Newcomers to 12-step recovery are often told, “I wish you a slow recovery.” How passive-aggressive, they think, little realizing that a slow recovery is often a sturdy recovery. Faced with the need to lose weight, many of us are tempted by radical measures. We want the magic pill that will curb our appetite. We want the magic potion that will jolt our metabolism into fast forward. We want a liquid diet that will allow us to eliminate pesky calorie counting. The tabloids are filled with dramatic stories of sudden and extreme weight loss. Movie stars have babies, and then shed their baby weight in a scant six weeks—with the help, of course, of a strict diet and exercise regimen, usually conducted under the hawklike eyes of a personal trainer, chef, and nutritionist.
But we are not movie stars. We are real people with ordinary lives. How do ordinary people lose weight? We must find a regimen that is compatible with our daily lives, with the people, places, and events we normally encounter.
“I was a yo-yo dieter,” says Marge. “I wanted to lose weight and I wanted to lose it quickly. I brutalized my body with extreme regimens. Always, I saw results—a sudden weight loss followed just as surely by the regaining of every ounce I’d dropped.”
Many of us, like Marge, crave a quick fix. Following the tabloids, we fail to understand that most successful weight loss is slow and steady.
When Mary Lou stopped drinking, she was twenty-five pounds overweight, bloated, and puffy. “I can’t believe I let myself get in such shape,” she says. But Mary Lou’s shape was the least of her problems. It was far more important that as a newly sober alcoholic she maintain her sobriety rather than drop her extra pounds. “I wanted to go on an extreme diet, but my sponsor told me not to get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. An extreme diet was a setup, she warned me, the greased slide back to a drink.” Reluctantly Mary Lou took her sponsor’s advice. She ate three meals a day with snacks in between—particularly during happy hour, when her blood sugar dropped and she craved a drink. The first thing to go was her bloat, a residual puffiness caused by the near-lethal doses of alcohol she had been imbibing.
“You look great. What’s going on with you? Have you lost weight?”
“Don’t even think about losing weight for the first year,” her sponsor advised, adding, “let’s just get you stable.” Striving to be stable, Mary Lou listened to her sponsor’s advice. She began a regimen of cleaner eating, substituting snacks like fresh fruit or trail mix for her absent martinis. At about six months without a drink, her clothes began to fit differently. Pulling her scale from beneath the bed, where she had banished it, Mary Lou hopped on. To her delighted surprise, she was down nearly ten pounds.
“Easy does it,” her sponsor counseled her when Mary Lou was tempted to accelerate her weight loss through the use of a liquid diet. “Just keep on keeping on,” advised her mentor. “You’re doing well so far.”
And so, despite her temptation to sign on to a radical diet, Mary Lou continued to eat sensibly, now adding in some gentle aerobics. “You need the endorphins,” her sponsor told her, “and exercise is an excellent time to pray.”
“One day I prayed for guidance, and I heard very clearly, ‘You need to write.’ I began writing every morning on a regular basis. I found with the writing in place, it was far, far easier to stick to a healthy eating plan. On the nights when I was tempted to binge on Ben and Jerry’s, I turned to writing instead. A day at a time, a page at a time, I began to feel more comfortable in my own skin.”
A year off alcohol, Mary Lou found herself twenty pounds lighter. The change had occurred so gradually—at about half a pound a week—that she had barely noticed her own transformation.
Those of us who practice writing discover in our writing a loving witness who gently encourages us along the trail. Living—and eating—one day at a time, we often feel restless, irritable, and discontent, but these feelings pass as we stick faithfully to our regimen.
“I didn’t want to hear ‘Easy does it,’” protests Aaron, a highly driven type-A personality. “I wanted the drama of a sudden change. Writing about this, I discovered I was addicted to drama in all areas of my life—my work, my leisure activities, my relationships. Why should my weight loss be any different?”
“An ‘Easy does it’ approach works,” Sara Ryba points out firmly. “A pound a week of weight loss accumulates to fifty-two pounds in a year. No matter what your size, that is a substantial loss.”
“I don’t like to think I’m a fool,” says Sally, “but I’ve always been fooled by the tabloid advertisements for quick weight loss. I was addicted to those bikini-clad before-and-after pictures. I looked like the before, and I wanted to look like the after. I tried fasting, potions, powders, pills—sometimes I did lose weight, but I always gained it back the moment I resumed normal eating.”
What we are after is the permanent shift in lifestyle, not the quick fix of an extreme diet. If we lower our consumption by 250 calories a day and raise our exercise by 250 calories a day, that’s a moderate shift that results in a pound’s loss weekly. One pound doesn’t sound like a lot of weight—not until you visualize a box of butter weighing one pound—that is the amount you have lost. A resolute dieter of our acquaintance lost forty pounds but was discouraged, feeling she still had thirty to go. “I’m not getting anywhere,” she complained. I suggested that she find the concrete equivalent of forty pounds. She called us back excited. At the grocer’s, she’d found two twenty-pound containers of lard. “I could barely heft them!” she exclaimed. “I couldn’t believe that that was how much weight I had managed to lose. Suddenly I felt encouraged. I was more than halfway to my goal!”
Many of us, striving to practice an “Easy does it” approach, find it helpful to set goals, modest goals for ourselves. At one hundred seventy-five pounds, Deirdre had an ultimate goal of one hundred fifty. We encouraged her to set mini goals—five-pound increments. This meant her first goal was one hundred seventy. She reached it in five weeks.
“I felt like I’d broken the sound barrier,” Deirdre says. “I really never thought I would weigh less than one hundred seventy again. Now I know that losing weight isn’t such a mystery or something I can’t do. When I control my food intake using the four questions and walk twenty minutes a day, I do lose a pound a week. I found I had to prove it to myself by my own experience though. If I was honest, I didn’t believe that the plan would actually work for me. Now that my immediate goals are much smaller, my large goal seems attainable.”
In the hyped-up world in which we live, it’s hard to believe that the “Easy does it” approach could ever work. We are attracted to extremes, certain that we have to punish ourselves in order to attain weight loss. The Writing Diet, with its emphasis on Clean Eating, seems too good to be true to us. But sometimes the easy answer is the right answer.
Ted was a high-powered lawyer whose sedentary lifestyle made him prone to overweight. An athlete in his youth, he now carried an extra forty pounds. We suggested that he write every morning for a start.
“It felt very Zen to me,” Ted says. “I didn’t really see what writing about my life could have to do with my weight, but I began writing and soon found I was addicted to it. I was astonished by all the worries and concerns that tumbled onto the page. After a few weeks of writing, I began to feel I was a better lawyer, more focused and clearheaded. I also noticed that I had stopped ‘grazing.’ I got rid of the party mix I kept in my desk drawer for a quick pick-me-up. Instead, I bought apples. At the end of a month my pants were looser. I stepped on a scale and I had lost nearly five pounds.”
As we raise our consciousness, we often lower our calories. Like Ted, we catch ourselves grazing on high-calorie foods. Catching on, we begin to eat differently. “Easy does it” is beginning to have its gentle way with us. At least, it will if we let it!
In the tabloids, it all happens so fast. Movie stars lose their post-baby weight in a matter of nanoseconds. They set out to be thinner, and presto! If you’re Jessica Simpson, you can lose thirteen pounds in two weeks. That’s thirteen pounds—or, to give you an accurate visual—thirteen boxes of butter.
“I’d love to lose thirteen pounds,” says Jodi, “but I’d like to lose it instantly, just like Jessica Simpson.”
Fast weight loss is a dangerous illusion. Nutritionists unite in telling us that a slow and gradual loss is more apt to be permanent.
“I like to see my clients lose one to two pounds a week,” says Sara Ryba. “A slow and steady loss is more likely to be permanent.”
TASK
Picture Yourself Perfect
Collect ten magazines. Buy a large sheet of poster paper. Find yourself a comfortable work area where you can make a mess. Take a half hour and leaf through the magazines, selecting body images that match your own physical type once you are in shape. Pull twenty or so images and collage an idealized you. Some of us combined photos of ourselves with our ideal bodies. Many of us found that when we thought about it, we preferred a body type that was not as skinny as the tabloid norm. Like Tyra Banks, who proudly flaunts her curves at one hundred sixty-one pounds, we may exclaim, “I am still hot!”