Week 6 of Simple Lifestyle Changes

Well everyone! It is the end of the 6 weeks of Lifestyle Changes. I hope that you have all incorporated a few of these simple changes! I would advise you to create a Journal Roadmap sheet using the information you have garnered from the previous weeks. You should have identified your helpful and unhelpful behaviors, activities, situations, and times that are hardest for you, and your triggers and feelings that are difficult. Fill out a cheat sheet for all of the ideas and helps that most apply to you.

Also, include on your cheat sheet the main changes that you hope to make in the coming months. Even if you are only working consistently on a few of these changes, you should see success as you are more aware of your choices, habits and patterns. Remember a great idea is to work on three habits per month as it takes a month to create a new habit. If you do this for a year, you will have 36 new habits incorporated into your life fairly easily.

I will share my personal cheat sheet with you tomorrow to give you an idea of how to do this!

Blessings!

Kerry

"Why do we Eat" and "How did we Gain Weight"?

Next week we are teaching a class on Emotional Eating at our local hospital. To prepare, I have tried to think globally about why we have ended up being a nation where 2/3 of our people are either overweight or obese! I am going to attempt to explain to you why I believe this is so. You will also be able to see why dieting has a long term success rate of 2%.

First question: Why do we eat?

Easy Answer: We are Hungry, right? Sort of right! Most of us eat only 20% of the time because we are actually hungry. The other 80% of the time, we eat for other reasons!

Now you know why diets fail. A diet usually says it is all about food. Change everything you know and love about food and do it this way and you will lose. Well, you box up your "80% reasons" for a time and lose the weight and then when the diet is over, you breath a sigh of relief and go back to your old ways. Voila!
Weight gain again, sometimes to a greater amount than you started at. Diets look at the "What". What are you eating wrong? Count your calories better and you should be successful. Do this by getting rid of carbs, or going low fat or whatever the lastest, greatest diet figures out to redo the calories. Not going to probably work!

Now for the rest of the story! This is your "How" or your "Personal History with Food". Have you ever started a diet and been asked to fill our your food history? I would highly doubt that. It would be like going to the doctor and leaving out your history. You would not get very far. I believe that diets do not work but each person must look at their personal history to find their answers. Most of us gain back the same weight with the same foods on the same days of the week at the same times over and over again! Enough!

What are some of the other 80% reasons that we eat?

Thoughts

All of Nothing Thinking (Perfection or Forget it)

Sabotaging Thoughts (Negative thinking)

Triggers (anything that triggers you to eat)

Biological-hunger, thirst, hormonally influenced cravings

Environmental-seeing or smelling food, food shows or ads

Mental-thinking about food, imagining food and the good and bad memories

Emotional-tension, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, boredom, happiness, excitement,.........

Social-offered food or being around others who are eating

Food-a particular food or type of food is your downfall

Situation

Time

Behavioral pattern

Habits

Mindless Eating

No Planning

Poor Nutrition

Your personal habits add here

Are you overwhelmed yet? Please do not be!

It is all about developing a unique set of great strategies that look at your particular food history and implementing them. Most of us are not doing that many things wrong. Most of us have not woken up today overweight, but have gained it slowly. We are not doing that much wrong. If you overeat by 100 calories per day you will gain 10 pounds this year. Let that go for 10 years and you would be 100 pounds overweight. By identifying your problem areas and cleaning them up, most of us can lose weight and feel better!

Bare Bones Nutrition Week 1

Happy Monday! Each day is a new day. Forget your weekend diet blunders and resolve to make some lifestyle changes in your life this year that could help you lose weight with little effort. I will post a six week guideline to follow for the next six weeks on Mondays. This is a simple guideline that we follow in our classes. It is mostly about being aware in your life and looking for ways to change your habits.

Week 1
Record what you eat in a food journal and make no changes this week. You will use your journal to see your food choices and patterns of eating!!! The more information you can include the better. I would suggest including  time, food eaten, amount, hunger level, calories, where were you, activity (what were you doing), how were you feeling. If you could even do this for three days, it would be helpful. Record every single item that you put into your mouth. A great idea is to take a photo of each food you eat with your cell phone and record it at your convenience. Make sure to note your feelings though! This journal will become your road map to the changes you will need to make in your behavior in the next 6 weeks.

Most of us have no idea how much we eat per day and journaling is the single best way to lose weight. There is no free food out there, like so many of us think. A Costco sample outing will likely cost you around 600 calories. Yes, I actually walked around Costco and tallied this one day! If you sneak in six extra bites, licks or tastes every day, it can add up to 15 extra pounds a year. Journaling also develops an awareness in us as we notice our daily habits, calories, what we really eat (wow no fruits and veggies), triggers, and portion sizes.

I will show how to look at your journal and make some simple changes and substitutions that can save you many calories. You will spot your problem areas, times and see if you are an overeater, snacker, grazer.......In our class we evaluate calories and look for simple ways to save. We can almost always cut calories in half with simple changes and some new strategies that are easy to incorporate.

Remember that it is not as hard as diets want us to think! Happy Monday and Journal away!

Review of "10 Habits that Mess Up a Woman's Diet" by Elizabeth Summer

Yesterday, I was reviewing my favorite books for our upcoming Emotional Eating class at Evergreen Hospital. I found some interesting facts in this book, and I will quote her.

• "If you're like most women, you probably rate your eating habits somewhere between "really good" and "pretty good". She then states that 90% of women polled think their diets are reasonably healthy and that almost all of them are delusional!
• 70% of Americans say they are eating "pretty much whatever they want," and the whatever is not the stuff of which healthy, trim bodies are made.
• We're eating more calories and moving less than we did 20 years ago.
• We are currently averaging 158 pounds of sugar eaten per year.
• Most of us eat 11 serving of grains per day, most of them highly refined and lacking nutrients.
• 40% of us are regularly eating fast food weekly.
• We are not eating enough healthy foods like fruits, veggies, and real foods.

Her book then has chapters on Mindless Eating, Your needs, Honesty, Healthy Eating, Planning, Excuses, Moods, Habits, Drinking, and All or Nothing Thinking. I would say that this book is the most practical one that I own for the person that does not want to diet, but wants to make healthy changes to their eating, work on mindless and emotional eating, and also change the way they look at the world. It is my favorite book and she makes it fun and easy to read!

This book is a must buy book for your library! Kerry

Another New Year

Wow Everyone,
It's another New Year and if you are like everyone else you are busy trying to live up to your New Year's resolutions! I saw a great comic where a guy goes into a gym and asks, "Do you have a membership deal that will last me just for the first couple weeks of the New Year, when I've fooled myself into believing that I can stick to my "Get in Shape" Resolution? Does that sound like most of us or what?

Let's make this year count and not be like the guy in the comic. Let's not diet, set unrealistic weight goals for ourselves or try to eat foods that we hate. Let's make some simple lifestyle habit changes that will help us become more healthy. I wanted to start the year going through some of my favorite ways to make some simple changes. I think that these changes basically fall into three categories. Our Habits, Emotional Eating and Food choices/Nutrition.

Our Habits are huge and it is in this area that most of us fail. You might need some changes with habits if you:

1. Eat and Watch television or multi-task
2. Skip breakfast
3. Eat straight from a container or bag
4. Eat at fast food often
5. Snack all day long
6. Eat in your car
7. Put your serving dishes on the table
8. Eat a lot of food that has a bar code on it.
9. Eat a lot of processed food
10. Buy a lot of processed food
11. Eat most of your calories after 6 PM
12. Have poor self talk and thoughts

Basically, you can see that I could keep writing indefinitely because there are so many areas in our lives that we have developed poor habits over time. Each of us is very different and has our own set of problem areas. There is no "one size fits all diet" or "diet advice" that works for everyone. I could make the same never ending list for healthy food choices or for Emotional Eating also, but you get the point. We all have different reasons for having weight problems. 

I want to take the blog and help you get started thinking about ways you can make some simple changes that will help you. Please make this year different by not dieting but by making lasting practical changes that will help you lose weight permanently. It is not rocket science like all of the diet books would like us to believe!

Don't be discouraged. There is much hope!

Kerry