A Scone By Any Other Name…

Nov 2, 2014

I used to joke that when I die they are going to have to take out my appetite and beat it with a bat, so constant was my longing and preoccupation with food.  I managed my weight because I understood how to work a caloric budget to save up for an repay indulgences.  To the total credit of environmental control which I assiduously practice, I could contain my treat eating to pre-selected times and places. Who knew however that my appetite was being hijacked daily by the food choices I was making?

Adopting a low starchy carb, high protein, produce and healthy fat eating style eventually handled much of the calorie balancing for me.  But it was when I became more grain-limited (and in my case, specifically gluten-free) that I not only restored my digestive system and got off fifteen years of proton pump inhibitors and psyllium fiber, but also saw my appetite mechanisms miraculously restored to their rightful balance.  So I wasn’t crazy after all.  I experienced the never before feeling of “enough”.  I had whole days of not being preoccupied with my next meal, whole periods of not being particularly hungry.  Wow.

Thank God for the unfolding science that explains so much about our mood swings, crankiness, fatigue and especially our endless cravings for that processed junk: junk that is engineered by the food industry to contain the perfect combination of sugar, fat and salt to override our natural ability to tell when we are full or sated. We willingly forget about the chronic inflammatory illnesses that rob us of the vitality of the extra thirty golden years that medicine affords us when we succumb to what the food industry calls that “bliss point”.

Who knew that eating just carbs for breakfast or no breakfast at all actually cues our body to store fat all day and crave sweets later? Who knew that if we got twenty minutes of sunlight within an hour of waking and ate upwards of 30 grams of protein for breakfast, we would help to reset insulin, leptin and cortisol and have better blood sugar management all day? Who knew that unprocessed low glycemic carbs with a high fiber to sugar ratio (like a sweet potato) would not create the blood sugar swings or insulin response of processed grain products, or that a hundred and thirty one different genes that mitigate inflammation, fat storage and appetite would be adversely affected when we eat those beloved processed foods? Good to know!

Of course, if that were all there were to it, we would all simply eat that way, be slim, energized and in a benevolent mood, right? Clearly there is more involved here if you are someone who “knows what to do but is not doing it”, to which most of my otherwise smart, committed and competent clients would attest.

No diet program or even gifted weight coach can ever truly be the arbitrator of your experience though. When you can connect with your own internal wisdom, you will at last take the reigns. Who else but you could possibly know what constitutes a slippery slope for you, what foods, moods, places or people are triggers for you, what is fraying too much around the edges with your behaviors? Clients come to me for my answers – which I willingly and sometimes too enthusiastically provide from my own knowledge, personal experience and the experience of others. But if I have not taught them to ask the right questions of themselves and to use their own histories to tease out the intangibles of their own motivation or lack of it, then I have done nothing to really help them in the long run.

Case in point: A client excitedly told me about these non-wheat scone recipes she had found in a popular wheat-free cookbook. As I gazed at its cover, I was surprised and disappointed to see it adorned with pizza, pasta and dessert pictures. I feel like these are deliberate ploys by the publishing industry to once again exploit the gullible, desperate and unsuspecting chronic dieter who still wants to believe that if the pizza, pasta and desserts are made out of something other than wheat flour they will be safe from their addictive properties. Is that true for you? This would be a good thing to know about yourself.  For me a scone by any other name is still a scone. I don’t care if you make it out of wet magazines, it may still be addictive to a weight challenged individual. Broccoli isn’t, ever.

Armed with insights about ourselves like these and the knowledge of the biochemistry of our appetites and fat storage, we can fight the good fight, and know in our hearts which foods are wise for us to keep on our kitchen counters. After twenty years coaching weight management, it is still my observation that the single most effective if intellectually insulting strategy for limiting intake of challenging foods (and potentially dangerous “safe” simulations) is that they simply aren’t there, and that something appropriate that you spent your hard earned dollars, time and energy acquiring is. I have thus far never met anyone too intellectually challenged to manage their environment, but I have met plenty of people who are too smart.

Begin your final weight loss journey now…