November 7
Don’t lose the good habits – keep your basic nutrition going. You can still get your basic nutrition in and have plenty of room to play. Fortunately, healthy food doesn’t take up that much space in your budget. I know that it’s really tempting during the holidays especially to just trade all your real food for holiday goodies because I did just that for a number of years. It works…if you can really do it. I haven’t seen too many of us with real food struggles successfully pull this off.
When I worked at the HMR fasting program at PVH years ago, it was a cardinal rule to teach patients to keep all 5 shakes in place no matter what. It seemed contradictory to me at the time since the program taught calorie balancing and your natural instinct would be to trade the shake calories for food calories. But sure enough, those who abandoned the shakes never got fully back on the fast and always ended up dropping out. So goes it too with basic nutrition and even with behaviors that support it. Successful weight management is the adoption of good (helpful) habits more than it is even the absence of bad (ineffective) ones.
Case in point: I once had a client (briefly, not surprisingly) who was maintiaing his 350 lb. weight eating both a lot of calories and an enormous volume of food. Some people are primarily overweight because they eat in a calorically concentrated way, although not eating all that much volume. He did both. A typical breakfast might be 8 eggs, a quart of milk, and six pieces of buttered toast. Whenever he would “diet” he would instead have one measly cup of oatmeal. I always felt so badly for him – asking something of himself that was both unfair and unnecessary, not to mention impossible. Is it surprising that he couldn’t ever maintain this?
He could have had literally tons more food than this and still met his goal of eating for 180 lbs. if he would have eaten a larger volume of low calorie foods – a skill that would also enhance his chance of long term success. I guess I was blessed in a way, coming off of 12+ years of bulemia. Eating small quantities was simply not an option. It forced my hand about the volumes of veggies needed to fill that place I seemed to need to fill to be “done”. Aside from the fact that he was never able to sustain this small quantity, he also never built the particular habits that he personally would need to live and sustain his life at 180 lbs. – learning to do what he would need to do to support his need for volume. Weight management is hard enough, and just like with your kids (so I am told) you have to pick your battles. Volume doesn’t have to be one of them. People who weigh 180 are simply not limited to one cup of oatmeal for breakfast – ever.
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