Safe detour:  So as to not have to make separate meals for herself, MaryLou deals with this by eating exactly what the rest of her family eats, just in much smaller portions and with heaps of veggies (often first).  Beth handles it by using her family’s Friday pizza night as her opportunity to do a Skinny Day, and has a completely separate meal – either steamed Chinese with the sauce on the side or a prepackaged entree.  Wendy has the treat night each week outside the house at a restaurant with the kids alternate picking their favorite places.

Safe detour:  Do something else to reward yourself.  Celebrate your loss!  Enjoy your new weight and the lifestyle it allows you.  Rose put before and after pictures on her refrigerator door -  a great place for obvious reasons.  Ultimately the reward for being slender is…being slender.

Safe detour:  Use the math to know where the scale should be…and then, wait for it to get there.  I had a client who shocked the pants off herself by comparing her actual scale loss to her projected loss over a 27 week window.  She was an excellent record keeper and during those 27 weeks had often been up in her weight when she should have been down, and down in her weight when she should have been up.  Body fat loss  projection:  -45.85 pounds.  Actual weight loss:  46 pounds.  Thank God she relied on the math not the scale on a week to week basis.  She never would have held out through those periods when the scale was not accurately reflecting the facts.

Safe detour:  She realized in that moment that that might not be the wisest criterion upon which to base meal choices.  Since she doesn’t naturally love the healthy things, she doesn’t have the luxury of being able to feel that way about every meal.  Most meals are probably going to need to be, by her standards, utilitarian.  I have many clients who take real pleasure in creative, delicious healthy cooking.  They do create meals that they love.

Safe detour:  On the one hand, once you repeat the behaviors often enough, they do get to be almost autopilot.  Being on track may still need to be deliberate, but it won’t need to be rocket science or such a struggle.    Personally, I think I think about food far less now than when any food choice was an option, when I waited to see how I felt and what I was in the mood for when the time came, when I hadn’t committed myself to being on track by planning and preparing.

Case in point:  I once had this therapist as a client who had always really struggled with her weight despite having a tremendous amount of insight about herself and her dynamics.  After discussing the concept of environmental control and planning at length one day, she stated that she simply didn’t think she should have to go to those lengths to help herself.  I can see how she would feel that way, especially as a therapist.  But, I guess I am just practical by nature.  If all her insight apparently wasn’t sufficient to make food a non-issue for her (at least not so far), why not just do what works?

Safe detour:  There isn’t one.  Learn to pay as you go.   It is the same bill whether you pay as you go or let it accumulate it and pay it all back at a later date.  At least if you pay as you go, you never wear all that fat in between.  If you let it accumulate and then diet it off again, you are overweight going up and overweight going down.  And in the end, you are paying the same bill.   Paying the bill has been the only consequence painful enough to get me to work harder at not incurring the debt in the first place.  Clearly being overweight isn’t bad enough for many of us.  If it were, we’d have been reconciling the debt rather than wearing it.  Denying myself is the thing I don’t want to do to begin with.  I need to bring home the point to myself that my options are only these:  I can deny myself now (and pay as I go) or I can denying myself later (by dieting).

Safe detour:  Learning to create such autopilot habits so that I am not depending on being psyched may be the singlemost most important task I ever undertake for weight management.  Otherwise I am potentially off the hook whenever I am stressed, busy, tired, bored, unhappy, yadda,yadda, yadda.  Can you guarantee that you won’t be?  I can’t.

Safe detour:  Depends on your goal.  Want to just balance your weight?  Then don’t eat more than it takes to be your goal weight, even if you eat all your food at night.  Good luck with that though.  Most people can’t pull this off.  Of course, this may be because they are successful at it and therefore never became my clients.  But I think that most people (to their character credit and unlike me), are not vain enough to override their appetite mechanisms.  This is the most common eating pattern of the morbidly obese population , BTW…clearly not working.  So, better yet, don’t starve.  See my blog entry “Stop Dieting and Act As If”, or “I Finally Figured Out That Starving Is Not My Best Skill” for some ideas and ways to get out of this seductive cycle.

Safe detour:  Fair enough.  Then a safe repertoire of restaurants where you can easily order safely would make sense.  Especially valuable would be those chains that are just everywhere, or delis or Chinese.  Happily they all have options that would work.  Since I am the one who creates the association of particular foods with particular places, I can cement its negotiation-free status by always ordering well there.

Safe detour:  Melissa passed the mantle to another teacher, and now brings an edible arrangement.  Willie just skips the pastries from Brooklyn that he believed he was known (and possibly even invited) for.  So far, no one has asked about them.  Maybe they respect his need to keep himself out of trouble.  Or maybe they were never that important to everyone to begin with.  Happily, he is still invited, so at least he knows he is wanted for his charming presence!