What the Diet Industry Doesn't Tell You

Fitness magazines and diet books have taught me a lot over the years, but I always felt like they were leaving out a giant piece of the equation. After devouring the latest dieting tome, I would excitedly plot out menus, shopping lists and exercise plans for the week. Yet two days later the plans would fall by the wayside and I'd be left feeling guilty, ashamed and frustrated that I couldn't seem to follow through.

In recent years the diet industry has added more discussion about healthy behaviors . In addition to the ubiquitous lists of approved foods and ever shifting focus from fat to carbs to protein, attention is now being given to habits that naturally thin people have. Advice like sticking to the outer perimeter of the grocery store (to avoid the packaged garbage in the center aisles), eating every few hours to regulate blood sugar, never skipping breakfast and not bringing trigger foods into the house are all excellent suggestions, but a major component is still missing: even after learning all of these tricks, many of us still have difficulty following through.

There have been many times where I’ve had an almost out-of-body experience, mentally screaming at myself to put down the 11th cookie and step away from the kitchen. I would get so fustrated. I knew what I should be eating to fuel my body properly, yet I continuously made terrible choices, even when I desperately wanted to change my diet.

After years of searching, I’ve finally found the missing link. I had to determine WHY I ate the wrong things (besides the fact that they taste delicious!) Like a detective, I recorded everything that was happening while I was eating, then scoured my emotional eating journal searching for clues. What were my triggers? What situations led to compulsive eating? What did I truly need, because it's not really about the food, it's about something in my life pushing me over the edge and feeling spiritually disconnected.

As I learned to solve my issues and become more spiritually awake, my compulsion to eat the wrong things honestly subsided. Notice I said "subsided", not "disappeared." Maybe someday I'll be able to be neutral about my favorite trigger foods, but for now I'm just thrilled with the progress I've made and the feeling that I'm finally on the right path.

Our emotional and spiritual health is the missing link that the diet industry rarely talks about. I understand why they don't. It's complex, it's ugly and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. “Learn to feel your emotions, communicate with your loved ones and process anger, fear and resentment like a mature adult” is not quite as sexy and simple as “Eat This to Have Rock Hard Abs!” But it's a vitally important part of the weight loss equation.

The Benefits of Temporary Blindness

What do you do when reality threatens to derail your progress?

Yesterday was an unbelievably gorgeous day here in the Northeast. It's not too often you see the temperature hit 65 degrees on January 7th. As I raced around completing errands in the morning I mentally calculated that I had exactly 75 minutes to fit in a walk outside and a shower before taking my oldest son to a birthday party. After grocery shopping I burst through the door, rapidly told my husband the plan and was dressed and out the door within five minutes.

Forty five minutes later my lungs were full of fresh air, my head was clear and I felt  really happy. I was proud of myself that I had made the time to exercise  - something that is easily pushed off the agenda when life becomes busy.

The smile was quickly smacked off my face, however, as I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in the mirror while climbing into the shower. I sucked in my breath as I remembered "Oh that's right, I'm still 50 pounds overweight." I felt the air leave my lungs, my stomach lurch and tears rise in my throat. Two seconds ago I had felt so good! My body felt strong and healthy. How could there be such a huge disconnect between perception and reality?

I was suffering from what I call "Dieter Dementia" - that unrealistic voice in my head that says "I've eaten vegetables, resisted the siren call of sugar and exercised for four whole days - shouldn't I be a size six by now?" It's easy to forget that it took me thirty years to get my body into this state. It's not going to magically morph in a few days' time.

Normally this frustrating moment would turn into a death spiral of emotional eating. But this time I decided that the best thing I could do for myself would be to pretend I was a racehorse and put some temporary blinders on. If my body felt strong, than I was going to stop looking in the mirror and focus on the fact that I was feeling physically stronger than I've felt in a long time.

I'm not advocating for ignoring reality, that's not healthy either. We need to be honest with ourselves about the state of our health. But if the image in the mirror is going to destroy a groove of healthy eating and exercise, than it's better to put some blinders on until the moment passes.

A Different Type of New Year's Day

I've always loved New Year's Day. It represents a clean slate. It's a chance to start over, do things the right way, "get my act together" and stop killing myself slowly with bad habits.

I've spent previous January 1sts surrounded by a stack of  fitness magazines and notebooks, making endless lists of menu plans, workout itineraries and weekly schedules. Like many other "dieters",  I would attempt a way-too-intense workout and make a spartan meal to start the year off right. And by 9:08 a.m. on January 2nd all of the previous day's planning had been nullified by a craving and caving in to a sugary foe.

This January 1st is different. I am still planning out a weekly menu, but it's something I do all of the time now. I am still making a schedule of when I will work out this week, but that's because if I don't put it on the calendar other things can easily become "more important." What's different this year is that I understand that planning is not the Holy Grail of weight loss. Don't get me wrong, planning is important. "Failing to plan is planning to fail." We can't feed ourselves properly without having the right food in the house and making time to prepare it. But the number one thing that I need for a healthy lifestyle is my mental game plan.

This is the whole point to Brownie Rehab. Most of us are intelligent people who understand that we need to exercise and eat healthy food in order to be fit. But for compulsive or emotional eaters, this knowledge is not enough. We need to have the mental tools to help us make the right choices WHEN LIFE IS THROWING US CURVEBALLS. Menus and workout plans can't help when the kids are screaming, the checkbook is in the red, your Mother is gossiping about your cousins and the car is making a $1000 noise.

The first tool in my mental game plan is the emotional eating journal. If you don't have one, click here to read all about it. Once you've tracked your triggers for a few weeks, the next step is to pause and ask yourself "What do I REALLY need?" when you find yourself reaching for that brownie. This is the part that takes practice.

The first question to ask yourself is actually  "What am I really upset about?" The mental conversation might sound like this: "The kids are fighting and I can't take it anymore. My nerves are on edge. I don't have any patience left. I'm exhausted and raw."

The second question is "What do I really need?" The obvious answer is that you need the kids to stop fighting. But what else specifically can help the situation? Maybe the kids need some time to themselves - not necessarily a punishment, just time without their sibling to feel like they can do what they want instead of having to constantly negotiate.  It could be as simple as having one kid play in the kitchen and the other one play in the family room. 


If you keep pondering "What do I really need" you might find other answers too. Maybe you'll admit that you need some time to yourself to decompress. It's like the pre-flight instructions on a plane - put your own oxygen mask on first, before you try to take care of anyone else.  Try to get a babysitter, negotiate free time with your spouse or call another Mom that you can trade drop off playdates. You might realize that you're just physically tired and you need to force yourself to go to bed earlier instead of staying up sucking time on Facebook.

This example happened to be parenting related, but the idea is always the same. When you find yourself staring into the pantry, searching mindlessly for something you know you'll regret later... pause.  Ask yourself  "Am I actually hungry? Why am I looking for something that I know I'll feel guilty about later? Am I actually upset about something? What can I do to resolve whatever is bothering me?"

The deeper you delve into "What do I really need?", the closer you'll come to gaining control of emotional eating.

The core of emotional eating is that we eat to stifle our emotions, the same way an alcoholic drinks to escape their problems. Actually dealing with our emotions and trying to problem solve are equally, if not more, important than any menu plan or exercise routine.

Happy New Year. May this be the year that you find what you really need.

xoxo,
Kay

Weight – Food – Behavior – Spirit

Years ago, people like my grandfather would say “Cousin Thelma has a weight problem.” Often it would be said in the same tone as “Cousin Thelma has the chicken pox.”  Well meaning relatives told Cousin Thelma to do a few calisthenics like Jack LaLane so she’d “lose the weight” and find herself a man.

A few decades later, conventional wisdom said that the real problem was the food itself. A dizzying array of conflicting reports confused us to the point of not knowing what was safe anymore.  Do you remember when bagels were the darling of the no-fat movement?  There’s not a drop of fat in them, what could be wrong!  Fast forward fifteen years and now bagels are nothing but 700 calorie behemoths that will send you into a gluten-induced death spiral. Every few years there is another food put on a pedestal, only to be sent to the chopping block later.  Don’t eat fat! Don’t eat carbs! Eat only raw food! Juice everything! If you would just follow this 28-day Fat Loss Diet, you’ll be healthier and happier! Food choice obviously matters, but even when a food plan is sane there is a giant chasm between seeing a diet printed in a book and actually following through on putting only the approved food into our mouths.

More recently experts began focusing on behaviors. Weight loss advice concentrated on when and how you ate:  Don’t eat anything after 7:00 p.m. or it will instantly turn to fat on your hips.  Fill up on soup and carrot sticks before going to a party with a tempting dessert table. Don’t go to the grocery store hungry. You can’t eat junk if it's not in your house.  While this is all sound advice, there is still a disconnect between knowing what we should be doing and actually adhering to the plan.

I am not saying that food choices and behaviors are irrelevant, but I believe that for many of us the underlying problem is a crisis of spirit.  You can interpret the word spirit in a bunch of ways, but I’ll start with a basic example. We know that certain foods are better for us then others, so why can some people consistently make good choices when others can’t?  Think back to a day when you realized that you were making healthy decisions easily and almost effortlessly. I’ll bet that it was probably a good day. For me, those days are extremely rare. But when I have those magical days where everything seems to be going right, it’s far easier to also make good food choices.

The rest of the time, when I didn’t get enough sleep, the kids are fighting, the car has a flat tire and customers are running amok at work, it’s really difficult to pay attention to how much better I’ll feel if I skip the drive-thru and eat a sensible salad for lunch. I guess that’s kind of the definition of emotional eating! But when I do things that feed my spirit, like connecting with friends, doing something nice for other people, giving my family some undivided attention and getting enough sleep and exercise, it starts a wheel in motion that naturally brings about more frequent “good days.”

Some people are comfortable taking that term spirit even further.  There is a growing trend that connects a belief in a higher power to the ability to make successful lifestyle changes. Overeater’s Anonymous (OA)  uses the same 12 step program as Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundation of both programs is believing in a higher power of your own understanding and leaning on that higher power in times of weakness.  Don’t let the term higher power scare you. For many people it’s a traditional God, but for many other people it could be the higher power of the group itself, or any other way that they envision a higher power. This is a foundation of many traditional rehab programs. I’ve included a link to OA in the resource section of this blog. If you feel like an alcoholic who eats instead of drinking, check them out.

However you wish to define spirit, it makes sense to include some spirit enhancing activities in your wellness plans. If you want to change your diet,  your spiritual state can either help or hinder your best laid plans. So if you haven’t done it already, start your emotions and eating journal. It’s the research that you need in order to take the next step in gaining control.

Lessons from the Fat Shrink - Step 1

There was a very specific reason why I named this blog Brownie Rehab. For most of my life, I've truly felt like an alcoholic who ate sugary confections instead of drinking. I frequently searched for an actual rehab, not for alcohol or drugs, but for food. I found treatment centers for anorexia or bulimia, but I never found a place just for compulsive eating. All of that changed when a good friend of mine underwent gastric bypass surgery recently. As part of her surgey, she had mandatory counseling with an eating disorder specialist. And luckily for me, she was more than willing to talk about what she learned.

The first step was to create an "Emotions and Eating journal". Now this is not your typical "track your food" advice that many dieters receive. The idea is NOT to log the day's descent from pious breakfast to afternoon binge. Instead, you are to track what you were feeling and what events were happening at the time you are eating. My friend and I were both shocked at how obvious our emotional eating was, once we started logging the correlation between events, feeling and food. Here is an example:

6:00 AM - tea, toast, peanut butter, fruit salad - house is quiet, kids are still asleep

7:00 AM - piece of cheese - making kid's lunch for school, starting to run a little late, mindlessly put it in my mouth

9:30 AM - yogurt and banana - running errands, getting alot accomplished

11:30 AM - grilled chicken sandwich - potato chips - at a restaurant and they came with the meal, so I ate them

2:30 pm - 3 cookies - boys home from school, cranky transition

2:45 pm - 3 more cookies - youngest son is having a temper tantrum and I'm trying hard to ignore it

3:30 pm - scoop of peanut butter straight out of jar - just got off phone with my Mom. She insisted on telling me all of the family gossip even though I'd rather just stay out of it.

You get the idea. I made it nice and obvious in the example above, but after a few days I really could see a blatant correlation between stress and snacking. My friend had a similar experience. A few years ago I would have told you "I'm not an emotional eater. I only eat because I'm bored, it tastes good, packaged food is easier and has a consistent taste, etc." But now I know better.  I've finally realized and admitted that I am a classic emotional eater.

Try it yourself for a few days. It might be an incredible eye opener for you. For years I felt like I had a good understanding of what I should be eating, I just didn't have the willpower to stop myself from sabotaging an otherwise healthy day. In fifteen minutes I could completely destroy ten hours of good food decisions. I was completely frustrated and angry with myself. But the emotional eating journal was truly my first step to finally finding my way to sanity.

After learning from my friend that counselors specializing in compulsive eating actually existed, I finally sought one out myself. And once I found one resource, many more resources appeared soon after. In the next few weeks I'll tell you everything that I've learned so far. If you've been spinning around the weight loss Merry-Go-Round, please follow my journey to get off the same Merry-Go-Round and reclaim my health, my body, my sanity and my life.