Stop Dieting And Act As If…
People will often ask me, “So, what is your program?” I usually reply, “I call it logic”. If you want to be a particular weight, doesn’t it just make sense to eat (and embrace the whole lifestyle, mindset and all, of course) for the weight you want to be right from the start?
Caveat: It goes without saying that living at your target weight is about much more than just calories. But, this particular conversation is about the calorie aspect. It speaks to the oft ignored or disowned issue of accountability. Obviously, one’s metabolism (and appetite and health by the way) would be best managed if one were eating optimally – arguably the smartest way to do it. However, that actually doesn’t have to happento manage weight – calorie balancing does.
No doubt, your target weight is “intended” to be permanent. Unfortunately, the word “diet” sort of automatically implies temporary. And there is nothing temporary about your new budget – at least, not if you want to stay at that weight! If the diet is temporary – the weight loss will be temporary too.
Why not just learn to live within your new means right from the very start, rather than eating for a flea for X months and then going back (immediately or gradually) to the old budget that put you where you didn’t want to be in the first place? That way you will be learning to act like the person that you want to be. When you arrive there, you will have been practicing that lifestyle all along the way and know how to do it. Basically, you are being the person who is the weight you want to be and just waiting for your body to catch up. It’s not my great idea. It’s just logical.
I often find that people understand it best when I explain this aspect of weight loss and maintenance using money analogies. So, here goes. Imagine that you find out that you are going to be taking a cut in pay in six months, and meanwhile you had charged up a lot of debt on your credit cards. Something people can relate to right now, right? While you probably feel the immediate pressure to to pay off the credit cards (lose the weight), the real priority long term, the task you must learn well and continue to do forever, is to live within your new means (maintain the calorie budget for the weight you want to stay), or you will ultimately find yourself in debt again (weight regain). If you learn to live within the caloric budget of your target weight now, you will continue to lose weight until you arrive there, all the time learning and practicing the ultimate, permanent task.
If it turns out that your target weight calories are a totally unrealistic level of change for you to make, you will find that out along the way. You can find out what is doable for you while you have the opportunity to practice living at the actual weight you want to be. Because of the ability to make caloric projections mathematically, you can also predict how much weight you should be losing each week and not have totally unrealistic expectations of the scale or get misled and demoralized by water weight swings.
If you want to lose faster than the savings that living within your new means will accrue, you can practice some extra “skinny days” along the way, an important skill to put in your toolbox anyway. Regular use of these “skinny days” is a motivator as well as an invaluable tool to budget for the inevitable return of the high calorie days we always promise ourselves we will never do again.
You also have the option to use your exercise to help lose the weight faster if you want – like having a part time job and throwing that money toward the credit card debt. That way, you will learn to live within your new budget without absolutely depending on your part time job (exercise calories) to get the task done. That’s likely good insurance in case you ever break your leg. When you do get all the debt paid off (reach your goal weight) you can then spend your part time job money (add back in your exercise calories) to eat more generally or to deliberately budget for treats you know (from your history of weight regain) you are going to have whether you budgeted for them or not!
Within reason we can figure approximately what that caloric number needs to be for what you ultimately want to weigh. You can estimate it using the standard formulas that account for about 85% of the population, or you can actually measure it to within 1% of the Douglas Bag (the gold standard for measuring metabolism) using a device like the Body Gem that measures metabolic rate. In any case, it isn’t a mystery. Even if that is not exact, (because of course none of these methods is taking into consideration all the other aspects of what you burn in a day), if you keep a diary, you can back into this number by using the information from your own record keeping to figure it out in retrospect – sort of like using your bank and credit card statements to find out how much money you spend on average.
When you look at it from this angle, you can ask yourself telling questions like, “Does a person who weighs what I want to weigh graze on this stuff? Can she afford this? What must she eat for lunch? Does she choose this restaurant? Would she walk or drive? What does her refrigerator look like? To what lengths does she go to fit her exercise in? And perhaps more importantly, your conversation about foods you choose to pass up will become about whether something is “worth it to you”, not whether you are “allowed”, as if someone else is making your rules.
Case in point: One of my clients recently told me a story of how she was brought up short by two lean friends on two separate occasions in the same week (the universe apparently thought she didn’t get the message the first time!). They each went with her to lunch at her favorite regular haunt. On each occasion she said, “Oh, you’ve got to try this. I love this ham, pear and brie panini I always get here.” Both had replied, “Oh, I know. So do I, but it’s not what I get.”
I often ask my clients, if you took a video of yourself over the weekend, would you look to yourself like someone who is preparing for a healthy week, or a week at the weight you want to be? If you looked through all your cabinets and refrigerator, would you think that someone intent on managing their weight lives here?
Another case in point: I ran into a long time friend and fellow struggler at a meeting a few years ago. This is a friend who has always battled with a large amount of weight to lose. She was very distressed because she had been to her physician that day and he was really on her case about her weight and blood work numbers. She said to me, “I’m desperate. I know I have to do something about this. My doctor was all over me today about my weight. Susan, I need an epiphany. I need to go away on an OA weekend retreat.” My reply was, ”Lucy, I’ve known you and watched you suffer with this for a long time. You’ve probably had 1000 epiphanies, but what’s in your refrigerator ready to eat for lunch when you get home? Is your kitchen set up to make lunch easy and mindless?”
Probably a more immediately practical question to ask yourself than, “Where is the nearest spiritual retreat center?” is, “Am I desperate enough to make my lunch in advance?” After all, that is
all most diet programs really are: a menu and sometimes the actual food. They have done for us exactly what we could be doing for ourselves – taken the negotiation out of the equation by making all the food decisions in advance.
I remember once reading a great quote very apropos to this story. It read, “Insight is cheap.” In my experience, epiphanies are great, but meaningless if they don’t inspire me to concrete action. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
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