Setting a New Year’s resolution? Follow my 10 steps to success.

January 1 often brings a mix of feelings, including a sense of renewal and motivation to make positive changes in our lives. For those of us who struggle with weight (and who might have overindulged during the holiday season, maybe even starting as early as Halloween), making a New Year’s resolution with the meta goal of creating a healthier body (often via weight loss) in the new year is familiar. Yet, how often have you attacked that goal with fervor for a few days or weeks, only to veer off the path toward a “healthier you” within the first few weeks or months… and then just give up entirely? You’re not alone: in a survey of over 12,000 women, about 50% of women in all weight classes reported having weight loss as a New Year’s resolution over the prior 2 years, and the majority of such women reported having made 2-5 annual attempts to lose weight.

Hundreds of studies have looked at goal setting and achievement, and found that specific and concrete goals are more motivating (and lead to more effort and goal pursuit, and thereby more success) than more vague goals.

For example, a goal to “lose weight” is quite abstract, and is really more of a dream than a goal. The goal to “lose 100 pounds” is more specific, but still somewhat vague in that there is no clear plan or end point specified. The goal to “lose 5 pounds by February 1” is much more specific, and can be broken up into even more concrete “subordinate” goals which essentially serve as the plan for exactly what to do and how to do it. For example, specific subordinate goals intended to get you to that 5 pounds weight loss might be to “eat a serving of vegetables or fresh fruit before each meal,” “stop drinking sugar-sweetened beverages,” or “walk to and from work every day for the next 4 weeks.” These types of goals are the key to success, and are often referred to as SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Research has shown that having a clear attainable end point in relatively close proximity significantly increases motivation and goal pursuit. But focusing entirely on the smaller more concrete goals can be demotivating over time – after all, the vision that you have of yourself and your life after you achieve the big-picture goal that is driving you to make these smaller changes, right? Without that meaningful meta goal, or “superordinate” goal, you are much less likely to actually stick to the smaller subordinate goals. The big picture superordinate goal represents your ultimate achievement — what you really value and aspire to. It provides context for those smaller, achievable goals. If each small subordinate goal is a stepping stone in a dark tunnel of effort, you want to be able to see the light — the ultimate superordinate goal — at the end of that tunnel to keep you motivated to keep trudging through.

So here is my advice for how to best lay out your New Year’s resolution for 2020 if your goal is one that you’d like to stick with long-term and actually achieve. (If you’d like to see an example of my own, I’ll include it at the very bottom.)

Sit down with a pen and paper and give yourself 15-30 minutes to hand-write your responses to each of the following questions:

1.     Think about your vision for your life — the superordinate big picture goal.  (E.g., “I want to be a normal weight.”) Write it down.

2.     Describe what that achievement looks like in concrete terms. (“I want to lose 102 pounds to achieve a BMI of 24.9.”)

3.     Dig deeper into WHY this goal has meaning for you. (“My weight is creating health problems for me, including diabetes and high blood pressure, and I want to improve my health.”)

4.     Now dig deeper still to think about why THAT is important to you. (“I want to live another 40 years to see my children have children of their own and experience the joy of grandparenthood.” 

Repeat step 4 until your original goal is connected with who you want to be, with something that will make your life truly meaningful — something that feels immensely powerful to you. Try to make it a positive, motivating statement (“I want to live to see my beautiful grandchildren grow up”) rather than a negative or self-deprecating one (“I want to stop feeling so tired and unhappy with my appearance”). Positive visions are more likely to drive identity-congruent positive actions. 

5.     Next, think about the concrete intermediate steps that you will need to take in order to be able to achieve your big picture goal, and write them down. (“I will lose at least 5 pounds per month every month, consistently, until I lose all 102 pounds.”) Breaking up the big — often overwhelming — goal into smaller intermediate goals makes them actually achievable. After all, you don’t have to lose 102 pounds. You just have to lose 5 pounds. And then do it again… 19 more times.

6.     Now brainstorm all of the different subordinate SMART goals that you can think of that will help you achieve that smaller intermediate goal. Do a brain dump and write down everything you can think of. You do not have to do all of them, but you want to have as many options to choose from as possible. Make sure each one is specific, measurable (it must be clear whether you achieved it or not), achievable (realistic is key – walking to and from work is likely more achievable than running a marathon if you are currently sedentary), relevant (the goal should be something that is expected to help you toward your main goal, obviously), and time-bound (short-term deadlines like “go to the gym at least 3 times each week for the month of January” are important to get your butt in gear; without a time-bound plan, it’s easy to procrastinate).

7.     Choose at least 3 of these subordinate SMART goals that you are committed to achieving, and then brainstorm every possible obstacle you can foresee getting in your way. Come up with if/when contingency plans for how you will deal with each of those obstacles. For example, if one of your chosen SMART goals is to stop drinking sugar-sweetened beverages because you’re a caramel macchiato addict, and you know that your best friend at work also loves to hit the Starbucks in your office building with you and will ask you to join them for a coffee break, think about various strategies in advance for how you can stick with your plan (e.g., decide in advance that you will go, but that you will only order a café Americano with heavy cream). Advance contingency planning can make a huge difference.

8.     Choose a start date (presumably January 1 in the context of setting a New Year’s resolution), and enter the specifics for each of your SMART goals into your calendar whenever possible. So, if one of your goals is to go to the gym at least 3 days per week for the month of January, look at your calendar and enter the commute and gym time into actual date/time slots in your calendar that you know you can honor. And then stick with that plan. Checking off boxes can actually be rewarding to our brains, so posting a calendar on your fridge or other easily-accessible spot and actually putting in boxes for each occasion and physically checking them off (and seeing that visual reward of the checked-off boxes) can help with motivation. (Even for things that are not scheduled at a specific time, like avoiding those caramel macchiatos, creating a check box in your calendar that says “no sugar-sweetened beverages” for you to check off at the end of each successful day can provide a reward for your brain, especially as you see those checked boxes accumulate over days and weeks.) 

9.     Each month, set aside time (enter it into your calendar!) to re-brainstorm your big goal and the smaller SMART goal steps you could take to achieve it, and while continuing to stick with the changes you’ve already made, add in one or two more SMART goals that you can realistically add. Small successes build momentum and it becomes easier to add in more and more small changes once you’ve mastered the first few. 

10.  Engage in thinking about the big picture/superordinate goal whenever you fail at achieving one or more of your SMART goals, as is likely to happen. Resilience in the face of setbacks and learning from failures are the key to long-term goal achievement, and being flexible about setting new, different SMART goals that can help you achieve your meta goal will make the difference between ultimate success and giving up on the big goal entirely. EXPECT that you will falter. Seeing more boxes checked than unchecked is a worthy achievement, so don’t give up just because you didn’t follow your plan 100%. Perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to weight loss.  

There are a few days left before we enter a new decade, and I, for one, will be one of those people with the New Year’s resolution to lose weight. My goal is to reach 135 pounds by April 1, which will put me right in the middle of the normal BMI range for my height. I’m committed to this resolution this year.

Who’s with me?

See you in 2020!

Love, Jen

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MY OWN GOAL-SETTING EXERCISE:

     1.     My superordinate big picture goal:

I want to achieve my dream weight.

2. What that achievement looks like in concrete terms:

I want to lose 12 pounds (and reach 135 pounds) by April 1, 2020. 

3.     WHY this goal has meaning for me: 

I feel really great both physically and emotionally when I am lighter. My health is better when I am lighter. My bad back will worsen with extra weight, and I am at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease based on my family history. 

4.     Why THAT is important to me: 

I had Graham at an older age, and am almost 46 years old as he just turned 3. He is an only child and I want to preserve my own health as long and best as possible to enjoy watching him grow up and to spare him (for as long as possible) the responsibility of helping care for me in my old age. I hope to see him partner up and experience the joy of having children of his own one day, so that I can experience the joy of watching him parent and the joy of being a grandparent.

5. Concrete intermediate steps toward my superordinate goal: 

I will lose 6 pounds by February 1 (goal weight 141), then another 4 pounds by March 1 (goal weight 137), then the final 2 pounds by April 1 (dream weight: 135).

6. Brainstorm all of the potential subordinate SMART goals that could help me achieve my goal of 6 pounds lost by February 1:

Keep a basic food journal and note how physically hungry I am on the hunger scale from -10 to +10 before and after every eating occasion; only eat when physically hungry (a -2 or hungrier) and stop eating by a +4; fast each morning until lunch and stop eating by 7pm; all eating occasions sitting down and without distractions so as to eat mindfully (no eating while surfing the ‘net, working at my desk, standing in the kitchen, etc.); eat no added sugar until I reach my goal weight; eat no flour-based foods such as bread or pasta until I reach my goal weight; continue working out on the elliptical for at least 30 minutes each morning at least 6 days per week; guided meditation at least 10 minutes on at least 5 days each week to train myself in mindfulness; get to bed by 9pm each night and prioritize > 7 hours of sleep; stop drinking alcohol entirely until I reach my goal weight; eat no nut butter (my go-to treat that I tend to overeat when I am off sugar!); intentionally leave food uneaten on my plate at least one meal per day to practice stopping when I am satisfied rather than automatically finishing my plate; meal plan/prep each weekend for the coming week to make food decisions ahead of time with my prefrontal cortex and avoid allowing my primitive brain to dictate food on the fly

7. My 3 chosen SMART goals and their potential obstacles and solutions:

A.     Eat no added sugar.

Obstacles and solutions: 

1.     Tempting sugar/sweets in my immediate vicinity: move sugar canister, honey, and other sweets from pantry into garage; have healthy alternatives (eg my roasted wasabi edamame packs, fresh fruit) on hand for immediate eating if hungry

2.     Someone offers me a sweet as a gift: thank them profusely and say honestly that sugar makes me feel sick (or that I have a sugar addiction I am trying hard to overcome) so I can’t eat it (or if I don’t want to get into my personal weeds, accept the sweet and say I’m saving it for later and then give it or throw it away)

3.     Hunger leaves me vulnerable to grabbing a sweet treat: plan and prep meals for the day in advance so that I know what I will be eating and don’t leave any decisions to my primitive brain; always have pre-chosen foods on hand (eg edamame packets in my purse)

B.     Eat no flour-based foods.

Obstacles and solutions: 

1.     The same as above for sugar; 

2.     Kevin forgets I am avoiding flour and prepares a dinner with pasta or other flour-based foods: have prepped meal options on hand at home in the freezer that I can eat in a pinch

3.     Eating in a restaurant: look at their menu online before arriving and choose what I will eat in advance, remove bread basket, tortilla chips, or other restaurant flour-based freebies from the table (or from my immediate vicinity if with a group of friends who want them) 

C.     Keep a food journal with hunger scale (with intention to eat only when physically hungry).

Obstacles and solutions: 

1.     Eating on the fly or don’t have my journal with me: jot it down in the notes app on my phone or email it to myself to record later 

2.     Not hungry by dinner time and afraid I’ll get hungry before bed: plan a hearty lunch with plenty of fiber and protein to keep my hunger at bay and avoid snacking before dinner, eat 1/3 of the dinner even if not hungry and take note of what I ate earlier that kept me from being hungry so I can tweak my plan for future days, just don’t eat unless I’m hungry and if I’m hungry right at bedtime I can eat a handful of nuts or other snack 

How does Santa maintain his weight in the face of all those cookies?!

I am here with my tail tucked to admit that I am human: over the past 2 weeks I’ve pretty much fallen into a sugar binge. It started with Graham’s birthday cupcakes (and leftover cupcakes) with cheesecake bases and cream cheese frosting (I mean, cream cheese in a dessert is like my kryptonite!), and culminated in my cookie exchange party where I did indeed refrain from bringing any cookies home, but I probably ate 10 cookies while I was there (and drank a few glasses of my homemade egg nog before nightfall, too). I am now on day 6 of no sugar again and feeling much less mental chatter and desire, thank goodness. But man, I can do some damage when I let myself eat sugar unchecked: my weight topped out a full 4 pounds higher on a December 16, at 148.2, than it was on December 5 (144.2). That’s 4 pounds in 11 days. Granted, some of that was likely just fluid retention related to the carb loading, since I was back down 1.6 pounds within the first 48 hours of sugar avoidance, but still… I am a great example of how even “normal weight” people who are living in a weight-reduced state can continue to struggle with weight maintenance even 13 years later.

I could beat myself up about my recent Christmas cookie binge, but at least I’ve managed to eat fewer cookies than at least one other person: Santa Claus. Over the years there has been a lot of speculation about how many cookies (and glasses of milk) that Santa actually consumes each Christmas Eve as he travels around the world delivering gifts, and a very important question always results: how the heck does Santa maintain his weight?

There are a few facts that the scientific community knows to be true. 1. Santa is real. 2. Santa’s reindeer can fly. 3. Santa and his reindeer visit children’s homes century after century without apparent aging or chronic disease, despite apparently eating waaaay too much sugar.

How much sugar, you ask? A pivotal paper looking at the actual number of cookies and glasses of milk consumed by St. Nick in the United States on Christmas Eve was published in 2018 in order to calculate his total calorie intake for that evening, and found that he takes in approximately 9.9 billion kilocalories (which I call “calories” for simplicity) just during his visits to households in the U.S. alone.
PEOPLE.     You don’t understand.
9.9.      BILLION.      CALORIES.
The authors went to calculate the calories lost to the thermic effect of food (calories burned just by digesting and metabolizing the food itself – usually around 10% depending on macronutrient breakdown), his estimated basal metabolic rate, and his total energy expenditure (which actually exceeds 54 million calories when you account for the energy it takes for him to climb up each chimney with his bag of gifts – no small feat!) , and determined that Santa’s net calorie surplus is almost 8.9 billion calories (or 2.7 million times the calories he needs to maintain his weight). The authors of this paper note that Santa returns year after year without apparent weight gain, so they throw out a few theories to explain this mismatch: that his metabolic rate is extraordinarily high, or that perhaps he underwent bariatric surgery and is experiencing a profound unexpected degree of malabsorption. However, Santa appears to be in good metabolic health with the exception of his obesity. I am here to tell you that neither of these theories hold weight (no pun intended,]: such a super high metabolic rate would require such an increase in thermogenesis (the creation of heat) that Santa would self combust and burn to a crisp, and that degree of malabsorption would undoubtedly leave signs in the form of fecal incontinence all over our fireplace hearths and gifts under the tree due to massive steatorrhea (stinky floaty diarrhea full of the malabsorbed fat). To the contrary, there are no known reports of St. Nick even using anyone’s restroom during his epic travels on Christmas Eve.

How is this possible? How can Santa remain in good health and maintain his weight year after year despite consuming billions and billions of fat and sugar calories? I suppose it’s possible that he has harnessed some elusive technology that allows him to defy our currently understood laws of physics (will you physical scientists please get on this?!), but I personally believe that the only reasonable explanation is that Santa is magical. The magic of Christmas allows Santa to remain immortal, in good health, and at a stable weight just as it enables him to visit 10,000 homes per second and travel faster than starlight (according to physics.org and NASA, respectively). Sometimes, in science, we don’t yet know the answer, try though we might. So in this case, I just choose to believe.

Merry Christmas to all!
Love, Jen

Our stockings aren’t the only things getting stuffed on Christmas!

As I mentioned a few weeks back, the 6 weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day tend to be the riskiest of the year for weight gain. And I am no exception: I am already 2 pounds heavier this morning than I was at Thanksgiving. Besides having already indulged in cupcakes and pizza for Graham’s 3rd birthday last weekend, I baked chewy Italian orange-zest and almond cookies last night in anticipation of our annual holiday cookie exchange party today (and although my plan is to indulge while at the party but refrain from bringing home any extra cookie spoils, contrary to the whole point of the party, I will also be bringing my homemade Baltimore eggnog – a punch bowl full, made with 2 dozen eggs, a gallon of whole milk and a quart of heavy cream, not to mention the loads of sugar and maple syrup — and will have a few glasses of that, too)… then I’ll be taking Graham to another preschooler’s birthday party tomorrow evening, attending a holiday luncheon for the Department of Medicine at work on Tuesday, and taking part in another cookie exchange with work colleagues this coming Friday. And it’s not even Christmas week yet!

It’s easy to see where all the extra calories can come from all season long, but Christmas Day itself can be particularly dangerous for those of us worried about weight gain: a survey study by the British kitchen retailer Wren Kitchens found that people who celebrate Christmas reported that their feasting for the day tallies up to, on average, 5,373 kcal. It’s a day that we often use as an excuse to go nuts and eat whatever we want, often starting with an extremely hearty breakfast, adding in highly caloric beverages throughout the day (just one cup of spiked eggnog runs about 600 kcal!), rich snacks like chips with dip, nuts, and cheese platters, and of course the heavy main meal with all the trimmings, a few glasses of wine, and topped off with a serving of dessert (or two). Not to mention the chocolate or other goodies that Santa might’ve left in your stocking.

I, for one, will not be restricting myself on Christmas. But, I will employ one small strategy to help keep my total calories marginally in check: I will eat something of “low calorie density” before each meal. Studies spearheaded by Dr. Barbara Rolls at Penn State have shown that eating a food that is high in water and fiber content and low in calories, such as a broth-based vegetable soup, 15 minutes before a meal will naturally cause you to eat fewer calories at the subsequent meal, leading to reduced caloric intake overall. After all, high-water/high-fiber foods have fewer calories per gram of food and fill you up much more than foods whose calories are packed into more dense packages. To illustrate the difference, imagine 8 cups (half a gallon) of chopped celery: it has the same calorie content as a single ounce of cheddar cheese, which is the size of just 4 dice. Which of these two options, if eaten 15 minutes before Christmas dinner, do you think would make you less likely to eat more turkey and stuffing?

Eating lots of fruits and veggies has been one of the cornerstones of my own successful weight loss and long-term maintenance, and Christmas Day will be no different: I plan to start each meal with veggies or a fresh apple, but will then let myself have the treats that I want and just stop eating when I’m satisfied. I will undoubtedly eat too much that day, but likely a lot less than I would have in my former life. Allowing for special indulgences is a part of my life in maintenance, and I, for one, will be enjoying my eggnog and figgy pudding.

Until next week-
 xo Jen

Why you bought those holiday Oreos

Remember how, a few weeks ago in my “Pavlov’s dog” blog post, I talked about how I had every intention of eating a low carbohydrate diet as I entered Trader Joe’s one morning but somehow walked out of the store with a bag full of peanut butter and jelly chocolate truffles?

Food manufacturers know how to take advantage of our primitive brains’ drive to eat highly rewarding foods, and they process Mother Nature into sugar/fat/salt laden products that we crave and adore. Even tomato soup, which you’d hope were “healthy,” has the perfect amount of sugar added to make it as palatable as possible to the masses (and thereby increase consumption and the dollars pouring into the food manufacturer) – you can learn more about this sugar “bliss point” (and much more) in this 2015 BBC documentary entitled The Truth About Sugar.

OK, so food manufacturers create crave-worthy processed products like Doritos and Oreos that light up our brains and make us want them. I mean WANT them. But it’s not just the manufacturing companies who are using brain science to play on our weaknesses. The food retailers have their own strategies, too. One is the very tactic that Trader Joe’s used to trick me into buying that bag of chocolates (notice I claim I was “tricked,” though of course I know I made that decision on my own no matter how impulsive it might’ve been): they placed the highly rewarding food at eye level and on the end of an aisle rather than buried somewhere inside. Visual food cues make us want food, as I talked about last week, so they place the foods they want us to buy in the prime viewing spots.

This morning I came upon an example of how one local grocery store took this strategy to the next level. I was walking along the perimeter of the store through the produce section, surrounded by fresh fruits and vegetables, when I came across this display:

Flashing lights twinkle and grab your attention — just in case the huge ski chalet full of cookies sitting smack dab in the middle of a major thoroughfare doesn’t hit you in the face.  Flashy signage using lights or bright colors draw even more attention than simply placing the items on an end aisle where they’ll be noticed.

Creating a sense of scarcity also tricks you into buying things you might not otherwise buy. “Only available through the holidays! Don’t miss out! Get ‘em before they’re gone!”

You might also notice that grocery staples like milk are intentionally placed at the rear of the store, thereby forcing you to walk through a myriad of other processed products that your executive brain might not want you to buy, but that your primitive brain — whose entire job is to seek calories and pleasure — WANTS.

Impulse items also tend to line the exits: right when your willpower muscle has been thoroughly fatigued, you’re forced to stand 12 inches away from highly rewarding candy bars, ice cold sodas, and bags of chips as you wait your turn to check out. Even if you’ve come to the store armed with a plan and a list that you stick to, noticing (and actively using your willpower to avoid) other junk foods while shopping (and perhaps trying to simultaneously mind an — ahem — active toddler?) leaves your self control depleted and significantly increases the chance that you’ll impulsively grab one of those feel-good items on your way out.

So, if you grabbed those holiday Oreos, this means your primitive brain is working perfectly normally and that the food manufacturers and retailers have done their jobs well. This works out beautifully if you’re an investor in Nabisco, but not so well if you’re a consumer who is trying to manage your weight! But knowledge is power, so now that you know some of the many ways that they trick you, you might be ever-so-slightly better prepared to avoid the traps the next time you run to the store for some milk. Don’t go hungry. Bring a list of items that your executive brain has thoughtfully chosen in advance, and buy only those items. And if you notice a particularly flashy display, take a photo of it for me and post it in the comments below!

Thanksgiving challenge results! (Affected by my foray into food porn?)

A week ago I talked briefly about the weight gain that we (especially the “we” that are already overweight) risk during the holiday season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day, and outlined a few different studies of methods that might help mitigate holiday weight gain. I challenged you to pay attention to your weight and try not to gain any over the week of Thanksgiving… and I never suggest that people do something I wouldn’t do myself, so I bravely posted my own weight last Saturday morning: 144.2 pounds. (Only one brave soul took me up on my challenge to publicly post their weight here along with me — my mother in-law June Marvel! Kudos, Grandma June!)

I can tell you that I had more problems with sugar cravings than usual this week, and not just on Thanksgiving Day. I believe it started the day before when I started looking at cookie recipes. You see, one of my oldest and dearest friends whom I’ve known since 7th grade, Nicole Armstrong, and I co-host a holiday cookie exchange party every December in which we invite our girlfriends and family to bake (or buy) several dozen cookies and bring them together to create a huge beautiful display of sugary holiday wonderment, with the intention of taking a few of each kind home to get a huge variety (and often eat quite a few at the party, too). So, the day before Thanksgiving I was perusing recipes, trying to decide what I am going to make for the party. And one of the strategies I’ve adopted in my own weight maintenance armamentarium is the avoidance of what I like to call “food porn.” Visual or olfactory food cues are a powerful trigger for cravings in our primitive brains, and one of the ways I’ve set myself up for weight management success is by essentially eliminating my previous habits of perusing through beautiful food-centric magazines or cookbooks, browsing Pinterest-worthy food blogs, and watching cooking shows on the Food Network. It wasn’t until I actually stepped upside of my own head to observe how often I was engaging in food-related mental activities that I realized I was sabotaging my own efforts with shocking regularity: these kinds of enticing visual food cues (including photos and videos) have been shown in clinical research to stimulate craving just as much as real food exposure does, and to actually increase the likelihood and amount of food intake. Meaning, just seeing photos or videos of high calorie foods makes a human more likely to overeat.

So. I made the mistake of perusing a cookie cookbook the day before Thanksgiving, and I am here to tell you that the struggle is real: I have been craving sweets like crazy ever since! I planned to eat a healthy low fat lunch at work on Thanksgiving Day and had my fat free vegetable soup along with some marinated tofu from Trader Joe’s, but I was feeling so many food urges that I ended up having a couple of small slices of turkey with gravy and some zucchini and carrots that were brought in as part of the catered lunch to treat the residents who were working on the holiday with me. I DID manage to refrain from eating the stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pie that was also sitting there, knowing that in a few hours I’d let myself have whatever sweets I felt like having when we got to our friends’ house for their lovely Thanksgiving gathering. I made my second mistake of the week on arrival to Lynn and Dick’s house: I started drinking. I caught one glimpse of my favorite Chandon sparkling rosé and immediately gave in to the urge to have some, which lowered my resolve and made it that much easier for me to snack on tortilla chips and shrimp dip, to go for seconds of the sugary sweet potatoes at dinner, and to partake of both some apple crisp AND some pecan pie for dessert. With whipped cream of course. By the time we arrived home, I felt hella heartburn and a racing pulse bounding in my chest — my body reminding me that eating and drinking that way are NOT doing my health any favors. (Apparently my primitive brain rules over my body, no matter how many times this happens!)

Though the plan was to return to my no-sugar way of eating on Friday, I was still in the throes of the sugar affair and ended up eating most of a bar of dark chocolate and some leftover chocolate cake with whipped cream (after a healthy dinner of salmon and asparagus). When I weighed myself before bed last night, the scale read 147 pounds. By the time I weighed in this morning, though, it was back down to 144.4 pounds. So, today — exactly one week after I posted my Thanksgiving weight maintenance challenge — my weight was 0.2 pounds higher. Does that make me a failure? Technically, I suppose so, since I am not at or below my weight from last Saturday. But I don’t really think a 0.2 pound difference is clinically meaningful in the grand scheme of things – after all, just hydration status or whether or not you’ve had your “morning constitutional” can move the scale by several pounds. Just look at how I lost 2.6 pounds overnight! And I refuse to beat myself up for overeating on Thanksgiving. I ate healthfully (for the most part) the rest of the week and I planned to let myself enjoy whatever I wanted on Thanksgiving, so I am deciding to be satisfied with my 0.2 pound weight gain. 

Now, let’s see whether I manage to maintain through the next 5 weeks of the holiday season! Our family Thanksgiving is actually happening tomorrow since I’ve been working through the real holiday, so my brother and sister in-law will come to our house and we’ll have another feast… then, Graham’s 3rd birthday is next week and there will be cupcakes and pizza to celebrate at his party next weekend, followed by my cookie exchange party the weekend thereafter… it’ll essentially be a nonstop sugar-and-flour extravaganza until the end of December. I want to enjoy these events and not feel so restricted that I can’t enjoy a cupcake with my son or share in the joy of some homemade egg nog and Christmas cookies, but I also want to try hard to attend to my weight and keep from gaining significantly. I hope I can do it, because last year I gained 10 pounds by January 1 when I let myself eat whatever I wanted. Stay tuned….

My Thanksgiving Challenge to You

Holidays around the world are celebrated with feasts and overindulgence, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the majority of weight gain in Americans occurs during a specific 6-week period of each calendar year: Thanksgiving through Year’s Day. Interestingly, weight gain over the Thanksgiving holiday seems to be more of a problem for people who are already overweight or obese than it is for people of normal weight. This study followed 94 people before and after the Thanksgiving holiday with body weights measured on average just 13 days apart, and found that overweight participants with a BMI over 25 gained an entire kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, while the participants with a BMI under 25 (normal weight) didn’t gain weight at all. This doesn’t mean that a normal weight person can’t gain weight over Thanksgiving, of course, but those of us with overweight to begin with are clearly at risk.

So what can we do about it?

There have been several small clinical trials looking at various interventions, and they all seem to be beneficial. This small industry-sponsored study found that overweight participants following an intermittent modified fasting regimen of limiting caloric intake to 730 kcal/day on 2 days per week and eating their usual diet the other 5 days per week over the 6 week holiday season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day actually  lost 1.3 kg (2.9 pounds), while the control group had no weight change. A totally different intervention with the stated goal was to gain no more than 0.5 kg over the Christmas holiday in the UK (where, of course, Thanksgiving is obsolete) asked normal weight participants to weigh themselves every single morning (and reflect on weight changes) and sent them reminders of various behavior strategies that can help maintain a healthy weight. They found that all participants met the goal of gaining less than 0.5kg, but the intervention group with daily self-weighing maintained their weight (on average actually lost 0.13 kg, or half a pound), while the control group gained on average 0.37 kg, or 0.82 pound.

It seems to me that the intentional act of simply planning to maintain your weight though the Thanksgiving holiday and actually practicing whichever form of restrained eating feels best to you (whether a 5:2 intermittent fasting regimen, or planning ahead which few indulgent foods you’re going to eat on Thanksgiving while choosing particularly healthful foods for every other meal over the 4 day weekend and weighing yourself daily to ensure that you’re on track) should keep us from gaining weight over this Thanksgiving holiday.

I challenge you to do this with me! Weigh yourself tomorrow morning and post it here in the comments, then come back 7 days later and post your weight again. I’ll start with me: this morning (the Saturday before Thanksgiving) I weighed in at 144.2.

Let’s do this thing!
With love,
Jen

I am Pavlov’s Dog (or, why we go nuts bingeing on junk when we are about to start a diet)

Back in August, when I was still in the throes of my passionate love-hate tryst with Sugar (which has been ongoing since Mother’s Day weekend!), I was shopping on an early Sunday morning at Trader Joe’s. I happened to be one day away from starting one of my quarterly DIY Fasting Mimicking Diets (FMD), which I’d planned for the following week, so I’d been planning on eating a very low carb diet that day in order to help me enter ketosis more quickly on the FMD. I passed around a corner, and displayed right there on the end of an aisle at eye level was a bag of peanut butter & jelly dark chocolate mini truffles. (Perfect positioning, TJs marketers!! I’ll write more about the food industry and how they manipulate us into buying more of their junk food in a future blog post.)

In a split second, my primitive brain — the one who wants me to overeat highly rewarding calorie-dense foods all the time — convinced me to pick up the bag and run. That tricky primitive brain even convinced my weakly protesting higher human brain that I would just eat one 3-piece serving of the chocolates and freeze the rest. And, they were organic, so… yeah, organic. Well, I’d eaten the whole bag (a total of 8 minis) by the time my car pulled into our driveway. Now, this was bad enough, but somehow my sugar addicted brain then felt waaay more cravings for sugar and processed carbs after I’d gotten that first hit, and you can imagine what happened. The rest of the day included bowls of Kashi cereal with honey (and I even reached into the jar with a finger and just scooped me up some straight honey!), pizza and Pringles for lunch (I don’t even LIKE Pringles!), pasta and a few glasses of wine for dinner, and some white chocolate pudding to top it all off.

It’s like my primitive brain knew we were going into a famine and wanted to overeat all the damn carbs in the universe beforehand to keep me from dying. I didn’t even eat yummy worthwhile sugar/flour, like a delicious handcrafted gelato or a beautiful pastry from a bakery. Not a single bit of it actually tasted delicious to me. I gained 3 pounds overnight from the crap, and I felt like crap. Obviously, even though I am incredibly knowledgeable about biology and medicine and why my body craves these foods and why they are terrible for me, my beastly Neanderthal brain doesn’t give a sh*t how smart I am.

Why did I — do we — do this to ourselves? Overeat junk like there’s no tomorrow right before starting a diet or lifestyle change?

Let me tell you a bit about conditioning. (Hang in there with me!) Remember Ivan Pavlov and his dogs? Pavlov won the Nobel prize in 1904 for his research in which he demonstrated that dogs can be conditioned to have a physical reaction – salivation – in response to the sound of a bell, because they learned to associate the sound of the bell with the presentation of food. This is called “classical conditioning,” when you learn to associate two stimuli with each other (the bell and the food), and have an involuntary response (salivation) to the new stimulus (the bell) even in the absence of the original stimulus (the food). Similarly, B.F. Skinner noted that in operant conditioning, an animal (or human) learns that when they DO something, a certain behavior, they either get rewarded with something positive or the removal of something negative, which reinforces the behavior, or they experience no response or even a punishment, which extinguishes the behavior. For example, if a lab rat gets a food pellet reward every time it pushes a button, it is conditioned to push that button and will keep doing so as long as the behavior continues to be reinforced with the reward. Interestingly, unpredictable intermittent rewards doled out randomly are even more reinforcing on a behavior than consistently predictable rewards, and produce behaviors that are more resistant to extinction: if you’ve ever seen a bleary-eyed gambling addict repeatedly pulling on the handle of a slot machine in Vegas, you’ve seen the power of random intermittent rewards on conditioning.

When the reward is suddenly stopped (e.g., the pellet dispenser gets jammed, which is what happened in B.F. Skinner’s lab), the rat will continue to press the button for quite a while without being rewarded until it eventually stops trying. This end to the behavior is called “extinction.”  Interestingly, animals (and humans) sometimes even increase their behavior dramatically when the reward is initially removed in an effort to get it back. This is called an “extinction burst.” For example, if you are conditioned to expect that an elevator will take you to another floor and open its doors to let you out when you push a button, but one day you get on an elevator and it just sits there motionless after you press the button, you will try to push the button again. And again. And again. And then you’ll start pounding on the button more frantically, then maybe jamming on all the buttons, in an effort to get the response you want. If none of those efforts make the elevator go, eventually you’ll quit hitting buttons (extinction). That little button-pushing tantrum of yours was the extinction burst.

I believe this is what is happening when we lose it and pig out on junk food right as we are eliminating highly rewarding foods from our lives. At baseline, we feel an urge to eat junk and do so (the behavior), and are conditioned that we’ll feel lots of warm fuzzy feelings thanks to our friends dopamine and endorphins flooding our brain. (Or that the junk food will reward us by taking away the negative feelings we are experiencing, as in the classic pint of ice cream eaten in response to a breakup: this removal of a negative stimulus is called “negative reinforcement.”) Either way, our brain knows it’ll feel better when we eat that food. So our inner animal starts panicking at the prospect of losing that reward, and we then experience the extinction burst: bingeing on the junk that we’re trying to avoid. Certain foods are more highly rewarding than others, of course — no one ever freaked out at the prospect of not being able to eat okra again, but giving up sugar and flour (no chocolate? No bread? No pizza?) is a completely different ballgame. And by randomly/intermittently giving in and eating the food only sporadically when we are attempting to extinguish the eating behavior, we are likely inadvertently reinforcing it even more by following a variable reward schedule than if we just ate the food consistently all the time (remember that gambler at the slots?).

So, my complete carb binge the day before my FMD started was most certainly an extinction burst. I knew I was going off sugar and flour, and my brain was like, HELL NO and acted much worse than usual, eating all the carbs I could find in the house. I mean, who eats honey out of a jar with their finger when they are not even remotely hungry? Apparently I do when my inner beast is faced with the thought of losing sugar. We are animals, after all, and the smart way that my brilliant and capable human brain will have to tackle this sugar addiction is to treat myself like one: I need to create a hard stop on the reinforcing rewards that I keep giving myself and prepare myself for the inevitable extinction burst that my primitive brain is going to try to throw at me when I do it.  I’ve created a situation in my body where I behave like a sugar addict. And my behavior of overeating sugar has become one that is extremely resistant to extinction because of my random intermittent reward schedule. When I avoid sugar for days or a week or two and then give in and have some, I feel intense cravings for it and usually eat way more than I intended. So, I believe that giving up sugar and flour entirely for at least 6 or 8 weeks at a minimum — feeling the craving and then failing to reward it over, and over, and over —  is the only way to extinguish my urges and create inner peace around food (and reach my dream goal weight of 135). The intermittent slip-ups are only serving to make my desire stronger and keep my weight stagnant in the 140s. Here comes the extinction burst: my inner beast is screeching right now that I should go get some chocolate. And it’s deafening.