August 24

Aug 24, 2024

 When I can predict in advance how I will feel in a particular situation, I can use that information for planning.  Figure out your deal.  What influences you?

Case in point:  I had a client who used to do these couples weekends with a group of women with whom, for a host of reasons, she felt somewhat uncomfortable.  And, it didn’t help of course that she was heavier than most of them.  Their husbands were all great friends, but she personally wouldn’t have picked their wives for her own friends.  Predictably she would over drink and overeat.  Not surprisingly, this even further compromised her self-esteem.  Anyone with a weight history gets this.  Only another overweight person can understand how one can overeat over feeling badly about overeating or about being overweight!  Makes perfect sense to me.

She came up with two strategies for this situation:  one was that she determined how much she needed to calorically bank ahead for these weekends so that at least she wasn’t wearing extra body fat every single day thereafter for the calories she ate over one lousy weekend.  Just practical and logical.  Since, it would take about two weeks to fully pay back or bank for these weekends, she made it a point to schedule no more than two of them a month.  Then, if she never got any better at managing them, at least she could afford them and wasn’t wearing them.

Even more usefully long term, she took a number of steps that helped her to not go over the edge right from the start.  She focused her strategies for the beginning of the chain of events, the catalyst points:  exercising in the mornings to build her own motivation and, temporarily at least, generate those feelings of self-control and self-mastery; eating protein and veggie based breakfasts and lunches which she made sure the environment actually supported already; bringing crudite platters and popcorn for that deadly pre-dinner cocktail hour so that she didn’t lose a grip before the meal was even served; drinking wine spritzers or lite beers to prolong the drinks themselves and delay the drunkenness that always triggered “Oh, what the hell”.

Another case in point:  I have a client who owns a boat, and historically she had programmed it as a floating food disaster till she decided to take it in hand and create a new history for herself and her family.  She knows that she is what we will call “a finisher”.  She also didn’t want to seem like a stingy hostess just because she can’t keep a grip.  So, her solution was, instead of bringing just a limited amount of snacks (another good strategy, by the way), she brought sooooo much that there was no way she would ever allow herself to buy into that, “let me just finish what’s here and I will never buy it again” thing.  She also chose to bring an assortment of healthy choices that she could start on and take the edge off her own appetite.  It also helped to unconsciously reprogram her family’s food associations with the boat.  The family would usually go out for dinner at the end of the day anyway, and she let this more time- and environmentally-controlled circumstance be the opportunity for her kids to eat something less healthy.

Yet another case in point:  I had a client who spent two weeks with her family each summer at the same rented shore house.  Typically they would spend the day at the beach and come back to the house late in the afternoon for hot tub and drinks followed by a dinner that she had always prepared.  She resented that while everyone else was in the hot tub, she was in the kitchen literally “slaving over a hot stove”. This really wasn’t much of a vacation for her, and she would then overeat because “she deserved it”…naturally, right?

Coincidentally, she had started going with her young daughter to this place in Waldwick where you can prepare lots of really gourmet meals in advance to freeze.  I don’t know if it is still there, but it is a great idea.  You pick the menu in advance and they have all the ingredients there ready for you to cook and assemble when you come.  You leave with meals for a week or more that can be used immediately or frozen.   She ended up taking with her to the shore tons of these pre-prepared gourmet meals that she and her daughter had made.  She was still the one responsible for dinner, but since she could just pop these into the microwave minutes before they sat down to eat, she could be in the hot tub enjoying her vacation and her wine along with everyone else.