Slim for Life (22 page)
Authors: Jillian Michaels
Let’s kick it off with the top slim traps: hunger and cravings. I’ll arm you with any and every piece of advice
or actionable step available to fend off these weight-loss demons (other than surgery and drugs—which are bad, by the way).
Hunger
THINK IT THROUGH • • • 3 POINTS
There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous tip that says “Think through the drink.” That is,
before
you drink, think through how it will play out if you actually have even a sip. I’ve found this tip works exceptionally well with food binges, too. Before you indulge, think it all the way through. How will you feel five minutes after you’ve eaten the food? How about the next morning? Better yet, how about in a year, after you’ve thrown down lots of excess calories unnecessarily over the months and have packed on 10 extra pounds? This one gets me to put the fork down every time.
Most people
think
they’re physically hungry when they aren’t. When you’re not sure if something else is prodding you to eat, ask yourself the following questions:
1. When was the last time I ate?
2. Am I experiencing physical signs of hunger like light-headedness, mood swings, and tummy growling?
3. Am I having trouble thinking or making a decision? Am I cranky?
If you’ve eaten a substantial meal within the last 3 hours and you aren’t actually having any physical symptoms of hunger, then
chances are … you’re not hungry! Ask yourself what else could be going on; what emotion is masquerading as hunger? Are you stressed, bored, lonely, or angry? Write down what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. Then try to resolve the actual issue in an appropriate way rather than relying on food as the solution.
THIRST • • • 3 POINTS
It’s not uncommon for
dehydration to disguise itself as hunger. If you find yourself feeling hungry, drink a glass of water first to make sure you’re not dehydrated. Wait 15 to 20 minutes—if you’re still hungry, eat. As a rule of thumb, drink first, eat later; you’ll avoid packing on unwanted pounds.
SLIM MYTH:
Some foods have “negative calories.”
FAST FACT:
We’ve talked about free foods, and they’re awesome choices for curbing hunger. But the theory we are dispelling here is that your body uses
more
calories to digest them than they contain, so you burn calories just from eating them. That’s not true. These foods are extremely low calorie, and you can pretty much eat as much of them as you want and never gain a pound, but digesting them won’t actually create a calorie deficit.
If you’re about to eat something you know you’ll regret later, like a huge bag of chips, before you mindlessly down it, stop and say out loud: “I’m eating this entire bag of chips because I’m bored, sad, mad, [insert emotion here], and I’m not even hungry. I know I’m going to mentally beat myself up afterward. I’m consciously making the decision to worsen my health and take a sledgehammer to my weight-loss aspirations.” If you do this, there’s a good chance you’ll think better of your decision. Sometimes when you bring things out into the open in this way, it takes you out of an unconscious, impulsive behavior that will mess you up and brings you to a supportive place of reason and logic.
An
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
study showed that when you
chew your food slowly and completely, as opposed to scarfing it, you take in nearly 12 percent fewer calories. It takes the body 20 minutes to register feelings of fullness—you know this, but you may not have considered how advantageous it is to slow down. Eat slowly, and you’ll give yourself a chance to feel full before you’ve scarfed an entire pizza. Try these simple strategies to go into slow mo and save yourself some calories and an expanding waistline:
• Eat with your opposite hand.
• Chew your food till it’s the consistency of applesauce.
• Take a sip of water between bites.
• Consume slow foods, like pistachios or peel-and-eat shrimp.
• Cut your food into small bites.
Although some of these ideas may seem tedious or make you feel silly when doing them, that won’t matter when you’re rockin’ that hot dress on a Friday night.
FREE • • • 3 POINTS
Did you ever play the game that asks, If you could have one wish, what would it be? My answer was always the ability to eat whatever I wanted and never gain weight. I’ve had no such luck with that so far, but there’s such a thing as free food, at least where your waistline is concerned. I’m talking about high-fiber, high-water-content, nutrient-dense, extremely low-calorie foods that take
nearly
as many calories for your body to digest as the amount of calories they actually contain. What I love about these foods is that you can fill up on them when you’re hungry—I mean literally eat as much of them as you want (provided you don’t add fattening sauces, oils, or dressings) and not gain weight.
I’m referring to these foods:
| Bell peppers | Jicama |
| Broccoli | Kale |
| Brussels sprouts | Leafy greens |
| Cabbage | Lettuce |
| Cauliflower | Mushrooms |
| Celery | Snap peas |
| Cucumbers | Zucchini |
| Green beans | |
I know. I built this one up as if I were going to tell you I’d discovered a calorie-free cake. Instead I hit you with rabbit food. This advice, however, has gotten me through many hungry nights. When my appetite is out of control and I’m out to dinner, I order
three veggie sides, like steamed spinach with lemon, steamed brussels sprouts (that I dip in hot sauce), steamed green beans, and for my meal an enormous dinner salad. Then I power through all and eat only a bite of dessert. It fills me up without the calories and squashes my hunger.
SLIM MYTH:
Exercise makes you eat more.
FAST FACT:
Many studies have found just the opposite, that exercise
suppresses
food intake. In 2012 researchers looked at how exercise affects our hunger hormones. It seems the relationship between appetite hormones, and the brain’s response to food sensory cues, is dependent on
the
type
of exercise you do. Back in 2008, a U.K. study found that cardio training is more effective than resistance training in suppressing hunger for two hours after training, due to hormonal changes in the release of ghrelin and peptide YY. Ghrelin, a hunger-stimulating hormone, decreased in both activities, but only peptide YY, which suppresses hunger, decreased during cardio. A recent 2012 study, published in the
Journal of Applied Physiology,
found that exercise significantly lowers our response to food cues after exercise. The evidence suggests that exercise may lessen your desire to eat by altering how certain parts of your brain, what is aptly called the food-reward network, respond to the sight of food. Bottom line: Don’t be afraid to work out! It helps you eat less and burns extra calories.
Sorry for being redundant, but I cannot tell you this rule often enough because breaking it can lead to a pitfall tumble. DO NOT SKIP MEALS, especially breakfast! I mentioned this in the
four-by-four rule
in Chapter 1. When you skip meals, you crash your blood sugar, which inhibits willpower, and from a physiological perspective it actually makes food taste better to you. This, of course, causes you to eat too much of the wrong things. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t skip meals.
MOOD • 1 POINT
Researchers suggest that when you’re happier and more content, you have less of a tendency to overeat. One study on how mood affects food choice found that feeling angry can increase comfort- and impulsive-eating behaviors. Another study observed individuals’ emotional response while watching a happy or sad movie; it found that the subjects watching the sad movie wanted to eat comfort (aka unhealthy) food like buttered popcorn and consumed more of it than those viewing the upbeat movie, who ate less food and made healthier food choices. A 2010 study, conducted at the University of Southampton in the U.K., found that a negative mood increased people’s desire for food, as well as the urge to reward themselves through eating. I’m sure you’ve lived what the researchers documented—who hasn’t?
Being chipper all the time is easier said than done, I know. We all have those days, but making an effort to make yourself happy, smile more, and do more of the things you love can actually help
you curb your appetite. Keeping a more positive attitude will not only help you lose weight, it will also help you keep the weight off. On even your worst day, I bet if you tried, you could find something good that has happened. Before you reach for food, focus on all the things that went well that day. They don’t have to be big to make you feel better.
Research published in the journal
Appetite
suggests that a 15-minute walk can keep your mind off snacking. The next time you’re thinking of having that pint of ice cream, before you scarf down a ton of calories that you’ll be sorry for, hit the road. Walk the dog for 15 minutes. Take a stroll around the neighborhood with your kid. If you live in a
walking city like New York, run an errand on foot. I don’t care how you do it—just do it. It took me a while to personally buy into this one, even with the research, but then I tried it and found that the majority of the time, I had a positive result. If you want to quell hunger—get movin’! Just don’t walk to a fast-food joint or mini-market!
Eat 5 wal
nuts or 8 almonds before a meal (roughly 65 calories) to stimulate production of cholecystokinin, a hormone that slows your stomach from emptying. This trick allows you to stay fuller longer from your meals. Remember, though, that each walnut has about 15 calories and each almond has 8, so incorporate the additions into your daily calorie allowance.
Studies show that cool
colors suppress appetite while warm colors increase it. That’s why all those fast-food joints are themed in yellow, orange, and red. Hello Golden Arches. So while Big Food is using
this information to wreck your diet and grab your cash, you can use it proactively to achieve the opposite goal. Use blue plates. Drink from purple cups. Paint your kitchen green—well, maybe you don’t have to paint the walls green (that could be a little overwhelming). Try just laying out some green placemats the next time you eat, paired with your blue plates and utensils. That’s more easily managed.
Remove food from your sight. It’s less about hunger than about willpower. We tend to eat things that are in front of us. It’s amazing how many times I’ve said I wasn’t hungry, but then a friend started to eat, and suddenly “I could eat, too.” An even clearer example: Bob and I regularly keep a bag of Newman’s Own peanut butter cookies in our makeup room. When it’s out on the counter, we devour it by the end of the week. When it’s tucked away in the cabinet, however, a month could go by, and we wouldn’t have even opened that package.
Remember: out of sight—out of mind—out of mouth.
EMERGENCY PLAN • • • 3 POINTS
I don’t know what part of the world you live in, but here in California we all have our “earthquake emergency plan.” We know what we are going to do when the big one hits, where we are going to go, and how much water, cash, and canned food we will carry. Just as you would prepare for this type of emergency, I want you to ferret out the dangers in your slim regimen and preemptively batten down the diet hatches, so to speak.
Here are the steps I want you to take:
1. Look at your life and identify the ways you get into trouble and sabotage your slim.
2. Write all these issues down.
3. For each one, develop a plan, so when it arises, you have a go- to behavior to turn to instead of food.
For example, if you always eat when you’re stressed, list ways you can nurture yourself that aren’t food related (take a bubble bath, buy some new songs for your workout playlist from iTunes, or turn to a hobby you love). If you know that going home for the holidays to your family will make you feel bad and turn to food, then have a good buddy on call to help talk you off the ledge. If you eat when you’re lonely, make plans to go out with friends as often as possible, so you avoid sitting home alone with your fridge
as your friend. You’ve heard it: failing to plan is planning to fail. So get strategizing.
SLIM MYTH:
The more you sweat, the more calories you burn.
FAST FACT:
Sweating is your body’s way of cooling itself—that’s all. True, you burn more calories when you work harder; your muscles put in more effort, and your heart beats faster. So sweating more might make you think you’re working harder, but that’s not always the case. In some instances, the exact opposite is true. Let’s take hot
yoga, for example. According to Bikram’s Yoga College, a Bikram yoga class should be practiced in a room heated to around 105 degrees. That’s plenty hot, but many teachers are known to crank the temperature up to as high as 115 degrees. While hot yoga has been trending for a while now and Bikram aficionados swear by its benefits, working in this kind of extreme heat can make you weak, dehydrated, dizzy, and fatigued—and boy, are you sweating. Conversely, when you do yoga in a room that’s a more regulated, moderate temperature, you’re able to work at a much higher intensity. Even though you aren’t sweating as much, you’re still burning far more calories than you do in the Bikram class. The same can be said of working out in sauna suits or exercising outside in hot weather. To get a real burn, put yourself in as comfortable an environment as possible, so that you can train at the highest intensity possible.