Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions!”
—Woody Allen in Annie Hall
Losing weight tops the list of New Year’s resolutions every year, the most made, the most broken, the most likely to be repeated when the next year rolls around. Yet diets work; if you reduce the number of calories you consume, you’ll lose weight; it’s simple chemistry. So why do most diet resolutions fail?
Eating is a complex set of behaviors and attitudes that runs mostly on (drum roll) autopilot. Our eating habits are largely unconscious, whether we are mindlessly nibbling off a friend’s plate or popping peanuts at a bar. In contrast to the unconscious autopilot behaviors that drive our everyday eating, dieting requires that we be conscious of every morsel, weigh every food option, and make endless choices. Making decisions at every meal exhausts our self-control,* making it difficult to stick with most diets beyond the first few weeks. Additionally, our narrow concentration on how much we eat, measured in calories or carbohydrates, ignores other autopilot behaviors that determine satisfaction and success: how we eat, why we eat, where we eat, what we eat, when we eat, and how long we sleep.
One reason that prepackaged diets, liquid meals, cleanses, and other highly prescriptive diets have gained in popularity is because such diets become a new kind of autopilot. We don’t need to think and decide; we just mindlessly consume what’s in the package and our weight declines. Yet sooner or later we must return to eating in the real world, making daily decisions at the grocery store, cocktail party, movie snack bar, and cafeteria. It’s then that our old eating habits reassert themselves, methodically undoing the progress we have made.
Every marginal change in behavior you make must be sustainable. Losing two pounds is a success if you keep it off for life; losing fifteen pounds is a failure if you gain it back in a year. Any shift in behavior you resolve to make is one you must be able to maintain: Don’t make resolutions you can’t keep.
Losing weight permanently means eating less for life. The only way to succeed at eating less for life is to be satisfied with less. Each of our eating behaviors–—not just what and how much we eat—plays a critical role in satisfaction and in curbing the impulse to overeat. Reducing the microresolutions way doesn’t require endless decisions, an abacus, or an app; the focus is on making discrete and permanent behavioral changes that reform autopilot so that it can maintain a healthy weight without mental effort.
After years of failed diets, I’ve finally achieved satisfied with less through microresolutions. I’ve reached a kind of nirvana where I enjoy everything I eat more, feel satisfied, and can maintain my weight at a level that pleases me, about twenty-two pounds less than before I began modifying my eating habits through microresolutions. Before achieving satisfied with less, I treated myself to extra snacks and second portions but often felt unsatisfied. I would eat for energy and end up feeling sluggish. I would swear off sweets and end up bingeing on them. By targeting specific behaviors and attitudes for reform, I increased my eating satisfaction, upped my energy, consumed fewer calories, lost weight, and improved my health.
The three sections that follow (“The Engine,” “Mindful Eating,” and “Less”) provide a framework for identifying a personal behavioral change at the vital margin that will advance a goal of eating more healthfully, with greater pleasure, while losing weight. You may be so used to adopting drastic tactics to lose weight that isolating one or two behavioral targets for reform takes some thought. The discussions below will help you sharpen your personal observations and zero in on a microresolution that will have an immediate and lasting impact. But remember: only two resolutions at a time.
Your body is an engine that combusts nutrients and turns them into energy. An efficient and vigorous engine is essential to eating satisfaction and maintenance of a healthy weight. When your engine is running at peak, it demands nutrient-rich food, signals hunger at mealtimes, and doesn’t crave excessive sweets, fats, and salts. An engine running at peak keeps up a stable burn that provides energy throughout the day, steadies mood, and contributes to a good sleep. In contrast, a body engine running suboptimally is always wanting, literally. It runs erratically, demanding fuel between meals, is prone to slumps and mood swings, and generates cravings and urges to binge. If your diet is poor, your sleep is inadequate, and you sit all day, your engine won’t get many miles to the gallon. Rather than rushing to lose weight, first consider microresolutions designed to get your engine humming.
As discussed at length in chapter 10, “Sleep,” your engine can’t run at peak without adequate rest. Following a night of poor sleep, your metabolism will run sluggishly, you may be plagued by cravings and hunger pangs, and you’ll end up relying on carbohydrate-rich snacks to restore your energy when the inevitable slump arrives.
Replacing lost sleep with food is a sucker’s trade. While adequate sleep will sustain you the entire day, whatever sugary snack you substitute for it will give you only a short burst of energy, leading you to refuel multiple times between meals. When you eat because you’re tired rather than hungry, you’re using food as a stimulant, a drug. That draggy feeling you experience midafternoon is better cured by more sleep, not more dessert.
When I first visited Google in connection with building the auction system for the company’s innovative IPO, I was struck by the nifty lounge areas Google had set up for its employees. The free snack bars were stocked mostly with sugary treats—cookies and candies—and a few healthier options. When I visited a couple of years later in connection with building a transferable-employee-stock-option exchange for Googlers, most of the sweet treats had been banished and in their place was a host of healthy and delicious snack options. But something new had also been added to the mix—napping pods where tired programmers could crash for an hour during the day. While no official connection was made between the snack-bar changes and the napping pods, perhaps there was an implicit message—sleep is a better fuel than sugar. (I have to give a shout-out here to the Google cafeteria, known by those who are lucky enough to work or visit there as the best restaurant in town. Wonderful chefs whip up healthy global cuisine, often seasoned with herbs grown on the Google campus. Whenever we could, my team scheduled our meetings with Google close to noon so that our sessions could end with a visit to the cafeteria. My favorite station: “Namaste.”)
How often do you get up to eat something while watching television late at night? Why not just go to sleep instead? It’s madness to snack at night in order to stay awake unless forced to by a workload that can’t be managed any other way. Late-night snacking interrupts the digestion that began after dinner, giving your body a new load to process just before sleep. New research demonstrates that eating late at night is more likely to cause weight gain than eating earlier in the day. If you have the habit of snacking between dinner and bedtime, you might want to focus your first diet microresolution on limiting or eliminating this behavior. See chapter 10 for a complete discussion of recent research, sleep’s benefits, its relationship to weight, and some examples of microresolutions aimed at eliminating chronic sleep deprivation.
Oscar Wilde famously wrote that a cynic “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” and it might be said that the inveterate dieter knows the calorie count of everything and the nutritional value of nothing. Years of measuring foods in calories—whereby a couple of mini candy bars are equal to an apple—has led many to eat poorly in pursuit of eating less. Whatever your weight-loss goals, they will be more achievable if you feed yourself nutrient-rich food: lots of whole fruits and vegetables; legumes and grains; lean protein; adequate dairy for gender and age. Think of these foods as a nutritional baseline. We all have favorite foods that aren’t of the highest nutrient value, but these should be eaten on top—not in place—of baseline foods. You don’t need a degree in nutrition to know that there is no sane health scale where candy is the equal of fruit.
If your diet is poor, consider starting with microresolutions that focus on nutrition first, perhaps before you try to reduce what you’re eating. If you’re eating a crappy diet and you decide just to eat less of it, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure, since the food you eat makes you prone to cravings, slumps, and binges. For example, if your diet is high in processed foods (pretzels, chips, baked goods, and the like) and low in whole foods (fruits, vegetables, whole grains), consider a microresolution to add some whole foods to your diet daily. A microresolution to eat two whole fruits a day will immediately improve your nutrition profile and give your engine a boost. If your breakfast is a nutritional bust (Pop-Tarts, Danish, commercial cereals, bagels, muffins, white toast), a microresolution to consume whole-grain cereal for breakfast would be a radical and positive nutritional change that could give you greater energy, alertness, health. If your dinner is meat heavy and vegetable light, doubling or tripling your green and root vegetables would be a huge health bonus. Sooner or later you’ll need to reduce what you eat overall to lose weight, but getting your engine fired up and learning to appreciate whole foods alongside the other foods you love is a great place to start. Give your body engine high-octane food, real meals, and get it humming before you try to cut back. Reforming breakfast is the most powerful way to get your engine stoked and to begin to feel the difference between being fed and being nourished.
Everyone learns at some point that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but many folks on the go give it short shrift. A flimsy bowl of cereal, a white-bread bagel, a doughnut, a sugary muffin, or just coffee with milk is how many choose to start their day. Focusing a microresolution on improving breakfast is a great way to get on the road to satisfied with less.
“But I’m not hungry in the morning. Why waste my calories?” you might ask. Perhaps you aren’t hungry for breakfast because between dinner and bedtime you ate (or drank) a fourth meal’s worth of calories while watching television. Making a microresolution not to eat after dinner ensures that you’ll arrive at breakfast with such good appetite that you’ll find it almost unbearably satisfying.
If you stop eating at a reasonable hour in the evening, by breakfast the next morning you’ll have gone ten to twelve hours without food, basically a fast (break-fast). With all the nutrients from the previous day now fully digested, your engine is primed to burn new fuel efficiently, so resolve to stoke it with something good. What you eat should give you energy until lunch without a midmorning slump.
Richard’s morning routine was erratic and his breakfast often nutritionally poor. He generally grabbed a muffin or bagel on the way to work, the hour depending on his changing work schedule. Richard often felt hungry long before lunch and kept himself going with caffeine and the stray doughnut left by the coffee machine. His first dieting microresolution was simply to eat breakfast at home on weekdays. He felt that once he had left the house and was in a rush, he had little control over breakfast choices.
Eating breakfast at home forced Richard to think about and plan his meal, something he had never done when grabbing breakfast en route. His resolution had the extra benefit of stabilizing his breakfast hour, because his commitment to eating at home meant that everything he needed for breakfast was already in the house, and he could eat soon after rising. Richard began making himself breakfasts of oatmeal with nuts or whole-grain bread with healthy toppings, easy to eat at home, hard to eat on the go. His improved breakfast and more consistent meal hour gave him energy that carried him all the way through to lunch without a slump. Establishing a consistent breakfast routine also standardized Richard’s lunch hour because he now became hungry at virtually the same hour of the afternoon every day. Once his mealtimes were clearly established, Richard ceased much of his between-meal snacking.
Whether you eat out or at home, eat oatmeal or eggs, you need to eat (and relish) a really good breakfast at a regular time to give your engine the best start to its long day. Your first resolution could be to eliminate or include certain foods at breakfast, to cease eating beyond a certain hour at night, or to establish a stable time and place for breakfast. Whatever you resolve, be absolutely relentless in establishing your new habit—nailing breakfast brings huge engine benefits.
So often diets force us into desperate trade-offs between healthy foods and the sugary snacks we feel we need to quiet overwhelming cravings. If I eat an apple, we reason, that’s a hundred calories, but what I really, really want is a chocolate-chip cookie. It’s a false choice, because these foods are equivalent only in their calories, not in their nutritional value. But we lust for the cookie, so we skip the apple. We miss out on the apple’s nutrients and the fiber that will keep us fuller longer. And we continue to crave the poor foods we associate with a boost in mood and energy, rather than developing a taste for the crisp freshness of an apple. One of my early diet microresolutions was to add two whole fruits to what I ate each day, rather than trying to substitute fruit for a favorite snack, such as chocolate. Eating more fruit killed some of my taste for sweets, and the extra fiber kept me from getting hungry before dinner. Now I often crave fruit, the same way I used to crave sugar. Do I still eat sweets? Yes, but less frequently and in smaller quantities.
Kathy generally ate in the office cafeteria, usually selecting a hot entrée that was rich in meat or cheese. She knew that her weight and nutrition would improve if she chose salad for lunch more often, but she enjoyed the hot lunch, and the salad didn’t satisfy her. When Kathy began looking for a microresolution to enhance her daily nutrition, she decided to eat salad at lunch with her entrée. Adding the salad meant that she was getting an extra serving of leafy green vegetables every day, a real nutrition boost. Over time Kathy began to enjoy her salad as much as the entrée, and she was able to pump up the salad size and skinny down the richer portions of her meal. Sometimes she just had a big salad or a salad and a cup of soup. Her microresolution to include salad improved her diet and over time made it possible for her to be satisfied with a less rich lunch. The single resolution helped put Kathy on the road to satisfied with less.
Fruits and vegetables are essential to a healthy, self-regulating engine. They fill you up, stave off disease, and provide vitamins, minerals, and fiber. New research shows that adding pureed vegetables to dishes such as macaroni and cheese results in consuming significantly fewer calories and more nutrients, without loss of enjoyment.* If your diet is low in fruits and vegetables, consider a resolution to add these foods to what you already eat, rather than fretting about what you’ll have to give up to “fund” these healthful additions. Adding more fruits and vegetables will improve your nutritional profile, increase your satisfaction, help reduce cravings for poorer foods, and ultimately change your tastes.
Thirst is often mistaken for hunger, leading us to eat when it’s really water our body craves. According to the University of Tennessee, 75 percent of Americans are in a state of chronic dehydration, and 37 percent experience such weak thirst signaling that by the time they feel true thirst they are seriously dehydrated.* Water is essential to keeping your body and brain running at peak. Staying ahead of the hydration curve improves brain function, elevates mood, supports short-term memory, boosts endurance, protects against injury, enhances athletic performance, and aids in keeping you feeling full and satisfied.
Good hydration improves the performance of your engine. A 2003 study at the University of Utah showed that dehydration leads to a decline in metabolism of around 2 percent per day.* In a more recent study, middle-aged and older dieters who consumed sixteen ounces of water before each meal achieved a 44 percent greater weight loss than those who ate the same diet without drinking extra water.*
Despite water’s importance to overall health and weight loss, the eight-glass rule is usually marginalia in diet books, where the attention of both writer and reader is on what food is allowed on the plan. Building a water habit, as with all habits, requires dedicated focus. But once good hydration becomes your new normal, when your hydration level starts to slip you’ll automatically begin to sip.
Theresa often went through the day drinking little or no water. Rather than setting herself a water quota, she made a microresolution to keep a water bottle at work and refill it when empty. This resolution targeted convenience and availability and did not include a mandate to drink more.
Once water was always at hand, Theresa’s water consumption began to rise. The first few days, she seldom drank all twenty ounces of water, but by the second week she was refilling the bottle by late afternoon. By the third week she generally drained the bottle twice during working hours. “I used to work at my desk and only get up for coffee when I began to feel tired. But because I now always have water right in front of me, I keep sipping it. Water is more than a habit for me now; it’s almost an addiction.”
One microresolution I made that increased my water consumption was simply to drink one glass of water for every glass of wine. My microresolution meant making sure that I had a glass of water at the table, and I often drank the entire glass of water as soon as I sat down, rather than reaching for wine to satisfy my thirst. Once I made my resolution, I often found myself drinking two or three glasses of water during the meal and I saw my wine consumption drop from two glasses to one glass, a savings of about 150 calories a day. Drinking water at dinnertime kept me from getting dehydrated during the evening, and I stopped waking up at night feeling thirsty or with the occasional light headache.
I once had a terrible flu that lasted for several days, during which I couldn’t eat a thing; I just sipped water, slept, and retched. When I finally felt a little better, I made myself some plain rice with a bit of salt. I was so hungry that the aroma from that humble bowl of rice intoxicated me and I felt close to drooling. My stomach had shrunk, so I ate very slowly. The rice tasted incredibly delicious and felt like a wave of pure energy entering my exhausted body. I can’t remember a meal that gave me more pleasure or satisfaction.
We needn’t starve ourselves in order appreciate the food we eat, but to be fully awake to the glories of eating, we at least need to exhaust what we consumed at our last meal before we eat again. When you arrive at the table already full from snacking, you cheat yourself out of the greatest pleasure in dining, and you’ll likely leave the table feeling overfull and sluggish (and thinking about eating something sweet to shake off the lethargy that comes with overeating).
Microresolutions can help you reform your eating behaviors so that you’re hungry at mealtime and experience greater eating satisfaction, and your body’s engine burns nutrients more efficiently. If you regularly sit down to dinner or lunch with anything less than true hunger, examine your eating behaviors to pinpoint a change you can make to better align your hunger with mealtimes. It could be dropping a snack, retiming a snack, eating a lighter snack, or taking exercise before a meal to burn off some fuel. Making just one microresolution to reduce snacking or up your exercise can have a profound effect on your long-term weight and eating satisfaction.
Robert generally didn’t snack in the afternoon at work and looked forward to the congenial meal he shared with his family each evening. Robert’s habit on arriving home was to get a cold beer from the refrigerator along with some salty pretzels to eat with it. The beer was filling in itself, and the addition of a couple of handfuls of pretzels often meant that by the time he sat down to dinner he had already consumed several hundred calories. Yet even without true appetite, he still ate a full meal with his family and often left the table feeling overfull.
In his quest to lose some weight, Robert reconsidered his predinner snack habit. He didn’t want to give up his beer ritual—it relaxed him after a long day of work—so he focused instead on reducing the impact that the salty snack had on his waistline and his dinner appetite. The beer was typically 160 calories and the pretzels around 200. Robert made a microresolution to limit my predinner snack to 50 calories. He made a list of salty treats he could eat for 50 calories: five small pretzels, five chips, six olives, three medium pickles. The pretzels and chips, Robert quickly found, left him wanting more, but the pickle kept him off the addictive carbs while delivering a salty wallop. Missing the crunch of the pretzels, he began eating celery sticks along with the pickles and beer. In reforming a single snack habit, Robert better aligned his appetite to dinner and saved himself 150 calories a day, enough to lose fifteen pounds over three years, according to the latest weight-loss models.*
If you make a microresolution aimed at increasing your hunger for real meals, be sure you know what hunger feels like. In our culture of plenty, we often use the word “hunger” to describe any idle urge to eat, confusing cravings with hunger. Hunger is a growling stomach, a cry that the body has exhausted its fuel, not suddenly feeling in the mood for Chips Ahoy. You can be full of food—the opposite of hungry—and still crave something to eat, very often something sweet. Craving carbohydrates in the absence of hunger is an energy distress signal from a tired brain and body; one strategy to relieve such cravings is to treat these urges chemically. Rather than letting the craving be a cue to toss back a handful of cookies or candy, make a microresolution to respond to carbohydrate cravings with simple sugars—a mint, a date, sweet tea or coffee. This will give your brain a direct sugar hit without the extra fat and calories that come with a carbohydrate-rich treat. One friend of mine who often indulged in afternoon confections made a microresolution to swallow a teaspoon of honey when craving sweets, a twenty-two-calorie hit of pure energy that saved her hundreds of calories each day. Making a no-excuses resolution requires that you be prepared when the craving hits, whether that’s having a jar of honey or a box of Altoids in your desk drawer.
If you reform your habits to preserve your appetite for meals, your pleasure in dining will increase tremendously. Rather than minimizing the importance of food in an effort to eat less, maximize its importance by investing in wonderful meals consumed with a full appetite. Cultivating your appetite for meals will strengthen the association of eating with hunger, rather than with entertainment, boredom, or depression. Once you reform your eating so that you are sitting down to real meals with real appetite, you’ll be on the path to better health, greater satisfaction, and weight loss.
Mindful eating is, first and foremost, enjoying every bit of what you eat. Every time you eat something without savoling it fully, stuff food into your mouth while driving, bolt down a meal between appointments, or dutifully finish every last bite of a soggy, tasteless sandwich, you’re robbing yourself of enjoyment and satisfaction. The hundreds of calories you consume every day without awareness or full enjoyment are very likely the difference between your weight now and the weight you want to be. Microresolutions can help you eliminate mindless eating behaviors and increase your eating consciousness and enjoyment.
Mindful eating means cultivating full sensory awareness of the foods you eat in order to achieve greater satisfaction and appreciation. So how’s this for a microresolution? I will only finish eating a food I am enjoying. Unless you can’t afford to toss food, recognize when what you’re eating is giving you no real pleasure and stop. Mealy apples, overcooked meat, waxy cheese, gummy pasta, tasteless sandwiches, pressboard cookies, sour chocolate—don’t dull your senses or waste your calories on unsatisfying food at home or when eating out. It’s disappointing to order something in a restaurant, look forward to it, and then discover that it’s totally blah, but there’s no point in compounding dissatisfaction with a lackluster entrée by spending calories on it as well. Don’t throw good calories after bad—stop eating the disappointment and eat something you can enjoy instead.
As most of your eating is done on autopilot, you’re programmed to finish what you’re eating even when it isn’t giving you any real pleasure. You have to practice asking yourself, Am I really enjoying this?* I save myself calories every day and up my satisfaction levels by practicing this simple habit. If it isn’t delicious, I just stop eating. Who said dieting isn’t fun?
Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac that he didn’t write, he typed, and most of us don’t dine, we eat.
In rule 4 (“A microresolution is personal”) I recounted at length my resolution to savor my food and drink. My resolution was meant to reform my habit of eating so quickly that satiation signals from my brain registered only after I had unwittingly blown straight past satisfaction to lead balloon. Eating more slowly by savoring every bite did indeed often lead me to lay down my fork before my plate was empty. My resolution was focused on enjoyment, not denial, and was far more effective in reducing my food consumption than any of my previous self-admonitions to eat less. As I learned to experience the pleasure of relaxing at meals, I began to invest more in the food, atmosphere, setting, and conversation. I learned how to dine instead of eat.
Studies show that children of families who share a dinner hour perform better in school and on standardized tests, are more successful, have higher self-esteem and more positive peer relationships, and are less likely to become overweight or involved with drugs.* The findings apply to two-parent as well as single-parent households, affluent and poor families. The conclusions in this research didn’t surprise me at all—dining with friends or family provides a haven of well-being in a busy, stressful day, where every person present is nourished by the warmth of the table, shared food and conversation, eating to satisfaction, and belonging. Eating is necessary to life; dining is essential to appreciation and community. If eating severally has become a habit in your family due to complex schedules that include working late, soccer practice, exercise class, or long commutes, consider making a microresolution that pulls the family together at least one more night a week, even if it means dining a bit later or giving up some discretionary activities.
Making microresolutions that put the focus on the ritual of dining and savoring every morsel of a meal can help you to lose weight by wringing pleasure out of every calorie. Food is something to be celebrated, to be grateful for, to relish. The more you truly appreciate and enjoy your food—the more you value it—the more likely you are to find yourself satisfied with less of it.
Our 24/7 eating habits are driven by mindless responses to environmental cues. If you’d like to lose weight, taking notice of the times you habitually eat with less-than-full awareness or enjoyment will expose fat targets for microresolutions.
Do you ever eat in line, snack from the grocery cart, or eat your breakfast doughnut in the elevator on the way up to your office? Have you ever bought a hot dog at a sporting event and finished eating it before you made it back to your seat? Do you circle free-sample food tables so that you can get more than one taste? Do you eat while you prepare food and scarf up the leftovers of others?
I was once standing behind someone in a cafeteria line who was eating off her tray as she waited to pay. Before she reached the front of the line, she had eaten most of the good stuff. How much pleasure could she have derived from such a meal? Not too much, because when she found herself next in line to pay, she broke out of the line and went back to get dessert! I would have laughed if I hadn’t identified with her entirely. A simple microresolution not to eat until seated might have turned the unsatisfied grazer into a happy diner.
Eating while walking, driving, or commuting is another way to gain weight mindlessly and rob food of its full pleasure. If you are an on-the-go type who can eat a taco while crossing the street or lo mein with chopsticks while shifting gears, ask yourself how much more you might enjoy these “meals” if you actually sat still to eat them, and make yourself a microresolution that results in greater awareness and appreciation of mealtime. Dude, sit down.
Yet sitting itself doesn’t guarantee conscious eating. Eating in front of the TV or the computer, while talking on the phone or texting, or even during a meeting at work dulls your appreciation and makes it harder to achieve real satisfaction. A meal consumed on autopilot will likely leave you yearning for “something else” when it concludes.
Jerry nearly always ate lunch at work in front of his computer, fielding phone calls and e-mails for the bare ten minutes it took him to consume his sandwich. Worse, if he was called into a meeting and had just sat down to lunch, he would wolf down his sandwich and wash it down with a drink in two minutes flat. Jerry craved sugar almost immediately after eating his shot-clock lunch and usually snacked heavily in the afternoon. He wondered if he could reduce or eliminate his snack cravings if he made more of a meal out of lunch. Jerry made a microresolution to eat lunch away from my desk.
The first week of his resolution, he ate at a table in his office away from the phone and computer but found it more anxiety provoking than relaxing. Hearing the phone ring and seeing the meaningful glances his assistant passed him through the glass door drove him back to his desk at least once during his short lunch. So Jerry began eating in the cafeteria, something he hadn’t done regularly since he graduated from cube to office. Eating away from his office reduced interruptions to the urgent, and Jerry began taking more time to eat and relax. To make his meal last a full half hour, he made a second microresolution: to always begin his cafeteria lunches with a cup of soup. Eating the hot soup helped him relax into the meal and take his time, rather than treating lunch as a quick refueling pit stop. And while Jerry hadn’t been seeking company when he began eating in the cafeteria, he found plenty of it. He ended up visiting and exchanging ideas with colleagues whom he wouldn’t otherwise have seen during the workday. Sometimes he joined a group of trainees from his team for lunch, giving him a chance to get unfiltered feedback on what the best, brightest, and newest people thought worked (or didn’t) in his department. Jerry’s lunch in the cafeteria became an important part of his day, establishing a break from task-driven work and encouraging networking and closer contact with his team. Taking longer to eat lunch (thirty minutes instead of five) did indeed increase his satisfaction and make it possible for him to resist treats in the late afternoon more often. Jerry gained greater satisfaction, ate less, lost weight, increased his work network, and became a better manager, all from making two microresolutions.
It’s a battle to eat consciously in our multitasking, fast-food culture. More and more companies cater to our penchant for eating on the go. I recently read an article in USA Today* about a scary new restaurant offering called Cup O’Pancakes designed to fit into the cup holder of a car so that you can eat pancakes while driving, no fork necessary! Can Feedbag O’Pancakes be far behind? Yet another new fast-food item is “popcorn chicken,” a snack/meal that allows you to toss back greasy meat pellets as you drive or walk, the same way you toss back popcorn in a movie theater. Make no mistake: There’s plenty of money to be made by encouraging people to eat less and less consciously more and more often. Practicing resolutions that increase mindful eating can help keep you from filling every empty spot in the day with fast food and snacks.
Food should be a headliner, not a sideshow. Consider microresolutions that increase your consciousness and pleasure in dining, and eating less will follow. A microresolution to start lunch on weekdays with a cup of hot soup could stretch your meal, increase your satisfaction, and redirect attention to your food, simply because hot soup means eating more carefully. Similarly, making a resolution to begin a meal by eating six doll-size bites will establish a slower, more conscious rhythm for your meal and stop you from inhaling your plate as soon as it’s in front of you. Resolutions that get you to savor and slow down will pay huge dividends. Pay attention! Enjoy more! Eat less!
Practicing mindful eating and cultivating habits that keep your metabolism fired up will make it easier for you to achieve satisfaction while eating less, but to lose weight you have to eat fewer calories than you eat today, period. Using microresolutions, you can achieve permanent weight loss by targeting specific behavioral changes that reduce the number of calories you consume each day.
In the introduction to this book, I talked about my microresolution to stop eating catered cookies in conference rooms at work. I succeeded in my resolution, but after several months of abstaining, my weight had dipped only slightly. “Can you believe,” I said to my hairdresser (with whom I discuss all such topics), “that I eliminated all those calories and didn’t lose more weight?” “Hey, that’s the ten pounds you would have gained,” he said (proving himself indeed to be the fount of wisdom I had always taken him for). My no conference room cookies pledge helped me to shed a couple of pounds but, more critically, halted the upward trajectory of my weight. We diet veterans often think that when we’re not actively dieting, we’re maintaining, when in fact we’re slowly gaining.
My friend Vivian, who worked hard to stay trim all her adult life, gave herself a pass during pregnancy and indulged in all the treats she had fought against eating for so many years. She expected the weight she gained to disappear after giving birth, but months later she was still fifteen pounds heavier than she had been before her pregnancy. Instead of jumping on the diet bandwagon, Vivian decided to embrace what she called her “Rubenesque” self and continue to enjoy the treats that had comforted her during her pregnancy. She believed she had made a smart and mature decision not to try to reduce to her prebaby weight.
But rather than staying at the weight she had accepted as her new normal, Vivian blew right past it into new territory. Within a year she had put on five pounds more, and a year further on, another three. Vivian didn’t add more calories; she simply continued to eat the daily treats she had eaten in pregnancy. Since the extra calories were marginally more than what she needed to maintain her weight, she continued to gain slowly.
These examples demonstrate how the battle to maintain a healthy weight is fought at the margin. Adding one new snack or a second beer or eating only slightly richer meals will see you creeping up the scale. A 2011 study published in the Lancet by Dr. Kevin D. Hall and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health put forward a new and more finely calibrated model of how caloric increases and decreases affect people of different weight and body composition over time.* Dr. Hall’s studies show that eating just ten extra calories a day will raise the weight of an average person by twenty pounds over thirty years, so imagine what an extra cookie a day can do. But the battle to lose weight permanently is also won at the margin. Dr. Hall’s model shows that for every pound of weight you want to lose, cutting ten calories permanently from your daily diet will result in losing half the weight the first year and almost 95 percent of the weight after three years.* If your goal is to lose twenty pounds, eliminating two hundred calories from your diet will find you ten pounds slimmer by the end of the first year and virtually at your goal in three (to achieve a loss of twenty pounds in a single year, you’d have to cut out four hundred calories). It’s likely that many of the calories you’d need to shed are consumed mindlessly at the margin of real meals and healthful snacks. All you need to do to achieve permanent weight loss is to lock in a behavioral change at the margin that shaves off some of these calories. So ask yourself: What’s at the margin?
One way to drop calories from your diet is to examine the times of day and occasions when you eat outside of mealtime and target one for elimination through a microresolution. It could be a midmorning snack (weak breakfast), afternoon snack (afternoon slump), Frappuccino for the ride home (reward after work), or late-night snack (stimulant). If you don’t think you can entirely eliminate a snack in your schedule, look to reduce its caloric impact, either by eating half of what you’ve become accustomed to or by eating something lighter in its place.
Sometimes you don’t need to eliminate a snack but just change its timing, its when. If you habitually binge on simple carbs at 5:00 p.m. when you’re a couple of hours from dinner but too hungry to wait, you may be able to save calories, avoid hunger, and cultivate more appetite for dinner by making a microresolution to snack earlier in the day. A microresolution to eat a snack I have prepared every day at 3:00 p.m. will give you a lift, stave off hunger, and still allow you to arrive at dinner with good appetite. Including the language of “preparation” in your microresolution will ensure that your snack is planned, not ad hoc. Casting about for a snack spells doom, while planning a snack puts you in control and forces you to think through and prepare a snack that is healthy, satisfying, and right-sized. In order to stick to a time and be ready with a decent snack, you’ll need to go at your resolution with rigor, because preparing a snack to bring to work each day (even one you buy on the way in) won’t happen if you give it only casual attention.
Another way to cut calories outside of mealtime is to set your sights on disrupting opportunistic snacking cues. For example, making a microresolution not to eat while preparing food will keep you from eating an extra slice of cheese while making a sandwich; a microresolution to eat only from my own plate will keep you from finishing the hot cocoa you made your kid. A resolution only to eat food in a bar that I order for myself will keep you from autopiloting over to happy-hour plates of potato skins and fried mozzarella. Circumventing just one of these cues permanently will make a long-term difference in your weight.
Keith often partook of treats made available on the desks of office coworkers. The bull pen with a fishbowl full of minis at its center, the jar of chocolate-covered mints at reception, the macadamia-nut clusters brought into the office by an employee just returned from Hawaii, tins of candied popcorn sent to the office by a vendor for the holidays. He not only took these treats when offered but also found himself searching out such offerings as the day wore on, his self-control weakening as he grew more tired.
In order to combat his foraging, Keith made a microresolution to eat only treats at the office that he himself provided. Now if he wanted an afternoon snack, he would have to plan for it rather than snacking mindlessly. Replacing his untracked, opportunistic office noshing with a planned snack forced Keith to account fully for what he ate each day and drop calories from his daily diet.
Another when worth a microresolution may be how long you give yourself before giving in to a craving for something less than healthy. Many of us experience a keen desire for something sweet when we finish a meal and digestion begins to slow our metabolism, and it’s at that moment we are most vulnerable to eating our way past comfortable fullness into food-coma territory. But if you make a microresolution to wait fifteen minutes after a meal before eating anything else, you may find that the craving for something sweet subsides on its own. Waiting is hard, but once you’ve trained yourself to do it, you’ll find that you pretty much forget to check in after fifteen minutes. And whenever I want to overeat a tasty something, I send myself this message: Overstuffed is a miserable feeling.
You can use microresolutions to save calories at the margin and lose weight by making discrete changes to the mix of foods you regularly eat. Any time you substitute a healthier food for a less healthy food, it’s a win for your engine, and any time you swap out a high-calorie food for a lower-calorie food, it’s a win for your waistline. Such swaps lock in calorie savings that lead to permanent weight loss while maintaining overall diet satisfaction.
One simple microresolution food swap I made was to use skim milk in place of whole milk in coffee. I used to make this substitution only when whooping down the diet warpath, and as soon my willpower folded I would return to my previous eating habits and richer brews. But when I began making permanent, marginal behavioral changes through microresolutions, I resolved to use only skim milk in coffee and tea. At that time I was drinking, on average, three cups of decaf coffee a day, each with half a cup or more of whole milk, for a total of 240 calories. The simple substitution of skim milk saved me 135 calories a day, and I didn’t even think of it as dieting, just a behavioral change it made sense to make forever. Every such saving you lock in will contribute to permanent weight loss. Now I prefer skim milk, I don’t feel cheated or deprived, and the calorie savings are locked in, my new normal.
If you regularly experience a midafternoon slump and you can’t nap it off, a microresolution to limit afternoon carbs to tea and honey (or coffee and sugar) will give you the boost you crave without packing on the extra fat and calories that come with a richer snack. The sweetened tea lifts your energy with 50 calories, the candy bar with 220. The hot tea will take longer to consume and give your brain a chance to register new energy and signal satisfaction. If you presently give in to a rich treat most afternoons, making this single microresolution could be the difference between your weight now and the weight you’d like to be.
If meat is the centerpiece of your evening meal, resolving to eat fish two nights a week for dinner will save you hundreds of calories as well as boost your health and create variety in your diet. If your diet is rich in fried foods, resolving to eat fried food only once a week would improve your health (even to the point of increasing your life span), likely result in weight loss, and sensitize your palate to lighter fare and subtler flavors. My guess is that adopting either one of these resolutions would ultimately increase dining pleasure as well as lead to better health and weight outcomes.
Making microresolutions that substitute whole foods for refined foods advances both weight loss and nutrition. Generally, the more refined a food, the more concentrated its sugars and calories: orange juice versus an orange; Cheerios versus oatmeal; potato chips versus a baked potato. Sugar and flour are the most highly refined culprits in the modern diet. While dieters know to avoid sugar, flour generally accounts for more empty calories in a day of eating. If you eat two pieces of toast at breakfast, two pieces of sandwich bread at lunch, and a couple of pieces of bread at dinner, that’s around six hundred calories a day just on bread, and if it’s all white bread that’s six hundred empty calories. And that’s just bread; pasta, pizza, packaged cereals, pretzels, chips, crackers, cookies, cake—even Twizzlers—are made with flour. When you add it all up, a huge portion of what should be healthy baseline calories is occupied by refined flour, which almost instantly turns into sugar in the digestive system. The sugar provides a rush but burns out quickly, leaving you prone to heavy snacking before your next meal.
Making resolutions that eliminate some white-flour items from your eating will improve your nutrition, help you lose weight, and begin to wean you from a sugar-based diet. Linda’s resolution to give up flour-based foods at lunch (recounted in chapter 9) is a great open-frame resolution. Ending her reliance on refined flour as a lunch mainstay led her to eat a healthier variety of foods and to slim down.
I made a series of microresolutions aimed at reducing the caloric impact of flour in my diet. My first resolution was to eat whole grains for breakfast on weekdays. That meant no toast, muffins, bagels, or refined cereals. In place of these bakery items, I began by eating a high-fiber muesli cereal and ended by falling in love with oatmeal, so much so that I have it even on those weekend days not covered by my resolution. Getting flour out of breakfast changed my eating and energy patterns for the whole day. First of all, hot oatmeal makes a real bowlful that takes time to eat and is immensely satisfying. Adding fresh fruit, nuts, and nut milk to the mix makes the oatmeal even more delicious and nutritious. The oatmeal, nuts, and fruit are so high in fiber that I don’t get hungry for at least five hours, and my energy burns steadily the entire morning without any slumps. By lunchtime I have a big appetite for something as real, delicious, and wholesome as my breakfast. It wasn’t until I made my whole grain resolution that I realized that eating sugar for breakfast corrupts the whole day’s energy and eating pattern.
My next microresolution target was dinner bread. I grew up with French bread at dinner and continued that practice at my own table, but in examining my diet for the next eating shift to make at the margin, dinner bread stood out as a fat target. Two pieces are close to two hundred calories (even without butter) and add nothing nutritionally, so I resolved to eat nothing from the breadbasket at dinner. When I really have a hankering for French bread, I have it as a treat, because that’s what it is. I sit down with my bread and maybe some butter and give it my full attention, relishing every bite of this savory dessert, but it’s no longer a habitual part of my evening meal.
Eliminating so much sugar from my diet helped to stabilize my appetite and cravings throughout the day and kept me on the path to my ideal weight. I didn’t rid my diet entirely of flour (can’t live without pasta), but limiting it resulted in my eating larger portions of healthier, more fibrous, and less caloric foods. Experiencing the engine and weight-loss benefits of banishing flour-based breakfasts and French bread from dinner changed my mindset, and I began avoiding flour at lunch (sandwiches, pizza) and for snacks (cookies, pretzels, corn chips). Flour is so pervasive in the modern diet that limiting it is a boon to the eating imagination. I eat far more fruits, vegetables, nuts, salads, and soups now that I don’t reach for flour every time I’m hungry.
Capitalizing on opportunities to swap out high-calorie items in your habitual diet for lower-calorie, healthier foods could save you the calories you need to reach your weight goal. These substitutions can lead to weight loss, better nutrition, and a more varied and satisfying diet. Your choices will be based on how you eat now. Start with the man in the mirror and look for modifications you can make permanent through a change in habit.
As a young teenager I once went camping with a friend’s family in Lake Tahoe. One evening we left the shore of the lake to go to a casino, where the adults did a bit of gambling and the kids a bit of gamboling. The highlight was a visit to an all-you-can-eat buffet. All around me people piled their plates high with mismatched entrees such as beef, pork, fish, and pasta; mashed and baked potatoes. My girlfriend and I spent most of our time hauling different desserts back to our booth—cakes, pies, cookies, and puddings. The food was really terrible—not even the desserts were good—but all around us people were going back for more, as if trying to make back at the buffet what they had lost at the gaming tables. But large portions are a losing bet at the dining table, where practicing portion control is essential for winning at the weight-loss game.
Portion sizes in our society have never been bigger, and it’s sad that in our culture we often confuse size with value. Rather than finding satisfaction in healthy and delicious foods, we seek satisfaction in more food. And since we’re a society of fast eaters (not leisurely diners), we serve ourselves giant portions just to make our meal last longer than fifteen minutes.
Many diets are based entirely on portion control. On these programs, strict portion sizes are prescribed across all meals and snacks, and those who can sustain the smaller portion sizes forever will lose weight and keep it off. For others the drastic and comprehensive reduction proves overwhelming, and when they quit dieting they revert to the portion sizes they favored previously. But you needn’t start by cutting the portions of everything you eat. Instead, target a reduction in a single food portion until eating less of it is routine. By identifying an item you habitually eat and reducing its portion size, you can lock in calorie savings for a lifetime.
For example, I used to have a weekly appointment near a bakery that offered a delicious oatmeal and blueberry muffin. I knew this muffin had around five hundred calories, but I found it irresistible and looked forward to my appointment and the muffin every week. Recognizing that the extra calories were a threat to maintaining my weight, I made a microresolution to eat only half of the muffin. As soon as the muffin was in my hands, I broke off the top (the best part) and threw the rest away immediately. I can honestly say that I continued to enjoy my treat with just as much satisfaction as before. How is that possible when the snack was half as large? Well, because autopilot generally just finishes a food for us, even if we’re already full and not really deriving any serious pleasure from continuing to eat. That’s the genius behind those hundred-calorie cookie packs—you can finish the entire bag on autopilot rather than exerting the self-control required to eat just two Oreos in a six-cookie pack (good luck with that).
The empty treat bag may signal the end of snack time, but at mealtime many of us don’t feel finished until we see an empty plate. Clean your plate, many of us learned as children. And it’s when you face the empty plate that the urge for a second portion is triggered. Making a microresolution to leave something on my plate at every meal will short-circuit this powerful cue and help you realize that a meal is finished when you are satisfied, not when your plate shines. If you have to serve yourself a bit more in order to leave something uneaten, go ahead, because disrupting autopilot’s finish fetish is powerfully important.
During the summer months, Will habitually went to an ice cream parlor with his family after dinner. The outing was a treat they all looked forward to, including taking a walk around the neighborhood in the warm summer night as they licked their cones. Wanting to trim calories yet participate in the family outing, Will made a microresolution to toss his cone after eating half the ice cream above the cone level, around a quarter cup. He licked the ice cream slowly and savored it to make it last. Will found that most of the pleasure in the cold creaminess was in the first several licks, not the last bite. He continued to look forward to the ice cream outing and didn’t feel deprived, although the size of his treat had shrunk. “The hard part was just throwing the cone away when I was at my limit, but once I threw it away, I didn’t miss it. I didn’t walk the rest of the way wishing for more. Once I had tossed it, I felt as if I had finished it. Gone is gone.”
Peter, a screenwriter, ate nearly the same lunch every day: a sandwich and a small bag of chips. The sandwich filling varied, but the general contours of the lunch were the same. He resolved to drop the bag of chips from his lunch routine, the single change he made to his eating habits, and lost eight pounds in four months. All he needs to do to lock in his weight loss is make the “no chips at lunch” rule permanent and change nothing else about his diet. Does this mean Peter will never eat chips again? No, it just means that chips will be an occasional treat, rather than a lunch mainstay.
There are many opportunities in any diet to make significant savings at the margin through portion control. A microresolution to never eat more than three French fries at a time will allow you to indulge but keep you out of trouble. If you currently eat a couple of cups of pasta a couple of times a week and you resolve to enjoy a single cup of pasta at mealtimes, you’ll save yourself a load of calories. A cup of pasta will still be very satisfying and filling, especially if you prolong the pleasure by twirling the pasta around your fork a couple of strands at a time, rather than spooling a mouthful three inches in diameter. If you regularly eat eight ounces or more of meat at dinner, making a resolution to limit meat portions to six ounces may win the waistline battle for you and leave you more appetite for the delicious vegetables that are a requirement for good health and a happy engine. If you eat a sandwich every day for lunch, a microresolution to eat only open-faced sandwiches on weekdays will save you eighty to a hundred calories a day, just from removing the top slice of bread. To go further, make a microresolution to eat no more than half a sandwich for weekday lunch, and instead add an apple or some salad or soup. If you drink two beers every night, making a microresolution to drink just one beer a day Monday through Thursday will save you six hundred–plus calories a week while allowing you more leeway on the weekend. If you eat a whole bagel with cream cheese in the morning, eating three-quarters of it will save you at least a hundred calories a day. Each marginal reduction will move you down the scale in the same way small changes to your diet inched you up.
Settings affect our dining experience and can in themselves cue us to overindulge. Visiting one’s childhood home and smelling Mom’s cooking can cue a teenage-sized appetite in an adult with a middle-aged metabolism. Sports arenas (and watching sports at home) can cue the desire for hot dogs, chips, fries, and lots of beer. Bars often offer greasy and salty happy-hour finger foods designed to induce the desire for another drink. Neighborhoods are full of eating cues—coffee houses, bakeries, pizzerias.
Examining the effect of place on your eating behavior can lead to good ideas for microresolutions. What you eat during half an hour of happy hour could be the caloric equivalent of a fourth meal. If you always go out for a drink with the gang on Friday nights, enjoy the greasy bar food, but then go home and eat dinner, your resolution could be to choose between bar food and dinner on nights out with the gang, which could cut five hundred calories from your weekly intake. Making a microresolution to eat just half of everything served at Mom’s can save your Sunday visit from becoming a weekly setback. Where you physically sit to eat your meal may also affect your efforts to eat less. Eating dinner in front of the television, having lunch at the computer, or snacking while Skyping with a friend will limit your satisfaction and lead to the urge for more.
There’s a famous deli my family loves in Brooklyn called Junior’s, where we often eat before going to a show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). After years of trying to order something low-cal in a high-cal place, I changed strategies and now order any deli sandwich I like and eat half of it. The Reuben sandwich I lust for is so huge that half of it is more than enough, and I usually don’t finish it. I look forward to it, relish every single bite, and feel really full when I’ve finished. This resolution began as place specific, or least deli specific, but on its own it’s turned into a flexible guideline that works whenever I’m in a situation where all the choices are pretty rich—I just eat part of what I’m served (very slowly).
When I was in my twenties, I told my doctor that although I was eating “hardly anything,” I wasn’t losing weight. My doctor replied, “When someone tells me that they can’t lose weight on an apple a day I say: ‘Eat half an apple.’” Clearly the good doctor was skeptical about my claim that I ate hardly anything, but thinking about this exchange today, I realize his broader point is the critical one. However much you are eating now, if you change one behavior that results in eating less, you’ll lose weight. It’s all happening at the margin.