bore is the one who knows the caloric count of every morsel you eat, and makes sure you know it too. She can expound, at length, on the relative merits of sugar, salt, protein and carbohydrates. She actually knows the difference (and explains it ad nauseum) between mono and unsaturated fats, transfats, and essential fats. She knows what's good for you and what terrible things will happen if you actually eat what's on your plate.

She's the one who makes you cringe in a restaurant as she meticulously quizzes the poor waitress about how everything is prepared and cooked. She demands special substitutions and omissions and then complains that her meal is bland. She carries salt and sugar substitutes in her tote along with her trusty food value books and a calculator to loudly total the calories and carbs she (and you) has consumed.

She causes more of us to fall of our diets than Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders combined because she makes the whole concept of losing weight so damned boring that we don't want anything to do with it.

As we happily pig out on our spaghetti and meat balls (with garlic toast), we can take comfort in noting that the diet bore, despite the breadth of her knowledge and her too public weight control efforts, is always a little heavier than she should be.

Maybe she bores herself too?

Why Dieting Is Keeping America Fat.

2005-10-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

There are literally hundreds of diets available to suit everyone's taste: Atkins, Zone, South Beach, low carb, low fat, liquid mixes, vegetarian, and all protein. Millions of us are on these different diets. So why are we still fat?

The key is our relationship with food. There is just so much of it available: fast food outlets clog our streets, television commercials and 24 hour cooking channels whet our appetites, super chefs tempt us to labor long hours in the kitchen to create our own culinary masterpieces.

The different diets all have one enormous component in common -they continue this infatuation with food. What can I eat? How many carbs? How many calories? What is allowed? How can it be made to taste as good as possible?

Our behaviors continue, even the self-destructive kind, because we receive some pleasant reward known in psychology as reinforcement. We continue to overeat because of the emotional satisfaction of devouring good tasting food. We will never slim down until we find satisfaction in something other than food.

Young lovers forget to eat because they are consumed with other passions. Gamblers neglect meals because the psychological thrill is in their games. Alcoholics and drug addicts almost never eat because their primary relationship is with their drug of choice. Corporate ladder climbers and entrepreneurs are slim because they are emotionally invested in their careers and their businesses and nothing else matters.

To pare off fat, we have to focus on something other than food. Focus on some aspect of your life: your family, your community, your job, sports, social welfare, sex, school, hobbies, anything important to you, and you will start to regard food as something that has to be consumed to stay alive but also as something that interferes with your life, to be avoided except when absolutely necessary.

Psychologically distance yourself from food and one day the commercials, the endless burgers and fries, and watching people eating in public will seem totally alien as if a parallel world exists with which you have no connection. It is then that you will be on the way to controlling your weight.

For more diet ideas, go to:
http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com/DietReportSignUp.html

Give Us Something To Shoot For!

2005-10-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

We have all seen the new Dove commercials that feature "real" women rather than the impossibly "ideal" models that are usually selected. While the Dove girls are universally attractive and fit, they also reflect different sizes and shapes, designed to represent the average American woman.

Is that what we want?

Glorifying our diversity seems like a positive development which should lead to increased self-content and improved self-esteem. Comparing ourselves to the imperfect bodies displayed is supposed to lessen our self-criticism and sense of inadequacy.

Does it?

We are a race of strivers, constantly seeking to better ourselves. Self-improvement is the biggest marketing niche of the Twenty-first Century, from books and classes to online information products, magazines, and television. The gurus of our day, from Oprah, to Martha Stewart, to Dr. Phil, to Donald Trump, all entice us towards improving ourselves, our looks, our relationships, our finances, our surroundings -- our whole life. We are dissatisfied with ourselves as we are because we have caught a glimpse of what we can become.

To keep us motivated in that direction, we need a vision of perfection to work towards, even if we know we'll never quite get there.

When it comes to weight control, what will keep us riveted on our goal? To look as gorgeous as the cover models on Cosmopolitan or the chunky figures in the Dove Ads?

We don't want to be patronized by the marketing mavens. We don't want a subtle reminder that we need to set our sights lower or aspire to something less than excellence. We want a dream that soars, that inspires us to unbelievable heights. We want a vision to move towards, no matter how unlikely it is that we will reach that destination.

So keep your condescending "Go ahead and settle for this" approach away, please.

Robert Browning suggested: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

I Can't Afford To Go On A Diet

2005-10-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

We are so eager to lose weight that we swallow the promises of every diet guru on the planet and eagerly plunk down our hard earned cash, praying that this time it will work.

What are the costs of the popular diets? The initial cost is to buy the "Bible" for the diet or join the program. Those initial fees range from $20 or $30 for a book to several hundred dollars for a personal program.

Then there's the food. Studies have shown that the average cost of a week's food purchases, per individual, is slightly above $50. To start the South Beach Diet, tack on an additional $25 per week. For the Zone and Weight Watchers Diets, add in about $40, for Atkins $50, for NutriSystems almost $60 and for Jenny Craig about $85.

Wait a minute, you say. I'm losing weight by cutting back on eating. Shouldn't that SAVE me money?

Looking at it logically, you would certainly think so. But we don't try to lose weight logically, we approach the whole process through our emotions. It is our emotions that lead us to buy things on impulse, to sign up for programs we know we'll never complete, and to join projects we'll never actively pursue.

Our emotional thinking is our weakness and it has nothing to do with intelligence or education or social level. We all get suckered into scams at some point in our lives and we all occasionally suffer from buyer's remorse -it's a part of the human experience.

The marketers and ad men know it well and spend their days devising tricks for which we all too often fall. How often have you eagerly dialed an 800 number during one of those brilliant infomercials only to receive something that doesn't work as it did on TV, is either shoddily made or just too complicated, and you stick it in the back of a cupboard where it gathers dust until you finally toss it?

When it comes to our weight, our emotions reign supreme. We so desperately want to be more attractive, more respected, more desirable. We will even subject ourselves to painful and sometimes dangerous surgery to bring our reality closer to our ideal. And we will rob our piggy banks, deplete our bank accounts, and run up our credit cards for anything that promises us a slender future.

Do we get what we pay for? Sometimes. There are a few successful disciples in every program. It is their pictures and stories that are prominently displayed in promotional literature. It is the old "before" and "after" trick that sucks us in. Our logic (and a tiny footnote) tells us that the featured results are not typical.

The wary left side of our brain wonders if a little airbrushing might have been employed. Then the right side explodes, filled with desire, well-meaning intentions, and an overwhelming urge to believe. And we fall for it again.

Notice that we never hear or see about the failures, the hundreds of thousands who start a diet with such high hopes yet live the rest of their lives overweight. All the diets have their failures but never bother to mention exactly what their percentages are. They may caution that their program must be followed exactly if it is to work, but let's be realistic: how many of us can follow an unswerving routine for the weeks, months, or years it is going to take to reach our ideal weight? We may be creatures of habit but life seldom fits into one unsquishable box for very long. We adapt the routine to meet our immediate needs and everything falls apart.

Sadder, wiser, guilt-ridden and self-critical, we vow to start again until, eventually, we give up. Is there a better way?

We can start by realizing that it really doesn't matter what diet we choose. The secret is to address our emotions, that infatuation with food that has, nationally, reached crisis proportions. We have to break off our affair with what we eat and restore food to its rightful place - something that keeps us alive and healthy, not our primary source of excitement and self-satisfaction.

It's Even Worse Than We Thought!

2005-10-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone -- I have been so busy pursuing other directions that I have been neglecting my blogs -- next week I'll be back on track.

In the meantime, here is a scary study on our chances of getting more and more overweight as we age.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9583615/

We have to take action now! Try this link and see if you like the new additions:

http://www.dietwithanattitude.com/index2.html

Blame It On Your Brain, Again

2005-09-21T06:02:00.000-07:00

Have you ever picked up a cup, thinking that it's coffee but it turns out to be tea? For one confused moment, you have no idea what you're drinking, you just know that it's not what you expected. In a few seconds, your brain figures out what's going on and your second sip has a normal taste. The same instant disorientation occurs when you bite into what you think is chicken but is actually pork.

What does this tell you? It illustrates the point that eating and drinking are not mere body functions but are intimately related to our minds. Our physiology may tell us that we're hungry but our minds tell us what we hunger for. Take our minds out of the equation and we eat with the instinct of animals, grabbing something, anything, to keep us alive.

We have taste buds that can determine the basics of our intake: sweet, sour, acrid, and bitter. Our tongues and teeth can identify the texture and shape of our food. Our palette and throat register temperature and the pungency of any spices. Our nose responds to aroma and our eyes to color and arrangement.

But it is in our heads that our real relationship with food resides.

More articles: http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com

Food As Our Pacifier

2005-09-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Last time we talked of the emotions involved in our choices of what to eat. Besides the choice of what to have, our emotions are inseparably bound up with our actual food.

We love this item, hate that one. Some foods make us feel relaxed and content, others give us restlessness and energy. We rarely look at our plate with dispassionate eyes because we have established a relationship with food that engages our senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and our emotions: satisfaction, excitement, love.

In our busy, problem-plagued lives, we daily encounter stress, anxiety, anger, and frustration. Like a fussing baby with a pacifier, we self-soothe our upsets - with food.

"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today," said the poet (Sydney Smith). He was right: there is something intrinsically soothing about eating. No matter what problem confronts us, a good meal makes us feel that we can handle it. We feel renewed, restored, re-energized.

No wonder we love to eat . . . and eat . . . and eat.

But we might wonder if there is another way.

http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com

The Perils of Choice.

2005-09-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

"What would you like?" is the first question asked before a meal, whether at home or at a restaurant. Once we reach adulthood, we don't have to eat, or not eat, a meal set out for us (except for those occasional rubber chicken banquet arrangements).

How do we decide what we will eat? Our choices are limited only by what is available, at home or on a menu. And the choices keep on growing.

It is rare to find a one or two page menu anymore. No longer is the fare for the day written on a chalkboard. Even fast food outlets no longer confine themselves to varieties of hamburgers and buffets have evolved into moveable feasts. The lettuce on a salad bar is dwarfed by dozens of ingredients that have little to do with traditional salad. At home, we fill our pantries and refrigerators with packaged foods that run the gamut from the exotic to the familiar, from raw staples to fully prepared meals.

We look over what is available and decide what to eat because we "feel like" a certain food. We are fully aware of which items are healthy, which items are questionable, and which items should be avoided at all costs. We tell ourselves that we "should" have this or that. We engage in an inner debate about what would be the best selection. Our logical mind makes suggestions but our emotions make the final decision.

To love what we eat, we eat what we love.

Look where those emotions have taken us!

Blame it on our brains

2005-08-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

We have been talking about the mind-body connection and how it impacts our weight.

There have been experiments performed with infants in which they are provided with an enormous spread of food. Instinctively and repetitively, they select items that provide a healthy, balanced diet. This suggests that the human body is pre-programmed by nature to consume what it needs to survive.

What happens as we grow up? We are fed calorie-dense, sweet, and spicy food that overwhelms those basic urges. Dwarfed by the variety and intensity of this onslaught, the body abdicates its responsibility for intake decisions and the brain takes over.

The body has simple tastes developed over thousands of years of hunting (meat) and foraging (grains and berries). The brain, however, thrives on novelty, innovation, and complexity. It is the mind that invented the great cuisines of the world, combining the abundance of nature with subtleties of flavor, sauces, blends, condiments, toppings, and garnishments.

Thanks to our minds, we no longer eat what we need but eat what we want.

We'll explore this further next time.

More tips: http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com

The Only Good Snack is No Snack

2005-08-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

We hear a lot about healthy snacks: a piece of fruit, a wedge of cheese, a handful of nuts, or raw vegetables with ranch dip. Without a doubt these selections work much better in your weight control plan than, for example, cookies, a piece of cake, or that all-American favorite, potato chips.

But hold on a minute . . . what if we dispensed with snacks altogether? What would that do?

For a start, no snacking is going to reduce your overall caloric intake. You may tell yourself that a healthy snack takes the edge off your appetite so you won't gorge at your next meal. Be honest - do you really eat less because you snacked?

Eliminating snacks also avoids teasing those unruly taste buds of yours. Once they wake up at the hint of food, they become raucous and demanding, clamoring for more food to still their frantic excitation.

Don't eat between meals, at all, and the old buds can stay in their calm mode, happily snoozing and disinterested and you have, once again, reasserted control.

The Mind-Body Connection.

2005-08-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

We usually think of our weight in physical terms. After all, lumps and rolls and bulges are the visible precipitants of our desire to lose weight. We pick a diet, pick an exercise, and pick a goal, all based on our distaste for our physical appearance.

But we are human beings - the species where the mind-body connection is so complex that it has eluded centuries of attempts to define it and tease it apart. Descartes and the philosophers wrangled over the concept for two hundred years. Freud, Skinner and a host of Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Theologians have debated it ever since.

Do our minds have an independence existence or are they inseparably bound up with our physical selves?

From the perspective of weight control, the inter-relatedness of the two is obvious. We physically put food into our physical mouths but it is the mind that sets the action into motion. We feel hunger physically but appetite arises from the brain.

Our goal may be to reshape our body but our head got us into this predicament.

We'll talk some more.

The Demise of Atkins and Low Carb

2005-08-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

It was announced this week that the Atkins Foundation has, or will shortly, file for bankruptcy.

Two or three years ago, low carb and the Atkins Revolution were the absolute rage and directly led to the flood of low carb products on the market. Why such a huge fall?

Undoubtedly the death of Dr. Atkins was instrumental in that his program has been hugely misunderstood and misrepresented and there was no longer a clear spokesperson to set the record straight. Competing diet plans and nutritional gurus attacked incessantly, slowly developing a public wariness towards the program. The rumor that Dr. Atkins had been overweight when he died was but another nail in the coffin.

But one wonders if even had the good doctor lived longer, would his Diet Revolution have continued to thrive?

Take a look at recent historical trends. For the past thirty years, diet programs have come and gone as regularly as clockwork. We eagerly embraced every new proposal that came along, convincing ourselves that, at last, we had found the secret to eternal weight control. Depending upon the diet of the day, we clutched our plastic bags of spinach, hauled around cans of liquid or packages of instant shakes, wiped out commercial supplies of lecithin and kelp, and tried every pill that promised what we wanted so badly to believe.

Despite the examples and testimonials paraded before us, and the earnest exhortations of the daytime talk shows, we found that nothing worked. Millions of us fork over money every week to online diet sites, raking in billions of dollars a year, and every month we grow fatter and fatter.

What's wrong?

The answer is in our head. Let's talk about that next time.

It's All In The Numbers

2005-07-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

Offer a woman the choice between a dress she likes a lot, that fits well but is size 12, and a dress she likes, which also fits well but is labeled size 8, and she'll take the lesser preferred every time.

Why are we so hung up on sizes? Men don't care. If something is too snug, they just go to a larger size. If the fit is a little tight for a woman, she'll buy it anyway, and swear to lose a few pounds so it fits more comfortably.

Many years ago, I worked in the garment district. I was shocked to learn that, as manufacturers, we were allowed to change a label two sizes in either direction if that was necessary to fill the retailer's order. Two sizes is a big difference! That's when I learned to ignore labels, especially during sales. Often the only reason something really nice is still hanging on the rack, despite deep price reductions, is that the marked size is inaccurate. I acquired a lot of inexpensive, beautiful clothes that way.

The female obsession with sizes has not been lost on the production folks. A size 8, for example, is now two and a half inches bigger around the waist than its size 8 counterpart 30 years ago. There are now sections in stores carrying size 2 and size 0 (what?), just to make us feel good. Pay more for your clothes at a fancy department store and I guarantee you'll fit into a smaller size than at the local K-Mart.

Where's the reality? As a nation, we are getting fatter all the time. Does the fact that we fit into "smaller" sizes contradict that?

No, it's just one more instance of the mutual-fooling-ourselves in which we so delight. Let's be honest and look at the size of our bodies, not our clothes.

Self-Criticism Is A Female Flaw

2005-07-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

My husband worries because he doesn't think I eat enough. I worry because I think I eat too much.

We are both aware of exactly what I eat so why do our judgments vary so greatly?

It is partially a matter of goals. I want to be model-thin so that I can wear the clothes I love and look just like the glossy pictures in the catalogs. He wants me to be comfortable and relaxed and could care less how much I weigh or what size I wear. I suppose if I became humungous, he'd wince, but it would probably require that I be clearly obese before he noticed.

Men give out such mixed signals. They profess their undying devotion but scan every pretty or well-endowed female on the street and read Playboy and other soft pornography, delighting in seeing any woman in some level of nudity. Ask any happily married man and he'll admit he enjoys looking at other women but has no interest beyond the occasional once-over when a female form grabs his attention.

Women feed themselves equally mixed messages. We don't believe in casual looks, feeling driven to actively compete with whoever captured our honey's eye. We critique the pictures he enjoys, pointing out the too-thick ankles, the pre-cellulite dimples, the obviously collagen-enhanced lips, or the lack of class or taste.

Men enjoy looking at women and are remarkably non-judgmental. They appreciate the view for what it is and fail to notice the minor defects we are supremely happy to enumerate.

Now if we could only learn to look at ourselves as uncritically as men do! We look in a full length mirror and instead of appreciating our assets, we groan with horror at our shortcomings. We camouflage less than perfect legs with draping pants or long skirts. We conceal a small bustline with vests and overblouses. We add to our diminutive size by tottering on platforms or stilettos. We cover aging skin with layers of makeup and add extensions to give thinning hair length and volume.

But underneath, we know exactly what we are. We stand in the bathroom and stare at the creases in our skin, the lines in our forehead, the swell between our hip bones. We grimace at every flaw and hate the imperfections of heredity, genes, an unhealthy lifestyle, and the ravages of time.

Then we wonder why we lack the self-confident manner of our male coworkers, relaxed and comfortable in the bodies fates dealt them, blissfully ignorant of their physical faults.

One day, we'll get there - maybe.

Bye-Bye Bread.

2005-07-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I absolutely love bread - not the soft, fluffy, rubber stuff sold as an edible napkin, but the scrunchy, chewy, whole grain staff of life bread. I can pass by decorated cakes without a twinge and eyeball ice cream as if were something alien and unappealing. But show me a slice of rich pumpernickel or marbled rye, and my knees buckle. There are breads that make sandwich filling unimportant: olive and herb rolls, panetone, extra sourdough, cheese rolls, raisin bagels, onion bread, poppyseed, sesame seed, and caraway.

Such breads are, we are frequently told, healthy and nutritious and make up part of a fiber-rich, natural diet. Unfortunately, the amount I'm likely to eat, once I start, is going to seriously derail my weight loss efforts. Cutting out butter and margarine, eschewing salad dressing above the 3 calories per tablespoon level, and eliminating fast foods and soft drinks does have a marked effect on my caloric intake. But I find that to really lose pounds, and keep them off, I have to pass on my favorite breads.

I hate it. Why can't I enjoy one of my favorite foods without paying through the nose (actually through the abdomen and hips)? It's so unfair! Well, Virginia, life is unfair and I have to learn to live with it.

My body just can't handle the carbohydrate load without burgeoning out of control. I suppose if I were really fitness-motivated, I'd run a few miles so I could have a fabulous sandwich. But, I admit it, I'm an exercise-phobe, barely able to make it through my minimal daily stretches.

Facing my weaknesses with guilt and self-criticism, I reluctantly conclude that bread has to go. Angry and resentful, but miserably aware of the choices I must make, I bid farewell for life to breads I will now only enjoy in my dreams.

The alternative means getting fat and I'm just not going to go there.

Emotional Eating

2005-07-07T17:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, out of the blue, without any foreboding gossip or rumor, the company I work for was taken over by a competitor. All afternoon we sat stunned and unnaturally quiet, trying to absorb what had happened and what it might mean to our future.

Two hours after the announcement of the sale was made, I walked through the office, a large call center divided into several teams that handle certain accounts or patients at different levels of care. Apparently quite independently of each other, each team was trying to handle the tension and the underlying anxiety in their own way.

What did they all choose? You guessed it: FOOD.

We eat when we're happy and celebrating; we eat when we're lonely; we eat when we're bored. And, above all, we eat when we're upset. When our whole world seems to spin out of control, food remains the only object that can seem to keep us anchored and stable. We reach to it for comfort, for re-assurance, for love. And we remain blind to the fact that our affection for it allows it to exert control over us. Over the next few months, as reorganization plans are implemented and the winds of change sweep through the offices of management and the cubicles of worker bees, we will reach out, over and over, for the comfort of eating to steady our stomachs and soothe our nerves.

Corporate downsizing - just another weapon to make us fat!

Does the pressure never stop? Perhaps when we're dead, there is no longer any compulsion to eat - or maybe we are destined to go into our graves as a starving corpse who tries desperately to communicate with the living about the overwhelming urge to eat.

Happy Fourth of July -- Food For Thought

2005-07-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

Independence Day has long been celebrated by parades, flag flying, and most wonderful and ethereal of all, fireworks. Due to a record of accidental burns and the behavior of a few hooligans, home fireworks are now banned in most communities. The number of parades is dwindling as downtown Main Streets become replaced by suburban malls.

So what is left?

What is always left?

FOOD!

July 4th now means barbeques - look at the holiday food sections of the major newspapers that teem with recipes and cooking tips. Our traditional holidays have become one feast after another.

Thanksgiving, by its very nature, was always about food although the scrawny wild turkeys of the 18th Century wouldn't recognize their current hormone-hulked cousins, poultry on steroids, and the fresh bounty of the earth has been pretty well enveloped by candied toppings, greasy gravies, and butter-dripping fiber-free rolls. Other holidays have torn away from their past to land squarely on the dining tables of the fattest nation on earth.

What happened to Christmas caroling and sleigh rides? There was no time left after the gluttonous family feast. What happened to gaily painted hard boiled Easter eggs? They morphed into rich, beautifully decorated and virtually impossible to resist, chocolate monstrosities. The hand-drawn, heart-felt Valentines we produced thirty years ago are replaced by the ultimate gift of the heart, a box of Godivas.

We are a food-in-your-face society. The world of endless sales pitches and cutthroat marketing has made every occasion commercialized to death. Over 40 billion dollars a year is spent by Madison Avenue on putting new spins on what we eat.

Trying to buck the relentless focus on eating is like a salmon fighting its way upstream. Starting a strict diet is akin to paddling a kayak into Niagara Falls and wondering why it overturns. It is not surprising that our weight loss attempts fail. What is truly astonishing is that 40% of us are NOT overweight!

Kudos to those who manage to dodge the slings and arrows of our outrageous food focus - please share your secrets with us.

Diet With An Attitude, The Workbook, Is Born!

2005-07-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

I have been chained to my computer for the past few weeks, finishing my ebook and putting up a mini-site to promote it.

Now comes the excitement of watching it grow (I hope). Come on over and check it out, just for fun:

http://www.DietWithAnAttitude.com.

Look on Aisle 5

2005-06-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Have you ever stopped to calculate how much time you spend in each section of the supermarket?

Apart from the non-food areas of drug store supplies, rubber goods, and diapers, most stores have about 10 distinct food areas: produce, dairy, meat, ethnic foods and pasta, canned foods, prepared foods, drinks, frozen foods, snacks, and deli.

The areas where most of our intake should focus, if we are watching our weight and our health, are always on the edges, against the wall: produce, meat, dairy. We can easily navigate through 80 or 90 percent of the store without bumping into them.

Next week, I’ll get vegetables, we promise, as we wade into the packaged and frozen foods that fit so much more neatly into our time-starved, rat-race lives. It is so much less time and trouble to microwave a plate than slow simmer or steam something, plus there’s all that cutting and chopping time we just can’t spare.

The frozen stuff doesn’t taste as good but luckily the manufacturers figured that out and added butter sauce or cheese sauce to give it more flavor, a few nuts or other crispy additions to add some snap – nothing is plain any more.

We stock up on packages loaded with chemicals we can’t even pronounce. We pick up bags of quick snacks with nary a nutrient in the bunch. We throw fluffy breads and crackers into our cart, knowing they are merely edible plates.

Ten years ago, I lived in a Korean neighborhood. I couldn’t read half of the market’s signs and ingredients but shopped there anyway because of the atmosphere, dominated by an enormous variety of produce that took up at least half the store’s space. Trying totally new, strange-looking roots and fruits was exciting: sometimes marvelous, occasionally vile.

We have taken our markets into the age of the superstores where everything is available but nothing is natural. What are we doing to our poor bodies? We feed them junk and then spend a fortune on trying to acquire the “natural” look. Fat chance (pun intentional)!

The Dairy Diet Debate

2005-06-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

The American Dairy Council's campaign to encourage adults to drink 3 glasses of milk a day, based on a 2004 Tennessee study, suggests that drinking milk is an excellent aid to weight loss.

This conclusion is based on a theory that the calcium in dairy products increases the body's ability to lose fat, a theory that has already produced yet another diet book.

Subsequent studies question the whole proposition and research reports with very different outcomes are now being released.

Again, our dieting hopes are dashed. Now I'm stuck with a refrigerator full of non-fat milk, terrified to drink it and gain weight but uncomfortable with just throwing it away. (I'll give it to my skinny neighbor down the hall who continues to benefit from my dieting mishaps - funny, she looks as if she's gained a few pounds).

Why do studies lead to such contradictory findings? If you have ever tried to design a study of any human behavior, you will find that it is impossible to cover every single variable - we are just too complex in our minds, our bodies, and our interaction with the environment. A year of graduate statistics convinced me of the dangers of accepting the results of many experimental designs.

By all means, read the latest findings and try to glean some kernel of information that is helpful to you personally. Then throw the rest away as the academic "publish or perish" debris that it is.

Look into your mind and heart: you know what weight loss requires and a calorie is a calorie, is a calorie.

Another easy path to slimdom is exposed.

Back to the hard work.

The Folly of Diet Recipes

2005-06-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why diet books always seem to have a section of recipes?

Apart from the desire to make the book look larger and therefore more worth its cost, why should we be so interested in studying foods and ways to serve it when we are trying to avoid it as much as possible?

It is inconceivable that we have reached adulthood without the basic skills to boil, bake, steam, or roast our food.

We all know that these are the only low fat methods we should be using on any diet. And whatever we eat, plainer is better to control calories.

So what are all these recipes doing in a book that is supposed to be redirecting our attention away from food?

Is it a case of mutual fool-yourself-time?

The diet authors know that unless their menus have taste, and enticing pictures or detailed ingredient lists, no one will select their plan and they'll lose money. In their real diet plan outline, they identify what is allowed and what is forbidden. Their recipe section might have been written by someone else. Certainly there are substitutions made to qualify as diet food but desserts, dips, and brunches?

We bury our heads in the sand, keep taunting ourselves with those addictive sweet flavors, and crow about the minimal number of calories in a serving of the dish (a thimbleful size - check the small print on how many people this little dish is supposed to serve).

Admit it, the only reason we crave recipes is to spice something up, to increase our pleasure and make the whole dieting task less painful. We could eat food plain without any fancy recipes but that would be no fun.

So we convince ourselves that all the stuff we are adding to our basics: low fat gravy, liquid margarine instead of butter, lemon and capers in place of tartar sauce, vinegar and oil rather than creamy Ranch, and a variety of sugar substitutes are all allowed in our plan so we might as well enjoy.

And then we are surprised and disappointed when the weight loss stops.

It must be my glands!

Results Not Typical

2005-06-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I had 14 weight/health-oriented newsletters in my inbox this morning. (Subscribe to one or two lists and they will multiply -- the rabbits of the Internet!)

Several contained testimonials from rabid fans of their particular diet program. Five contained before-and-after pictures or verbal descriptions.

What fabulous results! I've got to try this!

Wait, what are all those asterisks?

Ah, the phrase that turns the blood of the most motivated desperate dieter to ice: "Results not typical."

Now what exactly does that mean? Did they specifically select the greatest outlier to mislead us about results? Is it only the freaks who are willing to rave about the program? Does the plan only work for certain people? Should I assume that I, too, will reach the dizzying heights of the featured role model?

Lose the hype, please. Talk to me as if I'm intelligent as well as overweight. Being fat does not equate with being stupid!

Show me "typical" results and I'll assess your program with honesty and respect. If most folks lose 5 pounds, publicize that. If not, all those unhappy overwieghters who sign up for your diet will expect to lose the poundage of your featured dieter.

The last thing the desperate, guilt-ridden, and self-critical dieters of the world need is to be misled into unreal expectations. That direction will only result in a magnified loss of self-esteem and self-respect. Your marketing misinformation is psychologically destructive and emotionally devasting.

E-Diets, Atkins, Zone, South Beach -- Shame on you!

Rating The Diets - A Mindless Exercise

2005-06-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

There has been a recent surge in the experts weighing in (pun intended) on popular and celebrity diets to rate them in terms of effectiveness, nutritional adequacy, and balance. Look at the latest crop of magazines, Internet news reports, and television specials.

What is a semi-motivated would-be dieter to do?

Every diet listed seems to give rise to a chorus of criticism. Either it contains too few fruits and vegetables, not enough fiber, not enough fat, or too few calories. The glycemic index is too high or too low, the nutritional content of its staples are not good enough, there is too much or too little of something.

Who rates what we are eating now? We simply pig out on everything from pizza, to fast food, to snacks (did you know that potato chips are the most popular snack food in America - accompanying 32% of our lunches?), desserts, ice cream and beer.

While it would be nice, I suppose, to have a population who ate only healthy foods, in moderation, exercised daily, and took care to ingest at least the minimum requirement of vitamins and minerals, that is not reality, my friend. We overeat on all the wrong foods, we avoid regular exercise like the plague, and huff and puff our way into enlarged bodies that are twenty to fifty pounds heavier than our frames deserve.

Any way that we can take off some or all of that weight is worthwhile. No one is going to stay on any of the popular diets for a lifetime, let's face it. We look at them as temporary (which is part of the problem, but I digress) fixes. The last thing we need are experts who make us afraid to start because we might not be obtaining the right nutrition. Or do we take a certain degree of self-satisfaction in telling ourselves that we can't start until the "perfect diet" is identified?

Are we eating the right way without a diet? No, our nutrition is still deplorable, it's just that we are eating a lot of everything. Let's have at least one expert come out and truthfully report that no matter the deficiencies of any specific diet - going on it is absolutely better than eating the way we are now!

Let's get our collective weight down, and then start worrying about nutrition and health. Diabetes, heart attacks, and gall bladders care a lot less about what we eat than how much.

Start a diet, ANY diet, and follow through for a few weeks and I guarantee you'll be in a much better place, physically and mentally, to start looking after your health and long term fitness than when hemmed in by too much blubber, reading scare stories from the media about how your intended diet is somehow unbalanced.

Supermarket Sheep.

2005-05-29T05:32:00.000-07:00

Eighteen or twenty years ago, I was into high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diets, courtesy of the original Atkins Diet Revolution and, to an even greater extent, Stillman's Quick Weight Loss Diet (which I must admit I still prefer to Atkins but that's merely personal taste). At the time, every aisle was loaded with labels proclaiming Low Fat or Reduced Fat. I didn't care about fat and sought much different information. Unfortunately, low fat was "in" and I felt alone and abandoned.

With a certain sense of resentment, I tracked down the carbohydrate costs of a wide variety of food, keeping a sharp eye on ingredients, calorie levels, and nutritional values. Certain items were strangely emblazoned with banners announcing low fat: pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, and ice cream. I was puzzled: how could certain foods, full of fat to their very core, be low fat? How could all the fat be removed and there be anything left?

I became fascinated with certain labels. Have you ever, for example, read the labels on those flavored coffee creamers? Zero fat. Zero carbohydrates. Zero protein. Zero calories. How can anything we put in our mouths have zero calories? A negligible amount, maybe, but absolute zero? What is in that stuff? Or is it virtual food, existing only in our mind's eye as a kind of edible hologram?

Mercifully, the low fat craze died its natural death. Atkins and similar regimens took over and the low fat labels were reprinted (corporate recycling at its finest) to read Low Carb. Suddenly, everywhere you looked, there were foods recast as low carb - again with the pasta sauce, the potato chips, the candy bars, and the ice cream.

I was curious. Had the manufacturers taken out all those carbs and put the fat back in? Where did those carbs go? Are there vast dumpsites in the desert where unwanted carbs are buried - next to worn tires, plastic bags, and nuclear waste?

Once more, I wonder: what is left in those boxes, cans, and jars? Why am I paying $1.19 per ounce for something that really isn't anything?

Then I started to figure it out (sometimes I'm a little slow). The food hadn't really changed at all, just the packaging. Food labels are like those ubiquitous Internet sales letters. They trumpet headlines that catch our interest because they are in synch with our desires and goals. Is that accidental? Of course not. Highly paid copywriters choose their headlines with great care, buying into the national "obsession o' the day", floating on the coattails of the latest fad.

Many of us are so desperate to control our weight that we buy into the promises like the unaware followers we are: bleating sheep heading for a precipice with no thought of questioning our leaders or striking out in a different direction.

The unspoken secret is that the label doesn't matter. If we want to lose weight, we don't eat pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, or ice cream. Period. No matter what the package says. Deep in our psyche, we know what we can eat (very little) and what we can't (a whole bunch). Allowing ourselves to be misled is only a fashionably acceptable way to fool ourselves, and we know it. We buy into the hype because we want, so badly, to believe. We want to think that we are doing the right thing, that we're really trying, that our motivation is pure.

Our weaknesses are being exploited by the packagers and the super store con men. Our ambivalence, and the overwhelming need to avoid the very real discomfort of effective dieting, invests the misguidance of food labels with an illusion of truth.

Like our dimwitted ovine cousins, we, too, are eventually fleeced.

Milestones in The Weight Wars

2005-05-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

You Know You're Gaining Weight When . . .

You're asked to take off your shoes before walking on a friend's new parquet floor. The waterbed salesman declines your cash offer.
Your pantyhose keep sliding down.
Your seat belt locks when you try to fasten it.
The dry cleaner shrinks your shirt collar.

You Know You're Heavy When . . .

The sightseeing helicopter pilot won't sell you a ticket.
The recliner salesman says his insurance won't let you test out the furniture.
You only shop at a mall that offers valet parking.
The pizza delivery guy calls you by name.
They raise the all-you-can-eat buffet price as you reach the register.

You Know You're Fat When . . .

After you leave, McDonald's changes the "Number Sold" sign.
The cabin attendant asks 10 people to move to the opposite side of the airplane.
The water slide operator makes you sign a liability release.
You insist on pushing the shopping cart because you need the support.
You are banned from your local Smorgasbord.

You Know You're Losing Weight When . . .

You no longer make a beeline for the handicapped stall.
You sit down fearlessly on a schoolyard swing.
You can eat in public without feeling the stares.

You Know You're Thin When . . .

You trade in the family van for a subcompact.
You walk to the hotel pool without a cover up.
Your spouse keeps asking what others are looking at.

Salivation Cues

2005-05-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered who writes restaurant menus? Usually a very savvy copywriter, I suspect.

First there are the succulent, glossy pictures designed to lead you to order one of their higher priced items. When was the last time you saw a featured photo of a side salad or a scoop of cottage cheese?

Despite the best of intentions when you sat down, leafing through pages of bright images of mushroom-sauced steaks, sliced avocados, sauce-laden pasta, and sinfully decadent desserts, lead you to rethink what you really hunger for. You read the descriptions - everything friend is "golden brown," the bread sticky are "crispy," the dressings "smooth and creamy." Your taste buds start to tap out the flamenco on your tongue.

What has happened? Your diet and your resistance have been hijacked by your power of visualization: your emotional reaction to the graphic and verbal images so slickly presented. While you spend the rest of the day percolating in your guilt and self-disgust, consider the chain of events that occurred and how you might avoid future repetitions.

Thinking about, reading about, and visualizing about, food leads to unmanaged eating. Long before you take your first bite, you need to be aware of each step that is leading towards diet disaster and STOP the sequence as early as possible.

If you must dine out, attend to your options before you make your first move. You always have some choices. You may select a restaurant with which you are very familiar. Decide what you are going to have and refuse to even look at a menu when you get there (no Virginia, there haven't been any recent changes). Make sure you order first so the selections of others don't mislead you at the last moment. If there is nowhere available where you know the faire, pick a small mom and pop place where the menu was typed on a home computer -- the spelling mistakes only point to writing errors, not an inability to cook. Looking at basic descriptions is far less likely to lead you astray without the influence of verbal and pictorial cues.

Compliance with your chosen diet is a reflection of your mental processes more than your Physiological needs. Focus your mind on your weight control goals and sticking to them is far more likely (although, I'm afraid, never really easy).

Fat Is A Self-Inflicted Punishment

2005-05-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

I just came back from three days in Las Vegas. What an eye-opener!

The biggest, most lavish buffets in the world attract the biggest, most expansive people. "All you can eat" takes on a whole new meaning when you realize just how much some people can consume at a single sitting. Most remarkable was the sight of a dutiful wife bringing a piled up platter to the table for a husband who was obviously way too fat to stand in line on his own.

That picture was rather unusual in that the wife was about normal weight. It seems that in most cases, the woman is the humungous one, waddling through the casino in her big-as-a-tent shorts, followed by a skinny, wiry guy who looks, at best, disinterested in life.

Of course, it is harder for women to lose weight, courtesy of nature's trick of a small frame coupled with sinister hormonal influences. But in our society, where pretty girls and sex sell everything, women tend to be so much more weight conscious.

So what happens? Did they never approach the social ideal or did they battle for years and then one day just give up?

If you control your weight for an external reason - catching a mate, making friends, becoming popular - once these goals are accomplished, the effort no longer seems worthwhile. If you fight to stay slim for intrinsic reasons - you like to look slim, you like fitted clothes, you respect yourself when you know you look good - then you are more likely to keep plugging away at it.

What is so pathetic about the fatsos is not just how awful they look, it's the deadness in their eyes: no pride, no self-respect, no self-affection. What a depressing way to exist, made only more tragic because it is self-inflicted.

America's Secret Addiction

2005-05-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

America is a nation of self-disclosers, amiably acceptant of our weaknesses. Celebrities, family members, coworkers and friends think nothing of admitting their compulsions and dependencies on alcohol, street drugs, prescription medications. We enter rehab programs, clean up, dry out, and go on with our lives: beating our problem or entering a long series of relapses and treatment episodes. Except, perhaps, for politicians or ministers, there is little social stigma attached to such mistakes unless there are criminal overtones that may lead to incarceration.

Television and films have educated us on the dangers and side effects of dependence upon alcohol, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, designer drugs, steroids, pain pills, cannabis and opium. We had to coin the term chemical dependency (CD) to completely cover the broad and ever-growing field. We approach individuals ensnared in their abuse as victims of a disease, to be educated and helped as long as they have a willingness to change and are prepared for the painful journey that owning responsibility for one's own self-destructive behavior demands.
But the most widespread, self-destructive, dangerous addiction afflicting America is never discussed: FOOD.

The treatment of overeating is extensive: diet clinics, fitness programs, fat farms, plastic surgery. We collectively spend billions of dollars on weight loss aids and fitness equipment. We decry the epidemic of obesity that is overtaking our population to an enormous (literally) degree. We investigate metabolism and hormonal effects. We debate the comparative merits and flaws of protein, fats, carbohydrates, and roughage. We develop new vitamin and mineral formulae. Diet books, support groups, internet clubs, and television shows trumpet tips, techniques, special aids and hundreds of weight control regimes that promise inevitable weight loss with the right combination of "tasty" and "delicious" foods, guaranteed to ensure that our comfort levels remain high and our self-discipline minimally challenged.

We fail to confront the irrefutable fact that obesity is caused by food addiction. Excuses and metabolic rationales aside (No, Virginia, no one ever walked out of a Nazi concentration camp or a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp fat - macabre but true) our out-of-control overweight is a direct result of our obsession with, and dependency on, too much food.

You may disagree. After all, the other CD addictions are for substances we can totally banish from our lives whereas we have to eat to live.

Consider the problem from a slightly different perspective. In the United States, an "all or nothing" society, the goal of the typical CD treatment program is total abstention. The alcoholic is taught that one sip of liquor is never acceptable and constitutes a full relapse from which recovery must start over. In Europe, and many other parts of the world, moderation is considered more realistic than abstention. The goal is to lower the level of usage to the point where it has no deleterious effects on the user's life and the problems - work, relationships, mood, productivity - are resolved.

Such a model can more easily be applied to food. Our bodies require a certain level of sustenance to thrive. It is when the intake becomes excessive that problems arise: appearance, the inability to be active, fatigue, depressed mood, and strains on the internal organs. If we can temper that level of intake, we can avert the consequences that follow overindulgence in anything.

Such is indeed the focus of many weight control programs. However, they are missing one vital ingredient: acceptance of personal responsibility. At a 12-Step meeting, members repetitively admit to the group: "My name is B and I'm an alcoholic." Imagine, if you will, the different atmosphere that would be engendered if a member were to state: "My name is B. I drink a lot because I inherited the genes from my drunken parents and I can't drink, like all my friends can, without overdoing it. It's so unfair that everyone else can enjoy a drink and I can't."

Such a statement sounds ridiculous coming from an admitted problem drinker yet that is exactly what we allow from our problem eaters. It is far more likely that we will tell a close friend: "M, I think you have a problem with alcohol and I want you to get help," than we will tell an equally close friend: "G, I think you have a problem with too much eating and I want you to get help."

We remain silent about overweight because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. We use euphemisms like "heavy" and "queen-sized" to avoid the word "fat." When a very overweight friend asks plaintively, "Don't you think this dress makes me look slimmer?" we quietly agree, refusing to give the honest answer that nothing in the world will make her look slimmer except losing 60 pounds of avoirdupois!

One lesson learned over decades of CD research and treatment is that the problem must be acknowledged before it can be addressed and beaten. CD clients are notorious for making excuses, playing mind games with those around them, and shirking self-responsibility whenever they can. If we can bring ourselves to acknowledge that we are addicted to food, it allows for eventual movement into a process of change, bypassing the excuses and rationalizations at which overeaters excel -- to an extent that their CD counterparts would admire.

Confrontation of the problem requires that we drop the façade of politeness and euphemistic phrasing. As a society, we need to look at others and ourselves and call it as we see it. If I'm fat, I'm fat, and it's my responsibility to not only admit that honestly, but to also admit to myself and the world that it is my fault: I am the one who made myself fat. No one else forced food into my mouth. Like the recovering alcoholic at the bar, I can always say no or drink a plain club soda. Like the recovering cocaine addict who learns to stay away from certain street corners or drug houses, I can stay away from bakeries, fast food outlets, and pizza parlors.

Weight control can be simple - eat only what you need to survive - but never easy. The fallacy of many diets is that we can lose weight without suffering. Stopping or minimizing CD abuse is always painful and a craving for chocolate, ice cream, or the urge for sugar (no one seems to crave vegetables) can be as overwhelming to the dieter as the addict's emotional need for his drug of choice.

Naming our national weight problem for what it really is, a plain old addiction to food, releases us to start the process of rehab and recovery that has been so completely developed in the CD field. Honesty, and the willingness to work through pain to reach our goal, allows us to not only accept our responsibility for our problem but also to relish the triumph of our eventual success.

Removing Your Sweet Tooth

2005-04-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

Scrolling through the diet ezines clogging my inbox this morning, I detected a theme in several of them: creating "permissible" desserts.

Huh?

A true dessert should be totally decadent, over the top, fatally caloric but so scrumptious on the palette that weight control is thrown out the window - murder by chocolate.

But when you're on a diet, where does dessert fit in?

It doesn't.

Ingredient substitution and low calorie/low carb promises aside, the very last thing you need to complicate your weight loss battle is to tease your tongue with anything sweet. Nature tricked us by making a sweet taste addictive. Once we give in, we want more, just a little, just one more bite, just one more spoonful, more, more, more. Notice the difference with vegetables: you may love them as much as I do, but we don't CRAVE them. When we're full, we stop. Try to stop after eating one small chocolate or one teaspoon of ice cream: it's almost impossible.

If we're serious about our weight goals, the secret is not to even think about dessert or anything sweet. Keep that taste out of your mouth and you may be able to keep your hands away from your face and your elbows unbent.

Why put yourself through agony when the simple choice of tea or coffee makes a healthy third course and enlarges your backbone instead of your hips?

Remember, the diet gurus don't continue to make money unless you stay fat!

Where's The New Fad Diet?

2005-04-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

It appears that the low carb craze is quieting down. Atkins and South Beach are still somewhat fashionable but we fickle diet fanatics are on the prowl for something new. We've done low calorie, low fat, and low carb - what can we jump on next? Apart from the ubiquitous "instant weight loss" pills (you should know that more than 90% of the Internet searches containing the word 'diet' also contain the word 'pill'), where is the next mother-of-all-diets coming from?

Let's start something. Since spicy foods reportedly increase our metabolism, how about a "hot" diet? Lots of chinese mustard, jalapeno and habanero chilis, wasabi, turmeric and salsa. The antacid manufacturers would love it and would probably offer some kind of sponsorship. It could work -- increased metabolism and decreased intake (how much hot, hot food can you handle a day, anyway?) would add up to lost pounds in no time at all.

If you're not too keen on that one, how about vegetable o' the day? Each day, you eat a healthy, low calorie vegetable - broccoli, cabbage, bell peppers, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes. The key is that each day, you eat only that one vegetable and nothing else (no butter, no sauce, no gravy). By the end of the day, you will be totally sick of it but then you don't have to face it again for two or three weeks while you work your way through the rest of the list. There are so few calories in vegetables that weight loss should easily follow.

I think I'll try this (since I don't care too much for really spicy stuff anyway).

Now we just need a new guru MD to figure out how to package it so he can make a fortune and create a fad!

Super-Sizing America

2005-04-21T19:48:00.000-07:00

For some of us, food is warmth and love. We associate it with home and childhood: tempting smells that greeted us after school on a cold December afternoon. The kitchen served as the center of the house under the kindly direction of the Captain in the apron. If we were good, we might be allowed to stir the pot. If we were very good, we got to clean out the mixing bowl.

As we grew up, we found wonders elsewhere: the coffee shops and diners where adolescents gathered and food was only a platform for the real business of talking, bonding, and flirting. We drank cola and root beer and discovered sundaes, pizza and french fries. But real food was what we ate at home.

Later, we moved on to the pale imitation of food represented by college cafeterias and underground cafes that were heavy on music and political rebellion and light on the menu. We returned home for the holidays and again ate real food, as good as we remembered. Some of us moved on to the non-food of C rations and swore we'd never enjoy eating again.

We moved into the world of work: automats and deli lunches or expense-account steak and martinis where even the most exquisite fare took a back seat to table discussions. We married, moved into new homes, rediscovered the warmth and intimacy of a family kitchen and embraced the delights of gourmet cooking, homemade bread, and nouvelle cuisine.

At the same time, just below our level of awareness, the fast food industry started to blossom into the billion dollar gorilla it is today.

At first, it was small hamburgers and hot dogs with french fries and a drink. At first, it was an occasional visit to "get mom out of the kitchen." At first, it was just something fast that avoided interruptions in our race to the top.

The menus expanded to encourage more frequent visits. Drive-Thrus that sat closed and empty until noon suddenly discovered how to make breakfast items that could be eaten at the wheel. Chicken, fish, and ribs were added, soon followed by Mexican specialties, baked potatoes, fried vegetables, and sandwiches. The burgers got bigger and so did we.

Somewhere, a brilliant light bulb exploded in an ad man's brain and "Super-Size" was born. If a burger was good, why not make it bigger for just a little more money? If fries are the staff of life for American teenagers, why not make the portions bigger? Why not make the best purchase value a whole meal, combining everything the customer wants (and maybe something they don't)? Why not Super-Size the whole meal and really make money?

Rather than an occasional change-of-pace, the Drive-Thru gradually assumed a predominant place in our diets. Astute marketers targeted their sales pitches to the most responsive and easily manipulated niche of the population: children. Tired, time-strapped parents yielded to tearful pleas to visit Ronald or Jack. And our children grew fat.

Teenagers, with their deep-seated psychological preference to live in their cars existed on a
diet made up, almost exclusively, of fast food, turning up their noses at the thought of a home-cooked meal. Active and full of energy, they ignored the almost imperceptible puffiness that their intake triggered.

What was there to worry about? The Drive-Thrus were a gift from heaven: tasty food, fast access, car-proof containers, cheap satiation.

Then we woke up. We looked at a world where even the average individual was clearly overweight and more than a third of us were obese, even our children. In a culture obsessed with the appearance of being thin, we were become permanently, indisputably, fat.

The few earlier voices of criticism increased to a low roar. The tasty creations of yesterday became the now-maligned culprits of our condition. To keep the money-machine viable, the fast food moguls adapted to the cries for change: the oil used for frying was trumpeted as unsaturated, salads appeared on menus, substitute sides for french fries became available, and "Super-Size it?" was no longer the order taker's standard refrain.

The industry breathed a sigh of relief seeing that a few changes made everything all right and the world could return to its infatuation with the Drive-Thru. We beamed with a sense of satisfaction that we had prodded the market in a healthier direction. Then we noticed that we were still fat.

Where had we gone wrong? Well, the "small" burgers were still big: two to three times the size of their relatives of forty years ago. The salads were healthy until drenched with several hundred calories of creamy dressing. To maintain the taste we had come to love, toppings were added: more kinds of cheese, butter, relishes and dipping sauces. And everything was still primarily fried: breakfast, burgers, chicken, potatoes. Even high quality, frequently-changed deep fry oil is loaded with calories to be deposited on our waistlines, hips, and internal organs.

Fast food has taken us out of the kitchen into a world where the demand for productivity makes us work harder and longer and steals away any notion of spare time. We run to keep pace with a society spinning ever faster and we eat on the run because to pause is to fail. Is there no escape? This is the Twenty-first Century -- returning to the food regimes of fifty or a hundred years ago is improbable. The old fashioned "made from scratch" meals require too much time and effort, except for special occasions, in our fast-paced, two-working-parents, long-work-and-commute lives.

What we can do, if we seek to withdraw from the enormous herd of heavyweights, is to remember that the way to health, slenderness, delayed aging, and increased longevity has been demonstrated repetitively by our little friend, the laboratory rat.

The secret is consistent, prolonged, cheat-proofed, under-eating. Once that core concept has been adopted, and completely internalized, the pathway to a new, thin you becomes clear: eat whatever you want but a LOT LESS. We're not looking at the old adage of "eat moderately and move around a lot" because we know, from experience, that it doesn't work. When I say a "lot less" I mean it. You may be eating three times a day, plus snacks. Cutting out a snack here or a dessert there may eventually help you lose weight - if you have twenty years to invest in the attempt.

Don't "cut back." Slash, sever, pulverize your portions. If you eat three meals a day, change to eating just one. If you like to graze on six mini-meals or snacks, cut to two. Reducing your overall intake by two thirds should bring you into the zone of your actual daily needs. Yes, it would be nice if you opted to make those reduced calories all highly nutritious but we all know that you are going to eat what you are going to eat, no matter how much the health gurus nag you. So go ahead and eat what you intend, just one third of your usual rations.

To keep your energy on an even keel, you can spread your one meal throughout the day. If your usual lunch is a cheeseburger, fries, and a shake, split it up: a shake for breakfast, a burger for lunch, a dinner of fries and a slice of cheese. Are you then on a diet? Are you using your precious time on specialty shopping and food preparation? Do you have to think about what menu items fit into your prescribed weight plan? No, none of these apply. You are simply eating the way you have always done except one day of your prior food plan now last three days. If you're worried about your health, take a multivitamin (funny, you weren't worried about your health on the same fare in the past, were you?) If you are a tall, large-boned individual or you feel (genuinely and persistently) faint, take a canned nutritional booster like Ensure.

It is almost too simple and too easy IF you have really internalized the concept of under-eating and have adopted a "can do,will do," attitude - the key to everything.

P. S. You'll save a lot of money too!

How To Cop An Attitude With An Overzealous Hostess

2005-04-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

We all encounter those hosts and hostesses who feel it is their duty to make us eat whatever their specialty is and generate a sense of guilt if we do not flatter their creation by stuffing ourselves with it, regardless of our weight control plans and weight loss goals. Here are some nice ways to decline her offering.

For example's sake, we will use her justly famous (but horrendously caloric) cheesecake.

10 Nice Ways to Decline:

1. Thanks, but I came to enjoy your company, not your cheesecake.
2. I'll trade everything on that plate for a cup of your incomparable coffee.
3. Before I eat anything, I'd love to see your new vacation pictures.
4. This time I'm really losing weight so I can't break down, even though I know how delicious your cheesecake always is.
5. Thanks, but no thanks.
6. Thanks, but I'm on a mission - to thin-dom.
7. It looks too good to eat . . . I'd hate to spoil it.
8. I'm on a very strict diet that unfortunately bans your terrific cheesecake.
9. I already filled up on your wonderful dinner, perhaps next time.
10. Wow, that looks gorgeous but it just isn't something I'm allowed right now.

When these don't work (and they won't), bring on the big guns - the declinations that ensure your hostess will not continue to press you further but may actually retreat to the other side of the room to bug someone else.

The Big 15 (That Really Work):

1. Sorry, but I'm allergic to cheesecake . . . my eyes swell shut.
2. Thanks, but cheesecake always gives me flatulence.
3. Thanks, but I'm already so full I'm having trouble keeping everything down . . . where's your bathroom?
4. Thanks, but I see my personal trainer first thing in the morning and if I've slipped, he's a sadist!
5. I spent the day at the dentist's office so I couldn't touch anything.
6. My aunt almost died of food poisoning from eating cheesecake - I just can't face it anymore.
7. Sorry, but I hate cheesecake.
8. My grandmother was eating cheesecake when she died. I've never touched it since.
9. I'd love to, but cheesecake always gives me immediate hives.
10. Sorry, but I'm a cheesecake alcoholic. One bite and I'll eat the whole thing.
11. Sorry, I don't do cheesecake - and you shouldn't either, honey.
12. I'm fasting this week and it's time for my enema.
13. I'd love some, but cheesecake always makes me throw up.
14. Cheesecake always makes my crowns fall out.
15. If I eat that, I'll be forced to lead all your guests in 50 sit ups immediately afterwards.

Caution: you may not be invited back again for a while (but you're on your way to successful weight control).

Bad Day at Black Rock

2005-04-16T02:18:00.000-07:00

Remember the old 'Pogo' line: "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us"?

This week I was my own worst enemy, at least when it comes to healthy living. For those of us who must relentlessly monitor our weight (or risk reaching balloon proportions in the blink of an eye), I let overwork, not enough sleep, and a lot of stress, blow my intelligent eating rules and went hog wild, consuming a pizza, 3 bagels, and an enormous carrot cake muffin within 2 days.

Did I pay for it on my scales? Of course. Have you noticed how sneaky our bodies are? We cheat and cheat and for 3 days think we got away with it. Then after another day or two of controlled, disciplined eating we suddenly gain 4 pounds and are forced to admit that the payback for our excesses may be delayed but inevitable.

Now I have to climb back on the diet wagon, regretting my actions and trying to forgive myself, and move on, swearing to do better, This weight war is one damn battle after another.

Will it ever get any easier?

The Low Carb Trap

2005-04-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

The discussion at work last night revolved around the wonders of low carb peanut butter cups.

Several of the staff are on various low carbohydrate diets: Atkins, South Beach, medical supervised programs. I listened in amazement while they calculated how many they could eat and stay within their daily allotment. Now, mind, you, these are professionals with at least a Masters Degree, and they were deadly serious.

Come on, guys. If you don't want to control your weight, you don't have to -- no one is standing over you with a whip. But if you purport to be on a diet, and talk repeatedly about your plan to lose 20 pounds, what are you doing with peanut butter cups, low carb or not?

The secret to successful weight control is breaking your unhealthy attitudes about food. Obsessing on low carb treats, whether they be bagels, special cookies, or peanut butter cups, is not going to get you anywhere except Lane Bryant's. While you lament that your diet is "Not working for me and I've been so careful," get the candy out of your mouth, your hands, and, above all, your mind.

Have a carrot and grow up!

The Inconsistency of Weight Control

2005-04-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

I have dieted, intermittently, all my life: gaining and losing the same 30 - 40 pounds through the years. During those times when I just "blew it," I threw caution to the wind, ate everything that looked even remotely good, stuffed myself to a level of groaning pleasure and, generally, as we said in the Sixties, "let it all hang out." At other times, I have been remarkably disciplined, feeling very much in control.

Why am I so inconsistent?

Aren't we all?

We feel so good when we are in command of our appetites. We swear (and really mean it) that we will never be fat again. Like the dried out alcoholic, we see the world as a brighter, more satisfying place than we remembered. We feel better about ourselves and so we feel better about others. We walk with more spring in our step. We smile at our image reflected in the windows we pass. We feel light, and pure, and inspired. We are a new and better person and we enjoy it.

Then we lose it.

Unlike the alcoholic who often has one sip and is off to the races on a full-blown binge, we usually relapse on our weight control regimen slowly, one bite at a time. We tell ourselves "Just this once." The occasional treat becomes a regular part of our consumption. Fearful of regaining our former blubber, we surreptiously check the scales and sign with relief at only a minimal gain.

The secret of having an effect on our environment is to pay attention. As our concentration on eating control wanes, what we allow ourselves to eat starts to slip beneath the radar and gradually the weight slouches back. We intermittently try to stop the slide but we are distracted and one day we ruefully admit that we have regained everything we worked so hard to lose.

That's when attitude kicks in. We can throw up our arms in disgust and learn to live with it - it's our genes, our metabolism, our hormones - "I just can't keep my weight down; I give up." Or, we can take ourselves to task, cast an objective but critical eye on what happened, and cheer ourselves up with the knowledge that we gained control before and we can do it again. Then we start over.

For the most intelligent species on the planet, we are amazingly dumb. We eventually learn from our mistakes but usually only after multiple errors and repetitive painful consequences.

Momma Said: Keep Your Fingers Out of Your Mouth!

2005-04-04T19:54:00.000-07:00

Watching television exercises our eyes but nothing else. Unfortunately, it doesn't require us to do anything with our hands which leaves them free to grab something to eat. Then there are the food and restaurant commercials where everything is colorful and perfectly cooked. Don't even think about watching a cooking show: the temptation to snack or get up and cook is totally irresistible.

How can we break this self-destructive cycle? Any diversion may work for a while but loses its strength with too many repetitions. The secret is to have multiple alternatives available. If one doesn't work at any given time, try another. Mix and match as your likes, preferences, and moods dictate.

KEEP YOUR HANDS BUSY

When your hands are involved in a task, it is difficult to eat. Finger foods and dull television are inextricably bound together like flies in a spider web. Some activities to tie up those hands include: sewing, knitting, giving yourself a leisurely manicure (wet nail polish is a sure fire defense against eating), water the plants.

Turn the television off and try such pursuits as model making, card playing, videogames (that require both hands on the controls), sending e-mails, embroidery, and all kinds of crafts.

PREOCCUPY YOUR MIND

To bar thoughts of food from entering our heads and whetting our tastebuds, we have to keep our minds engaged, and our attention focused, in other directions. Clear away snack foods and dig into a riveting novel -- you won't want to leave the story for anything as mundane as fixing a snack. Start a daily journal and write about your thoughts and feelings and aspirations. Tackle one of those time-consuming chores you skip in your weekly clean-up: clean out drawers, work on the car, clean the BBQ, set aside stuff to go to Goodwill or storage, restring broken necklaces or re-organize your closets. All will help to keep your mind off food and no mental image of food means no consumption of food.

PRIORITIZE THOSE AROUND YOU

Play with your kids or help them with their homework. Go for a walk with your significant other and really talk about what is going on in your separate lives. At a long, safe distance from anything edible, call your parents or an old friend.

Do these techniques work? Sometimes. With regular effort and multiple task changes to maintain interest, they can be effective. For those days when nothing seems to work and the food cravings are overwhelming, we need to bring in the "big guns" which we will discuss another time.

What is Diet With An Attitude?

2005-04-02T19:51:00.000-08:00

Diet, weight control, weight loss -- the American obsession. A nation of the overweight and obese, we spend more money on diet aids, exercise equipment, gym memberships, and appetite control aids than the entire budget of some third world countries. Are we successful? Considering that the average weight continues to increase and our children are becoming more fat and less healthy, we could answer no.

What is the problem?

As a nation, we are infatuated with food. We have a more intimate relationship with what goes into our mouths than the spouse who shares our bed. Every month, there are millions of searches on the Internet for weight/diet products. What is the largest -- by a huge amount? Diet pills. We are looking for a painless way to control our binges. We gather recipes and a strong of diets are issued which promise "delicious and tasty" foods to soothe our spoiled palettes.
Doesn't anyone get it? We don't need tasty and delicious foods. We don't need diet pills. We don't need effortless diet plans.

We need to change our attitudes about food. We need to be ruthless on ourselves when it comes to carbs and calories and sugar. No, Virginia, low carb Peanut Butter cups are not the way to the svelte, slender figure we crave. No, Don Juan, six packs of low carb beer do not create six pack abs.

Wake up and get a grip! Weight control is tough; it demands persistence, pain, and denial.
Once we internalize that, and not until then, are we ready to make changes.

Salut!