WHAT YOUR GOAL-SETTING WORKSHEET MIGHT LOOK LIKE
1. What is my healthy-eating goal? Find a goal you know you can achieve; nothing overly ambitious. For instance: “Keep a food record for at least four days this week and at least two days next week.”
2. What is the most positive outcome of achieving this goal? This is crucial: You must be able to name and imagine a benefit. Otherwise this technique won’t work. The positive outcome is what drives motivation and infuses meaning. For instance: “The food record will help me assess my diet habits, a critical first step needed before making healthful changes.”
3. What is the main obstacle standing in my way? For instance: “I don’t trust myself to write down everything I eat because I never leave myself enough time, and I’m bad at estimating portions.”
4. How can I overcome the obstacle? Be very specific, noting the “when” and “where” the obstacle occurs. For instance: “I’ll make sure to leave time after each meal to write down what I ate. And when I don’t have time, I’ll take before-and-after photos with my cell phone or camera, then record it later. That will also take care of the accuracy issue.”
5. How do I prevent the obstacle from occurring in the first place? Again, be specific about the “when” and “where.” For example: “To deal with the lack of time, I’ll plan an extra one to five minutes after each meal or snack to write down what I ate or to take before and after shots of meals and snacks.”
6. How, specifically, should I achieve my healthy-eating goal? This means focusing on specifically when and where it would happen. For example, “This Thursday through Sunday will be relatively calm days, so I’ll do it then. I’ll carry blank Lifestyle Log pages around with me at all times. I’ll also always have my phone and/or a camera with me to snap before and after photos of the meals and snacks. That way, I’ll have a photo, so I won’t forget, or I can share it with someone who can help me determine portion size.”
Prepare more meals yourself. If you’re not a confident cook or simply got out of the habit of preparing meals, take on the challenge and try out some easy recipes with few ingredients. The Best Life Diet Cookbook and www.thebestlife.com are filled with such recipes.
Give your favorite foods a healthy makeover. This is important on two levels: It staves off feelings of deprivation and trains your tastes to prefer foods lower in sodium, sugar, and fat so that you might not want to return to the old versions. If you can’t find a pre-prepared healthier food out there, try making a leaner, lower-sodium, and/or lower-sugar version yourself.
THE PACE OF YOUR STEPS
Nine steps may not sound like many, but taking even one step toward changing your eating habits can be challenging, especially if you’re a food addict. If these nine steps seem too hard to do all at once, then don’t. Choose one step and use the goal-setting worksheet for a realistic, doable plan to achieve your goal. Work on one at a time, if that’s the most you can handle. Or, if you can swing it, work on two at a time. The goal I’ve picked as a sample—logging your food intake for a few days—is only a suggestion; you don’t have to follow it. But it is a good starting point for just about everyone. If you’re an emotional eater, I’d start by going to chapter 2 and working on that first (if you’ve skipped around in this book). As your emotional dependence on food wanes, the other steps in this program will be easier to implement.
As the successful maintainers whose stories dot this book illustrate, it is possible to overhaul your diet. In fact, people do it all the time—people with entrenched food addictions, people who might not be addicted but are abusing food, and people who overeat because that’s what they were taught. Sure, we get stuck in a groove, but we all have the power to get out of it. Just keep your reasons for change (pages 91–93) in the forefront of your mind, take this at a realistic pace, and you’ll be a better eater next week, and an even better one next month and in the years that follow.
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CONQUERING EXERCISE AVERSION
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By Bob Greene
WE WERE MEANT TO move. And when we don’t, we increase our risk of virtually every known ailment. I’m sure you’ve heard about a lot of the illnesses associated with sedentary living, among them diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, and stroke. Beyond that, though, researchers are continually finding new ways that physical activity protects our health. We now know, for instance, that exercise strengthens the immune system in ways that can help the body fight everything from small infections to cancer. In another way, by keeping the body leaner, exercise also helps guard against cancers that are associated with body fat, including cancers of the esophagus, pancreas, colon, kidney, and breast. Lowering body fat is one way that physical activity protects against heart disease and diabetes, too.
All this should be enough to get people in their right minds to the gym, but, of course, lots of perfectly sane people don’t even own a pair of workout shoes. The number one reason is that many people simply hate exercise. It is the biggest barrier to regular physical activity and, by extension, one of the biggest barriers to long-term weight loss success. If you too hate exercise, it’s easy to ignore all the reasons why activity is so vital to your health, and I’ll even go as far as to say your happiness. But let me state it simply: You really need to do it. One thing we know for sure is that people who have long-term success are physically active. So even if you don’t care about all the health benefits of exercise, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, there’s virtually no way around it. You have to exercise.
The challenge in front of you is to get past your resistance to exercise, zero in on a way to make it part of your life, and stop making excuses about why you can’t be physically active. In this chapter, I’m going to give you a few different ways to accomplish those goals. You’ll take a step back and think about the reasons you might be reluctant to exercise, find what you can use to motivate yourself, and, by adjusting your mind-set, overcome the obstacles that you perceive are getting in the way of activity. You may never learn to love exercise (though who knows? A lot of former exercise haters do), but you will learn to love what exercise does for you. That was the experience of one woman I met on The Oprah Winfrey Show, whom I’ll tell you about shortly.
I also want to say a word about why I believe you should begin incorporating physical activity into your life even before you attempt to cut calories. This idea doesn’t go over big with many people; most want to begin by changing their eating habits. I really have to warm them up to the idea of establishing a fitness routine first.
This is not just me being an exercise kind of guy trying to convert everyone to my way of thinking. There are solid reasons for diving into exercise before you begin fiddling with your food intake. For one thing, most people have greater long-term success when they begin with exercise, and there are several reasons why. Generally, when you eat fewer calories, your body reacts by slowing down your metabolism to preserve body fat, a defense mechanism that helped your ancestors avoid starvation and is still programmed into your DNA today. Exercise, on the other hand, boosts your metabolism by increasing production of enzymes that allow you to process more oxygen. That boost counteracts the metabolic slowdown that comes from calorie cutting and allows your body to shed body fat, just as you’d hoped. What’s more, the increase in metabolism you get from regular exercise can last the whole day. Exercising might make you a little hungrier, but, on balance, between the calories you burn while working out and the spike to your metabolism, your workouts will nudge you into a calorie deficit. Interestingly, some research shows that while people who exercise do report an increased appetite, they seem to be satisfied with less food at mealtimes. That’s going to make calorie cutting less painful when you do begin reining in your food intake.
Consider, too, that exercise preserves muscle, while cutting calories alone can cause muscle loss. Exercise also boosts your mood and gives you more energy, two things that go a long way to
ward helping you confront the challenge of making changes on the food front.
Another reason that I encourage you to focus on fitness first is because you can see tangible, more immediate results with exercise, and that’s motivating. A firmer body, glowing skin, a better night’s sleep, an ease that comes from gaining muscle strength— those are all things that come from physical activity and are all things that can inspire you to take self-improvement up a notch. Many exercisers find that their workouts give them the will to refuse that slice of cake or plate of French fries: They don’t want to negate the gains they’ve worked so hard to make.
EXERCISE AND YOUR EARLY YEARS
While exercise aversion is rampant, it’s the rare person who didn’t begin life as an active person. Have you ever noticed that, before they reach the age where they become mesmerized by PlayStations and computer games, most kids move nonstop? I was such a kid, though we didn’t have PlayStations and computer games back then. But even if we did, I think I would have opted to be doing something active. I loved any kind of physical activity—especially outdoor activity. My parents always had to hunt me down when dinnertime rolled around because I was out somewhere riding a bike or kicking a ball, trying to wring out every last minute of daylight before I had to go in for the night. Because I naturally gravitated toward exercise, I easily made the transition into more structured forms of activity like organized sports and phys ed class. In that way, I was lucky. So many people I’ve talked to had the opposite experience with formal athletic activities, and it’s almost always the reason why they grew up to be exercise-hating adults.
When I speak to groups of people, I often ask them, “How many of you had a bad experience in PE class?” Generally, about half of the audience raises their hands—and those are just the ones who admit it. When I think back on my own school days, I can see that, while I might have been having fun, the seeds of exercise aversion were being sown all around me. Whenever my classmates and I were dividing up into teams to play a game like kickball, I was the kid fortunate enough to be picked early on. But then as the selection process went on, I would watch uncomfortably as some of my nonathletic friends stood there fidgeting uneasily, waiting to learn their fate. Their faces would turn red and they’d avert their eyes, looking as though they’d rather be anywhere else on the planet than in that school yard. I knew they were praying, Just let me be picked second to last, not last, because being last, of course, was the ultimate humiliation.
And it wasn’t only during the cruel process of choosing up sides that my friends suffered. These were the same kids who, to their mortification, could not perform more than a single push-up or lap around the track. It was tough on them. As I was gaining confidence from being able to shoot a ball through a hoop and boot a soccer ball into a net, a lot of my classmates were losing confidence because they couldn’t sink a shot or kick a ball in bounds.
The funny thing was that while PE was one thing, recess was another. These same kids who recoiled from sports and took such an emotional beating in gym class would run and jump, play tag, and just generally horse around in a very active way during recess. They liked moving; they just didn’t like the phys ed teacher telling them what to do or criticizing them for not being fast, agile, or coordinated enough. Do you see what I’m getting at? It’s quite possible that even if you weren’t one of those kids who got picked early for teams, and even if you think that you’ve always hated exercise, there was probably a time that you actually loved to move your body.
As we become adults, we have a lot going against us when it comes to physical activity. It gets harder to run or swim or bike or even take a long walk with age, partly because we’re not used to it. Life happens, and we can’t spend all the time we once did out on the playground running around. (Now kids barely have time to do that either, and forty-eight states don’t even require PE anymore, but that’s another story.)
Lack of exercise, though, goes beyond lack of time. We don’t have to move anymore. Elevators. Escalators. Email. Most housing developers don’t even bother to put in sidewalks anymore. People who want to walk in these new neighborhoods have to take their chances with traffic in the street. No wonder so many drive everywhere instead. Everything is so automated nowadays that you don’t even have to use your hand to open a can or sharpen a pencil anymore. As a result, because so few of us are physically active in the course of everyday living, exercise becomes even more uncomfortable than it might be otherwise. Most people don’t find all that panting and sweating pleasurable.
When you add physical discomfort to the bad memories of Coach Woodcock yelling at you for dragging your feet on the track or being late for PE class, you’ve got layer upon layer of reasons for not getting up off the couch. Still, even with all that going against you, you can relearn to like moving your body or, at the very least, be able to tolerate grinding it out. And I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the way they feel after finishing a workout.
CHANGING YOUR MIND ABOUT EXERCISE
Not long after The Best Life Diet was published, I asked a few people to join the Best Life Diet Challenge on Oprah. As they adopted the principles of the plan, the show followed their progress. One of those people was a young woman named Tracy Ring. Tracy was one of the most exercise-averse people I had ever met. The first day, she let it be known that she didn’t really see herself exercising; I could barely get her to walk on a treadmill! I was worried. I knew there was little chance that she would succeed if she didn’t change her attitude about exercise. But as the challenge went on, Tracy amazed me. She not only did very well, but in a huge turnaround, she became an avid exerciser.
Tracy is someone whose relationship with exercise echoes everything I just talked about. When Tracy joined the challenge, she weighed about 240 pounds. Nine months later, she had lost 74 of them, and now, two years down the road, she has kept the weight off. Exercise played a big role in Tracy’s turnaround, something she couldn’t have predicted before she made the commitment to lose the weight once and for all.
Tracy, who’s now thirty-two, is one of those people I talked about earlier who had a negative experience with activity in her formative years. Grade school, middle school, high school—she found PE awful every step of the way. “I didn’t like that you had to change clothes in the locker room and pretend to be cool while feeling self-conscious,” she remembers. “Then there is an immediate stratification of who’s good at PE and who is not. The good kids rise to the top, and the gym teacher thinks they’re fantastic. Sports never came easy to me, but other things like band and debating did, so why in the heck would I kill myself exercising when I was better at other things?” For Tracy, there was also the added pressure of having parents who are extremely athletic. Her dad was on the U.S. Olympic Committee for track and field and is a triathlete; her mother runs marathons.
To hear Tracy talk about her early experience with physical activity, you’d never think that she was the same person who, when I caught up with her recently, had gone to the gym at four-thirty that morning; she had to be at work by seven and didn’t want to miss her workout. Despite the fact that she travels about 250 days a year for her job—“My life is like the movie Up in the Air,” she says, referring to the film starring George Clooney as a perpetual airline passenger who lives out of his suitcase—Tracy exercises almost every day. She’s completed a minitriathlon and regularly enters 5K races. “I wouldn’t say I love exercise,” says Tracy, “but I do love the way it positively impacts my life.”
So how did she go from gymphobic to someone who rises before the sun to get in a workout? When Tracy joined the Best Life Challenge, a friend asked her, “If you’re not going to do it now, when millions of people are watching you, then when?” The question struck a chord with her, but it would be wrong to think that she was letting an external factor—Oprah’s large TV audience—drive her. (And the fact that Tracy has kept the weight off for two years without an audience to prod her is testament to that.) Tracy’s real m
otivation came from within. “I knew that I wouldn’t be happy being a size twenty for the rest of my life,” she says. “I had spent years trying to shortcut the system, but I could see that wasn’t going to work anymore.”
Tracy had found her motivation, which, as I discuss in detail later in this chapter, is an essential part of getting physical activity into your life. But that wasn’t all she needed to move forward. There were obstacles in Tracy’s life—not to mention her intrinsic dislike of physical activity—that she would need to surmount. The first challenge: making exercise bearable and even somewhat enjoyable.
Tracy has a business degree and is very analytical. She likes facts and figures, and, to her, exercise has become something of a numbers game. She wears a heart rate monitor and tracks how many calories she burns, she sets distance goals (this is where training for an event like a 5K can help), and she checks to see that her energy expenditure through exercise is high enough to balance the amount of food she’s eating. It keeps exercise interesting for her. “And it keeps me honest,” adds Tracy.
One of the things that most impresses me about Tracy is that she has kept exercising despite her travel schedule. One way she’s made that happen is by always staying at a hotel that has a gym, and if she has to miss a workout because of work priorities, she makes it up on the weekends. She even has a good strategy for watching her calories while living out of a hotel room: Before Tracy hits the gym, she orders a healthy meal from room service so that when she gets back, it’s there waiting for her, ready to subdue her appetite and keep her from rummaging through the chips and nuts in the minibar.
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