Beating the Stress Cookie Monster

Remember Cookie Monster from Sesame Street? Do you ever feel like attacking some chocolate chip cookies with the tenacity that he does? Most of us have probably felt that way on a very stressful day-- just let me at 'em! Last week, I blogged about how stress leads to weight gain. Now, we'll take a look at how to handle that stress differently.

The first key is hidden in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. It's the recognition that you will have to deal with the stress. It's an active proposition; stress can't handle you-- you have to handle stress. For some of us, we feel utterly helpless, and the stress of life can be as terrible as the poor cookies must feel as the Cookie Monster is ripping through the package. This feeling of helplessness causes us to hope for some period where our lives will be stress-free and go according to our perfect plan, but generally speaking, this never happens. Stress can ebb and flow, but it seems to always be there. Understanding that you can deal with it effectively is the first step to being effective in dealing with stress. As many others have said in the past, if you don't think you can, you probably won't.

The other equally critical component that people fail to consider in dealing with stress is the perception of stress. Do you realize that you actually create stress for yourself! Things happen to you all the time...what you do with that information and how you process those events leads to the feeling of stress and thus your emotional, physical, and behavioral response.

There is no denying that your perception is your reality, so you should work on shaping your perception so that your reality results in less stress in your life. It's really the classic glass half full or half empty issue. Some of us look at the upside of everything while others of us look at the downside. If you feel stressed and out of control, take a minute to see how you interpret the things that are happening around you. Contemplate the things that you can control and for those things that you can't control, let them go. When everything in your world seems out of control, food is one of those things that you can exert some control over. So you decide to "reward" yourself by making the choice that you want no matter what anyone says. You have the power to do that with so many other areas of your life! Why exert that control to only hurt yourself more? Don't be afraid to exert that power to do something good for yourself.  You'll find that the Cookie Monster can be tamed, and that he likes other things besides cookies.

In your journal this week, identify things that caused you to feel stressed. Try to figure out why you perceived it as stressful, how much control you had in that situation, and what types of choices you made as a result of the control you had. I'll be interested to hear what you find.

The Battle between Consistency and Perfection

In the journey to lose weight and adopt better lifestyle habits, perfection is NOT the goal. Consistency, however, IS the means and the end.


In working with one of my patients this week, I noticed that she was apologizing throughout our session. We were reviewing her food journal, and every time we came across a food she deemed "unacceptable" she apologized for "messing up" or making a "mistake." This is not an uncommon experience—patients tend to approach weight loss as if there are hard and fast rules that can't be violated. In the worst form, people give up after breaking these rules or "cheating" as most people call it. They find that they can't get back on track because they only anticipate that they will find themselves breaking the rules again very shortly.


The All or None way of thinking can dominate your approach to healthy lifestyle behaviors, and when you're on track, you feel invincible and incredibly focused. However, when you're off track, you're a train wreck full of despair. The All or None approach may be helping you in some aspects of your life. For example, you may be able to block out distractions and have laser-like focus on work projects. This can lead to you being incredibly successful and accomplished, but it won't help you when you're trying to modify your lifestyle.

Sometimes, you may miss the mark. Just keep aiming in the right direction

Why can't this approach work? Healthy living and losing weight is not governed by some set of rules and regulations. Despite what some people may have you believe, there are many effective strategies to achieving a healthy lifestyle and weight. You have to find a way of doing things that works for you, based on your situations and unique challenges. As you develop this approach, your goal is to implement it consistently. You also have to take ownership of the actions and choices you make using a framework other than "cheating." You're not cheating anyone if you eat the chimichanga and your original intent was to get the grilled fish. That was a choice you made, and you should own it. When you own it, you have to then understand why you made the choice and how you can make other choices that are consistent with your goals the next time.


Liberate yourself from the unattainable goal of perfection and go for consistency. See how much easier that feels already!

Don’t Let that Gym Membership Keep You from Being Active

Is your gym membership holding you back? Have you ever considered this question…it could be keeping you from being active on a regular basis.

Don’t get me wrong; having a gym membership is a perfectly reasonable way to gain access to a place that will allow you to exercise. But having the membership does not automatically imply that you will use it. The gap between ownership and usage is pretty large. There's a large group of people who are nodding their heads in agreement with me on this. These are the people who started 2012 with great intentions of getting into better shape and losing weight. Their first move was to jump on that local gym membership special. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and it worked out well for the first month.

Then there was the change in the schedule for the daughter's dance lessons; or there was the unexpected job assignment that required some later hours; or (you fill in the blank).

Now it’s been 3 weeks, and you pass by the gym on the way home but haven’t graced them with your presence. In the meantime, you opt to do nothing until you can get back on track. After all, you are paying for this membership and you plan to use it…sometime. One of my patients once explained it to me like this—why go out and walk around the neighborhood or do something at home when he had this perfectly good gym membership that he should be using. He would feel guilty for cheating on the gym by exercising elsewhere.

Physical activity and exercise need to be SIMPLE, structured to MEET YOUR LIFESTYLE DEMANDS, and ENJOYABLE enough for you to look forward to the time. Trying to do the latest fitness craze won’t be successful for you if it’s too complicated for you or you loathe the idea of turning on that DVD. Feeling that you have to meet a pre-conceived idea about what physical activity or exercise is can hold you back from doing anything at all. If the gym membership isn’t working for you, don’t be afraid to drop it and find something you can do. Invest that money in a good pair of shoes and start a walking program or a Couch to 5K program.

This week, devise the simplest plan you can think of to get some higher levels of physical activity. It could be a 10 minute walk at work or a quick loop around the block before you head in the house upon your return home. Let's work on this for the week. Continue your daily journal and keep track of your activity levels. We'll come back with more on exercise this week.   

Smoke and Mirrors

Ok, the third week of our program is here. Now it's time to talk about food.

You've completed a food journal on a daily basis for the past 2 weeks and are starting to recognize some patterns by now. You understand that for every ACTION you take, your body responds with a REACTION that should be fairly predictable, now that you have some data. If you skip breakfast, you're starving by 1 pm. If you wait too long to eat, you make poorer choices. If you're really tired, you graze to keep yourself awake.

So what should you be eating? I'm going to suggest that for now, we ignore the number of calories that you should eat. Again, I'm not crazy, just evil. Here's the rationale for ignoring calories for now. I want you to focus on how to fix the structure of your eating, and this is NOT dependent on calories. As you may have noticed, the days that you consumed fewer calories and didn't starve yourself, you were more regular in the timing and spacing of your meals. Your portions were probably more consistent, and you likely avoided extremes of hunger and fullness.

We've become so calorie focused in our efforts to lose weight that we lose focus on what's important. We begin to implement smoke and mirror tricks to say we can eat whatever we want as long as we don't go over the calorie limit for the day. We trick ourselves into saying that we're "saving up" calories like we're about to make a down payment on a new car. As a numbers game, it may work for a while. Then the weight loss stops and no amount of manipulating those calories from the candy and ice cream will work to get it going again.

Rather than give you a calorie target to manipulate, I want you to use a simple method to get started with your plan of what to eat. Start by adding fruits and vegetables to your day based on the table below. 

Current number of fruits and vegetables per day	Number to add per day
< 2	2
2-4	3
5+	4

Add the fruits and vegetables in place of the highest calorie items you consume (for most of us, it's fried potatoes, juices and other sugar beverages, and desserts). Ideally you should have 5 eating episodes per day. If you have spaces in your day where you were not eating, add the fruits and vegetables there as well.

If you start here, this will naturally lower your caloric intake and keep you more satisfied throughout the day. You are simply swapping higher energy dense foods for lower energy dense foods, reducing calories without trying to cut the amount of food you are eating. Simple how it works...almost like magic!


Keep journaling to see the results...

Never Enough to Lose Weight

Routinely, I ask my patients what they need to be successful with losing weight. Invariably the responses include two things you will never have enough of—motivation and willpower. If you're banking on this to help you make a lifestyle change, you're setting yourself up to fail.
Why do I feel this way? Motivation can be misplaced and fleeting. Willpower by its very nature is inconsistent at best. When these two factors are the things you call upon to help you make better decisions and make changes in your lifestyle consistently, you will find that consistency is hard to achieve.

Let's deal with willpower first. The battle of willpower is something you will always lose. It's like gambling…you may get on a good roll, but if you do it long enough you lose. A misperception I hear all the time is that some people must have incredible willpower to stay thin or not eat certain foods. More likely is that these individuals manage their environment and avoid tempting themselves repeatedly with the things they are trying to limit. If I like to eat chocolate cake (and I do), and I only want to allow myself the option to eat it once a week, it makes no sense for me to bake a cake and leave it sitting on my counter top all week. Every time I walk past the cake, I'm going to think about it and have to expend mental energy to not have some. I may be able to do this when I'm at my best, but the next time I'm upset or really hungry or tired from working all day, I'll probably give in and make an exception. However, as soon as I finish that last bite, I'll resolve to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

Motivation is necessary, but only as a means to get you to reorder your priority list. Your motivation becomes sustained when you can recognize how the benefits of your lifestyle change outweigh the benefits of doing your default. When this happens, you make time for meal planning or exercise. You find ways to pack your exercise clothes for the business trip. You spend your time and effort doing the things that you care about most. If doing the things that are needed to make a lifestyle change and lose weight isn't important enough, you won't do it. The key phrase here is that you need to care about DOING THE THINGS. You have to care about the PROCESS just as much as you do the OUTCOME.
Losing weight is a challenging proposition for many, but very doable. Set yourself up for success by valuing the benefits of the small lifestyle changes you make (walking, eating better choices, journaling, good sleep) and by managing your environment.

 

Self-Evaluation- Form Follows Function

In the first week of your program, I asked you to complete a basic but critical exercise as you begin to lose weight—self-monitoring. The primary purpose of self-monitoring is to provide an opportunity for you to examine your current behaviors, increasing your awareness of what you are doing currently in your daily lifestyle.

Now the second week of your program is about evaluating what you've recorded and making plans for how to move forward. In many instances when we ask people to journal their food intake the week prior to coming to the EatRight clinic at UAB, people will start to recognize patterns and areas for improvement in their typical intake. By the time our team of clinicians meet with them, they have diagnosed many of the problems that are making it difficult for them to manage their weight successfully.

What have you noticed about your week of journaling? Common patterns of eating that I see frequently include skipping breakfast, irregular spacing of meals, unplanned snacking, and grazing. Each pattern of eating has an underlying cause—I skipped breakfast because I stayed up eating "unmentionables" until midnight. So of course, I wasn't hungry at 7 am! Or I graze in the afternoons because I worked through lunch and didn't take the time to get a balanced meal.

I'm almost done with this post, and I still haven't said anything about WHAT you ate. And, I won't. This is all about understanding your structure of eating. In the design world, the phrase "Form follows function" describes a principle that the design of an object should be consistent with the intended purpose or use of the object. Your "FORM" of eating has a lot to do with the "FUNCTION" of your weight. You can't eat in a pattern designed to promote inconsistency and high calorie intake and expect to lose weight in the long-term. It just won't happen.

So for week 2, I want you to review your food journal from week 1 and identify any structural changes that you would like to make. Think about timing and spacing of meals and snacks (ideally every 3 hours); think about triggers that make you inconsistent; think about how the previous meal sets up the next meal. Figure out what you need to do to be consistent with your "FORM" of eating on a daily basis in the setting of your lifestyle. Continue journaling daily on your road to success.

Self...Meet Self

Most of my patients have a pretty good idea of the issues that have contributed to their weight gain or inability to keep it off after losing it a few times over. One of the biggest reasons they often identify is themselves.

The first step I recommend that you take in your plan to get to a healthier weight is to learn more about yourself. Why is that you ask? Because despite all of the suggestions about genetic predisposition or the influence of the environment, we have to look at ourselves as the final decision maker in the choice between having seconds or putting the food away; between taking the walk (even when it's cold outside) or watching television and snacking. If you don't understand your own tendencies and inclinations, you won't be able to critically address the issues that plague you. For most of us, we are creatures of habit and respond to a stimulus in a fairly predictable way. That response may be programmed by years of conditioning (if I say "birthday" you think "cake") or naturally selected because it brings a survival advantage (the taste of sweetness signals us to eat more-- a useful trait when you're a caveman, not so much when you go to Krispy Kreme).

What does any of this have to do with your weight? Everything.

The key is to stop approaching your weight as simply a function of the number of calories you eat and how many minutes you can get in on the treadmill. You need to understand why you eat, when you eat, and how you  eat to be a healthier person. You need to understand if you move, when you have time to move, and how you move to be a healthier person. These issues represent your habits and tendencies that will either need to be overcome/modified or propel you on your way to a healthier lifestyle.

Week 1: Keep a journal for the next week, recording everything that goes in your mouth. Don't record calories (that's right, I said it)! However, do record the time you ate, what you were doing while you ate, where you ate, and your portions. Also make note of your mood and your mental and physical appetite [your mind is saying you could go for something to eat vs. your stomach is saying you need something to eat]. Think about your activity level as well. If you don't have a pedometer, now is the time to buy one.

This is your work for week one. As you jump in, we'll start to talk about some of the patterns that emerge and approaches to change your lifestyle.