Archive for the ‘General’ Category
NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS THAT STICK….AND TEN SMALL CHANGES THAT COUNT
Monday, January 2nd, 2012It’s a fresh start….it feels great….but I’m afraid I won’t keep it up…. I’ve heard these words, or something like them, a lot this week. So, I start this new year with thoughts on our resolutions to eat well, lose weight, or otherwise improve our diet habits.
New Year’s diet resolutions usually fizzle quickly. The goals we set may be too broad and sweeping, too out of touch with reality to last. They don’t factor in the inevitable complications and challenges. They don’t consider whether or not we’re really prepared or ready. Grand resolutions—say, to eat every day in a way that keeps weight down, for good, forever, period—require understanding and preparation. I’ll return to those in my next blog. Here, I offer some ideas for smaller resolutions.
Those who follow my blogs will know that I believe in the power of small changes (related blogs listed below). Changing one or two specific habits may or may not lead immediately to lost pounds. They open the door to other and bigger changes, though. And they usually have value in themselves, however they affect the scale in the short run. Perhaps most important now, they’re likely to stick. They’re less likely to fizzle out in two weeks. So they’ll leave you feeling confident about your ability to make future changes. (more…)
WEIGHT LOSS SURGERY Part 1: Neither Nightmare nor Magic Wand
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011Mention weight loss surgery, and you’ll get some strong reactions. “Surgery!?” , some will exclaim, as if you’ve suggested amputation for a scraped knee. People just have to eat less, or deal with their emotional problems, is usually the thinking here. At the opposite extreme, there are those who believe their lap bands will finally free them from diet struggles. “At last I’ll be like everyone else, not always thinking about food.” Both of these surprisingly common views distort reality and don’t support real solutions.
Recent statistics suggest that about two thirds of American adults qualify as obese (with children’s rates catching up). Nearly 250,000 people had bariatric (weight loss) surgery last year alone. Increasingly, the overweight turn to surgery as procedures become safer, insurance-covered, and effective against illnesses like diabetes. Given these facts, a discussion of sane eating, and how to achieve it in life, must make room for these realities. To fit them into the discussion, we first must confront those harmful misconceptions. (more…)
COOKING TO EAT MORE SANELY
Friday, October 21st, 2011Yes, it would be great to adopt all those habits that lead to better weight loss and health. But here’s one to tackle that you might underestimate in your search for diet solutions. Simply put: Cook more often.
Cooking can check weight and improve health even if you’re no expert low-cal chef. When we cook at home, we can avoid the added salt, sugar, and fats contained in take-out, fast-food, or restaurant fare. We can control portions better. We can up the vegetables, shrink the starches, make more of those foods we don’t gorge on. We can make extras for dinner to bring for lunch and thereby avoid the cafeteria. We can get used to, and develop preferences for, real fresh foods that are good for us and our waistlines.
Two myths can stand in the way of our cooking more, however: (more…)
DIET: You’ve Got to Exercise the Willpower Muscle, Too
Friday, October 7th, 2011On self-control, again….
http://www.hivehealthmedia.com/diet-exercise-willpower-muscle/
IF SELF-CONTROL’S A MUSCLE, WHY CAN’T I EXERCISE IT?
Friday, September 9th, 2011A new book on willpower asserts that it’s a muscle. That is, you can strengthen it with practice, and you can exhaust it with stress and overuse. This makes sense, and years of research back the idea. For those trying to eat differently—to lose weight or simply to choose more wisely—the strength of this muscle can determine whether change occurs or not. As with physical exercise, many of us struggle to start and stick with it. However, even those who can flex the muscle in other situations can find it too weak to budge when it comes to food. So if self-control’s a muscle, why can’t you exercise it here, too?
The book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, draws on Baumeister’s work on self-control. The benefits of self-control have been documented for decades. And studies have established that practice indeed bolsters self-control (even if people vary genetically in that trait). Baumeister’s work goes farther, finding that self-control can fizzle out—when people’s minds are taxed and fatigued, when they’ve been struggling at self-control for too long a stretch at once. Here is more solid evidence against restrictive dieting. And here is support for the idea that small, persistent efforts will become habits. That’s all good news, and helpful for those working to lose weight.
It can be hard to see, though, how this applies to those who say “It feels like a force comes over me”, as they head for the ice cream. Or: “I just wasn’t thinking,” as they pull into KFC. “I knew I was doing it but didn’t care,” as they attack the brownies.
And what’s going on when a person’s done well for months, then suddenly finds herself slipping into old ways, regaining every lost pound? These are the stories of many, maybe most, overeaters. (more…)
FALL CHANGES
Monday, August 29th, 2011Sometimes I think we should make resolutions in September instead of January. After all, this is when we’re shifting anyway—returning to work or school, getting kids ready for new routines, adjusting to cooler weather and shorter days. It’s a time of transition, usually to busier days that are nevertheless more structured and predictable than in the looser summer months.
By resolutions, I’m not referring to grand declarations of sweeping change once and for all. I’m thinking more of those smaller, much more realistic adjustments–changes or additions to a routine, say– that may not sound dramatic but lead to solid results that tend to last over time. These are the kinds of changes that can join your new, or reestablished, fall routines without too much pain.
For example, we often return to more predictable mealtimes in the fall—even if schedules vary from day to day with kids’ activities or work meetings. Busy as we may be, we can at least look at the week ahead and know where we’ll be when. Healthy weight maintenance and sane dealings with food relate directly to how we approach mealtimes. To move closer to those goals, pick one mealtime to improve on a regular basis. Try the change for a week, fine-tune and problem-solve as you go along, then try it a second week. If you veer off your plan for any reason, resume as soon as you can and go from there. (more…)
MORE HELP FOR SANE EATING
Monday, June 27th, 2011Regular visitors will notice some streamlining in the EatSanely website (and later this week: a new easy-to-access format for the monthly newsletter). These tools are meant to help you succeed in eating more sanely. This journey, as I often say, usually requires trial-and-error. It doesn’t necessarily proceed in a straight line. What works for one person may not work for the next. And the world we live in isn’t always helpful. As you review the tools available to you, look again at the working definition of “sane eating” first offered here:
Sane eatingis eating in a way that maintains a healthy-enough weight, for good, without constant worry or guilt. In other words, without short-term or extreme diets that cause frustration and regain. This doesn’t mean one way of eating fits all. It also doesn’t mean that this is easy, or that it happens all at once. Given the world we live in, though, it does mean that we each have to find some way of reaching that sane eating path—because our food world isn’t going to change overnight. Finding your own path to sanity can take trial and error, and time and attention, given that we live in a world of fast food, fake food, 300,000 diet books, and 1,400 calorie hamburgers.
To eat in a way that keeps your weight where you want it, and makes you feel good, you may need to tackle how you think about food, how you deal with stress and relationships, and how you take care of yourself generally. I hope the tools offered here lead to solutions that will work—and keep on working for years—for you.
Sane Eating – Part 3: A Road Map
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011Many thousands of entries pop up when you enter “diet” on amazon.com or any search engine. At the very least, this confirms the fact that what works for one person may not work for the next. But if you’re asking yourself how to manage weight and eat more sanely, you can come up with a few rules of thumb to follow, no matter who you are.
To start with, keep in mind that any eating issues exist in a complicated social, biological, and psychological environment. If you’ve reached a point of discouragement because of repeated weight loss failures, this will hopefully feel at least a little freeing to you. It’s not your fault, and you can learn some new ways.
So, first, you must figure out what is the best way for you to eat. Many healthy diets exist (and of course the books to explain them). Each and every one of us must learn what foods, in what quantities, contribute to our maintaining a healthy weight. This must be a pattern of eating and food choice that you can live with forever, period. Anything that is short-term will likely lead to regain and a return to diet craziness. Furthermore, diets that require special foodstuffs and odd concoctions won’t last for the long run.
Finding a diet pattern you can live with usually takes some trial-and-error, paying attention to how you feel physically, whether or not you feel satisfied, how the plan fits with your lifestyle and preferences. Many people need help with this part of their plan—for example, from a coach, nutritionist, or doctor. On the other hand, many, maybe most, former dieters know what works for them and feel that what they really need are better skills for sticking with it.
Then, you get started, with the intention of creating a path and a chain of habits that can survive a lifetime. How do you prepare yourself to get started? Do you start all-at-once or in baby steps? Understanding how change happens, and what helps you to change, can help. (more…)
NEWS FOR SANE EATING
Friday, May 6th, 2011 Every day, the media serves up something about food or diets or weight. Some of it can support our efforts to eat sanely, and some not so much. In either case, these items often spark my blogpost comments In the last two weeks I’ve culled quite a few of these flashes. I share them here in hopes that one or more might catch your interest, or spur you to make or keep wanted changes.
-research supports the idea that “stealth vegetables” can help you reduce your overall caloric intake while keeping you feeling fuller. The idea is to add pureed vegetables to meals like soup or casseroles, making them heartier, more filling, and more nutritious as they curb your appetite. This same body of research suggests that cayenne pepper might act as an appetite suppressant, particularly for people who don’t regularly eat spicy foods.
-the April 11, 2011 New York Times Magazine features a cover story about sugar as a toxin. I’m still hearing people talk about this one. Read it for a jolt—and possibly some aversion therapy if you’re trying to reduce your sugar intake. Generally speaking, reducing sugar can help you eat more sanely, whether you’ve got a lot of weight to lose or not. (more…)
BE KIND TO YOURSELF: It’s Better for Your Diet
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011How we beat ourselves up for that brownie or pizza slice! Once we’ve lost control or overdone it, forget about self-care and serenity. But research keeps confirming some ancient wisdom when it comes to eating better. Gentleness, being kind to oneself, paves a better path to success than self-flagellation.
One early (2007) study asked dieters to go easy on themselves in the face of eating proferred candy. Eaters first rated as “highly restrictive” ate less after hearing a self-compassion message than those who did not. Christopher Germer, Ph.D. mentions this study in The mindful path to self-compassion (2009). He explains, “When dieters’ heads are ‘not cluttered with unpleasant thoughts and feelings,’ they can focus on their dietary goals rather than trying to improve their mood by eating more food.” (more…)
-
Subscribe To Our RSS Feed
Categories
- "Thin From Within" (20)
- Addictions (10)
- Assertiveness (3)
- Eating at Work (2)
- Emotional Eating (24)
- exercise (3)
- Featured Article (2)
- General (29)
- Habit Changes (57)
- Healthy Foods (19)
- Holidays (9)
- Kids (2)
- marriage (3)
- relationships (10)
- Self-esteem (6)
- Weight Loss (67)
- weight loss surgery (2)
Archives
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- July 2009
Copyright © 2009. Eat Sanely. All Rights Reserved. Site Design By The Green Internet Group.