Small Spoons, Small Plates

This is sort of another aside, but very important. Judith Beck points out the cultural issues around overeating. Our society is all about huge portions these days. (If you haven't seen the movie Super Size Me, run out and rent it right now!) American restaurants serve much larger portions than is the norm in other countries or was the norm here a generation or so ago. We are used to seeing big plates filled up with big portions for every meal, so a normal portion looks small to us and makes us feel deprived.

Think of this: your stomach is only about the size of your fist. Of course it stretches, like a balloon, but think about how much food it would actually take to fill it up without blowing it up: not much, huh?

My friend Terri commented about eating her ice cream (actually it was low fat frozen yogurt, wasn't it?) with a small spoon and how that changed her experience (THANKS for commenting, Terri!!!): that's something I hadn't though of that would be fun to experiment with. I also recommend serving yourself on a small plate. Check out The Small Plate Movement at www.smallplatemovement.org. It's an easy thing to try.

How Not To Eat Behind Your Own Back

I had a few asides there, but I am back on track. We left off with Judith Beck telling us to to eat slowly, sitting down, and enjoying every bite (or something along those lines, right?). This is about paying attention. When we are eating for reasons other than hunger, we go out of our way not to pay attention. That is when we try to eat behind our own backs.

Geneen Roth's eating guidelines mirror Beck's suggestion, although Roth puts much more focus on these ideas, while Beck slumps them together as one of many "skills" to master.

You may remember Roth's first three guidelines: Eat When You Are Hungry; Eat What Your Body Wants; Stop Eating When You've Had Enough.

Guideline #4 is Eat Sitting Down. Apparently this means at a table. She goes out of her way to tell us this does not include eating in the car. I get the impression that lots of people, especially emotional eaters, eat standing up in front of the fridge. I rarely do this, nor do I eat in the car, but I did catch myself eating my daughter's leftovers as I stood at the sink to do the dishes. Mom: the garbage disposal. I also eat standing up at parties. OK, maybe there's no place to sit down at the party, but you get the idea. It's like if you are standing up it doesn't count. If you fix yourself a plate, maybe even set a placemat and a napkin, light a candle or something...you are much more likely to realize that you are eating. Sounds simple. Try it!

Guideline #5 is Eat Without Distractions. Again, it's all about paying attention. TURN OFF YOUR TV. (That's my guideline #1!) Of course, you may be chatting with your family or friends, you may have some music playing, but let eating be what you are primarily doing. If you are eating while you're driving, you are, hopefully, mostly driving (for example). If you are eating while you are watching TV, you may keep eating until the show is over and not even know what you had. Even if you cannot escape distraction altogether, make a point of checking in with your body every now and then. How do you feel? Has your body had enough?

Guideline #6 is Eat with the Intention of Being in Full View of Others. Do you have eating habits that you would never indulge in when you had company? Do you sneak food that you would never eat if someone were watching? I remember a few times that I ate something simply BECAUSE no one was watching me. (Can't miss those opportunities!) Of course, we all have times we eat alone (and if we are trying to eat without distraction, it is helpful to eat alone sometimes), but we should then respect ourselves as our own witnesses. (What would I think if I saw myself eating this way?)

Guideline #7 is Eat with Enjoyment, Gusto and Pleasure. When you eat a bag of chips while you're watching TV when you are not hungry, do you enjoy them? (Do you even notice them?) Diets can take all the joy out of eating, but eating can be and should be pleasurable. (For me it's too pleasurable.) If you really feel hungry, and you choose something that your body wants and needs, and you sit down and pay attention to the food you've chosen, and then you stop eating when your body has had enough so that you don't ruin the beauty of this meal with a follow up tummy-ache and possible guilt-fest, don't you think you would really enjoy that food? And if you really enjoy and appreciate your food, don't you think you will pay attention to it?

Do you eat behind your own back? If so, do you enjoy that food? And you don't enjoy the food, what is that about?

If you think you don't eat behind your own back (like I did), try following all these guidelines. If one of them is hard for you, that's where you need to put your attention. (If they're all easy, you probably don't need to be reading my blog!)

Remember, it's simple: all you have to do is pay attention.

goals so far

I told you I'd mention possible goals as we went along, and I have not. Based on what we've talked about so far, you might want to consider goals such as:

I will do a self assessment every three months.

I will write at least one long term goal and one goal for this week which will be my first step.

I will track my hunger level before and after every meal for one week.

I will not eat unless I am a 4 or below on the hunger scale at least 3 times this week.

I will stop eating at a 5 or 6 at least one meal a day.

I will make a list of reasons I want to manage my weight.

Even one will do. Choose a goal, write it down, work with it. What can you do in the next 24 hours to improve how you manage your weight? What can you do this week to move you in the direction of your long term goal?

Checking In

Hullo? Anybody out there? Several people have told me they've been reading, but no one is writing! No comments? No questions? No complaints, tirades or confessions? Please, tell me I'm crazy or tell me this is what you've been waiting for. Tell me what's working for you and what isn't. Tell me your successes and challenges. I know I'm not the only one with something to say about all this!

A Few More Tips

I forgot two more quick tips from Judith Beck.

When you want to eat and you're not hungry, drink water.

Or, imagine past the instant gratification to 15 minutes from now. How will you feel if you eat; how will you feel if you don't?

A Few Tips

There are a few more things I learned from Judith Beck that I want to share with you before I move on.

She does talk about differentiating between hunger and non-hunger, but we've covered that. She also talks about decatastrophizing hunger. This was interesting to me. I tend to avoid eating until I'm starving, and then I scarf, but a friend of mine does just the opposite: she does everything she can to avoid getting hungry in the first place, so she snacks all day. Both of us end up over-eating, but her style was new to me! Either way, Ms. Beck's point here is well taken: hunger is not an emergency. I don't need to get in a panic and overeat, and she doesn't need to avoid hunger by eating all day.

She also talks about things you can do to manage cravings. She talks about this in a very "restrictive eating" context, i.e., to avoid going off your diet. I think they can be used in an intuitive eating context too. If you are trying to eat only when you're hungry and to stop eating when your body has had enough, there are going to be times when you want to eat that don't fit those guidelines. Now maybe by now you've gone to therapy to figure out the underlying emotional issues and this is no longer a problem, but short of that, here are some simple techniques (in addition to those mentioned in the last post).

Ms. Beck describes an "Oh Well" technique in which you may feel disappointed that you are not eating that brownie sundae, but you just tell yourself, "oh well," which puts it in the category of being in a situation that you just have to accept, like being stuck in traffic.

I hate these little "techniques" because they feel so contrived and simplistic, but I was stuck in traffic on my way to work last week and was just making the worst of it, feeling annoyed with myself for the route I'd taken, wondering how much longer this would take than if I'd just stayed on 280, generally torturing myself over nothing. Then I just stopped and said, "Oh well." Suddenly, just like that, I was no longer tortured or even annoyed. I was perfectly content. It worked like a charm. (I haven't tried it with food yet, though.)

She also suggests a "No Choice" technique which is similar. Think of the conversations you have in your head about food sometimes. (Like, "Gosh, that brownie looks good." "Don't even think about it, fatso! That's the last thing you need." "But how can I possibly resist? It's freshly baked!" "Don't you dare!" ETC.) Would you ever go through that kind of torment over brushing your teeth? Putting on your seatbelt? Those are things we've put in the No Choice category. She suggests putting "sticking to your diet" in that category, but we're not dieting, are we? I used it, long before I listened to this CD, with exercise. I was having ridiculous arguments every morning about whether or not I would get up early to exercise, and the NO vote was always winning. Finally I got so sick of myself, I just started doing it, and that required basically putting it in the No Choice category. (Incidentally, I also told my husband my plan and had too much pride not to do what I'd said I'd do. That helped more than anything I think.)

She also suggests that if you get off track, rather than using that as an excuse to get farther off track ("I've already eaten two donuts: what's one more?"), cut your losses as soon as you. And, when in doubt, distract yourself from the temptation. (She recommends creating a "distraction box," which might include, among other things, clear nail polish because if you paint your nails your craving will likely be gone by the time your nails are dry. Again, that's not for me, but there it is.

OK, here's the clincher: "Learn to eat everything sitting down, slowly, and enjoying every bite." Here, we hit the jackpot! She mentions this as one of many skills to learn, but I think this, along with differentiating hunger from non-hunger, is the key to what we all need, and this will lead me to my next post...

cognitive behavioral therapy for weight management

In my last post I mentioned Judith Beck. I recently spent too much money on a seminar she put on CD only to find that her program did not exactly float my boat. Too much structure, complete with eating plans and eating schedules: yikes! Yet, it was not a total waste. She is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, and she does have some points that I found useful, so I'm going to share those, along with some of my own editorializing, so we can all get my money's worth out of that seminar.

In my last post, I talked a little about emotional eating, but Beck barely mentions this, focusing more on the automatic thought (cognition rather than emotion) that precedes the behavior of eating. For example, if you reach for a bag of chips when you are not hungry, there must be a thought involved in that decision, whether or not you are aware of it. So you would be thinking, "It is okay to eat this even though my body doesn't need it because______."

We each have a million ways to fill in that blank, like "because I had a hard day," or "because he worked so hard to make this for me" or, well, you get the idea. If you can hear the self talk that precedes the decision to eat more than you need, you will learn something about your relationship with food. (She doesn't go into your "relationship with food," that's way too touchy-feely for a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist--or CBT: those are my words, and Geneen Roth's.)

I'm going to be self indulgent for a moment and use myself as an example. If we eat for something other than hunger, we are responding either to an internal trigger (eg, I'm bored and lonely) or an external trigger (eg, someone brought donuts into the office this morning). I respond to external triggers, and when someone brings donuts into the office, not only will I eat one even if I'm not hungry, I will eat three! Now it would NEVER even cross my mind to stop by a donut shop and buy a donut, so when there's a boxful in front of me, I'd better eat as many as I possibly can, because who knows when I will have another chance? Besides, I need to try every flavor. I don't want to miss anything.

I am an opportunistic eater, or what my husband would call an "opportunivore." I hate to miss an opportunity. If I'm at a potluck, I have to try every single dish. Have any of you ever been to Fresh Choice with me? It's a scary thing.

Now what is that about? I'm actually a little stuck here. It's almost a hoarding behavior. It's like I grew up in the depression. But I have never known any real scarcity. There MUST be an underlying emotion about not having enough...of something. So maybe I am an emotional eater after all...

Beck and CBT in general don't go there (to the emotion behind the cognition behind the behavior), but can you see how identifying that automatic thought can be helpful? It is okay for me to eat this third donut because.... How you fill in the blank will tell you a lot about what you believe about yourself and food and maybe life in general. Then you have to ask yourself: Is it true? Is that statement true?

Where Beck does go is to a very task-focused program, and one of her many, many tasks is writing reminder cards or response cards with statements that will ultimately (hopefully) replace your automatic thoughts. Two of her examples are, "I can eat whatever I want whenever I want, or I can be thinner: I can't have both," and "It's more of a waste to keep eating than it is to throw this food away." (This is my other issue: I am fanatical about not wasting anything--clearly related to that hoarding impulse!)

I guess the idea is when you are considering that third donut, you pull out one of your handy cards which calls your automatic thought out onto the table. Personally, I can't see myself carrying around little cards, but carrying those two statements in my head might turn out to be pretty handy.

One of the main tasks in her program is to motivate yourself every day. She tells you to write a list of all the many specific reasons why you want to lose weight and read your list at least 2x a day (every day for the rest of your life), in the morning and whenever your "weakest point" is during the day. Even better, you can write all your countless reasons on little cards so you have a whole deck to work with. Each morning you can pick out the three that feel most relevant to you that day and carry them around with you and pull them out of your pocket to contemplate throughout the day, maybe even visualize them. If one of your reasons for wanting to lose weight is to fit more comfortably (or at all) into an airplane seat, picture yourself doing just that. (That is her example, not mine.)

I'm all for visualization, and I'll talk more about that later, and maybe Beck's approach would be great for some people, but I think she takes it a little too far for me. Still, I did say at the very beginning that you need to know what your motivation is, and reminding yourself of that whenever you need to can only be helpful. So next time I'm reaching for that donut, instead of saying "This is okay because I rarely have the opportunity to eat donuts," I will say, "Wait a minute, do I really want this donut more than I want to fit into an airplane seat?"

Intuitive Eating

Some people will read my first post about my losing 25 lbs on a low carb diet and ask, Where do I sign up for THAT? Even now, I am often tempted to do it again. If I lose 25 in a year and gain back 15 the next year, it will only take me six years to lose the 30 lbs I originally wanted to lose. It doesn't seem all that unreasonable...does it?

Yet I KNOW that is not the way to go. Even Judith Beck, who developed The Beck Diet Solution (www.beckdietsolution.com), recommends that you don't go on a diet that you can't keep up for life. Who can feel good about a lifetime without a sandwich, a plate of pasta, a cold pint of IPA (my favorite kind of beer)? Not I!

The class I'm taking encourages INTUITIVE eating over RESTRICTIVE eating. I think the whole concept of intuitive eating is summed up in the first three of Geneen Roth's seven eating guidelines: 1. Eat when you're hungry. 2. Eat what your body wants. 3. Stop eating when your body has had enough. (See www.geneenroth.com.)

Following these guidelines has been much harder for me than dieting, but I believe it is much healthier for mind and body.

Eating when you're hungry implies not eating when you're not hungry. So when you feel the urge to eat, ask yourself, Am I Hungry? (See www.amihungry.com.) Some people really don't know how to tell when they are hungry because they never let themselves get to that point! Do you really feel an emptiness in your stomach? Maybe some growling? If not, your body is not hungry for food. So you must then ask yourself, What am I hungry for? What do I really need or want? If your body is not hungry, what you need is not food. What is it?

If you eat when you're not hungry because you feel a desire for something and use food to fill that non-hunger urge, that food that your body didn't need or want turns to fat, and your real need remains unmet.

So from now on, when you want to eat, just stop yourself and ask, Am I hungry? If so, honor that by nourishing your body with the food it needs. If not, ask yourself what is behind that urge to eat, and honor that with the time and attention it needs.

NOTE:

If you find that you often eat for emotional reasons, I recommend Geneen Roth's work (see website above). I have a CD program of hers called "When Food is Food and Love is Love: A Step-by-Step Spiritual Program to Break Free from Emotional Eating" which I listen to during my commute about once a year. I actually am not a big emotional eater, but I find so much of her work valuable anyway. I also find her rather annoying to listen to, though, so I'd recommend one of her many books instead of the CDs. (When she reads excerpts from her books on the CDs it makes me wish I were reading them instead of listening to her. I think she is a good writer.)

The Hunger Scale

One of the simplest and most useful tools I've found is the hunger scale. Imagine the continuum of hunger-fullness on a scale from 1-10, one being famished, ten being so full you are at imminent risk of barfing. Five is just right, neutral, not hungry, not full, comfortable. You can use your own words to associate with each number, obviously (you don't have to go with "at imminent risk of barfing," for example.).

So next time you reach for some food, take a moment to rate yourself on the hunger scale. If you are at a four or below, it's time to eat. If not, it's not. Then, while you're eating, stop every now and then to check your progress up the hunger scale. I try to stop at a five whenever possible, but I usually end up at a six, and a seven only if the food is really tasty.

This sounds very simple, but it's actually quite difficult to do for many reasons. First of all, it requires slowing down and paying attention to our bodies, which does not come naturally for most of us. Secondly, most of us eat for a million reasons besides physical hunger. We are not used to the idea that the purpose of food is simply to nourish our bodies.

Try keeping a small pad of paper with you and just writing down your hunger number when you start eating and when you stop eating every meal for a week. Don't try to change anything yet, just note it and start to be curious about it. If you do this, I am sure by the end of the week you will have a lot of information about your relationship with food. My next post will talk more about what to do with that information.