Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (8 page)

Once you determine your portion size, place that amount on a plate or napkin, close up the food container, and put it away. You don't actually have to measure food portions (as I said, it's too easy for people who feel too much to start obsessing over these things!). Then again, if you're a person who considers a pound of hamburger or a mega muffin a “just right” portion, it might be a good idea to get some measuring cups to get used to reasonable healthy food portions. In many countries, portion sizes have ballooned over the years. We've become used to bottles of soda pop or servings of salty snacks that are 50 to 60 percent larger than they were thirty years ago. As you get further into building skills to manage your porous boundaries and your emotions, it will become easier to choose, and stick to, smaller portion sizes instead of heading off to the couch with your supersized bag of munchies.

When you eat mindfully, you focus on the food and your body's experience of it. If you tend to eat meals alone, it's understandable that you might want to switch on the TV or watch some online videos to keep yourself entertained while you're eating and keep your mind off your desire for friends or family to sit around a table with you. Did you know that when you eat while watching television you consume more calories? In fact, women who watch three to four hours of television a day are twice as likely to be obese as women who watch for an hour a day. When you get together with other people to break bread, as they say, you can create a sense of community that would satisfy you much more than watching another reality show or eating a huge plate full of food.

The rule in this weight-loss program is simply to eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. To do that, you have to be mindful of your hunger signals and stick with a simple plan for eating that prevents dips in blood sugar levels. For the next eight weeks, you will eat three meals and two snacks. Now, there's some flexibility to this rule depending on what your body needs. One of my clients has two light meals for breakfast—some protein and fruit when she gets up and a snack with fiber and whole grains a couple of hours later. Whatever works for you, go for it—but it's very important that you
never
skip a meal. If you do, you're fooling yourself—you're going to eat that meal anyway, just when you're absolutely famished owing to low blood sugar and far more likely to overeat. Then you will probably consume the very foods you're trying to avoid (the noisy ones that scream, “Enough already! You're hungry and you deserve to eat! Take a big handful!”). Be mindful of your body's needs and plan to be around healthful food when you're inevitably going to get hungry. Then have your snack or meal, on a plate. Enjoy it, clean up when you're done, and don't mindlessly scan the refrigerator to see if there's anything else you might want.

On this plan, it's important not to deprive yourself. If you're used to eating a whole chocolate bar every day, don't set a goal of eating no chocolate whatsoever. You'll miss it so much that you'll be tempted to binge. Plan on having perhaps two squares of chocolate a day, or a half a bar twice a week. If you suddenly feel you need to have chocolate you haven't planned for as part of your three meals and two snacks, stop for a moment and ask yourself,
What am I really hungry for? What do I want right now?
You might be surprised to see that when you ask yourself these questions, you will very likely not want that chocolate after all. The real answer will rarely be “a giant chocolate bar.”

Everyone is different—our blood types are different, our body shapes are different, our food preferences are different—and you may do better on one food plan than on another. However, what we people who feel too much have in common is that we use food to ground ourselves because
we have too much of our own feelings jumbled up with what we pick up from the environment.
For us, food needs to find its proper place in our lives, and the kind of food we eat matters a great deal.

How to Eat: A Primer

We all know how to eat: it's instinctual, really (well, maybe not eating artichoke leaves—that takes some training). What we don't know is how to eat healthfully. Crazy thought it may sound, I'm going to attempt to re-teach you how to eat.

Step One: Sit down.
We're all busy and on the go much of the time, but you can't eat mindfully if you're walking, standing over a sink, or driving.

Step Two. Make sure your food is contained.
As I said, don't worry about portion sizes for now. Just make sure that you're not eating from a big container or an overfilled plate with the intention of eating until you're no longer hungry, or you will eat more than you intend to eat. There was a fascinating study done on unsuspecting subjects who ate from a soup bowl that they didn't realize was being refilled from tubing underneath the bowl and table. Rather than listening to their hunger signals, they let their eyes tell them whether they needed to eat more.

If you were a member of the clean plate club as a child, and felt keenly that it was your personal obligation to make up for all those people starving over in some other country by listening to Mom and eating every morsel on your plate, you will have to let go of that old thinking and start listening to your body's signals about how much food to eat.

Step Three. Turn off the TV and other distractions.
Don't eat while talking on the phone, watching TV, or surfing the Internet. It will distract you from how much you are eating and whether what you're eating is what your body needs.

Step Four. Breathe and focus.
After serving yourself a snack or meal, take five or six long, deep breaths. Pay attention to how you feel. Are you agitated and responding to noisy food, or are you calm and responding to your body's need for nourishment? You will know beyond a shadow of a doubt if the food is okay for you to eat or not. Listen to your intuition. Taking several slow breaths helps calm your system and any strong emotions, and gets you in touch with your body's divine intelligence, which will tell you what you're truly hungry for. If you're about to eat a food that you realize you don't want, you can mindfully choose to not eat it after all or to exchange it for something your body wants to eat—and you can make this choice without drama.

Step Five. Be grateful.
Before you pick up your fork, take a moment to be grateful for the nourishing food in front of you. Imagine where that food came from and how it came to your table. Be grateful for the farmer, the workers who harvested the food, and all those who handled it with integrity before it came to you. Imagine the rich soil, the sunlight, and the rain that gave life to the plant and helped it to grow fruit, grains, or vegetables for you to eat. You might wish to say grace aloud or silently, using words you learned as a child or making up your own.

Step Six. Eat mindfully.
Notice what is on your plate and your fork, notice how it feels when you put the food in your mouth, and notice how your whole body feels as you eat. Pay attention to your hunger signals, and eat slowly and mindfully.

At-Your-Best Eating

I'm not going to tell you exactly what you may and may not eat. This is not the typical weight-loss book or program, nor is it meant to provide you with the latest breakthroughs in magical weight-loss formulas. You know your body better than anyone else does. And, you might even have a library filled with diet books, cookbooks, and the like. Yet, if you're here now with me, I bet you'd agree that knowing it all hasn't helped you up until now, has it? You have to commit to this program one day at a time and make it workable for you. Be radically honest with yourself about what your body needs, and what you need. I'm going to set forth a simple plan for “at-your-best” eating.

My clients and students who have had the best success with the weight-loss program simply avoided all sugars, most stimulants, and all processed refined flour. I am happiest and at my best when I do this, too. I know that if I listen to that noisy food I'll quickly return to disordered eating. Once I've eaten it, I get cravings and start sailing down the River of Denial, telling myself that it's okay, I can eat “just one.” Who am I kidding?

Sugary, fatty foods that appeal to our brain's pleasure centers tend to be noisy, but so do foods made of processed or refined flour. Refined flour acts on the body like sugar, spiking your blood sugar quickly and causing blood sugar fluctuations that lead to food cravings. Think of it as just another form of sugar. It makes sense to avoid any food that triggers food cravings, especially if it's high in calories, but for some of my clients who had success with the People Who Feel Too Much weight loss program, I suspect that removing gluten, a key ingredient in grain-based foods, was important, too. These days, many people have low tolerance for gluten or even have celiac disease, a severe food intolerance, and shouldn't eat even a small amount of it.

Gluten, the protein that makes bread stretchy when you pull it apart, can be found in products made with wheat, rye, and other grains, but if you're gluten intolerant, you might have trouble digesting rice and oats as well. If you can tolerate gluten, make sure your breads, pastas, and cereals are whole grain, meaning they contain the entire grain, including the fiber found in the hull or husk. Your body needs fiber for a healthy digestive system. And don't be fooled by “multigrain” breads that are made with highly processed flours, dyed brown with natural food dyes, and have about as much fiber as a marshmallow. If it's squishy, it's not whole grain!

In addition, in at-your-best eating, you should avoid
all
stimulants and depressants, especially if you know you depend on them to manage your moods and your energy level. If you can't operate without three cups of coffee, or you can't get through the evening without a glass of wine before dinner, you're relying on these foods for mood management and fuel. Don't worry—you're going to learn plenty of healthy techniques for perking yourself up or relaxing. The coffee, caffeinated tea, sugars, colas, and alcoholic drinks won't be so tempting once you've started working with the exercises in the book.

Drink plenty of water to stay hydrated, and try to abstain from processed foods that have been highly altered from their original, using everything from high temperatures to chemical treatments, and which include all sorts of artificial ingredients including artificial flavorings, colors, and preservatives. Processed foods are often packaged and include prepared with nitrites (think sausage and luncheon meats), bleached flour (the wheat flour is chemically treated to make it look whiter), refined sugars, and hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils (also known as trans fats). If the label has a long list of ingredients, many of which you can't pronounce, or your grandmother would not recognize as food (where exactly are the nuggets on a chicken, anyway?), you probably shouldn't eat it. And if the pre-cooked version of what you're about to eat looks like the pink slime some fast-food restaurants put in their meat products, think long and hard. Should you be eating that? Just saying.

Eat lots of fresh food, and make most of your food plant based.

If you're not a vegetarian or vegan, and you choose to eat fish, poultry, meat, and dairy, eat cleanly. Avoid processed meats and cheeses, and as mentioned, buy organic foods whenever possible. You'll learn later why I recommend not eating factory-farmed meat or dairy products at all, but you don't have to be a vegan or vegetarian for this weight-loss plan to work. I have gone through periods of being strict vegetarian, then vegan, and now I feel better eating fish; I will have grass-fed humanely slaughtered beef a couple times a month. It's personal for each of us. For now, just eat simply and concentrate on eating mostly plant-based foods that contain no additives and eating cruelty free.

Go ahead have some fruit, and if you like fruit juice, drink it in moderation—just a few ounces a day (you can mix it with water) so you don't take in too much sugar at once. Just be honest with yourself; if you are drinking lots of juice because you crave the sugar, cut down or cut it out altogether. I love carrot and beet juice. Of course, I do! It has the highest sugar content of any vegetable juice. Be aware of your choices.

Second-Best Eating and Off Days

If you normally use sugar as a sweetener, try to go without. If you can't, use a little maple sugar or syrup, dark agave sugar, stevia, or unprocessed honey (don't use fake sugars like Aspartame). Using healthy sugars, eating some processed foods, chowing down on white pasta, and having a latte or a cocktail isn't strictly forbidden, but it is
second-best eating.
You can do better—try to avoid these foods completely. Coffee? Tea? Green Tea is your best option, but if you're like me and love your coffee, buy organic coffee and make it at home; and if you can, make it with alkaline water to cut down on the acid in it (more on that later).

That said, you are going to have off days, when you just have to grab for cookies, chips, candy, cake, or other comfort foods to deal with feeling too much. These are not “Faturdays,” as my girlfriend Jennifer calls them: “cheat days” when you plan in advance to eat a piece of chocolate cake for dessert. These are the days when you don't just sneak a latte with a tablespoon or two of sugar, you eat a huge frosted sugar cookie or a candy bar (or two or three) furtively in the bathroom when no one is looking—or you pretend you're sick so you don't have to go out with others, preferring a good old-fashioned binge in the comfort of your own home.
But it doesn't count if no one sees it and I eat over the sink.
Wrong!

On these days, when you recognize you're about to eat a food that's on your “avoid” list, ask yourself,
Is this what I really want right now?
If the answer is
no,
abstain. If the answer is
yes,
go ahead and eat a small portion of that food on a plate or napkin or in a cup or bowl. Do this even if you bought it from the gas station checkout display or a vending machine at work. Having comfort food once in a while isn't bad or wrong—it's how you eat it. A great rule of thumb is this: if you can't eat it in public, right out loud and in front of people, and you only want to eat it when no one's looking, it's not the right choice. That would be a
no
.