Unsafe at Any Size

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

Down another .6 for a total of almost 113 lbs lost!  Pretty good considering I’m not doing what I “should.”  Meaning I’m not tracking.

Our leader handed out a slip of paper with nine tracking free days on it.  Hah!  Every day is a tracking free day.  Really, I would be losing 1-2 lbs a week if I were On Plan.  But I’m not, and I don’t.  And I’m ok with that.

At most, I think I’ll go for another 10 lbs.  I’ve achieved my goals with weight loss: I’m healthier, I don’t have joint pain, I can do stuff I want to do, and I’ve inspired my husband to come along for the ride.  I’m living a healthy life, regardless of what the scale says.

I cook most of the food I eat now, and I think that has the most to do with being healthy.  Oh, I guess WHAT I choose to cook has something to do with it… I used to make fudge and cookies for myself, yum!  Those days are no more.

I really do believe that junk food is as addictive as heroin.  How else to explain continuing to do something you know is bad for you?  Like those rats in the study, I would’ve tolerated electric shocks for that fudge.

I used to LOVE Halloween, and what fat kid didn’t?  A license to eat all the candy you could get!  I would strategize how to get the most candy, from the streets I’d love to visit to the costume I’d wear (maximum mobility!).  Getting mugged by the bigger kids for your candy was always a risk, so  a firm handle on the candy bag was essential.  Oh, and that bag?  As big as it could be.  None of these dinky plastic pumpkins.  A pillowcase didn’t have any Halloween decorations, but it couldn’t rip and could hold a LOT of candy, even by my standards.

Strangely enough, my mother didn’t limit our candy consumption; perhaps she was going by the theory that you let them eat as much as they want and they’ll get sick of it.  HAH!  Maybe I did have a tolerance level, but I never managed to hit it.

My candy was gone within days.  First the fun sized chocolates, next the miniature chocolates.  Next, the pseudo chocolates (Milk Duds).  Finally we got down to the crappy candy like Nekkos and Smarties.  Even though I didn’t really like them, I ate them anyway.

Then I tried to mooch from my sister, who of course ate candy like a sensible person.  It didn’t seem that sensible to me, because if I didn’t get into it, the dog would.  What a waste, or so I thought at the time.

N9wadays, I’m not so scared of the costumes, unless you count being scared by how much I’m going to spend on my kids’ costumes (yikes!).  I’m not scared of the bigger kids stealing my candy, but of them putting out awesome candy on their desks.  And am I going to be one of those moms who steals candy from her kids’ stash?  Um…. I plead the fifth.

How bad is all that candy?  Hungry Girl has a great list of the calories/point values of all your Halloween treats, from blechy smarties to miniature chocolates to fun sized.  Who knew that a Reese’s peanut butter pumpkin had 4 points?!?

What’s your strategy for Halloween?

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

I’m jealous.  My husband lost a whopping 4.2 lbs this week following my “pay to eat” plan.  So did I have similar success?

Not so much.  I lost only .2–that’s right, there’s a . in there.  Ah well!  Better luck next time.  Maybe if I tracked… nah!

My meeting was rather annoying, too.  The topic of the day was getting in your filling foods, but we got stuck at the vegetables.  What was annoying was the attitude of one of the participants.  Now, one of the things I like about my meeting is it isn’t all “everything is wonderful” all the time.  But still, you have to wonder why some people return if there’s NOTHING they can do to improve their situation.

In this case, this member couldn’t find any way to eat more fruits and vegetables.  She doesn’t like vegetables like eggplant or bell peppers.  Her brother-in-law bought tons of fruit, but it didn’t “call” to her.  Her inlaws cooked, and she couldn’t get them to follow a recipe.  She won’t cook.  When she made a big salad, she gained weight the next day.  And so on.

At the end of it, it’s like she wanted the room to agree that, yes, you are powerless.  Yes, there really is nothing you can do.  But if she really believed that, why was she there?

We can always come up with reasons why we “can’t” do something.  And sometimes, we really can’t.  But sometimes, we’ve boxed ourselves in with reasons so we don’t have to leave a place that’s comfortable, but not making us particularly happy.  Don’t fool yourself though that you are really powerless; you’ve made a choice, and you’re coming up with reasons to justify that choice.

So I’ve made a choice not to track points.  I’d definitely lose weight if I did. But at this time, I just don’t want to.  It’s not that it’s too hard, or inconvenient.  It’s a choice I’ve made.  Maybe I’ll change my mind.  But it’s my choice to make; I’m not the hapless victim of circumstances.

So what are your reasons?

I’ve been having a lot of problems with free food recently.  It’s been easier this week because the fountain o’ candy has run dry, but it’s a tough thing in general.  It’s really tough for my husband, too, who contends with a newsroom full of candy bombs.

I realized that the biggest difference between free candy and candy at the store is that free candy, is, well, free.  I don’t have to actually make a choice and pay for it.  Even when the amount transacted is trivial, it’s that transaction that makes it easier for me to resist.

So, this week, I set up a deal with my husband: all that free candy isn’t free.  If either of us eats a candy bar, it’s ok, but we owe the other a dollar.  Whatever the “street value” of the food, that’s what we owe.

A wonderful thing happened: we were both able to resist the free food now, since not only was it not free but you had to ‘fess up about it, too.

And my husband lost 4.2 lbs this week!  That’s huge at any time, but especially so when you’ve been doing this for a while.  He’s down almost 80 lbs altogether.

My weigh-in is tomorrow.  I doubt I’ll match his success, but I feel I’ve been successful just by putting this one to rest in my own mind.

How about you?  How do you fight free food?

We have such great intentions.  Eat well!  Exercise!

But somehow, those good intentions sometimes fly out the window.  Eat well!  But that brownie looks so good.  Exercise!  But it’s more fun to watch TV.

Why do we trip up?  Why can’t we follow through?  Are we just weak people who can’t make up our mind?

Actually, we’re many different people, according to an article, “First Person Plural” by Paul Bloom in the November 2008 Atlantic (yes, you read that right, I’m a little behind).

According to Bloom, the reason why it often feels like we are at war with ourselves is because we are.  Instead of a unified “I” who makes decisions and then acts on them, we have a multiplicity of selves who are constantly jostling.  One self may say, “no more brownies!”, but another self may say, “ooo, but brownies are many kinds of awesomeness, and there is one right here.”

Drawing on the research of the psychiatrist George Ainslie, we can make sense of the interaction of these selves by plotting their relative strengths over time, starting with one (the cake eater) being weaker than the other (the dieter). For most of the day, the dieter hums along at his regular power (a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, say), motivated by the long-term goal of weight loss, and is stronger than the cake eater (a 2). Your consciousness tracks whichever self is winning, so you are deciding not to eat the cake. But as you get closer and closer to the cake, the power of the cake eater rises (3 … 4 …), the lines cross, the cake eater takes over (6), and that becomes the conscious you; at this point, you decide to eat the cake. It’s as if a baton is passed from one self to another.

Furthermore, these selves may try to self-bind, meaning they try to prevent other selves from getting ahead by setting things up against them.  For example, a healthy eating self might try to prevent the compulsive eater self from getting the upper hand by throwing away the brownies, or not walking by the bakery with brownies.  If the healthy eating self is really sharp, it would probably refrain from writing or reading about brownies.

So if each of us is actually a multiplicity of selves, some thinking long-term and some thinking just as far as the brownie in front of us, how do we win?  The answer is to do as much self-binding as we can.  Make it hard for that brownie eater to get what it wants, and use productive self-talk to keep that long-term thinking self on top.

Does this kind of research help you stay focused?