Diet Survivors: May 2006 Archives
A little weight gain while learning non-dieting is okay? So say the experts. But I don't think so.
I don't know about you, but whenever I seek alternative healing of any kind, even the more mainstream chiropractic, I never report, "It's getting worse!" I find that these healers love that statement too much. They'll always reply, "That means it's about to get better."
Likewise, non-dieting gurus love to tell you that your new-found weight gain is a signal that you're about to start losing, big time.
I don't buy it. I say, if you're learning normal eating (also called non-dieting) and you're gaining weight, you're doing something wrong. Initial weight gain is not inevitable (unless of course you started out underweight). Instead, your weight should level off or drop.
Here's how to avoid weight gain when you've finally ditched the diet:
1. Take legalizing with a grain of salt. That is, when you legalize all foods, as suggested by some of the non-dieting gurus, this simply means that you'll now remember that fats don't make you fat, and neither do carbs or sugar.
2. Get your mind firmly fixed on the idea that overeating makes you fat. I notice that folks on the board who really understand portion size are often those who've read Gwen Shamblin's book, The Weigh Down Diet.
I urge you to read Shamblin's book (ignore the Christian content if you desire), or mine (a secular alternative to Gwen's), especially if you've read some non-dieting books that overemphasize legalizing while under emphasizing portion control. Gwen Shamblin suggests starting your new normal eating career by cutting your usual portions in half.
Gwen Shamblin aptly states that dieting is about making the food behave (that is, changing the content of the food so it won't make you fat) and that it's now time to make yourself behave instead.
3. Accept the idea that it is dieting itself that increases our appetite, due to chronic deprivation of taste, timing, and certain food ingredients. We try to make up for quality with quantity. Now here we are trying to learn to eat normally again, but our portions are much bigger than they once were, due to all the dieting.
That's why in my book I even go so far (horrors!) as to suggest reading The Zone Diet, just to get an idea of what real portion sizes look like (ignore all the math and precision and do add sugar to your diet).
4. Get used to the word "small." Portions should be small small small. It's okay to eat small portions. If you're listening to your body's hunger and fullness cues, small will be all you need. We think we need a lot of food to be satisfied but it's not so. Instead, we need the right foods to be satisfied.
5. Our bodies don't like refined white flour and tons of carbs. It is my personal belief, based on my experience in counseling others and my own experience, that weight is best controlled when we try to stick to complex carbohydrates (such as potatoes) and whole grains (such as multigrain bread and pasta.) The occasional thin slice of cake made with white flour would be a treat, but ice cream for dessert is generally a better choice. So think complex carbs and whole grains.
6. Our bodies are more rapidly satisfied while chowing down if our meals are balanced. So to the extent possible, at each meal, get some carbs, protein, sweets, fruits or vegetables. Eat the way your grandmother told you to eat.
7. It's astounding to see the irrational beliefs folks carry right with them into non-dieting, the most insidious one often being the belief that suddenly with non-dieting, you can eat all you want of any food, and lose weight. This is known in psychology as "magical thinking." Sorry. It won't work. The truth is that our bodies don't need much food. The point of non-dieting is to find out how to eat such delicious, balanced, healthy, satisfying meals that our bodies are easily happy with just a few bites and lots of conversation at the table.
8. You may have compromised your metabolism by past dieting, but over time, if you allow yourself enough fats and a balanced diet, your metabolism will improve. In the meantime, though, your true appetite (if you're following hunger and fullness) should allow for less food.
9. Some folks try all these things, but they're emotional eaters. Be sure and address your emotional eating.
The biggest challenge for many new normal eaters is the adjustment to small portions. But don't worry. These portions are not dictated by daily points, zone percentages, prepackaged meals, or calorie counting.
No matter how far gone your instincts are, you can restore your ability to judge portion sizes for yourself, and you can learn to curb your appetite. Read "Does portion control scare you?"
When you tune into a radio station, you get a bit of static until you've hit on your target. If you've ever listened to a station that's far away, you may not get a clear sound at all. There may be a bit of static in the background, but if it's faint enough, and you like the song enough, you can tune out the noise.
Folks often call this slight annoyance "noise level." 
From this day forward, you can think of your binges as noise level. That's because the goal isn't to eliminate the binges before learning normal eating. Such focus on binges will backfire.
Instead you can learn to tune in to your station while putting up with a bit of background noise. You might be, on occasion, distracted momentarily by the static, but you can say "Oh yes, there's that noise. I can still enjoy the song."
If ending the binges isn't the top priority, and doesn't have to precede learning normal eating, then what comes first? The answer may not be just one thing, but several, and you can address them in a manner and timing that is right for you. Here's a list of a few things you can do to learn to tune in to your own station:
1. Recognize the true size of meals that your body would need in order to gradually achieve and maintain a reasonable weight.
2. Do your best at each meal to approximate, using your wisdom, the size of good portions for you.
3. Do your best to wait until you're hungry before eating.
4. Learn to tune in to your fullness signals. This could take a while.
5. Experiment with foods that you once thought were evil, and now understand can be the most satisfying foods of all. Perhaps consider going back to old-fashioned American cooking (think "Fannie Farmer" cookbook) or ethnic cooking, complete with carbs and fats.
6. Begin to recognize your irrational and distorted beliefs and self-talk concerning food, body image, and diet.
7. When you do binge, practice the art of being impolite. Learn to interrupt your binges. But don't focus on them. They're not a measure of your success at normal eating. Instead, they will fade away over time from neglect, like a plant without sunlight.
Check out these two companion books on Amazon.com:
How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever
Today, decide to step forward into normal eating. Choose to take the power out of your binges. When they happen, notice them, acknowledge them, then tune them out as noise. Keep listening to the song. Soon it will come in clearly.
Find out how to interrupt a binge.
There's nothing more confusing for folks new to normal eating than the whole issue of what's healthy and what's not healthy. Add to that a layer of what will make you fat, and what won't make you fat, and you have a recipe for guilt, confusion, and reverting back to the old familiar routines. 
So let's sort it out. First of all, we're learning as normal eaters that no food makes you fat. In fact, those formerly evil foods (that which are high in fat or carbs) are the very foods that satisfy the appetite best. We've learned all the wrong rules about how to be thin. So let's go back to the basic of normal eating once more: NO FOOD MAKES YOU FAT.
To be a normal eater, you are learning instead to tune in to your body well enough that you know what will satisfy without much food. It's the amount that seems to matter most when it comes to a good weight. That means adding back to your diet the very evil foods you still feel guilty about. Get over that.
Need help getting over the guilt? Join a free Yahoo! group like Diet Survivors where other like-minded folks will help you deprogram yourself from your former brainwashing.
And now for the second part of the equation. Aren't those foods which you used to avoid for the sake of weight loss also unhealthy for you? No.
Think about it logically. When you eat small amounts of balanced food every day, including fats and carbs, isn't your daily overall consumption low in everything?
In fact, when you're a normal eater, (a person who eats small portions of everything), you are permanently on a low-fat, low-salt, low-carb, low-additive, low-saturated fat, diet.
Why? Because if you're only eating around 2500 calories a day, you don't have to think in percents anymore. Back when you were eating 6000 calories, it really mattered if your diet was fifty percent fat. But now that you're eating normally, fifty percent fat amounts to far fewer fat grams.
And if eating fifty percent of your diet from fat keeps you thin because it's satisfying, isn't that good for your health? Thin folks are at low risk for heart attack, diabetes, and all the other medical outcomes that result from obesity.
Now let's look at one more aspect of "foods that are evil." At the start of the low-fat craze, experts were telling us we get two bangs for our buck if we eat low-fat. First, we will supposedly lose weight, due to the lack of all that hidden fat. We all now know this was misguided, untested theory. It just doesn't work.
Second, we supposedly would benefit from a healthier body. Somehow, we could continue to eat too much, but if we lower our percentage of evil foods enough, we'd be okay. But the experts committed an egregious error, from which they've been trying to recover ever since.
Authoritative sources such as the American Dietetic Association and others now tell us we need those fats. There are three basic categories of fat: saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated. Saturated fats typically come from fatty meats and whole-fat dairy products. The unsaturated fats typically come primarily from vegetable oils, nuts and fish.
According to the American Dietetic Association, we need all three kinds of fats, and the polyunsaturated fats are especially beneficial.
Olive oil, canola oil, peanut butter, nuts, salmon. avocados, margarine with no trans-fatty acids, and many other foods are not only begrudgingly okay for us to eat after all, they are ESSENTIAL for health. Chocolate has health benefits, and so does wine.
Carbs are also essential for health. We need them for fiber, satisfaction, trace minerals and more. Whole grains and complex carbohydrates are best of all.
Apply small portions to these facts, and suddenly the world is completely open to you. Unless you have some other medical restriction, you can now enjoy all these foods and more:
1. Full-fat yogurt
2. Whole milk
3. Omelettes
4. French toast with butter and syrup
5. Coffee with half and half
6. Whole grain toast with butter or margarine
7. Roast beef on whole grain with mayo, salt and pepper
8. Cheesecake
Now imagine that the above list is endless. Those are the foods you can have.
Have you tried real hard to lose weight? To break up with your food? You may have been trying real hard to be normal, to stick to a diet, to count calories, find hunger and fullness, or to lift weights. Like scores of other frustrated dieters, you might be tired of trying real hard.
Let's think creatively. Open up our minds and test our beliefs. Maybe, just maybe, trying real hard is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Have you ever seen the movie "28 Days" starring Sandra Bullock? It's about a woman named Gwen who has a problem. She enters a drug and alcohol rehab rather than go to jail. At first she denies her addiction. Then she tries real hard to avoid her pills and alcohol. But it feels impossible. Indeed, it is impossible. Her substance overpowers her.
While in rehab, she's required to participate in an unusual therapy. She and the other patients are encouraged to lift a horse's leg with the goal of inspecting the hoof. Sounds easy, right?
I don't know anything about horses, but it sure looks from the movie like when those rehab patients try to force that leg off the ground, the horse resists. It digs its foot further in the ground in stubborn rebellion.
Gwen is unable to force cooperation from the horse. It won't budge. Gwen slowly learns about locus of control. She begins to discern which forces in life she has control over and which she doesn't. She learns that to get what she wants from the horse, she needs to exert control only where she truly has control. This requires inner confidence, wisdom, intuition, patience, and a little nudge--in short, all the traits that set apart the winners in the pursuit of normal eating. When it comes to complex problems, trying real hard gets you nowhere.
How can you get your metaphorical horse to cooperate? Borrowing from the lesson of the horse and the wildly successful twelve-step programs, here are some thoughts to meditate on today. They will help you find your own way. They will help you recover from your relationship with food. They'll help you learn normal eating. They'll help you gain control over other areas of your life as well.
1. Learn the serenity prayer, and really work it. If you don't like the religious context, then by all means, alter it. Here is the prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
2. Contemplate the value of intuition. Our country as a culture tends to undervalue this component of wisdom. Yet to negotiate all the intricate forces in the world around us requires something as complex as intuition. These forces are just too numerous and intertwined to always be able to handle as discrete components. Intuition can be so powerful. Be sure it's informed intuition, not uninformed intuition.
3. Discern who and what has control over you, and consider what kinds of subtle, yet powerful influence you may, indeed have. To do so may require shedding some faulty beliefs about how things "ought to be."
4. Identify your goal. This sounds easy, but it's hard work. Is your goal to prove a point? This goal often leads us away from our true heart's desires. See if you can get at the real goal, and fix your sights on it. Perhaps your real goal is to be self-contented. Consider that weight loss may not be synonymous with self-contentment. Tease apart your goals from people-pleasing. Separate them from the world's goals, or your perceptions of the world's goals for you. Set out to think entirely for yourself.
There's nothing like a picture to paint a thousand words. If you like movies, you might like to rent the movie "28 Days." At the end, watch Gwen figure out how to get what she wants from that horse.
