5
MIND OVER HABIT
Most Americans equate diet success with how many pounds they lose. Having maintained my weight loss for more than twelve years, I can tell you that the most difficult part of “dieting” is not losing weight, but keeping it off. I have tried countless diets and diet products—from restrictive yet popular no-carb, no-fat, and high-protein diets to moments of despair betting all I had on the ultimate liquid-only diet. I’ve had the drive to go hard with exercise. The results were inspiring, and the weight seemed to melt away. I was so optimistic that I threw away all of my “big boy” elastic-waist pants and vowed never to wear them again. I was convinced that I had won the struggle.
Within as little as two weeks to a month, I found myself wishing I still had those pants. Once I went off the strict diet, I gradually fell back into my old habits. As my weight crept up, depression and feelings of failure returned. In my mind, I was back in the basement again.
I know what it is like to commit to fad diets, follow the advice of quacks, and believe the broken promises of the self-proclaimed “experts” in the diet business only to end up crushed and disappointed, not to mention heavier than I was when I started. In this chapter, I want to give you my hard-learned tips on how to succeed at breaking food addictions, take control of your eating, and substitute food that is so delicious you won’t believe it’s good for you. When you do that, your weight will go down as a side effect of eating tasty food that happens to be healthy.
TEN WAYS TO BE THE BOSS OF WHAT YOU EAT
1. Redefine the Word Diet
When I felt the hopelessness of my yo-yo dieting, I knew it was time for me to look at the word diet in a different way. If you are like me, you have selected a diet to “go on” for a specific amount of time or until you reach your desired weight. When viewed this way, a diet means a punishing period of deprivation and hunger. You have a quick weight loss regimen to follow, which you do for two weeks, a month, or six weeks. When you are enthusiastic about your falling weight, you are able to follow any regimen, no matter how restrictive, for a given period of time.
If you were to calculate the daily calorie count on most quick-weight-loss diets, you would find you are eating 700 to 1,100 calories a day. Of course you are losing weight—you are barely eating enough to sustain yourself. The trouble is that you are not meant to eat that way for long periods of time, and you set yourself up for failure when you do. Every cell in your body reacts to your drastically reduced caloric intake with alarm and kicks into starvation mode. Not only do your cravings intensify, but your body also becomes more efficient with the available calories, which means your metabolism slows down. When you “finish” the diet, your body is primed to fatten up to make up for the perceived period of starvation—the last thing you want.
The first step to diet success is to change the meaning of the D-word. You have been conditioned to see a diet as something you go on to lose weight and then go off once the weight loss has occurred. The weight loss industry is a $60-billion-a-year business encompassing gyms, weight loss programs, and countless diet foods, including diet soda. At any given time, 108 million people in the United States are “on a diet.” Most “go on” a diet four or five times a year. How many diets have you tried in one year? As you have probably learned from experience, “going on” a diet that has a beginning and end has done little to solve your weight problems.
As I said earlier, a diet is simply what you eat, a habit. If you want to be healthy and lose weight, you have to look at what you normally consume every day and substitute healthier food options for the junk food. You have to change your diet, the way you eat, for good. That’s what I have done. Now, let me be clear: I’m not saying that I don’t have a craving for junk food now and then, which I do satisfy occasionally, but I don’t go into a food trance anymore.
As you will see, The Spice Diet will help you to make fundamental changes in the way you eat. The satisfying and delicious “real” food you will be eating will make junk food pale in comparison. The difference is like a beautiful piece of dry-aged beef grilled to perfection versus a piece of roadkill cooked until it’s as hard as a hockey puck. Once you retrain your taste buds, you might find it hard to believe that you ever devoured food designed to make you crave it. Junk food will taste chemical and disgusting to you. I know I was surprised when I was able to drive by a fast-food restaurant without a thought of stopping. Now that was a victory—better yet, it was a miracle!
2. Face Your Truths
When I saw that graduation picture of my obese self at more than 350 pounds and was shocked by the reality of my weight situation, I resolved to change permanently, but there was a major roadblock in my way. I had to face my truths before I could expect to change the key issue that defined my life. I had to meet my demons head on if I was to fight for my life. Doubt and fear crept in. I wondered if I could do it. After all, I had tried to make changes in the past, and nothing I did stuck. I knew I had to get to the source of my issues with food to succeed at change.
As part of my process, I forced myself to dive into my past to get to the root causes of my addiction. This sort of introspection was new to me. I had spent so long denying who I was and what I felt that the process was extremely difficult. It hurt to review the painful experiences and perceptions that had shaped me. I uncovered so much struggle, pain, self-hatred, and rejection that had plagued me when I was young. I grew to understand the family dynamics that had troubled me, without judging or blaming anyone. I saw that all the bad feelings had followed me into adulthood.
I took an introspective nosedive into that jumble of emotions. It was the first time in my life that I broke through the facade I had so carefully constructed to protect myself. I allowed myself to be vulnerable and to go to places I had consciously and unconsciously avoided. I acknowledged that I had been in denial about how overweight I was. I had managed to turn away from that obvious truth. It went the other way, too. My perceptions came from such a hypersensitive, self-critical place that I probably misinterpreted many experiences. I came to realize how wrong I could be about situations. I had kept everything buried deep within myself. I knew I had to let it all go to prevail. I needed a complete cleansing of my mind and spirit in order to reset the way I saw the world and my place in it.
When I finally let the walls down, the darkness inside me erupted, demanding that I acknowledge the negativity and pain I had kept contained for so long. Confronting my inner demons was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, but I finally came to terms with my issues. I was able to forgive myself, as well as those in my life who had hurt me. I stopped playing the blame game, making others responsible for my problems. I knew I had to become accountable for my troubles. I was no longer harboring anger at those I thought had wronged me. On the contrary: I had to ask for forgiveness from those I had wronged as a result of my deep self-loathing. During my soul-searching, I cleared the way for growth and inner light.
If you want the Spice Diet to work for you, you have to face your truths by addressing the issues and emotions that got you to this point. It’s easy to focus on the outside—what you see in the mirror, instead of what is happening inside. If you have never gone to this place before, I won’t hold back or sugarcoat the reality that it will be one of your most painful experiences. We spend our lives giving advice to others to help them figure out their way. When it comes to engaging in a one-on-one with ourselves, we rarely go beyond the surface. One of the most powerful thoughts we must repeat as often as possible is “I love me.” As cliché as I may sound, something as simple as demanding your attention, when you are staring at yourself in the mirror, and repeating it as many times as you need to ensure that you believe the positive affirmations you must speak to yourself. These affirmations provide strength and help you believe in the potential of an action you are trying to manifest. Though this is true, be aware of your internal dialogue and troubled thoughts when you look in a mirror.
Some of my choice words are:
“I love you, [say your name], beyond measure.”
“I am conscious of my current situation and refuse to let it dictate or mold my future.”
“I am ready for a transformation into a healthier new me.”
Binge-eating disorder (BED) is one aspect of associated disorders, which results in a dual diagnosis. Binge eating involves consuming more food than needed past the point of satiety and having uncontrollable urges to eat, even when not hungry. Described this way, BED has similarities to substance use disorders as experienced with alcohol or cocaine, or opiate use disorders, better known as addiction. It does not matter whether psychological or physical dependency factors dominate—the end result is strikingly similar: a loss of control that leads an individual to behave with reckless abandon in order to fulfill the behavior associated with the disorder. Addiction actually produces changes in brain function, which can be seen on images of the brain.
Dual diagnosis is a modern treatment approach that considers a patient on biological, psychological, and social levels. Treatment involves integrating medical, medications, and social work to deal with all aspects of the illness. Parallel treatment is when separate treatment methods are employed at the same time to address different problems. Would you want to wait to treat your high blood pressure until your heart problems were resolved? Of course not. You would want to treat both problems, which are associated. Allowing your blood pressure to spike out of control would place more stress on your heart, which could intensify your health problems.
We have found that integrated treatment is superior to parallel treatment for patients with a dual diagnosis. In the case of BED, strengthening the ability to resist urges to eat impulsively may allow the individual to focus on modifying his behavior, which may be difficult to do without the aid of medication. Consider someone addicted to opioids. Even if that patient is supported by rehabilitation, he will find it difficult to change his behavior while he is struggling with incessant cravings and opioid withdrawal symptoms. Today, medications such as buprenorphine can reduce cravings and allow addicts to use their higher cognitive abilities to change their lives during rehabilitation.
For someone with a propensity for gaining weight, a family history of metabolic syndrome, a sedentary lifestyle, and subclinical depression, the approach would be multifaceted. She may eat as part of her coping mechanism, which only contributes to her weight-related health problems, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Being overweight sets off a vicious cycle. Fat tissue releases hormones, which hinder weight loss and favor weight gain. The more fat involved, the more your body resists weight loss.
An individual with low self-esteem, who is already self-conscious regarding his weight, may be more likely to spiral down into bad health and psychological despair. From what we have learned, patients with two or more co-occurring conditions, or dual diagnoses, respond more robustly when their conditions are treated in an integrated way rather than with parallel treatment. A psychiatrist may determine whether a patient had a preexisting mental health ailment resulting from psychological and/or social dysfunction. Treatment may then focus on integrating multidisciplinary approaches that are tailored specifically for the patient.
In the case of binge-eating disorders, we have FDA-approved medication that has been found effective in reducing binge, erratic, loss-of-control patterns that result in consuming large quantities of food. Binges are often followed by extreme remorse, shame, depression, and feelings of guilt. These feelings may leave the patient despondent, hopeless, and depressed, but it does not end there. Over time, the depression may cause the patient to self-medicate by eating more as a coping mechanism. This situation of depression with co-occurring binge eating behavior is no different from that of a patient with anxiety and co-occurring alcohol-use disorder. When both conditions are treated simultaneously, we have seen greater success in breaking the addiction and significantly improved health. The treatment may involve antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anxiolytics (relaxing medication), psychotherapy to treat underlying psychiatric conditions, and/or therapy to alleviate food cravings. A multifaceted treatment plan can enable a patient to exercise rational control to stop binge eating. A professor in my addiction psychiatry fellowship liked to quote another faculty member when discussing addiction. Those insightful words are: “Addiction is suicide on a payment plan.” Without treating every aspect of addiction and considering the whole person, we allow patients to make those self-destructive payments.
Nathan M. Carter, MD
ABPN board certified, psychiatry
ABPN board certified, addiction psychiatry
ABAM board certified, addiction medicine
Overeating is often a quick fix for pain—emotional or situational. The pain will eventually return, and you will use food to make it go away again. You want to get out of the weight gain spiral. Each of us has a history that led to our current situations—self-hatred, family or relationship issues, fatigue, financial issues, disappointment, and depression all contribute to food addiction.
Food can become a coping mechanism to help you deal with emotions. When you eat, you can be suppressing anxiety, stress, and grief. As you’ve read, your brain and body become conditioned to crave food for a momentary relief of stressful emotions. Feeling lonely and empty, some eat compulsively to fill that void. If you are unhappy at work, in a bad marriage, single, alone, looking for a soul mate, unable to pay the bills, or caring for an elderly parent, you might turn to snack foods to fill in what’s missing, to help you escape the reality of your life rather than trying to improve the situation.
You might be carrying heavy baggage. You could have been abused as a child, cyber-bullied, the object of ridicule at school, afraid of exposing your sexual preference, dateless for the prom, the last to be picked for any team, or criticized by your mother and/or father. You might relive instances when the “perfectly” thin sales clerk dismissed you by saying the jeans you want don’t come in your size, or when strangers feel free to insult you as they walk by you on the street. Maybe you are the only one in your family who is overweight, and one aunt always eyes your plate at the family holiday dinner and says loudly that it’s no wonder you’re fat. Be prepared to experience pain and anger as you look back. I was surprised that the memories I brought up had lost none of their sting.
Pulling back the layers will stir up some tough emotions, but it’s absolutely vital to deal with your past before your future can begin. Then you can put your mind to developing healthier coping mechanisms/strategies. You have to forgive and let go—I did.
3. You’ve Got to Believe
As enthusiastic and persistent as I am, I thought that committing to a change of diet after all my soul-searching would not be too challenging. That wasn’t the case. I had been yo-yo dieting for so long that it took me some time to get back on track. As I began to work out my new approach to food, I had the gut feeling that this time would be different, because I was committed in a way I hadn’t been before. Maybe it was my health scare or the graduation photo that brought me to my senses. I found I had new depths of resolve.
You have to begin to see yourself as you currently are and visualize your new self. No more personal beat-downs are allowed. To break a habit, you have to see yourself in a positive light. If you have photos of yourself at a more desirable weight, look at them and use them for inspiration. The photos will give you an image of where you want to be in time. You were there once, and now you can head in that direction or begin to get back to where you were. If you don’t have a photo of yourself that you like, create one in your mind. Just don’t go over the top with supermodel fantasies. I have to remind you that most models were born that way, and most of the photos you see of their perfect bodies have been Photoshopped.
Although you have a tough road ahead of you, there is a big difference between difficult and impossible. Changing your eating habits is challenging but totally doable. You have to devote your energy to change and be ready to fight. When I began my transformation, I vowed to myself that I would not get discouraged if the road got bumpy or if I fell off the wagon.
When you feel you are not seeing results quickly enough or you are struggling with image issues, you have to be your own cheerleader. You have to have confidence and encourage yourself. Be ready to give yourself a pat on the back for every victory—no matter how small.
4. Break Up with Your Current Relationship with Food—It’s Not Working
You may at some point have been involved with a love interest or friend who simply was not good for you, or have known someone in that situation. After realizing that your relationship is more hurtful than supportive, you still may have a hard time removing yourself from the drama. As the song goes, “Breaking up is hard to do.” You may be used to the situation or afraid of being without the other person. If you don’t take action, the problems will only get worse. The same applies to your addiction to food.
Food addiction has to do with how you behave around and think about food. The habits you have formed with food are the real source of your addiction. If you are serious about losing weight, you have to develop a healthy relationship with food. My goal is to guide you to eat properly again; to replace self-destructive habits with self-fulfilling ones.
By now, you have identified your diet personality.
The Chocoholic
The Deep-Fried Fanatic
The Fizzy-Drink Enthusiast
The Foodie
The Grazer
The Salty Snacker
The Starch Softie
The Sweet Tooth
Your diet personality reflects your overall cravings and addictions. Of course, it’s OK to acknowledge that you are many of these types, as I have. Now it’s time to take stock of your strongest food cravings, which you probably know by now. Also, take some time to observe and understand what situations or emotions fire up your food cravings.
It is helpful to write down not only your food cravings but also what triggers them so that you can look at the list to remind yourself to stay vigilant about what causes you to overindulge. Knowing what sets you off can help you to curb the urge to eat.
The Trigger Trio
Food, emotions, and environments can be triggers to overeating. Trigger foods are different from food cravings. A food craving is an intense desire to eat something, provoked by an emotion or situation. A trigger food sets off out-of-control eating regardless of emotion or situation. A food that satisfies your strong cravings can become a trigger food. Trigger foods are usually highly palatable, calorie-dense foods that combine sugar and fat or salt and fat. Cookies, chocolate, potato chips, and ice cream can fall into this category. A trigger can open the door to a tsunami of bad eating choices.
Think about the foods you just can’t stop eating. If you open a bag of chips, you have to finish it. You help yourself to slivers of a lemon meringue pie until it is gone. Make a list of your trigger foods. By identifying your trigger foods, you can avoid them. You can keep them out of your home and resist them when you are out.
Trigger emotions are feelings that set off a period of overeating. When feelings such as anxiety, loneliness, or fear compel you to overeat, the behavior is called emotional or stress eating. Chronic stress can cause you to turn to food for relief. When you are stressed out, your body produces high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods, and there you have it. Stress can cause you to eat more. Unpleasant emotions—shame, sadness, anger, and resentment, for example—can make you turn to food to bury those emotions. You are in a sense numbing yourself with food. Food can fill a void. Boredom, feelings of emptiness, and lack of fulfillment can prompt the urge to eat.
Some of your eating habits likely originated in childhood. Memories of your parents buying you an ice cream sundae after a visit to the doctor or celebrating a good report card with three pieces of fried chicken, fries, and a biscuit can be evoked in adulthood when you use food as a reward. Maybe you remember baking holiday cookies or pound cakes with your mother and eating the cookie dough raw, or learning Grandma’s secret to her crowd-pleasing mac and cheese, and of course indulging in tastes as you both create, or Fourth of July family barbecues in the backyard. These nostalgic associations are so positive, they can drive you to eat particular foods to re-create those good feelings.
When trigger emotions drive you to stuff yourself, you must work on better ways of coping with your feelings. Simply understanding the cycle of emotional eating is not enough. You have to take care of your emotional well-being. To do so, you have to find what makes you feel alive and occupied. Rather than turning to food for comfort, do something that engages you and takes your mind off your emotions. Watch stand-up comedy on TV, soak in a bath with scented oils, learn a new language, join a book club, or have a massage. There are so many ways to indulge yourself that don’t involve food. Do not hesitate to find psychological help if your emotions are too strong to deal with on your own. There are psychologists and psychiatrists like Dr. Carson who specialize in treating people with weight problems.
Cumin
Cumin can help you break through a weight loss plateau. This is a spice that burns fat. In one study, people who had a teaspoon of cumin stirred into yogurt every day for three months, along with reducing their daily intake of calories, lost more weight and had a decrease in body fat almost three times more than the control group. The researchers speculate that cumin temporarily increases the metabolic rate.
Cumin is versatile. You can add cumin to guacamole, hummus, or eggs. It’s great sprinkled over vegetables you are roasting.
Environments can be triggers, too. I vividly remember eating everything in sight during sumptuous holiday meals at my grandparents’ house. I never failed to be a “gutbuster” at those celebrations. Maybe you can’t resist eating junk food at a sporting event. Those concessions are meant to be tempting. An all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant might qualify you for the eating Olympics. You might not be able to stop yourself from eating the tiny appetizers passed at a wedding reception. I couldn’t drive by certain fast-food places without stopping for a big order. When the cashier looked at me with disgust or concern, I pretended all the food I was buying was for the family. Some people can trigger your overeating. A group of friends or a family member may encourage you to overeat.
The first step to resisting triggers is to know what foods, emotions, situations, and people you can associate with overindulging. Be aware of the triggers that shape your eating behavior. Once you recognize the triggers, you can avoid them or learn not to respond by eating.
You’re the Boss
You have to believe that you can control what you eat. You can reclaim your brain, so that you do not succumb to addictions, and you can control what you eat. Remember not to label the foods on your list “bad.” It is just food.
Your expectations can affect your eating behavior. If you believe you are going to lose control when you are around a trigger food or you cannot resist a craving, you will do exactly as you expect. You have a list of foods that you crave and those that set off a bout of overeating. A mental shift is required to put an end to your compulsive eating behavior. In your mind, you can turn each of your trigger foods into a food that you can choose to eat or not in whatever size portion you decide to have. By reimagining and relabeling the food, the food has no real control over you.
When you feel like eating or crave a particular food, stop and ask yourself if you are hungry. It’s easy to focus on what you want to eat and not consider why you want to eat. Take a reading of your emotions and your stress levels. Are you about to use food as a tool for coping? After years of unhealthy eating, you may no longer recognize the cues that signal hunger or fullness. To put yourself back in control, turn your attention to your body.
If you have a craving or are confronting a trigger, breathe through the urge. Just take a few deep breaths. Try to identify the emotion or situation that has automatically made you want to eat. Know that you do not have to give in to the craving or be triggered. The desire to indulge will crop up, peak, and then go away. Wanting to eat your go-to junk food can happen a number of times each day, but be confident that you can resist giving in. If you stop eating junk food cold turkey, it usually takes only twenty-one days to break the habit. Expect to experience withdrawal symptoms for three to five days. As you break your addiction, you may be irritable, tired, and headachy, but those symptoms will pass. When resisting the urge to binge on trigger foods, resist entirely, savor two or three bites and breathe through the urge to continue, or go straight to a healthy substitute. See the “Healthy Substitutes” section on here for a start. I’ll also be giving you some healthy, tasty recipes that will be so much more satisfying than a bag of chips.
Keep a written record of the times you did not give in to a craving or managed to eat a trigger food in moderation. When you look at that documentation of your accomplishments, you will gain confidence in your ability to control what and how much you eat.
5. Shift from Mindless to Mindful Eating
Life is so fast-paced today and things change so quickly that we do everything in an accelerated way, including eating. There are multitudes of distractions to shift our attention away from the food we eat. We multitask all day long. We pick up fast food at a drive-thru and eat on the go. We read the paper on our smartphones as we inhale a pastry for breakfast. We eat lunch at our desks and continue to work. We look at our smartphones to check out Facebook as we take big bites from a sandwich and barely chew the food. We have dinner in front of the TV.
If you’re like I used to be, you spend more time obsessing about food than actually enjoying what you eat. That’s just mindless consumption. When I talk about mindful eating, I mean paying attention to your food at every step of the way—as you buy, prepare, serve, and eat it. I found that reconnecting with the experience of eating helped me to get the junk food out of my life and replace it with much more nourishing choices. Mindful eating had a lot to do with my losing more than half my body weight and locking in the loss. No relapse for me!
When you eat mindfully, eating becomes an intentional act instead of an automatic one. Rather than “grabbing a bite” and wolfing it down, try making your meals a ritual. Here are some tips for eating mindfully that helped me immeasurably:
Plan your meals and snacks in advance. Eating randomly and on the run is a recipe for disaster.
Try to eat at a table in your kitchen, dining room, or office. Having “meals” while sitting on the couch or at your desk is out.
Turn off the TV and silence your phone. Eliminating distractions is essential.
Recognize when you are really hungry. Learn to make the distinction between emotional and physical hunger. Tune in to your body. When your stomach growls and your energy drops, your body is sending you signals that it is time to eat.
Don’t rush meals. Eat slowly and chew thoroughly. You will release more flavor when you do. You will eat less if you slow down your eating, because it takes your brain twenty minutes to register that you are full. If you gulp down your food, you can do a lot of excess eating before your brain has caught up with your belly.
Savor what you are eating. Engage all your senses when you eat. Appreciate the color, texture, and aroma of the food on your plate. Pay attention to flavor. Focus on how the food makes you feel. Really appreciate your meal. My recipes in The Spice Diet have layers of flavor that are a treat for your taste buds. When you prepare your own food, working with the ingredients as you cook your meals can add to your pleasure and enjoyment of the aromas and textures of your food.
Stop eating when you are full. You will feel full sooner if you slow it down. There is no need to clean your plate. Small portions can help you eat only what will make you feel satisfied, but not overloaded. I will guide you on portion control in chapter 5.
Be mindful of how the food you have eaten affects your mood and energy throughout the day.
When you make mealtime a calm oasis and pleasure point in a busy day, you will find yourself eating less and enjoying it more. Those are goals worth aiming for.
6. Don’t Set Yourself Up to Fail
When you are setting goals for yourself, refrain from being too ambitious, because you run the risk of quitting if you don’t achieve a difficult milestone. Don’t be obsessed with results. You don’t want to set yourself up for failure. Although we all want instant gratification, patience is important. It has probably taken years for you to gain the weight you are trying to lose. Do not fall into the fad-diet, quick-weight-loss mind-set. Your goal should be to lose one to two pounds a week. At that rate, you would lose roughly 52 to 104 pounds in a year. As the saying goes, slow and steady wins the race. Imagine yourself a year from now!
You have to do a reality check about your expectations. You should have a weight range as your goal, instead of a number etched in stone. Rather than aiming for your ideal weight and having the total number of pounds you want to lose in mind, break the desired total loss down into smaller increments—say, five pounds at a time. That way you will have many successes along the way that will make you feel good about yourself.
To begin, you might want to focus on small, attainable changes that you can control to improve your lifestyle. Learn to create little, positive habits. They add up. It could be increasing your daily number of servings of fruit and vegetables, getting eight hours of good sleep a night, taking a walk for fifteen minutes after dinner, or substituting a salad for fries. When you are successful at making healthy changes in your life, you will feel in control and confident about your ability to form new habits.
If you are consistent, you will hit the weight that is right for you, and you will do it one step at a time.
Backsliding Does Not Have to Be Forever
In my mind, I was obviously set to go when I started my transition to healthy eating. I had been shocked when my doctor called me to report that my tests showed that I had become borderline diabetic. He said the best way to keep my condition from progressing was to lose weight and to eat in a healthy way. I was relieved to hear that I had a shot at reversing the condition before the disease became full blown. I was worried about whether I could change my entire attitude about “eating healthy,” which would require dramatically changing my way of life. Honestly, I felt I was experiencing déjà vu, as if I had been in this place in my life before, and I always ended up right back where I started: overweight.
A friend told me about Chef Judson’s story and the Spice Diet. Most important, he sounded like someone who understood my struggle. In fact, Judson had experienced the struggle himself. The program seemed like the answer I was looking for.
I got off to a good start, because I was so motivated. I enjoyed planning and cooking my meals. What excited me most was that I had so much variety with the flavors and spices. What I was making wasn’t your typical diet food. My weight started dropping, and I was on top of the world. My clothing was becoming baggy. I was delighted to treat myself to some smaller-sized clothes. Then the company I worked for announced it was reorganizing. The CEO was let go and consultants were running the place. No one knew who would stay or who would go.
I ended up working later and later. I couldn’t carve out time to exercise. I’d order in the nights I worked late and eat at my desk for lunch. Salads just didn’t do it for me. I needed “comfort” food because of the stress. It was burgers, fries, and shakes, fried chicken dinners, deli sandwiches dripping with Russian dressing and mayonnaise, bags of BBQ chips, and all types of pasta in cream sauces with my signature diet soda. I guess I had to save a few calories somewhere. I kept candy in my desk, which I nibbled at all day. I only got up for meetings or to raid the “cookie basket” in the office kitchen. I’d stop at a fast-food drive-thru on the way home. How could I be so weak-willed?
In no time my weight started to inch up. Speaking of inches, my new slacks were getting hard to button. I literally hated myself for losing control. I winced when I overheard one of my colleagues say, “Patty is packing it on again. Guess she can’t take the heat.” I was convinced that everyone saw my weight gain as a symptom of my anxiety. I was sending all the wrong messages. The more upset I got, the more I ate.
I couldn’t believe I was doing this again. I thought my yo-yo days were over. How could I lose sight of the fact that my health was more important than my job? The way I was eating wasn’t doing anything to help me. I knew I had to stop being down on myself and do something. I had to take care of myself.
My compulsive eating was doing me in. I understood that relapses would happen, but I didn’t have to spiral out of control. I knew the signs. I could rein in those cravings as soon as I started to backslide. I now had a way to overcome my food addictions. I could substitute healthy Spice Diet food for the junk I was eating. No sacrifice there!
I pulled myself together and followed Phase 1 of the Spice Diet again.
—Patty K.
7. Be Easy on Yourself
No one is perfect. There will be times when life hands you lemons. You’ll feel exhausted, discouraged, and defeated through no fault of your own. External stresses, along with your body’s resistance to dropping more pounds may stall your weight loss, even if you don’t revert to your old habits. Stick with it. You can break through plateaus.
Don’t be negative and beat yourself up. Your chattering inner voice can yell at you and criticize you relentlessly. A good way to stop negative self-talk is to talk to yourself as you would to a friend. I know I judge myself with very tough standards. I set the bar high, but I rarely hold my friends and family accountable to the same standard. You have to learn to treat yourself with compassion and kindness. You are healing yourself in body, mind, and spirit.
Be gentle with yourself. If you fall off the horse, get right back on. Understand that going astray is normal. When you find yourself in this situation, remember all the effort you have put into the program so far and how much you want to succeed. If you can’t resist a craving for sweets, fries, or bread every now and then, it’s OK to have a taste. Allow yourself two or three bites of what you crave. Savor each bite. You don’t have to devour it all. A few bites can satisfy the craving. If you go off course, look forward, not back. Remember that every meal is a chance to start over.
Rethink rewards and celebrations, which don’t always have to involve food. Food as a reward is a habit you are trying to break. For the new you, a treat could be an adventure that promotes physical activity—window shopping at a mall or on Main Street as you think about the new clothes you will have to buy as you get smaller; picking berries, apples, or peaches at a local farm; taking a yoga or water aerobics class—you get the idea. Be generous with yourself and give yourself a pat on the back when you reach every milestone.
8. Be Positive
To break old habits, you have to see yourself in a positive light. If getting on a scale upsets you and makes you doubt you can do what you have set out to do, don’t weigh yourself. A negative mind-set undercuts your efforts and almost always leads to failure.
These new behaviors and attitudes will improve your health, extend your life, prevent illness, and allow you to enjoy everyday activities. You are aiming for so much more than dropping pounds. If you focus on those important, life-improving outcomes when you are discouraged, you will be motivated to keep at it.
Stay away from friends and family who enable your food addiction. Some will intentionally try to sabotage your efforts. They might be jealous of the progress you are making and fear that you will leave them behind as you change. Don’t let their words and actions get to you. Just smile and refuse their tempting offers of food or respond to their barbed comments with a smile and an upbeat remark.
I remember an acquaintance coming up to me and saying, “Don’t lose too much weight. You don’t want to look gaunt.”
I laughed and replied, “I’ve got a long way to go to be gaunt. Thanks for believing I can keep it up.”
By spinning the negative comment into a compliment, I stayed upbeat and managed to dodge bad feelings.
Instead of being brought down by negative types, count on positive people who will contribute to the emotionally healthy environment you need to beat your bad habits. You want to be with people who believe in your ability to win the battle.
Not Everyone Will Be Thrilled by Your Weight Loss
I had been successful at eating well and was looking good. I expected everyone to be excited for me. Boy, was I wrong! Some people were more interested in enticing me to go off course than in supporting me. When I went out to dinner with the guys, they pushed me to drink some IPO beer with the wings we had ordered. They just wouldn’t take no for an answer. One friend poured a tall glass and pushed it in front of me. When I said, “No, thanks,” he got belligerent. He asked if I thought I was better than everyone else. He said I was more fun when I was fat. I just laughed it off and didn’t touch the beer. Of course, I would have loved to have a cold one.
Another time, at a birthday party, my family made all my old favorite dishes, including my wife’s flourless chocolate cake with both ice cream and whipped cream. This banquet was a disaster waiting to happen. I served myself a small taste of everything. Restraining myself was not easy.
My cousin took a look at my plate and said, “Here, let me give you more. You’re going to starve if that’s all you’re eating. We worked hard to make your favorites.” She proceeded to heap more food on my plate.
I didn’t even bother to protest. Resisting was a no-win situation. A piece of my wife’s cake was what I had planned as my birthday splurge. I had been thinking about it for a week!
I tasted everything on my plate—it was all delicious, but I was not going to stuff my face. My cousin noticed as I moved food around to make it look as if I’d eaten more. She said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you like the food? Eat up!”
I raved about the meal and said I couldn’t eat another bite. She kept pushing me, insisting I should eat everything I wanted on my birthday. This was not a loving gesture. She was clearly envious about the weight I’d lost and wanted to break me down. I was embarrassed. Finally, my mother told her to cut it out, that I’d eat what I wanted to eat. Nothing else would have stopped her. I realized that it came with the territory when you made big changes in your life.
—Rob M.
When you notice negative thoughts arising in your mind, acknowledge the thoughts without judgment, and tell them to stop. Think, “There’s a negative thought,” and let it pass on by without reacting to it. Don’t let thoughts that bring you down take over. Think about what you have accomplished so far and what you will achieve in the future. Imagine yourself as you want to be. Good thoughts will drive the bad ones out.
9. Get Support
You don’t have to go it alone. Having friends or family members who support your healthy eating and exercise goals is important for long-term weight loss success. They can provide a shoulder to lean on when you are discouraged, or they can be a cheering squad when you reach a milestone. They can give you practical support—for example, watching your kids while you exercise. Having a team behind you who understand what you are trying to achieve can be a big help. You should try to talk with two people from your support group every day on the phone, by e-mail, via text, or in person. These conversations will keep you focused as well as let you vent.
Finding a weight loss buddy can make the process easier. If you enlist a partner, a friend, or a group of friends who also want to slim down to join you in your efforts to lose weight, you will be in it together. Having a companion or group can take the loneliness out of your weight loss journey. You can give each other tips, ideas for healthy snacks, and your favorite recipes. It’s great to have someone who will exercise with you. When you have a date to exercise, it’s hard to skip it and let someone else down.
Someone who is experiencing what you are can be a great sounding board as you commiserate and share the ups and downs of your attempts to eat well or your anger at people’s insensitive remarks. You can remind each other that no matter how much you lose or gain each week, your personality, character, and intelligence remain the same. With this sort of support, you are likely to lose more weight and not gain it back. There is strength in numbers.
There are now many online sites with a community of people working to achieve the same goals you are. If you are self-conscious, the anonymity of joining an online support group can be a blessing. These sites can provide you with a lot of tips and support, including recipes, message boards, and chats, from people who have the same goals as you.
These are a few popular sites:
www.thespicediet.com
3 Fat Chicks on a Diet Weight Loss Community, www.3fatchicks.com
Weight Loss Buddy, www.weightlossbuddy.com
Support Groups, https://obesity.supportgroups.com
Daily Strength Obesity Support Group, www.dailystrength.or/group/obesity
If you search online for “weight loss support,” you will find many other sites to check out.
As mentioned previously, you might find it extremely difficult to confront past hurts. It can be a dark experience. If the emotions and memories you uncover are disturbing, do not hesitate to turn to a professional for help. There are psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in treating people trying to break through emotional obstacles to losing weight. Seeing a professional in the field can help smooth the way for you to set yourself free from emotions and attitudes that are holding you back. My advice for anyone trying to lose weight is to get all the help you can from family, friends, support groups, and health-care providers who are trained in obesity and weight loss.
Garlic
Although garlic has many health benefits, including cancer prevention, it can also contribute to weight loss. Here’s how:
Stimulates leptin, the satiety hormone, which reduces binge eating and cravings.
Boosts metabolism.
Acts as a diuretic to reduce bloat.
Garlic is so flavorful, you probably already use it liberally in the food you cook. If you don’t, it’s time to start benefitting from garlic’s “anti-obesity effect.”
10. Make a Vision Board
I’m sure in the past you have dutifully kept a food/diet log at the beginning of a diet and stopped recording your meals, moods, and cravings at some point, never to open that log again. It can get tedious and predictable. I think creating a vision board is a much more effective way to motivate yourself. A vision board is a concrete visualization of your goals. To make a vision board, you select and display images that represent what you want to achieve or how you want to feel in your life. Vision boards have power because they clarify what you want. By creating a colorful montage of your goals, you are reminded of what you want to achieve in a way that focuses your attention. The thinking behind the vision board is that what you focus on expands to become a reality.
To make a vision board, you’ll need a big piece of poster board, a corkboard, a bulletin board, or a magnetic dry-erase board. You should find a place for your vision board where you will see it often—for example, near your desk or in the kitchen near the refrigerator. There are also many free apps and vision board software programs that enable you to construct your vision board on your computer, phone, or other electronic devices. The upside of doing it electronically is that you can take your digital vision board with you wherever you go.
Your vision board for the Spice Diet could contain:
A picture of yourself now.
Pictures of yourself from the past before you gained weight or were closer to a healthy weight.
Pictures of slim people enjoying life for inspiration.
A cravings and trigger-foods list.
Pictures of beautiful, healthy foods.
Anything that inspires and motivates you—pictures of your grandkids; images of people doing activities you might enjoy, like surfing, biking, playing tennis, hiking; great vacation photos; or fashion shots of clothes you’d like to wear.
Weight loss affirmations—you can find colorfully designed inspirational sayings online to print out.
Symbols that celebrate achieving mini goals—remember gold stars?
Your vision board should be dynamic, so keep some empty space for adding more items. You might see a headline that speaks to you, receive a greeting card, keep ticket stubs to a sports or cultural event, or pick a flower you want to mount on the board. Your vision board is there to give you positive energy and to be a reminder of where you want to be.
Take some time to create a mind-set that will give you confidence in your ability to take control of your eating before beginning Phase 1 of the Spice Diet. By dealing with the history, emotions, and attitudes that drive you to overeat, you will have a clear picture of what you need to change.