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.

Non-scale victory: I finally think I look thin in a photo!

My Non-Scale Victory (#NSV) was a doozy this week! I had a new pair of plaid pants and a new scarf that I had received from Stitch Fix, and I wanted to get a more objective idea of how they looked on me before deciding whether to keep them than I get from simply looking in the mirror. Somehow, looking at myself directly in the mirror leads to a distorted view of how I look – often actually making me appear thinner in my head than I might perhaps appear in real life. Anyone who is overweight might relate to walking along a city street and suddenly catching a glimpse of an extremely fat person in the reflection off of a glass building or door, only to realize in an instant that that fat woman is ME and feeling somewhat shocked that I was that big, even though I had looked at that same body in the mirror just a few hours prior. Or seeing a photograph of yourself in which you feel shocked and think, “WHOA… am I really that big?” So in my 45 years of life, my experience of catching sight of myself in a photo was always a surprise in the “I though I looked thinner than this” negative, disappointed kind of way.

So back to my Stitch Fix outfit. I have an #EchoLook which is an Amazon Echo product that takes your photo and has several different features, including just taking the photo (or a quick video if you want to turn around and see the back of your outfit or see how the fabric flows), having Alexa give you advice on how you look and what can be changed about your outfit, submitting two variations on an outfit (or even two totally different looks) that will be compared by Amazon’s style staff to help you choose between them, etc. So, because I always seem to get a more objective idea of how I really look when I see myself in a photo as compared to the mirror, I stood in front of my Echo Look and asked Alexa what she thought. The shocker was my instant impression when I looked at the photo that popped up on my iPhone: “Holy crap, I look THINNER than I thought I was!!”

People, seriously. You don’t understand. I. Look. Thinner. Than. I. Thought.

What a surge of the feel-goods that gave me! It was quite literally the first time in more than 4 decades, in my entire life, that I had ever been surprised by a photo of myself in that happy direction rather than being surprised at how big I am.

It felt great, and it brought up many thoughts and feelings for me:
         First, some low level shame that I am feeling vain and enjoying how I look. I definitely try hard to maintain a normal weight for health reasons, because I have an extremely strong family history of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and Alzheimer’s Disease (all weight-related conditions) and I myself was insulin resistant (prediabetic) at the start of my Biggest Loser weight loss journey when I weighed in at 270 pounds in 2005. My “before” photo above was taken in college when I was about 300 pounds, my highest in life (and I know my blood pressure was a little high then so I can imagine I was similarly insulin resistant even in my teens and 20s). So health is extremely important to me, more so than ever now that I have Graham to live long for. But I am not going to lie — taking pride in my appearance is an extremely strong motivator for me as well, whether that is ideal or not. I recognize that even my calling it a “happy direction” might be viewed by some as anti- #fatacceptance, which I most definitely am not. Although I fully support any human being who is happy with their appearance no matter their shape or size, I personally still feel best about myself when I am in the normal BMI range, and that’s ok too. Just keepin’ it real.
        Second, this #NSV brought up extreme interest in how our brains interpret visual data so differently. I have not yet researched why this happens, why I think I look different in photos or surprise reflections in glass doors than I think I do in real-time mirror engagements, but there is a clear effect that my brain has on how it interprets objective data. My appearance did not change objectively from mirror to photo, yet my brain thinks it did. This is just so fascinating! Does this happen to you? Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Until next week, with love-
Jen

Oh yeah, btw, I kept both the plaid pants and the scarf! 😘

There is NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU if you’re fat!

The diet and weight loss industry wants to sell you the idea that they have a solution that’s easy to follow. Effortless. Comfortable. The pounds will just melt off if you just follow this particular plan, take this supplement, or drink this shake (and, of course, pay them for it). I believe that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. (And wouldn’t we all be thin if that quick and easy solution had been discovered?) Scientific research has shown us time and time again that diets don’t work (weight regain after about 6 months being the norm), AND that every diet works as long as people actually adhere to it. Let me repeat that: almost any diet will work to produce weight loss, and the primary determinant of success at weight loss and longer term weight maintenance is one’s level of adherence. The people who stick with the plan the best and continue to show up day after day are the people who lose the weight and keep it off. This applies whether you follow a low fat vegan diet or a low carb ketogenic diet. The reasons why “diets don’t work” is because people stop following them, not because they don’t technically work. So why do we stop following them?

Is this our fault? We just don’t have the willpower, the strength of character, to follow a diet? No, it’s not a moral failure. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU if you struggle with obesity. Our brains and bodies are built to search out and eat food and to store it as fat, and these very strong counter-influences make weight loss extremely hard for people. Our brains and bodies evolved during thousands of years of relative food scarcity, before the advent of industrialized food production, so our biology is set up to store energy (as fat) whenever and wherever we can. Our brains evolved to create desire to get us up off the cave floor and out hunting for food — the natural high, courtesy of our friends dopamine and the endorphins, that we got when we came across some honey or a handful of ripe berries was an advantage that kept us healthy and allowed the human race to flourish. The people who couldn’t gorge on food and store fat died during times of food scarcity. If our brains didn’t have a mechanism to make us want food and drive us to go get it and eat as much of it as we can, we’d be extinct. The problem is that in the last few centuries, our brilliant brains have come up with all kinds of solutions to make life easier for us. We now have food in abundance, available anywhere we turn, 24 hours a day. We don’t have to work for it anymore. And not only is food ubiquitous, it’s also now been transformed from whole foods like berries and meat to processed foods which take the small amount of pleasure we would’ve gotten from a handful of berries and concentrating it into a refined source of megapleasure: sugar. A brain that has evolved over thousands of years to give us a natural high with every bite of sugar is no match for the current food environment in which massive doses of sugar are available at arm’s reach anywhere and always. It’s perfectly natural for us to overeat sugar and refined carbohydrates. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. And it makes us feel gooood in the moment. Trying to counter against this is NOT easy, I don’t care what any diet plan or product tells you. It’s not going to be effortless, and it is very often uncomfortable (especially in the beginning). And we don’t want to be uncomfortable! But we are the most brilliant, powerful beings on the planet, and that same primitive brain that wants us to eat sugar and refined carbohydrates all the time has also evolved to have a higher center — the prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain that is aware, can plan ahead and make decisions that are good for our futures even when our instincts want us to do something else in the moment. The human part of our brain is so brilliant and powerful that it is capable of overcoming thousands of years of evolution, overcoming our fat-storing biology, and overcoming the current food environment where we can eat sugar or refined carbohydrates any time we want without lifting a finger. No matter what any diet plan or supplement advertisement tries to sell you on, weight loss and long-term maintenance is NOT easy or comfortable. It’s hard as hell.

Luckily we brilliant humans can do hard things. We just have to be willing to let our executive brains rule our primitive brains and be willing to feel the resultant discomfort. Anyone who is unwilling to feel some level of discomfort will not be successful at weight loss or successfully keep it off, period. (And, by the way, isn’t it ironic that we would then feel discomfort anyway, just for a different reason: the discomfort of living in an overweight body). So we need to get comfortable with discomfort in order to achieve our goals. If you’re willing to invest the effort, it just takes practice… and then, over time, it gets easier.