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The popular movie, The Hunger Games, is raking in the profits after capitalizing on the word-of-mouth from readers of the popular teen book and a boatload of publicity.
I wish I had come up with this name for the book I am writing. The Hunger Games – doesn’t it sound like a self-help book for pulling yourself out of food addiction?
Well, here are some REAL Hunger Games we play. Which one’s your favorite?
1. Diet/Avoid Food All Morning and Binge the Rest of the Day
This is the surest road to excess weight. I did it for years. I thought I was “saving up calories” for the rest of the day and exercising my willpower muscles, but I was creating more hunger and programming my body to store fat faster and more efficiently. I was also losing touch with what real hunger felt like and teaching my body I would not respond to its natural hunger cues.
2. Plan Days/Events/Activities Around Eating
OK, my bad on this one. It’s still my favorite example though. I used to choose an Overeaters Anonymous meeting because it was near one of my favorite restaurants. Since I was the one doing it, I can cop to it now. It’s so counter-intuitive, it’s amazing. Many of my clients tell me they hit goal weight in Weight Watchers and have already planned their “reward binge” or mapped out the directions to the nearest fast food restaurant. Yeah, it makes no sense, but it happens. A lot. It’s a sign nothing has changed.
Do you choose events or movies because you like a restaurant nearby? Does “being in the neighborhood” sound like a good excuse to hit a favorite type of food? Or do you say, “Who knows when I’ll get a chance to eat this again?” That’s not a real reason to eat, just a Hunger Game.
3. Eating as Entertainment (Food Focused or Foodcentric Lifestyle)
When you get together with friends, family or a partner, is your main focus eating? A movie is entertainment. A bike ride is activity. Eating is functional. It’s the gas station. Fuel. It can taste great and transport your taste buds, but if it’s your main source of entertainment, it’s time to branch out and see more of life.
4. Fear of Hunger
Many of my clients stash food in their cars, offices, gym lockers, computer cases and bedrooms so they will never be without a fix. What’s so scary about being hungry? Well, it’s usually not hunger we really fear, but the needs underneath. These needs, often subconscious and unexplored, are darker and usually created long ago, in childhood. However, it doesn’t matter if it’s unlikely to happen (running out of food or not being able to get to food in our society???), fear loves to run our behaviors.
5. I’ll Fix it Later
This is my favorite. We live under the illusion, reinforced by the diet industry, that choices today are unimportant because we have the ability to fix our weight later. Have that rich, fat-laden five course meal and promise to run every day next week to make up for it. Turn into the drive-thru – it’s OK because you’re going to the gym tonight.
This is simply untrue. Dieting rarely works, and reinforcing this negative belief (or LIE) of the “quick fix later” just makes it feel true. The truth is, once fat is processed, it’s more difficult to remove and resists dieting and excessive exercise. In fact, the longer you work out, the less fat you will burn every minute.
Understanding how the body works is the key to ending the Hunger Games in your life. Being consistently healthy is simpler and more effective than playing games too.
If you (or anyone you know) is ready to end the Hunger Games in life, share this post with them and check out my next enLIGHTen Your Life! class starting soon! Click here for information.
We hear a lot about “lifestyle change” today. In fact, most diets call themselves a “lifestyle change”, even the popular commercial ones that are nothing more than a prescribed food plan.
I guess it makes customers THINK they’re doing the big job, not the little (short-term) one.
My favorite “lifestyle change” quote came from a friend who dropped a lot of weight (temporarily) during the Phen-Fen pharmaceutical debacle.
I made a big discovery in the land of permanent weight loss yesterday. Even after maintaining my weight loss for five years (which signals “permanent weight loss” in the medical community), I still struggled at holidays. And, in my coaching practice, clients bring their struggles into their coaching sessions and holidays are often a very tough time for them when they are addressing their excess weight.
Now, however, 12 years into maintaining weight loss, this holiday season is remarkably different.
Instead of forecasting and planning, which I once felt helped me
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Hard Truth: The more we focus on losing weight, the more we gain. It’s true – dieters regain at an average rate of 108%.
Today, there are more “diets, “fixes”, “cures”, “pharmaceutical relief” and “apps” for weight loss than ever before in history. But our society weighs more and has MORE health problems associated with weight too.
It doesn’t add up, does it?
Here in the U.S., it’s Thanksgiving week. All around me, I’m hearing a collective intake of breath: those who eat, those who do not eat, those who eat by rules, and those who eat in disordered patterns — they are all in a panic.
Thanksgiving is feared by anyone who isn’t living in a peaceful relationship with food. Laden with high-fat, high caloric food, it’s a celebration of abundance that Americans translate into plenty of food.
Celebrate your happy body.
We could celebrate the abundance of ingenuity, fun, humor, love or… just about anything… but we have translated it into food. Too funny, when you think about it. What if we celebrated an abundance of energy and lined the highways, exercising all day?
Hmmmm.
Don’t mind me, my mind just works that way. As I direct my thoughts towards the past 15 years of my life as I have lost weight (and not refound it), I find myself grateful for many things this Thanksgiving:
I’m always a little sad when the baseball season ends. Baseball has a consistency other sports do not; games fill practically every day from April to September. Baseball means summer. The World Series marks the coming of cold weather and snow.
Though my faves, the Yankees, weren’t in the World Series this year, it was a hard-fought, fantastic post-season. It even had a few weight loss lessons, if you looked close enough.
The St. Louis Cardinals were the last team standing. They came back numerous times, particularly in a do-or-die nail-biter Game 6 where they were down three times and came back anyway. It wasn’t enough to tie the game in the 6th inning, Texas came back with a wicked 7th inning and the Cardinals ran up against their very last out of the game before MVP David Freese, a little-known Cardinal playing among big stars, hit a line drive that tied the game again.
But…
Weight loss takes time. I’m often asked to define the best loss rate. My answer is: “The best rate is what your body and mind will allow. It will take as long as it takes YOU.”
There are natural restrictions on what your body will release in terms of weight. If you are careful to burn fat and nothing else (optimal because the body fights back when other elements of the body are threatened), you will release as much as your body can process. The process of burning fat is quite complicated, and doesn’t happen as efficiently as burning some butter on your stove – misunderstanding this is a big reason most people never achieve permanent weight loss.
Did you know that, if you could burn one pound of fat in a day (and you can’t), it would take
We often have a picture in our heads of what successful weight loss looks like.
It might go like this:
New Diet + Short Period of Time = Skinny Me
We convince ourselves this is how it works and, when it doesn’t work, we blame ourselves. Or the diet. But usually ourselves – as if any diet EVER worked!
With a 99% fail rate and a 108% regain rate, diets are so not the way to go.
Once we realize this, some really big opportunities open up! As one of my clients recently said, “There really are 50 ways to leave your lover!”
In the U.S., it’s Independence Day! Is today the day you will declare your independence from using food in any way that does not serve your body well?
Create Some Fireworks in Your Life!
In our food-driven society, we use food for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with hunger or physical need.
Just a few of the very common food excuses: Continue reading »
No, I’m not talking about her skimpy outfits or the skinny half-naked dancers flanking her live shows.
Lady Gaga is the most famous woman in music/culture right now, and I don’t think it’s because of her music (although it’s quite good) – it’s because of her message. Music is only part of her life played out as performance art.
Her deeper message to her “little monsters” (her fans) is screw everyone if they don’t like you, be who you are, because, no matter what that might be, that’s perfect.
Lady Gaga at the 2011 Grammy Awards
What’s the connection to weight loss? Listen to
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