The Life Plan (9 page)

Do you keep your feelings about food and eating a secret?

Has your weight gone up and down over the years?

Have you ever lied about how much sweet food or other carbs you eat?

Have you ever binged on sweets or white flour foods?

Is it impossible to “just say no” to sweet foods and other processed carbohydrates?

Do you frequently eat more than you planned to eat?

Have you hidden food so that you could have it later?

Have you felt angry when someone ate your special food you saved for yourself?

Do you worry sometimes that you cannot control how much you eat?

Do you gobble down certain foods rapidly, with little chewing?

Do you fast in order to avoid eating foods you cannot control?

Do you overdo exercise to make up for overeating?

Have you ever gone way out of your way to get something sweet?

We can beat food addictions by using a powerful tool: avoidance. Just as people with food allergies know that they can’t eat certain foods or they will have a reaction, you may have the same relationship with certain foods, only this time the reaction is that they cause you to eat more. Potato chips, French fries, bagels, ice cream, cookies, bread, and fast food are all “trigger” foods. Trigger foods are the ones that you can’t “have just one” of. People prefer and crave different trigger foods because of our individualized brain chemistry and even genetic makeup. Typically, trigger foods contain high levels of sugar, fat, or flour. It’s quite rare for brussels sprouts, chicken breasts, broccoli, and asparagus to fall into the trigger food category.

Trigger foods stimulate the same circuits in our brains that are activated by pleasure-producing mind-altering drugs, or other addictive behavior, such as sex. In fact, many researchers believe trigger foods are truly addictive for many people because they invoke a loss of control that duplicates the behavioral consequences of addiction.

The only way to maintain control over trigger foods is by totally eliminating them from your nutrition plan. Don’t deceive yourself: You will never be able to control a trigger food. The idea that you can just have “a little” never works! This is why 75 percent of dieters who are able to lose fat gain it all back in 12 to 18 months. When people reach their goal weight, most of them think they have gained control over their trigger foods. But trigger foods always win. You can never control them unless you learn to retrain your brain (see Chapter 9 for more on that).

The return to full-blown addiction is slow and very insidious, but, before you know it, you will be back to eating as much or more of your trigger food than ever before. Because of this, on the Life Plan, there is no room for a “free day” when you can eat whatever you want. The secret to getting lean and staying lean is to gain total control over your eating—and never lose it.

Social events and holidays will inevitably come up and will test your willpower. To control your eating behavior when you are at parties, you must create an eating strategy before you get there, and then stick to it. Rehearse in your mind just how you are going to deal with the foods and beverages offered. And when you do arrive—don’t get there hungry. Fifteen minutes before I leave for an event I have a rounded tablespoon of Metamucil in an 8-ounce glass of water. Metamucil is psyllium, a nonsoluble fiber, which mixes with the foods you are about to eat, thereby slowing the speed of digestion and the release of sugars into your bloodstream. This really slows the entire process of eating way down and can give you the extra edge you need for staying in control.

If your hosts insist on forcing one of their dishes on you, tell them that your doctor has you on a special nutrition plan to correct a potentially lethal medical condition (fatness—but you don’t have to tell them that). Then, eat only the healthiest options and avoid at all costs your trigger foods. Stay away from hors d’oeuvres that you can’t account for because you are eating one at a time, and not filling a plate. If you start obsessing over one of your trigger foods, tell a friend that you’ve made a commitment to get lean and healthy. This will make it less likely that you will allow yourself to get caught shoving something into your mouth.

Many popular diets allow you to take a day off from eating right. This so-called free day isn’t free at all. In fact, I guarantee that you’ll pay for it later. The U.S. government found when it reviewed all the different weight-loss plans that within one year, 66 percent of dieters gain back all the weight they lost, and 97 percent gain it all back within five years. These numbers point out just how vulnerable we all are to trigger foods.

In my opinion, free days need to be handled with extreme caution; better still, avoid them altogether. What you eat on your free day depends entirely on your personality, your eating history, and just how much control you have over your eating. We all have very different abilities to control eating, many of which have been influenced by culture, physiology, psychology, genes, environment, brain chemistry, and the sensitivity of our taste buds. If you are overfat because you have always had a problem with control (like most of us), and if you recognize that you’re especially vulnerable to trigger foods, then you simply can’t afford a free day.

I know that we aren’t perfect, so I can’t expect you to follow this diet perfectly every day. In all honesty, I cheat every once in a while. But at the same time, I know that if I take a free day, I’ll lose control for a whole lot longer. Instead, if I mess up and eat something that I shouldn’t, the very next meal I’ll get right back on track. So instead of thinking about a free day, I have a “free” meal once a week at the most. And I try very hard to make sure that I completely avoid trigger foods that cause me to lose control.

I also try not to eat foods that I know are bad for my health, such as French fries and fast food in general. A recent scientific study by Rudolph, published in the
American Journal of Nutrition
in August 2007, showed that in the four-hour period following eating a high-fat meal (for example, a Sausage McMuffin® with Egg/two hash browns or a Big Mac® with fries) there is a 70 percent drop in overall blood flow (because your arteries constrict, offering less elasticity), a 125 percent hike in triglycerides, a 50 percent jump in leukocytes (inflammatory white blood cells), and a 125 percent rise in IL-8 (an inflammatory marker). These changes are all a result of the immediate impact high-saturated-fat foods have on the endothelial lining of blood vessels and the heart.

The key to losing weight, and keeping it off forever, is not to follow a diet, but rather, a healthy nutrition program for the rest of your life. You must continually monitor your eating and exercise programs daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly in order to watch for pitfalls resulting from stress, negative thinking, or lifestyle changes—all of which can easily sabotage your success.

Bob Greene writes, in his book
Get with the Program
, that if there is a secret to permanent weight loss, it is the complete elimination of emotional eating. I couldn’t agree more. Emotional eating occurs when we eat because of something we are feeling instead of actually being hungry. As you might guess, the causes of emotional eating can be very complex, and the successful elimination of this destructive behavior requires making significant changes in your life. These changes can be as simple as developing creative ways to handle stress or as involved as entering a psychological counseling program.

The four most common reasons for emotional eating are:

Boredom

Stress

Loneliness

Turmoil arising from childhood trauma

Emotional eating can occur at any time—during meals, at the end of meals, between meals, at social occasions, and late at night. Eliminating emotional eating from our lives is as important as (and maybe even more important than) a well-planned exercise and nutrition program in achieving and maintaining a lean, muscular, healthy body.

The first step in eliminating emotional eating is to make eating a conscious activity. Eating must always be organized and well planned. Again, keeping a food journal can really help in achieving this goal. The next step is learning to distinguish where physical hunger ends and emotional eating begins. Once this point is identified, you can then begin the hard work of taking a clear and objective look at your life and start making the changes needed for permanently eliminating emotional eating. It takes a lot of courage to get to the root cause of emotional eating, but the result will be a permanent change in the way we use food—a change that will guarantee a lifetime of leanness, fitness, and great physical and mental health—goals definitely worth achieving.

If all of these strategies fail and you find yourself reaching for your favorite trigger food, which will most assuredly lead you back down the path to fatness, reach instead for your “before picture” for an instant reality check.

If you have trouble controlling your eating after dinner, or wake up in the middle of the night to eat, you may be suffering from night-eating syndrome (NES). This syndrome is associated with both obesity and chronic fatigue. NES may be the direct result of an overreaction to stress, since we know that the stress hormone cortisol is much higher in the evening and during the night in men who have NES than in those who do not.