That’s hardly a profound statement. Even one of the biggest diet industry giants of all time uses that phrase in their commercials. As if they could convince us that counting the “points” in every bite we take isn’t a diet!
Before finding that British lifesaver otherwise known as Paul McKenna, I was caught in one of the cruelest Catch-22’s imaginable. I had been on enough diets to know they didn’t work, at least for me. And yet, I thought the only way to lose weight was to diet.
So I had simply given up.
I had even resigned myself to the probability of an early death, and that is a sad thing to admit. I ached everywhere. I knew I was digging myself an early grave with my fork, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
I went on my first real diet when I was 14. Between my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I dropped maybe 10 or 15 pounds, and went from being fairly chubby to just a little chubby. I had not even darkened the threshold of obesity then, but I was a teenage girl, and just a few extra pounds were enough to cause me great distress.
I kept that weight off, miraculously, throughout high school, and graduated wearing a size 12 or 14, back when those sizes really meant something – before the days when the fashion industry decided to make us all feel better about our expanding waist sizes and increased the dimensions on the clothes they produced.
No I wasn’t a size six, but I wasn’t fat either, and if I had stayed that weight I would be a healthy, normal-weight woman right now.
But instead I dieted my way up to a size 24.
Here’s what I’d do: I’d pick a date somewhere in the near (but not too near) future.
Always a Monday.
Usually the first Monday of the month.
If January 1 fell on a Monday, that was an omen. That was God’s designated day to start The Diet, wasn’t it?
So I’d have this future date in mind. D-Day. It would be a week or a month or several months in the future, and it would be looming.
On that day, I’d begin eating cardboard in the form of rice cakes, dried out chicken breasts, and lots of unseasoned veggies.
Facing that, there was only one way to handle the intervening time: Eat like there was no tomorrow.
So with D-Day in mind, I’d go on a binge. If it wasn’t nailed down, I’d eat it.
After D-Day, I'd tell myself, I’ll never eat another potato chip in my life, so I’d better sit here and devour this whole bag now. Cookies will be banished forever, so I need to finish this batch immediately.
D-Day would arrive, and I’d get up resolved to once and for all diet my way to a reasonable size. I’d eat some tasteless breakfast, write down the calories or points or carbs, depending on the Diet of the Day, and set forth into the world.
By 10 a.m., I’d be ravenous enough to eat the paint off my office walls. When someone came by and announced a co-worker had baked a cake and put it in the break room, I’d grit my teeth and say, in my best martyr’s voice, “Oh, no, I can’t eat that. I’m on a diet.”
Maybe I’d make it through lunch, eating a dry salad.
Maybe.
But by the end of the day, some of that cake would be in my belly.
I’d decide at that moment that I had messed up, and would say, “oh what the heck!” and abandon the diet then and there.
There was always such glee and freedom in that moment when I realized I was not going to be eating rabbit food for the rest of my life after all.
So then I’d go on my merry way, eating whatever I wanted to eat. But I always knew that another D-Day was coming.
This story varied from time to time. There were periods when I did manage to stay on some restrictive program for a significant amount of time and lose weight, but I eventually always slid back up the scale. But most of my “diets” were of the one-day or half-day variety. I cannot count the number of times I did this.
Is it any wonder I got fatter and fatter? I was always eating in anticipation, or reaction to, a Big Diet that usually never even got off the ground.
So about three years ago, I just gave up. I just ate, whatever I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.
Still, in the back of my mind, I knew I was eventually going to have to do something.
In a way, it was the same as all the times I’d set a D-Day date in the past, except I wasn’t even going through the formality of setting a date anymore.
All of that seems like a nightmare now. I was like the mouse stuck in a maze who kept bumping his head against the same wall, when if he’d only turned around and gone the opposite way, he would have been free.
To get free, I had to turn around and go the opposite way.
I had to turn my back on the whole diet mentality that had worked such a number on me for so many years, and face the light.
I had to acknowledge that no one else – certainly no dieting guru – could tell me what I should eat and when I should eat it. I had to realize that the answer was within me all the time, and that to be free of it all – diets and excess weight and the whole tragic rollercoaster – I only had to tune into what I really wanted and needed.
It was a revolutionary idea! Could I really depend on myself to know what I needed to eat and when I needed to eat it? Could I trust myself around all the so-called “trigger foods” that had plagued me in the past?
For so long, I’d been told I needed some “expert” to tell me what to eat if I wanted to lose weight. I believed that, but at the same time, I resented the heck of that so-called “expert”. So I repelled. Time and time again.
Now that I’ve started following Paul McKenna’s Four Golden Rules, I’ve developed a whole new relationship with myself. I do know what’s best for me, and I can trust myself to do what needs to be done.
The other day, someone offered one of my co-workers (the low-carb queen who yo-yos with amazing regularity) some watermelon.
“Oh, no,” she said, in her best martyr voice. “I can’t eat that yet. That’s added on week four of my diet.”
Watermelon! How restrictive would a diet have to be to deny you fibrous water?
I could start an office pool. We could bet on how long she’ll be doing this. She’s more stoic that I could ever be, so it may be awhile. But sooner or later, she’ll get tired of being told what and when to eat, and she’ll throw it to the winds.
And then she’ll inflate like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
And I’ll still be listening to the only expert that really matters when it comes to losing weight:
Me.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Why am I fat?
That’s a weighty (every pun intended) question.
I’m the kind who wants to think it’s because I really like the taste of food. Some people like to build model airplanes. I like to eat.
Other times I cite family and geographical history. I live in the South, and just today I saw a report about how fat we all are down here. All I have to do to know that's true is look around me, starting with my own family.
I can remember sitting at the lunch table with my mother and aunts, eating something good and fatty. Or gooey. Or crispy. Anyway, something sinfully good, as we would always label it. We knew it was sinful to eat like that, but it was the only vice my Southern Baptist aunts and Pentecostal mother would ever own up to.
“What do you think we should have with the pork chops for supper tonight?” my Aunt Estelle would ask my mother, right in mid-bite of a cathead biscuit.
“How ‘bout some mash potatoes, field peas with fatback, and cornbread,” my mother would reply, chomping on her fried chicken thigh. "We can make some gravy with the pork chop drippings."
How could a person live with this family – one who talked about supper at the lunch table – and not end up overweight? How could the daughter of a woman who collected Southern Living cookbooks – and actually used them – not have a belly shaped like a basketball?
Add to that the couch potato tendencies that run deep in my family, and hardly anybody would escape with any kind of figure at all, except round.
And yet, I know it’s more than this.
I am resolved that this is the last time I’ll ever need to lose weight; that I’ll get rid of it this time and it will be gone for good. I’ve found the answer, I truly believe, with Paul McKenna’s Four Golden Rules (see previous post) and I’m never going back.
But I’ve got to look a little deeper if I really want this to work. The rules are simple enough, and I can easily follow them, but that really doesn’t matter when my self-sabotage reflex kicks in. And I realize that I do have something inside of me – not just in the external taste of food or family history – that wants me to stay fat.
I was a puny young child, but along about puberty I began to plump up. This is not unusual. Pre-adolescence is a scary time, and sometimes you just want to hide. I found refuge in the food that was readily available at my house. Not only did it comfort this changing person I was becoming, but it helped me to avoid so many scary situations. I was the kind who turned into a trembling zombie if a boy so much as looked at me, so I can only conclude that subconsciously I wanted to make sure they didn’t look.
The funny thing is, looking back, I wasn’t really all that fat. But because I felt fat and ugly, I ensured myself immunity from the whole boy-and-girl thing that I just didn’t feel I was ready to handle. Sure, I wanted a boyfriend. I dreamed about it all the time. But daydreams were safe, and always turned out the way I wanted them to. A real boy was an entirely different matter.
Despite this, though, I did manage to meet a sweet, shy boy at the tender age of 17 (both of us) and marry him at 18. We lived more or less happily ever after for just under 27 years. I’d like to say he had a mid-life crisis and ran off with his secretary, but these stories are always more complicated than that. Suffice it to say the fairy tale ended. So I found myself at age 45, on my own for the first time ever, and really fat.
That was over 13 years ago. I found out that I actually like living alone. I learned there is life after divorce. I have friends and I’m happy.
And fat. Oh yes, through thick and thin, I’ve been fat.
My weight has fluctuated through the years, of course. What woman’s doesn’t? I have had periods of nearly normal weight several times throughout my adulthood, and for about three years in my early 30s I lost a significant amount and was actually thin by most anyone’s standards outside of Hollywood.
But here’s what I’ve discovered. Every time I’ve lost enough weight to begin feeling good about myself, some inner girl who wants attention from the guys comes out. She wanted it way back at 13, but was afraid of it, so she pushed it away with food. Funny thing is, that girl is still there. She still wants to push it away with food, and she still wants to be what Paris Hilton would call “Hot”.
And those two diabolically opposed sides are always at war.
I’ll be 59 in just a few weeks. You’d think that frivolous little Miley Cyrus wannabee would be dead and buried by now. But, no, as I’m discovering through the shedding of an estimated 30 pounds or so, the girl lives on. She wants what she wants.
She wants a guy’s eyes to follow her all the way down the street and she wants to hide behind food and fat. And she wants both these things at the same time.
McKenna has a technique, where he asks you to acknowledge that each side of you – the side that wants to lose weight and the side that wants to stay fat – both have your best interests at heart.
The side that wants to lose weight wants you to be healthy and look better and be able to buy clothes in the front of the store, instead of having to trudge all the way back to the furthest corner where they hide the “big girl” sizes.
The side that wants to stay fat wants to protect you from all the scary things that we fear can happen to skinny girls: heartache and heartbreak and even, in many cases for those who have had terrible pasts, abuse and rape.
He says to imagine a side of you in each hand, and acknowledge they both exist. Then he tells you to bring the two sides together and pull them to your chest. This is intended to incorporate your two sides and help you to stop self-sabotaging.
Have I done it yet? Well, no, but so far I haven’t really needed to. That little girl has just barely begun to raise her head at this point. Maybe the grandma in me will prevail this time. After all, the “boys” are all old men now, if not already dead, so the little girl may just not be that interested. Maybe she’ll acknowledge that her time has passed, never to return, and just quietly go away.
Maybe.
But if she insists on waking up and doing battle, then I will do what McKenna says. It sounds kind of silly, but everything else he’s told me to do has worked beautifully, so I’ll just have to trust him on this one.
Food tastes good. That’s undeniable.
And I was raised to love it. That’s a given fact.
But that’s not the whole story, and acknowledging that may help me lose weight and keep it off for good.
I’m the kind who wants to think it’s because I really like the taste of food. Some people like to build model airplanes. I like to eat.
Other times I cite family and geographical history. I live in the South, and just today I saw a report about how fat we all are down here. All I have to do to know that's true is look around me, starting with my own family.
I can remember sitting at the lunch table with my mother and aunts, eating something good and fatty. Or gooey. Or crispy. Anyway, something sinfully good, as we would always label it. We knew it was sinful to eat like that, but it was the only vice my Southern Baptist aunts and Pentecostal mother would ever own up to.
“What do you think we should have with the pork chops for supper tonight?” my Aunt Estelle would ask my mother, right in mid-bite of a cathead biscuit.
“How ‘bout some mash potatoes, field peas with fatback, and cornbread,” my mother would reply, chomping on her fried chicken thigh. "We can make some gravy with the pork chop drippings."
How could a person live with this family – one who talked about supper at the lunch table – and not end up overweight? How could the daughter of a woman who collected Southern Living cookbooks – and actually used them – not have a belly shaped like a basketball?
Add to that the couch potato tendencies that run deep in my family, and hardly anybody would escape with any kind of figure at all, except round.
And yet, I know it’s more than this.
I am resolved that this is the last time I’ll ever need to lose weight; that I’ll get rid of it this time and it will be gone for good. I’ve found the answer, I truly believe, with Paul McKenna’s Four Golden Rules (see previous post) and I’m never going back.
But I’ve got to look a little deeper if I really want this to work. The rules are simple enough, and I can easily follow them, but that really doesn’t matter when my self-sabotage reflex kicks in. And I realize that I do have something inside of me – not just in the external taste of food or family history – that wants me to stay fat.
I was a puny young child, but along about puberty I began to plump up. This is not unusual. Pre-adolescence is a scary time, and sometimes you just want to hide. I found refuge in the food that was readily available at my house. Not only did it comfort this changing person I was becoming, but it helped me to avoid so many scary situations. I was the kind who turned into a trembling zombie if a boy so much as looked at me, so I can only conclude that subconsciously I wanted to make sure they didn’t look.
The funny thing is, looking back, I wasn’t really all that fat. But because I felt fat and ugly, I ensured myself immunity from the whole boy-and-girl thing that I just didn’t feel I was ready to handle. Sure, I wanted a boyfriend. I dreamed about it all the time. But daydreams were safe, and always turned out the way I wanted them to. A real boy was an entirely different matter.
Despite this, though, I did manage to meet a sweet, shy boy at the tender age of 17 (both of us) and marry him at 18. We lived more or less happily ever after for just under 27 years. I’d like to say he had a mid-life crisis and ran off with his secretary, but these stories are always more complicated than that. Suffice it to say the fairy tale ended. So I found myself at age 45, on my own for the first time ever, and really fat.
That was over 13 years ago. I found out that I actually like living alone. I learned there is life after divorce. I have friends and I’m happy.
And fat. Oh yes, through thick and thin, I’ve been fat.
My weight has fluctuated through the years, of course. What woman’s doesn’t? I have had periods of nearly normal weight several times throughout my adulthood, and for about three years in my early 30s I lost a significant amount and was actually thin by most anyone’s standards outside of Hollywood.
But here’s what I’ve discovered. Every time I’ve lost enough weight to begin feeling good about myself, some inner girl who wants attention from the guys comes out. She wanted it way back at 13, but was afraid of it, so she pushed it away with food. Funny thing is, that girl is still there. She still wants to push it away with food, and she still wants to be what Paris Hilton would call “Hot”.
And those two diabolically opposed sides are always at war.
I’ll be 59 in just a few weeks. You’d think that frivolous little Miley Cyrus wannabee would be dead and buried by now. But, no, as I’m discovering through the shedding of an estimated 30 pounds or so, the girl lives on. She wants what she wants.
She wants a guy’s eyes to follow her all the way down the street and she wants to hide behind food and fat. And she wants both these things at the same time.
McKenna has a technique, where he asks you to acknowledge that each side of you – the side that wants to lose weight and the side that wants to stay fat – both have your best interests at heart.
The side that wants to lose weight wants you to be healthy and look better and be able to buy clothes in the front of the store, instead of having to trudge all the way back to the furthest corner where they hide the “big girl” sizes.
The side that wants to stay fat wants to protect you from all the scary things that we fear can happen to skinny girls: heartache and heartbreak and even, in many cases for those who have had terrible pasts, abuse and rape.
He says to imagine a side of you in each hand, and acknowledge they both exist. Then he tells you to bring the two sides together and pull them to your chest. This is intended to incorporate your two sides and help you to stop self-sabotaging.
Have I done it yet? Well, no, but so far I haven’t really needed to. That little girl has just barely begun to raise her head at this point. Maybe the grandma in me will prevail this time. After all, the “boys” are all old men now, if not already dead, so the little girl may just not be that interested. Maybe she’ll acknowledge that her time has passed, never to return, and just quietly go away.
Maybe.
But if she insists on waking up and doing battle, then I will do what McKenna says. It sounds kind of silly, but everything else he’s told me to do has worked beautifully, so I’ll just have to trust him on this one.
Food tastes good. That’s undeniable.
And I was raised to love it. That’s a given fact.
But that’s not the whole story, and acknowledging that may help me lose weight and keep it off for good.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Sherry had the answer all along
My friend Sherry is beautiful. Graceful, elegant, classy. And thin, of course. That goes without saying.
Sherry eats whatever she wants to eat, but never much of it at a time. I’ve been with her when she’s unwrapped a candy bar, taken a dainty bite or two, and then wrapped it back up and put it in her purse. I’ve seen her open a bag of potato chips and nibble on a few, then roll up the top and leave it sitting there in plain sight on the counter.
“How can she do that?” I used to wonder, resentfully.“I could never take a bite or two of something I love and leave the rest alone!”
Well, it turns out I can.
Ever since I watched Paul McKenna’s “I Can Make You Thin” series on TLC in mid-March, I’ve been doing just that kind of thing. Without struggle. That opened bag of chips doesn’t even call my name anymore. That half-eaten candy bar in my purse doesn’t beg me to eat it.
I am as amazed as you are. I am the woman who had to eat everything on her plate, the one who couldn’t leave a can of nuts alone until she was running her finger along the bottom to collect the left-over salt.
And now, suddenly – miraculously, even – I don’t have to eat it all anymore.
So what happened? What took me from being the Great Devourer to being a woman who can have food – and not just food but JUNK food – sitting in her pantry for weeks on end without having to eat it all in a single sitting?
I’m not really sure myself what happened. I saw the promos for McKenna’s show, and thought, “Yeah, Buddy, I just bet you can make me thin. And you say I won’t have to diet? That’s just another wild claim from a guy who’s trying to sell me something, but I’ll give it a look.”
So I found myself sitting in front of the TV and this bald but strangely attractive British guy was giving me four simple Golden Rules and telling me he could help me lose weight “through the television”.
And next thing after that, I was losing weight and actually ignoring foods that used to torment me with their very existence.
First let me say that Paul McKenna has not, nor will he ever, pay me a cent for saying any of this. And I might also add that what he says is not new, nor is it original to him. Since his show, I have learned there are lots of people who have been preaching intuitive eating (that’s what it’s called, even though McKenna never uses that phrase) for years. Many, including a woman named Geneen Roth, have written books about it, espousing the same general ideas that McKenna brought to TLC.
But just because someone else is already preaching this way of living, doesn’t take a thing away from McKenna.
When you think about it, my friend Sherry has been showing me the way for years, but I didn’t believe I could do it. What McKenna did was give it to me in such a simple form, even I could understand it. And then he convinced me, somehow, that I could do it. I have laughingly said it was his British accent that made the difference. You know how much more authoritative a British accent can seem to us US yokels.
That first night I watched him, I had all the tools I needed to get started, and the next morning I did just that. I've never looked back.
His first rule:
Eat when you are hungry
was easy enough. Wasn’t I already doing that?
Likewise his second rule:
Eat what you want, not what you think you should
Was a piece of cake, literally.
The third rule:
Eat slowly and consciously without distractions
Actually involved a major lifestyle change, but still I could see it was doable.
And the fourth rule:
Stop eating when you begin to think you are getting full
Was something I’d never done before, but surely I could learn.
And suddenly losing weight did not seem like some big, complicated, mountainous undertaking anymore. I really wouldn’t have to count anything – not calories nor carbs nor grams. The food scale could be tossed away. When McKenna told those simple rules in his pretty accent, I knew that I could do it.
Four months later, and I’m still doing it. I know you want to know how much weight I’ve lost, and I’d tell you if I could, but I’ve freed myself from the other kind of scales, too. Six weeks into this lifestyle, I had shed 20 pounds, and I know I’ve lost more since then, but the weight-loss is just a fraction of the benefits of learning to eat like a thin person. I have developed normal – not obsessive – feelings about food. In the process, I've gained an abundance of confidence and contentment. I'm not even sure how all this happened, but it did, and I'm a happy woman.
Paul McKenna claims he can make you thin. Going by my experiences during the last four months, I believe him.
Sherry eats whatever she wants to eat, but never much of it at a time. I’ve been with her when she’s unwrapped a candy bar, taken a dainty bite or two, and then wrapped it back up and put it in her purse. I’ve seen her open a bag of potato chips and nibble on a few, then roll up the top and leave it sitting there in plain sight on the counter.
“How can she do that?” I used to wonder, resentfully.“I could never take a bite or two of something I love and leave the rest alone!”
Well, it turns out I can.
Ever since I watched Paul McKenna’s “I Can Make You Thin” series on TLC in mid-March, I’ve been doing just that kind of thing. Without struggle. That opened bag of chips doesn’t even call my name anymore. That half-eaten candy bar in my purse doesn’t beg me to eat it.
I am as amazed as you are. I am the woman who had to eat everything on her plate, the one who couldn’t leave a can of nuts alone until she was running her finger along the bottom to collect the left-over salt.
And now, suddenly – miraculously, even – I don’t have to eat it all anymore.
So what happened? What took me from being the Great Devourer to being a woman who can have food – and not just food but JUNK food – sitting in her pantry for weeks on end without having to eat it all in a single sitting?
I’m not really sure myself what happened. I saw the promos for McKenna’s show, and thought, “Yeah, Buddy, I just bet you can make me thin. And you say I won’t have to diet? That’s just another wild claim from a guy who’s trying to sell me something, but I’ll give it a look.”
So I found myself sitting in front of the TV and this bald but strangely attractive British guy was giving me four simple Golden Rules and telling me he could help me lose weight “through the television”.
And next thing after that, I was losing weight and actually ignoring foods that used to torment me with their very existence.
First let me say that Paul McKenna has not, nor will he ever, pay me a cent for saying any of this. And I might also add that what he says is not new, nor is it original to him. Since his show, I have learned there are lots of people who have been preaching intuitive eating (that’s what it’s called, even though McKenna never uses that phrase) for years. Many, including a woman named Geneen Roth, have written books about it, espousing the same general ideas that McKenna brought to TLC.
But just because someone else is already preaching this way of living, doesn’t take a thing away from McKenna.
When you think about it, my friend Sherry has been showing me the way for years, but I didn’t believe I could do it. What McKenna did was give it to me in such a simple form, even I could understand it. And then he convinced me, somehow, that I could do it. I have laughingly said it was his British accent that made the difference. You know how much more authoritative a British accent can seem to us US yokels.
That first night I watched him, I had all the tools I needed to get started, and the next morning I did just that. I've never looked back.
His first rule:
Eat when you are hungry
was easy enough. Wasn’t I already doing that?
Likewise his second rule:
Eat what you want, not what you think you should
Was a piece of cake, literally.
The third rule:
Eat slowly and consciously without distractions
Actually involved a major lifestyle change, but still I could see it was doable.
And the fourth rule:
Stop eating when you begin to think you are getting full
Was something I’d never done before, but surely I could learn.
And suddenly losing weight did not seem like some big, complicated, mountainous undertaking anymore. I really wouldn’t have to count anything – not calories nor carbs nor grams. The food scale could be tossed away. When McKenna told those simple rules in his pretty accent, I knew that I could do it.
Four months later, and I’m still doing it. I know you want to know how much weight I’ve lost, and I’d tell you if I could, but I’ve freed myself from the other kind of scales, too. Six weeks into this lifestyle, I had shed 20 pounds, and I know I’ve lost more since then, but the weight-loss is just a fraction of the benefits of learning to eat like a thin person. I have developed normal – not obsessive – feelings about food. In the process, I've gained an abundance of confidence and contentment. I'm not even sure how all this happened, but it did, and I'm a happy woman.
Paul McKenna claims he can make you thin. Going by my experiences during the last four months, I believe him.
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