The concept of bodies changing throughout a lifetime really does belong under the category of No Shit, Sherlock. We all understand this logically and intellectually, and most of us probably aren’t going around saying, “I’m going to have this fantastic 27 year old body for the rest of my life!” And yet, over the years I’ve heard many women AND men bemoan their changing bodies once they start to get older. “My [belly, hips, thighs, butt, arms] are getting [bigger, wobbly, saggy, poochy] – and they NEVER used to do THAT!” To be fair, I was once included in this group of complainers that I like to call everybody.

We live in a time that is positively phobic about aging (and maybe there was never a time where this wasn’t true for women, I honestly don’t know). Women are encouraged to “fight” the “signs of age” and now even men are increasingly expected to retain the taut physique of their youth. But bodies do change over the course of a lifetime. So why are we so damn freaked out when it actually happens?

Recently a gorgeous friend of mine lamented that all her pants had become too tight and she didn’t want to buy new ones. She’s a very healthy eater and regular exerciser, but she had just turned 30, so maybe things are starting to…shift. I recalled that right around the time I turned 32, my body, which had maintained its relative thinness for 9 years, also began to change. While my weight remained the same, there was some…sagging. Some pooching about the waist. Some poufing of the hips. I can guarantee you no one else noticed this but me. That’s okay, I noticed it enough for everyone. I decided to “fix” this “problem” of my maturing body with more dieting, more exercise and much more misery. You know how the rest of the story goes.

Now that I’ve had time to contemplate the ridiculous rules of the world, I haven’t got a clue why we are so determined to stave off age; after all, I was a mess in my 20s and much of my 30s (a fun mess, but a mess nonetheless), I struggled professionally in unsatisfying jobs, and in general nobody seemed to be rewarding me for my dewy youth. I have learned so much about becoming a better human in the past 20 years that I wouldn’t trade all my hard-won self-confidence and knowledge for a smaller waist or less saggy face. Those things wouldn’t mean I hadn’t gotten older anyway.

After I gained back all of my weight, I weighed as much as I did when I was 22 (before dieting). But I’m 44 now and my body is much different. I’m more muscular in some areas (probably from exercising) but my stomach is a fatter and for the first time in my life I have hips. Some of the changes in body composition might be from dieting (one theory is that we lose muscle mass which is then replaced with fat, a much better energy storage unit), but I suspect a lot of it is related to aging as well. The number-one complaint from my beloved middle-aged-lady friends is about their stomachs. Women’s stomachs get fatter over time because as estrogen production from the ovaries decreases, fat migrates to the stomach. The reason for this isn’t abundantly clear, but it may be because belly fat produces estrogen. If I had to guess, increasing belly fat after menopause most likely has a protective effect, but currently our fatphobic society focuses only on how to get rid of it (don’t do an internet search on this topic if you want to save your sanity points).

Back to my friend and her dilemma. I asked her, “So what will you do about your tight pants?”

“I’m going to try to exercise more,” she said.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

She paused and then sighed a little. “I guess I’ll have to buy new pants.”

And that’s the moral of the story: our bodies are going to change, and eventually you are going to have to buy new pants. You can do all sorts of crazy things to manipulate your body, or you can just buy some new pants, learn to appreciate all your body has done for you, and then work on the parts of you that really do get better with age: achieving wisdom, intelligence, kindness and happiness.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

I hear it, or some version of it, at least once a week: “Oooh, if I have this [insert delicious or even just plain regular food here] I’ll have to do at least an extra half hour on the hamster wheel tonight.”

To which I usually cringe, roll my eyes, eat the thing in question, and then leave. I don’t have time for this kind of tomfoodery anymore.

I was recently at a goodbye work party with a fantastic spread of Mexican food. Someone had baked the best tres leches cake I had ever tasted – actually, make that the best cake I had ever tasted…ever – and as I stood next to it at the end of the buffet, the middle-aged surfer dude I work with sidled up to the punch bowl, eyed it nervously and uttered, “Hm…is it worth the calories?” Then look lustfully at the cake. “That’s another hour of exercise for me, I guess.”

I didn’t walk away this day. “Really? Because I’m probably gonna lay down for a nap after this,” I said. I suppose sarcasm shouldn’t be my first line of response, but I am what I am.

I get it. He probably doesn’t want to look like me. We’ve talked before and I know he watches his weight religiously. But if you have to do so much hard math about what you’re taking in and expending, if your energy balance is so fragile that a glass of punch or a piece of cake can throw it completely out of whack, then you’re probably not at the weight that your body wants to weigh – a weight I’d like to define as your happy weight.

Your happy weight, by my own definition, is the weight your body arrives at when you’re just living and enjoying life, eating normally and moving pleasurably. You might be trying to eat healthfully and get regular exercise, but those things don’t take up too much mental real estate. It’s the weight your body eventually returns to even after a week of vacation in Paris (two words: baguettes and brie). It’s the weight you maintain without constantly trying to deny yourself cake or breaking yourself at the gym every night. Because, in the end, trying to outrun calories doesn’t work for most in the long run and it’s no fun either.

I remember having similar thoughts about food during my dieting days. Looking at a piece of birthday cake or a slice of pizza, I’d mentally calculate how much extra time I’d have to spend at the gym that night to compensate. I was terrified the dial on the scale would inch ever so slightly, but steadily, upward. Maintaining a constant level of hunger was crucial to my success, but it sometimes resulted in overeating the exact foods I was trying to avoid, without the joy I would have experienced if I’d just eaten the damn thing in the first place. I was definitely not at my happy weight. I was able to buy size 6 clothing but I was so preoccupied with outrunning my calories that I couldn’t even enjoy it.

The reality is, when you are at the weight that is right for you (and only your body can determine what that is, not some diet plan), you can afford to live a little out of balance, a little decadently, on occasion without facing massive exercise compensation. After I ate 3 small pieces of that amazing cake (that’s just how good it was) I was done with sweets for a few days. I craved lighter meals with lots of vegetables. As far as I can tell, my weight did not change significantly (I don’t weigh myself).  The body has its way of bringing us back into balance if we will only trust it.

I hope surfer dude enjoyed the cake without too much guilt, if he could bring himself to have a piece. After all, cake is a normal, wonderful, usually occasional part of our lives. He probably would have been just fine. I know I was.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

Just as I had been thinking this week about how I was going to write about what good nutrition is and isn’t, I stumbled across this (somewhat dubious) article about kale and how it is an accumulator of heavy metals which, if eaten in excess, could potentially cause harm (in theory).

Does this mean you should stop eating kale? Probably not, since this article is a far cry from showing an actual harmful effect from normal kale consumption. More importantly, I think the article underscores how our society’s relationship to food is so completely out of whack. (For a wonderful debunking of the recent kale-panic, check out this page)

Kale fell under the “superfood” category (a term I despise heartily) somewhere in the last decade, and since then I’ve seen kale popping up everywhere in many forms: dried as “chips,” chopped up raw in bagged salads, mixed with grains, presented as the star player in soups. I enjoy kale, but I’m so totally kaled out right now from its ubiquitous presence that I’m about ready for a long vacation to Aruguland (hardy har).

Kale is merely the current symbol for what I’m going to call Superfood Syndrome: a food’s nutrition profile is found to be especially bountiful, and suddenly everyone is eating that vegetable AND ONLY that vegetable.

Except they’re totally missing one of the fundamentals of good nutrition: variety is key to getting everything we need. Yes, kale has a lot of thisthatandtheother nutrients (to be specific, beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C, calcium; the carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin; and sulforaphane, which is known to have anti-cancer properties), but it cannot possibly have everything we need in it.

I think Superfood Syndrome is not about people worried about getting good nutrition. I think it’s about people trying to find the silver bullet that will ward off the inevitable end. I’ve got some sobering news for everyone: no one’s getting out of this thing alive. Even if eating kale (or other superfood) relentlessly every day for the rest of my days added another 10 years to my life, I’m not sure I’d want it if it involved eating the same thing every day. Thankfully, good nutrition doesn’t require you to do that!

Here’s all you really need to achieve good nutrition:

1. Have a good relationship to food.  A healthy relationship to food means you aren’t thinking about it 24/7, you don’t fear your next meal, you don’t need to document everything you put in your mouth, and you feel relaxed, never guilty, about eating. Without this healthy relationship, your eating may end up out of balance at some point, eating either too much or not enough of what your body needs.
2. Eat intuitively. Your body’s signals for hunger and satisfaction are the best guide to let you know when and how much you should eat. Listen to them, not some article or corporation or book or website that purports to know exactly how much you should eat.
3. Eat a variety of foods. Eat every kind of food, from fruits and veggies all the way to fun foods like cookies and cake. You might argue that there is no nutritional value in those treat foods, but I argue that they satisfy other needs in our body, such as the need to eat really yummo foods from time to time. Psychological needs are easily as important as physiological needs when it comes to eating, and there are many different foods that satisfy both. The bottom line is that eating from a wide variety of foods ensures that we will get all the vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that we need for optimum health.
4. Eat fruits and vegetables. At least some every day, if you can. That these foods are really good for you is at least one part of nutrition science we can say we’ve got figured out. Aim for an average of five fruits and vegetables a day; for me that means some days I might not eat more than one serving, and other days I might eat 10. If you have a hard time including fruits and vegetables because you don’t like them, experiment with them slowly and introduce them to your palate a little bit at a time. I was never a veggie lover as a young person, but experimentation over the years has opened up that world to me, and oftentimes I’ll crave some veg like Brussels sprouts (which I upchucked when I was 5 years old) or rapini (which I didn’t even know existed till my early 30s).
5. Enjoy what you eat. We’re designed to enjoy food, so enjoy it! Why spend time eating food you don’t like? Overall, I like including fruits and vegetables and whole grains in my diet not because they are “healthy” for me but because they make me feel good and I like the taste. I just can’t eat foods I don’t like (sorry, quinoa).

Experimentation. Variety. Enjoyment. And that’s pretty much it. You don’t have to be extreme or restrictive in your eating to get the best of food.

So put down that superfood you’re having for the tenth time today and see what else is out there!

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

Perhaps I am a naughty dietitian for saying so, but I think doing “healthy” stuff now to ward off vague future health threats is a terrible motivation for behavior change.

There. I said it. So sue me. But first let me explain.

I think we humans tend more toward hedonism than toward future thinking in that, most of the time, we just want to feel good in the immediate here and now.

This has been gleaned anecdotally by me in a not-at-all scientific way but I’m standing by it right now because 1. That’s how I am myself and 2. That’s how my clients are and 3. That’s how my friends are. So, with only a few exceptions, that is, like, everyone I know! Yeah, people want to be healthy but more importantly they want to feel good.

Somewhere along the way to feeling good and feeling healthy, weight became the stand-in for both, perhaps because it has immediate, visible results that let you know if what you are doing is working AND you feel good because everyone tells you nice things about how you look. But weight is a poor barometer of health and we know now how poorly weight loss works and so now the thing we implore you to do is “eat for your health.”

But I gotta say, that sucks. Even *I* don’t want to do that. And I’m a great planner. So what to do then?

Well, how about a little something I like to call feel-good-now-nutrition?

Let’s say you’re mastering intuitive eating, dieting is a thing of your past, and now you’re ready to try this business of eating healthier. You eat “virtuously” because you don’t want to get diabetes or heart disease, but then you keep forgetting about your reasons for eating this way because it’s a future thing. And who wants to be scared all the time worrying about conditions you might not – or worse, might – get? It’s too depressing, so you put it out of your mind. And I don’t blame you! Aside from some basic (and, sigh, I’m guessing inadequate) retirement planning, I don’t want to think of a future where I may be infirm in any way. I just want to enjoy living in the now.

And that’s where feeling good becomes your new guideline. For example, one of the best reasons to stop overeating is because the feeling of being overly full is just plain unpleasant. When you are in the middle of a meal, then, it makes sense to pause and not think about how healthy you’ll be in 30 years if you stop now, but how uncomfortable you might be in 30 minutes if you don’t stop now. Our internal cues around hunger and satiety are designed to make us feel good. Getting to that hungry-and-ready-to-eat point? Feel good. Getting into hangry territory? Feel bad. See? Simple!

Our bodies seek balance. After even a day of “treat” foods, I find myself craving a pile of vegetables. And when I have them – ones that I like, prepared how I like them (i.e. in a non-diet way) – I feel good. My stomach doesn’t feel weighed down or bloated, and I like that feeling. Or sometimes I want something “heavier” like comfort food, because that’s what makes me right as rain at that moment. Our bodies crave variety so that we get all the nutrients we need from a range of foods. Yes, vegetables are healthy, so there is definitely an advantage to including them in your diet. But there are a ton of feel-good-right-now reasons to include them in your diet, taste being one and bowel regularity being an important other. Can’t poop? Feel baaaad. If you’re not a vegetable lover, try experimenting incrementally with different veggies using recipes that combine them with favorite foods (like green beans sautéed with bacon fat, Stilton blue cheese, and walnuts – thank you Jamie Oliver!).

This works for exercise as well. I only exercise now when I feel like it and I only do what is fun or what helps me to clear my head and loosen my joints. After years of experimenting, it turns out that I feel good getting some sort of movement most days of the week. All of those days aren’t spent at the gym – at most I want to be there two days a week, and others not at all. I’ve found other forms of activity that make me feel good for a variety of reasons. Most recently this has been a line dancing class at work, which feels good not just because it is movement but because it’s totally fun, goofy, and social. Exercise doesn’t have to be about the sweat at all if that doesn’t make you feel good.

So to recap: Feeling healthy = Feeling good right now. Math portion of the post now complete.

Finding the “healthy” foods and the right movement is important, but they have to make you feel good in the moment. We are creatures built for happiness now first and foremost, so let that be your biggest motivator for being healthy. Because after all, our happiness is the most important part of our health!

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

“As soon as a woman gets to an age where she has opinions and she’s vital and she’s strong, she’s systematically shamed into hiding under a rock.” – Sarah Silverman

“Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.” – Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

The body-snark title of this blog is meant to be a bit ironic, but also truthful, I think, in the way that these kinds of messages ticker tape their way across our brains with alarming regularity. This blog is as much about body image as it is about learning to live a non-diet lifestyle, because negative body image is the kind of thing that drives the kinds of harmful, wackadoodle behaviors we engage in such as dieting and the general pursuit of perfection.

One of my very good friends asked me recently, via email, what I thought of botox and fillers and such. This was born out of conversation about not liking getting old and “old-looking.” I don’t steer clear of these conversations with my friends because I think it’s important to acknowledge insecurities when we have them, and then dissect the possible reasons we feel that way. A classic Glenys email rant followed that went something like this (edited for purposes of clarity and general sense-making):

My thought on plastic surgery, botox, fillers, etc. is that they just make a woman look insecure about who she is and getting older, because you can always tell. I’m not judging women who have these things done because we do live in a world that encourages us to hide our age.* But why must we submit to this world? It’s like throwing in the towel and saying, “Yes, yes, we admit it, our only value in society is the physical beauty and youth we have to offer.” And it’s literally ruining our lives. I’m such a better, smarter, kinder, more confident, more fun, wiser person now than I was when I was in my 20s and even my 30s but lately my initial thought (and I AM working to overcome this) when I see photos of myself is “Look at my belly! Look at my sagging face! I’m an old and hideous sea monster!” At the same time, I recognize that this is all bullshit, that no man walks around thinking anything but “I’m great!”  [I know this is not true for many dudes. But I think it might be true for a lot of dudes, and I actually congratulate this kind of self-confidence, we should all walk around feeling like this. As long as you’re not a total dickhead.] Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I’m pretty happy with the way I look, when I bother to look…but this reflexive thinking still rears up and bites me in the ass often enough to be annoying.

So yeah, I sometimes don’t like the external aging process either. I wish I could say I didn’t care, but I also know I’m not alone here. I don’t think we can be blamed for this; we live in a youth-and-beauty-obsessed culture. On top of that our current culture does not support the accomplishments of women unless the accomplishments are 1. The woman is beautiful 2. The woman was “ugly,” then got beautiful (Pygmalion-style) 3. The woman is thin, and managed to remain thin into middle and old age 4. The woman was fat and got thin 5. The woman is young, thin and beautiful.

So we are steeped in this horseshit where all anyone cares about women is that they are winning on either the thin front, the beauty front or the youth front (and bonus points for all three at the same time!). I almost never hear men complain about getting older-looking, maybe because our culture celebrates the actual accomplishments of men rather than how they look doing them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bagging on men, I love men, and this is how it should be for both genders. Unfortunately, lately instead of the situation getting better for women, men are getting dragged into the malarkey of the pursuit of bodily perfection now, too. This is not progress!!

This is nothing Naomi Wolf didn’t tell us in The Beauty Myth. But that was 24 years ago and I’m left wondering, what has changed? The other night I sat across from a pretty, funny, smart woman who fretted that she had been fabulous 15 pounds lighter, but not so much now. There’s something wrong about a world in which someone thinks that 15 pounds can erase the fabulousness of her entire person.

We must fight it. When I start in on snarking myself in photos, I immediately follow it up with two thoughts: A. WHO THE FUCK CARES!? and B. I’m a human who accomplishes real things that have nothing to do with how I look. Because for the most part (trolls be damned) no one else cares what we look like except our own selves, and we need to stop making ourselves feel bad because it’s making us do a lot of extreme things in the name of trying to like ourselves better – like dieting and invasive (and potentially dangerous) surgeries.

My friend who laments getting older-looking is one of the best. She is the funniest person I know, talented, smart, strong, and the person I email first when life is getting me down. She made her way through some seriously hard times with humor and aplomb when neither were required. Looking younger would not make her more awesome. I bet she thinks similar things of me. We are both wonderful ladies who don’t need to pick apart stupid things like double chins and bulging bellies and wrinkles.

If we are lucky enough, we get older and then old, and yes, god forbid, old looking. Why we aren’t looking at those signs of change as badges of honor and saying, “Yes! We made it! Another year to do amazing things!” will be forever beyond me, but I’m going to start making it a habit right now.

*I’m not counting plastic surgeries done for medical reasons, such as breast reduction to relieve pain or breast reconstruction after mastectomies. I’m talking about cosmetic surgeries and procedures for purposes of relieving insecurities.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

There is a peculiar phenomenon that seems to be particular to me, and which has happened to me frequently at various times throughout my life, and it is when people insist to me that I have lost weight when I have not. Yes, I have lost significant weight at least twice in my life which may have attracted notice. These, however, are not those times that I am asked.

Here’s a recent example: A work colleague ran into me in the hallway and exclaimed, “You’ve really lost weight!” I had not – in fact I had just been weighed at the doctor’s and my weight had been rock solid for a year, and I was happy about this.

“Nope!” I said.

“No, REALLY! You’ve lost weight,” she insisted, as though somehow she were better acquainted with the recent workings of my body than I was.

“No, I haven’t. I just went to the doctor and…”

“Take the compliment!” she huffed, exasperated. I’m not a fan of this type of compliment, this sort of kindness-that-isn’t, in which the true message is, “You look better now that you are less fat.” Wouldn’t a simple “You look nice today” have sufficed?

It’s happened three more times since then. On the last turn, I said that I had not lost weight, I’m not interested in weight loss, and by the way, I’m fine with my body just the way it is. She was about to say something else on the subject when I blurted, kindly but with finality, “I don’t really want to discuss my body anymore.” Let me tell you, this does the trick of immediately halting any body talk you’re uncomfortable with!

This also happened to me at my thinner weight, with people who only knew me at that thinner weight, which I had maintained for eight years with little change. I used to wonder if people just imagined me fatter, as though they still saw the aura of my former fat self. Now I’m thinking it may have just been their way of trying to give me an awkward compliment.

I’m being generous, of course. A more paranoid translation might be that it was their way of insulting me, a little hint that I need to lose more weight. Which leads me to the whole point of this post: the weight of others is not really good, polite discussion material.

I get that in our fat-phobic society, telling someone they’ve lost weight is supposed to be a compliment. But think of all the possible outcomes of this misguided statement:

1. The person intended to lose weight and did lose weight and is happy about that, but since about 95% of people regain the lost weight and more, they might later feel bad about the fact that you said they looked better thin, and now they aren’t.
2. The person, like me, has not lost weight, and is left to wonder if you think they should lose weight.
3. The person might have an eating disorder and you’ve just reinforced the destructive motives to keep it going.
4. That person might have cancer. No joke, I’ve heard no end of mortifying stories of people who were being treated for cancer, lost a lot of weight unintentionally, and then friends and family told them how great they looked. Even as they battled a life-threatening disease, somehow their weight loss was supposed to make up for all that. That’s just fucked up. We should have learned this lesson with the indelicate question, “Are you pregnant?” but I guess we haven’t.

I’m not for banning any kind of speech – I value freedom of speech, it’s impossible to police, and frankly hearing the dumb-ass things that come out of some people’s mouths lets me know if I should avoid them or not – but let’s agree that there is such a thing as polite conversation. We don’t ask acquaintances how many times a day they poop, or what time of day/night they like to have sex and in what position (and if you do ask these questions of people you barely know and you’re not their therapist, you may want to rethink your boundaries). So how about we put questions about one’s body under the category of impolite conversation? If they don’t bring it up, you don’t bring it up.

And while we’re at it, how about we do that with people who aren’t in hearing distance too? This kind of body talk (“She’s lost/gained weight,” “She looks anorexic,” “Her boobs are enormous”) happens more toward women than men, and it’s high time women’s bodies stopped being a topic of casual catty discussion. It diminishes what we have or could accomplish apart from our bodies. It holds us back and it doesn’t do men any favors either as they get drawn further and further into the bodily perfection madness. No one feels good about this (and if this kind of conversation does make you feel good, please feel free to examine your own insecurities). I’m not proud to admit I used to participate in this kind of talk wholeheartedly, and it only served to make me more insecure about my own shortcomings and what was being said about them when I wasn’t in the room. The bottom line is, let’s stop talking about other people’s bottom lines.

By the way, I’m not talking about eliminating body talk as useful descriptors, e.g. she’s short, fat and has brown hair or he’s tall and thin. In these instances, body talk is neutral and non-judgmental. Similarly, if you want to tell someone they look beautiful or have a great sense of style, go for it – just make sure it’s occasion- and location-appropriate (i.e. “You’re a hot babe” may not fly well in your workplace with someone you’re not good friends with). I guess what I’m saying here is use your head and just ask yourself, “Is this polite?”

Also, if you want to talk about Joe Manganiello’s pecs in Magic Mike XXL, by all means go ahead because that’s what that movie is all about – people who display their bodies for a living and for your comment (It’s not about the dancing? But I really like the dancing!). Joe Blow’s body on the street is not your business to dissect.

So if you see me on the street or in the hallway at work, let’s talk about something else besides my weight. Like Magic Mike! Did you see that dancing?!?

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

I have been reading Fiona Willer’s excellent book, The Non-Diet Approach Guidebook for Dietitians, which provides a structured approach for dietitians teaching normalized eating (aka attuned eating aka intuitive eating aka mindful eating). I can’t recommend it enough for dietitians. I’m really enjoying the material and it made me think about how I teach this approach.

My shorthand for intuitive eating has always been, “Eat when you are hungry, stop when you are full.” But reading Willer’s book alerted me to something very important: there is a difference between full and satisfied. Satisfied is the absence of hunger that we need to pay attention to in our eating. The absence of hunger is actually the biological signal to stop eating – not feeling “full.” The difference may seem small, but it is in fact profound. It can be the difference between eating more than we need and eating just enough. Stopping when we are no longer hungry and waiting 10-15 minutes will take us to that comfortably full feeling, because it takes at least that long for our body to recognize fullness.

If I hadn’t given this a lot of thought before, I had to ask myself: Am I truly an intuitive eater?

When I first quit dieting, I decided to give myself a break and just eat. I hadn’t heard of intuitive eating yet, and was doing my best to figure out how to eat normally for the first time in my life. For the most part I didn’t binge – that was something I did when I was restricting – but I didn’t have a clue of how I wanted to feel before, during and after I ate a meal. I did become more of an intuitive eater as I learned more about it, but it’s a process that takes time and practice, especially after so many years of restrictive, regimented eating. Lately my efforts at eating well have concentrated around trying to find ways to get more vegetables into my day, but now I’d like to back up a bit and make sure my IE skills are where I want them to be.

So, because I will never ask my clients to do something I could not or would not do, last week I vowed to really start paying attention to my body’s signals around eating.

Hunger is not a problem for me – I recognize hunger like it was an old pal (although I as a dieter I considered it more of a frenemy). I generally do try to eat when I’m hungry but there are times when this is harder to do – like at work. I’m sometimes a poor planner around snacks, so I occasionally (all right, several times a week) find myself starving and without food at hand. Allowing my hunger to go on for so long – either because I am too busy or too lazy to get food – probably leads me to eat more than I need when lunch time rolls around. Thus, task number 1: make sure I have sufficient snacks throughout the day and access to a lunch I want in order to properly honor my hunger.

I realized last week that I have another hungry-habit that is a holdover from my dieting days. Never a morning exerciser, I like to work out (either at the gym, or by going for a walk) right after work and before dinner. But that means we sometimes don’t eat until almost 8 pm, some nights even later. No good – my significant other (S.O.) and I are both starving and miserable by then and a late dinner means trouble for my acid reflux problem. No to mention we tear into our meal like wild dogs at that late hour, sometimes holding our bellies in distress and dismay at how we ate more than we needed just because we were so hungry.

Task number 2, then: we’re going to eat dinner when we are hungry, which happens to be right after we get home from work. We don’t want snacks then, we want to make dinner because we still have the energy for it. I’ve avoided this because I didn’t like exercising on a “full” stomach after dinner…but exercising on a “satisfied” stomach should be fine…once I get there.

Which brings me to discovering my stopping point. The truth is, I’m often stressed and rushing when I eat, either at work because I’m busy or at home because I’ve waited too late to eat. I’ve also always been a fast eater, speeding through meals as though I’d had to compete with ten siblings for food growing up (I’m an only child). So I’m not actually sure at what point I am stopping these days. I have noticed lately that I feel fuller than I want to at times, and I’d like to remedy that.

(Incidentally, I asked my S.O., who is a very well-self-regulated eater, “Do you stop eating when you’re full, or when you’re no longer hungry?” He honestly didn’t know. He sometimes professes to be a member of the clean-plate-club, but nearly 10 years of watching him eat has allowed me the secret knowledge that he is not – quite often he’ll leave behind food that he is no longer interested in, even if it’s just a few bites. Now there’s an intuitive eater. Except when it comes to pizza, his personal kryptonite, and then all bets are off. Hey, we’ve all got something.)

Over the years I’ve participated in mindful eating exercises in which one bite of food is experienced with all the senses. The Non-Diet Approach… also has a script for this kind of exercise. As you eat slowly and with attention, your body and mind have time to recognize that magic moment when the food tastes suddenly less delicious, your hunger is gone, and you know you are done. While you do want to try to enjoy every bite of food, you probably wouldn’t want to eat quite so deliberately every single time; the idea is for you to practice recognizing the signals of hunger/satiety so that eventually, heeding them becomes automatic.

Again, I have to be honest; lately I’ve been eating at my desk, while working. It’s not the best environment for enjoying my food or recognizing body cues, so I’m determined to make eating a priority not only at home, but at work too. Task number 3: I will step away from the computer, I will put down the pen, and I will be one with my meal. I will eat slowly and mindfully and wait for “not hungry.”

I’ve been practicing all of this the last few days: enjoying my food, honoring my hunger and satiety signals, noting the difference between satisfied and full, eating slower. And I’ve been surprised to find that I am eating less than I thought I would at meals and avoiding that unpleasant, too-full feeling I often get when eating out. The whole point, however, is not to trick you into eating less. Eating with the intention to eat less is just another diet. Checking in often with your body means you get to decide if you want to eat more or not based on what your body is feeling, not a misguided sense of how much you think you should eat.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. But after several years of being diet-free, I finally feel ready to really listen to my body and let it be the boss of how I eat.

For more reading on how to normalize your eating, I recommend these books:
Intuitive Eating
Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat
The Diet Survivor’s Handbook
Overcoming Overeating

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

It starts out with a simple declaration: “I really need to eat better. And I could shed a few pounds. It’s for my health.” So you join a weight loss group. You don’t really think of it as a diet because diets don’t work, everybody knows this. You’re just going to eat healthier and lose weight.

You measure and weigh out portions with the fancy food scale you bought and the measuring spoons that tell you exactly what one portion of everything is. At first this is easy and kind of fun, like a game. You’re a little bit hungry, but it tells you that your new diet eating plan is working, or at least that’s what someone in your weight loss group told you. You do frequently think about cookies and cupcakes, a lot more than you used to, but you’re not going to have any because this is for your health. Also, they don’t fit into your eating plan.

You love walking, so that becomes your main source of exercise. You walk almost every day and you love it.

You lose a few pounds pretty quickly and you think that all the weighing and measuring and avoiding of butter was worth it. People constantly tell you how great you look now that you’ve lost weight. That feels pretty good! Luckily, you barely hear the insult in the compliment.

After a few weeks, you have your first trip out to a restaurant with friends. You’ve been avoiding this for a while but you miss your friends and eating out. You scan the menu for something you can eat without breaking your diet new way of eating, but there is nothing. You heard about how restaurants will prepare food to your specifications if you ask. “Can I have a plain, skinless grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables without any butter or oil?” The meal arrives and you are elated at how easy it was to ask and get what you wanted requested. Then you eye your friends’ meals and your mouth starts to water a little bit. However, you are also proud of how good you are being, and you revel in a mild sense of moral superiority at your eating austerity. You don’t even have a bite of the dessert your friends split. It looks delicious.

Soon you have lost several pounds. Somewhere along the way you decide on a number. What you have lost is great but you have not yet reached the number. You have reliably lost a little bit each week with your diet sensible eating that you think getting to the number will be easy. But then a funny thing happens. The number on the scale stops going down. For weeks. “You’re just on a plateau,” says the kindly weight loss counselor. “It happens to everyone. Just keep at it.”

Clearly things must change. You cut your portions down a bit more. Walking for exercise, you decide, is just not cutting it, so you join a gym and start moving very fast on cardio machines. You don’t like being inside instead of outside and you dread the sweaty, exhaustive pace, but hey, this is for your health.

A few weeks after you’ve made these restrictions changes, the scale breaks free and drops a pound. “Congratulations!” the lady says as she takes your weekly payment.

Even more diet changes: you switch to a very high fiber cereal that tastes like gravel and gives you painful gas cramps every afternoon. You eat massive quantities of low fat microwave popcorn (the kind you heard gives people who produce it “popcorn lung”) throughout the day to keep the now-constant gnawing hunger at bay. You make large quantities of steamed vegetables and low-fat, low-carb vegetable soup that you don’t want to eat after it’s made – but you do. Even with all those vegetables to fill you up, you are still hungry before you go to bed. You suck on a sugar free candy to fool the pangs away.

You lose a few more pounds but the scale stalls again. You have stopped eating out altogether – you can’t stand looking at others’ meals, can’t deal with the wonderful aromas of the foods you are afraid to eat. You’ve bought new clothes for your slimmer body but have nowhere to wear them because social outings usually involve food or drink, and right now you can’t have too much of either of those. It’s just not worth messing up all that work you’ve done on your weight health.

One day, you get tired of eating the same 10 safe foods and go out with friends. “What the hell!” you think, and order steak and mashed potatoes and sautéed vegetables. You think you deserve this because you’ve been good, but the fact is that you cannot stop yourself from eating the entire plate, well past your point of fullness. Even though your stomach hurts, you order dessert and eat it all yourself. You are not sure what came over you to make you eat that much.

You feel ashamed of your binge and determine to get back on the wagon. You do at first, but that meal opened the flood gates. You think of food 24 hours a day. You simultaneously lust for and fear your next meal. You double down on your exercise and diet (yes, yes, it’s a diet, you know it and can no longer deny this to yourself), but the number on the scale starts to move up a little anyway.

You hate everything you are doing to maintain this weight loss. You hate the gym and feeling like you have to go. You are so bored of your monotonous diet and also the lack of taste, and you are so so hungry. You dream of cheesecake one night and wake up in despair. You are not sure this is for your health anymore.

You keep gaining weight, even though you never really stopped dieting and exercising. So you start eating everything and anything you want. You know this is worse than how you ate before you dieted but you need to fill yourself, fill up the hollow feeling. You quit exercising, including walking, you haven’t done that in forever anyway and all the joy has gone out of it for you. Nobody compliments you on your weight gain.

When all is said and done, you have gained back all your weight plus a few more pounds. You don’t know that this is your body’s way of saving your life from another famine like the one it thinks you just went through. You also don’t know, yet, that you will go through this many more times, trying a different diet (Zone, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, Volumetrics, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem) each time, all with the same results. And in the end you’ll have gained an extra 40 (or 50, or 60, or 100) pounds and you will think it is all your fault.

Someday you will find out that there is another way. It’s a way to learn how to be healthy but without worrying about your weight. A way to live without fighting your body. You will find that revolutionary. Will you choose it?

*This is a composite of many different diet experiences…including mine.

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!

This little gem showed up in my inbox this weekend: Cost-Effective Weight Loss Programs Help Shed Pounds And Keep Them Off.

The article reports on a study that examined a low-cost weight loss program, Taking Pounds Off Sensibly (TOPS), following 75,000 participants for seven years. The program cost about $92 a year.

Within their first year at TOPS, 50% of participants reached clinically significant weight loss. “Clinically significant weight loss” is defined as a mere 5% loss of body weight. It’s significant because it’s been found that even just a 5% weight loss results in vast improvements in “weight-related” conditions. We’ll talk more about this later. After seven years, 62% of those who lost weight maintained that weight loss. The cost of attending TOPS for seven years was roughly $644.

Well stop the presses, we’ve finally found a cure for obesity! It’s the miracle weight loss cure we’ve all been waiting for! Or so the title of the article would have us believe.

But let’s break it down, shall we? Of 75,000 people, 37,500 (50%) of them were able to lose 5% of their body weight. For a 200 pound person, that equates to 10 pounds, 15 pounds for a 300 pound person, etc. After seven years, 23,250 (62% of 37,500) managed to keep off that 5%. That amounts to 31% of total participants. So roughly one third of these folks were able to lose 10 to 15 pounds (slightly more for people who weighed more than 300 lb) for the mere price of $644. Having done my time in the weight loss industry – both as a customer and an employee – I know that most people don’t join these kinds of groups to lose just 5% of their starting body weight.

You know, I can give myself food poisoning and lose 10 pounds for free. I’ve done it before (by accident, obviously). I might not keep that weight off, but at least I’ll keep $644 in my pocket.

Meanwhile, 69% of the participants either could not lose any weight at all or regained the weight they lost. My guess is that they also spent $92 a year to find that out. Great. Did they get their money back, or were they just blamed for their lack of willpower? All 51,750 of them.

Now let’s talk about this clinically significant weight loss. The health authorities (the CDC, the NHLBI) have lightened up on the previously heralded 10% weight loss (likely having realized that even that is unattainable long term for most people) and now encourage a mere 5% weight loss. I won’t argue that some studies back this up – they do. But a 10 or 15 or even 20 pound weight loss for a 200, 300 or 400 pound person still leaves them fat. If the conditions that are “weight-related” are improved but the person remains fat, what does that say? It says that it might not be the weight loss at all that caused the improvements.

What do people who try to lose weight start out doing? They eat better and exercise. Gee, could it be the behavior changes and not the weight loss that caused the health improvements? We’ve already seen numerous studies that show that healthy behaviors make healthy people regardless of weight. Yet weight loss, a possible by-product of behavior changes, is touted as the supposed cure. Which would be great except it doesn’t seem to work for most people.

We’re smarter than this. This study does nothing but support the idea that we can’t turn fat people into thin ones, which is what people who buy into weight loss are being sold. Who plans to pay $644 to stay almost the same weight when you can do that for free? You don’t need to pay that much to make changes in your eating and exercise habits and become healthier (but not necessarily thinner), I promise you. You probably don’t need to pay anything at all.

It’s just a shame that the remaining 69% of the participants weren’t studied for the improvements they might have made in their health despite a lack of weight loss. Although my guess is that if they didn’t lose weight, they probably got discouraged and gave up any positive changes much quicker than those who did lose weight. And that, my friends, is the problem with a health intervention that focuses on weight loss.

Thanks but no thanks. A failure rate that high won’t see me giving away that kind of money. How about you?

Subscribe and get my free guide:

Why you overeat …and what to do about it

Click here if you just want my newsletter!