THE BIG LIE (Continued):
There is another excellent book out there called Like Mother, Like Daughter: How Women Are Influence by Their Mother's Relationship with Food--and How to Break the Pattern by Debra Waterhouse. It is a MUST-read for any woman with children, especially girls, but I think these days it rings true for any children. It explains a lot about how our Diet Diva-ness programs our children into thinking they need to diet, too, whenever they gain a little weight. It also says on page 118:
"Dieting, not a lack of willpower or self-control, is the cause of overindulgence. In fact, just being reminded about dieting can cause us to overeat. A study at Williams College had three groups of weight-conscious women wath the movie Terms of Endearment. One group saw no commercials, one group saw food commercials, and the last group saw diet commercials. Would you like to guess which group ate the most during the movie? The diet commercial group not only ate more, they ate twice as much as the other two groups." (Waterhouse, Debra. Like Mother, Like Daughter. New York: Hyperion, 1997).
THIS is why I never use the word DIET. I have a very impressionable 7 year old. I realize that what I say and do will affect her for her entire life. I don't get on the scale and frown; I just get on and say, "Okay!" Then I invite her to get on, and admire how much she's grown. She has no fear of the scale, and no fear of food.
Yes, I am picky about sugar, but not because she (or I) will "get fat." I am picky about sugar because it's not very nutritious, and she can tell you that if you eat too much sugar, you won't eat the good foods that help you grow big and strong. I keep telling her if she eats well 90% of the time, then she can have "junk" and sugar the other ten percent, and it just won't hurt her body.
I also trained her to LOVE going to the dentist. Same theory. It's all in how you sell it to the kids.
So far even my 8 month old is happy to eat salmon, broccoli, greek yogurt and fresh fruits, among other things! Don't tell me kids and babies won't eat a variety of good-for-you foods. My oldest famously turned down chocolate while trick-or-treating one Halloween, asking for some broccoli instead.
I'm sure the poor woman who heard that request still tells the story to this day!
So to go back to the magazine issue: if the magazines are wrong at best, or misleading at worst, and dieting really doesn't work, then what the heck did I do to lose over a hundred pounds?
Lifestyle change.
It isn't exciting. It isn't sexy. It isn't fast. It isn't a magic bullet or a pill or even a promise from a magazine. Think about it--even the newest weight-loss pills can't work in isolation! You still have to change your eating patterns and move for them to "maximize" your weight loss.
But making a lifestyle change was realistic, and it's what every reputable doctor in the world has recommended for ages. And for me, it works beautifully. I mean, if I wanted to keep getting what I was getting (fatter and fatter), I should have kept doing what I was doing (unabated eating and not moving).
If I wanted something different in my life, I needed to BE different. Lifestyle change means eating and moving in a different way than I did for all those years. I had to CHANGE my LIFE STYLE!
It's as simple as that...and as difficult. Nobody likes change. It's difficult, and it's not comfortable. And we do LOVE being comfortable. I did too, but I had to decide that being fit and healthy was more important than eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it.
Yes, we all want to eat whatever we want. Sure, it'd be a lot more fun to eat cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting every morning than my usual bread, greek yogurt, and banana. But it would also make me jittery in short order (from all the sugar) and, unless I reduced the rest of my daily intake of calories, the 600+ calories in one average Cinnabon would rapidly lead to even more weight gain.
So I eat differently. I eat good food, or what a sports nutritionist I spoke to recently called "High-Test Fuel." She said the body is like a fine machine; junk in, junk out. You know what happens when you get water in your gas tank or, worse, someone puts sugar in the gas tank. The car won't go.
This nutritionist said that it's the same with your body. High-quality foods are defined as low-fat protein, low-fat dairy, whole-grains, healthy fats, and quality carbs (including fruits and veggies). All these are, of course, the same types of foods Drs. Oz and Roizen recommend you eat. They explain that if these foods are eaten in moderation (there is the key word!), they can help you lose weight, improve your cholesterol, and lower your blood pressure. Junk foods will junk you up; you cannot live for long on sodas, chips, and sugar before the magnificent machine starts shredding itself.
So to lose weight, what do you have to do?
This may sound simplistic, but it worked for me. If it didn't, I'd still weigh 259 pounds:
As I have read over and over in book after book, the concept I used to lose over 100 pounds so far is it takes 3500 calories to make a pound, whether it's a gain or a loss. Losing weight is about eating primarily healthy foods in the proper amounts, and the accepted wisdom in the medical community is that if you do nothing else, you at least need to create a 500 calorie deficit each day all week through calorie-watching and/or exercise in order to lose a pound at the end of that week.
But, as I've also read over and over, don't drop below 1200 calories because that's the happy trigger to slow your metabolism.
How many calories should you eat? This is the most simple method I've found yet to figure it out, as reported in both Prevention Magazine (September 2007) and by the Sports Nutritionist I spoke to last week:
Take your goal weight, and multiply it by 13 if you don't exercise. If you exercise 4 times per week for 30 minutes or more per session, multiply your goal weight by 15. If you're like me and actively training for a triathlon, exercising six times per week at 1-2 hours or more per session, you can probably get away with multiplying by 18.
Apparently, if you do nothing else, you'll eventually get to the proper weight. For me, just to be sure, I do the multiplying, then subtract that 500 calories, which for me puts me into the 1700-2100 calories range. I actually shortened it a bit more and personally aim for 1800-2000. Doing that (but some days eating as much as 2600 calories or as few as 1700), plus exercising, helped me lose that hundred pounds so far.
Here's another benefit: if you add exercise, you don't just burn more calories. Oh, no, nature does you one better than that! All that exercising will also create more muscle mass, and muscle burns more calories than fat. Think about it. Fat doesn't actually do much but just sit there! It cannot actively burn calories for you--it's stored energy! That's why you don't want to lose water or muscle mass; you want to lose fat, and gain muscle.
Water will always come back. Dehydration is a bad thing, anyway.
So talk to your doctor, read Drs. Oz and Roizen, and read Debra Waterhouse. Then try to create your caloric deficit through proper "diet" (as in your "particular selection of foods") and through moving your body.
No, you won't lose 18 pounds in 13 days; you probably won't even lose ten pounds in four weeks. In fact, you'll probably only lose a pound a week.
But the pound you lose will be ALL fat, and that's the best kind of weight to lose.
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"The only one who can tell you 'you can't' is you. And you don't have to listen." - Nike
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Disclaimer: Look, I'm not a doctor. However, I am a teacher certified in both California and Maine to teach science curriculum, including the human body (and health/nutrition) to kids in grades K-8. This blog is my attempt to wade through the current thinking on weight loss, and to present it in a way that makes sense to everyone. As a woman who is successfully recovering from obesity herself, I feel it's even more important to help others understand what I did to lose the weight; what worked, what didn't, and what the struggle has been like as I went from morbid obesity to fitness. It doesn't mean that I have all the answers, however. If you want to lose weight, by all means, read my blog--I think I can provide some help and clarity. BUT, please know that I am NOT a medical expert, and you should most definitely consult with your own doctor or family physician before undertaking any weight loss efforts yourself. Weight loss is a personal journey. I'm making mine visible to the world, but each of us has to take our own steps with our own doctor's guidance; please make sure you check in with yours before you try to do anything I have done. Good luck and God bless!
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