My twitter buddy Trish was having a tough time this week. She felt she did all the right things and yet she gained 2 lbs on the (*%#@^^!!) scale!
Here’s my answer to her:
I’ve had to work through many frustrating situations in my weight loss journey. Since I’ve kept my weight loss for over 10 years now, I’ve learned a lot. You might not like what I’m going to say, but you asked “what would I do?”
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Most of us don’t want to think of ourselves 20, 30, 40 or 50 years from now. We tend to imagine ourselves just like we are today, or project a movie of ourselves shot through a soft-focus rosy filter with beautiful lighting.
But our job, our primary job in life, is to make sure we get to 73 one day. And the path we take will determine what that 73 looks like. Take a look at Ernestine Shepherd at 73!
Now, you might think that my blogging about Ernestine has to do with her body. Well…
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I love baseball. I love the symbolism, the metaphor, and the geometry of it.
Phil Hughes is a Yankee pitcher.
He started his big league career with a couple stints as starting pitcher in 2007 but was injured in just his second game. He rehabbed but wound up in the minor leagues. Phil DID NOT LIKE the minor leagues! He made no bones about it.
Last year, he returned to the major league but didn’t fit into the Yankees’ rotation of starting pitchers. He wound up in the bullpen, a place starting pitchers don’t like. Phil, however, said he’d do anything not to go back to the minor leagues (hint: he had motivation).
This year, he competed for the 5th and last spot in the Yankees’ starting rotation of pitchers and won it. Yankee starting pitchers are VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE!
Good for Phil, right?
Last night was his second start. He was hurling heat! His curve ball was curvy (admittedly a girly descriptive for a pitch), his cutter was slicing across the plate at unhittable angles.
He issued only 1 walk in 5 innings. Phil was working on a no-hitter, a rare feat in baseball! (Even rarer, a perfect game is no walks and no hits.)
It was mesmerizing. After the 6th inning, still a no hitter!
After 7, Phil still in charge!
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If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a very funny sketch from the April 10, 2010 Saturday Night Live featuring Tina Fey and her “brownie husband.”
Tina Fey and Brownie Husband from SNL
Food, especially those that heighten the senses like caffeine, sugar and chocolate, are often substitutes for connection, intimacy, and uncomfortable sexual feelings. Chocolate and sex produce similar emotional charges in the brain. “Brownie husband” is always available when we’re not in a partnership, or our key relationships are overstressed or poorly scheduled. Today’s over-busy world poses considerable challenge for the intimacy within relationships.
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What the world calls “weight loss” is a temporary condition based on a diet, not on real life. As I discovered, we pay for temporary weight loss with deprivation, excessive exercise, and, most importantly, we pay with the body’s precious metabolism. Then, we’re forced to give back the “weight loss” when we can’t support the payments anymore.
I call this “renting weight loss.” It’s prevalent in our society, and heartbreaking.
As I lost over 70 lbs. (and sustained that loss for 10 years), I learned a few things. Speaking at my 10th year celebration forced me to think about all my lessons from an overview perspective. It looked like this:
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When I look back at my weight loss, and my current healthy way of living, I see that what I ate was much less important than what was going on in my head.
I was a fat thinker.
It didn’t matter if I wanted to lose weight; I was never going to succeed until I changed thinking fat into thinking thin.
One of the things I did was examine the equations in my head from a different perspective, and bust them if they led to overeating, destructive attitudes, or feeling bad about myself.
Here are some examples:
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This past weekend, I led a wonderful seminar full of amazing women learning about permanent weight loss for the first time in their lives. Many of them had been focusing on food as a solution to excess weight for 10, 20, 30 years! It’s funny how we tend to doubt ourselves, rather than the methods foisted on us by commercial weight loss, doctors, trainers, diet gurus, etc. So often, we naturally assume we did “something wrong” when the diets fail time after time.
But this workshop was about changing our minds! And we did! Mindgames, be gone! We witnessed some major change to thinking patterns that get in the way of progress towards a healthy weight.
March 13 also officially marked my own 10th anniversary at my current weight after losing over 70 lbs. I very much wanted to be teaching others on this anniversary so the timing was perfect. I was looking forward to raising a glass of champagne with friends and clients but, when the time actually came, I was oddly emotional.
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As I travel, spreading the word about permanent weight loss, I often speak to middle and high school girls about health, body image, and the negative impact of dieting on weight. It’s always very touching for me to look out over the classroom and see the young women as I speak. Many of them (according to some statistics, about 50%) are already dieting and associating being thin with deprivation.
Thin = Deprivation
Wrong!
Most of them can’t look ahead to see how their current behavior and stringent dieting will lead to frustration, anger and excess weight in their twenties and thirties. It takes many years to see the real equation:
Dieting and Food Avoidance = More Fat
If I could do one thing for these girls, who deserve a healthy future free from disordered eating, it would be to freeze them right where they are.
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- Confused? Most people are. All this is diet advice from the perspective of what I call Diet Mentality. Based in fea… https://t.co/oLbdhU6utw
- https://t.co/0JcSIOHFVS https://t.co/0JcSIOHFVS
- I've always said exercise is more important than food control. What do you think? https://t.co/nRyJeKMZ9y
- Before and after pictures are usually complete fakes, and give us the misconception that the "after" picture is the… https://t.co/QUdTrITjeG
- Take a look! Wisdom! https://t.co/zjh6DbmIh9