Man Meets Scale

Size matters redux

2012-02-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

Our brain is a funny device. It holds a surprising sway over us, often in ways we cannot imagine. I read with interest and curiosity a few weeks ago an article in the WSJ talking about the curious benefit of placebos (Why Placebos Work Wonders). Sometimes when our brain thinks we are getting better or are satisfied, it instructs the rest of the body to follow suit. It seems that when our mind plays tricks on us, those tricks can impact much more than what's bouncing around our noggins. In the article, they referenced one particular study from the journal Health Psychology. Here is the excerpt from the WSJ...

Another study, published last year in the journal Health Psychology, shows how mind-set can affect an individual's appetite and production of a gut peptide called ghrelin (GREL-in), which is involved in the feeling of satisfaction after eating. Ghrelin levels are supposed to rise when the body needs food and fall proportionally as calories are consumed, telling the brain the body is no longer hungry and doesn't need to search out more food.

Yet the data show ghrelin levels depended on how many calories participants were told they were consuming, not how many they actually consumed. When told a milkshake they were about to drink had 620 calories and was "indulgent," the participants' ghrelin levels fell more—the brain perceived it was satisfied more quickly—than when they were told the shake had 120 calories and was "sensible.

The results may offer a physiological explanation of why eating diet foods can feel so unsatisfying, says Ms. Crum, first author on the study. "That mind-set of dieting is telling the body you're not getting enough."

So there you have it. This study suggests that if you think you are getting a lot of food, then it can instruct your hormones to pipe down and let you feel full. If your brain thinks you are getting gipped, then it asks your hormones to scream for more. There is clearly a bizarre circular logic being used by our neurological systems, but what I suppose it is what it is.

One example of how we can use this curious effect to our benefit is in the use of low energy density foods. These are foods that have relatively few calories per cubic meter, often filled with water, air, fiber, etc. It goes back to one of my personal rules of eating: bulk up your food. If I go back to my staple breakfast:

Regular oatmeal with blueberries and sliced banana
0 fat Greek yogurt with grapes with a little Fiber One

By the time I'm done with these concoctions, they completely fill two pretty decent sized bowls. It's enough food that my family looks at me slightly aghast by the quantity. Yet these two bowls add up to about 6 PointsPlus per serving. It's my little version of cheating the devil. My brain clearly thinks I'm getting a decent amount of food because I'm not really hungry until lunch. You might now ask the following question: if this hypothesis is true, then why aren't I destroying this phenomena by asserting it? In other words, the fact that I am acknowledging that I'm only eating 6 PointsPlus values should signal to my brain that I'm still hungry, yet this does not happen. Why? Simple. My brain isn't very smart and/or is quite gullible.

The above WSJ excerpt also reminds me of a Charles Barkley quip from the Leno show: "You can't give a fat man a little meal and expect him to be happy." Amen to that.

Big food indeed...

There is more than a fair bit of research out there to suggest that visual cues can go a long way to convincing us that we are either being well fed or starved, regardless of actual calorie content. Personally, I view this as a gift because it allows me to imagine strategies to mentally cheat (i.e., by bulking up my foods). I'm perfectly happy to outsmart my dimwitted brain.

This is also a good reminder for me of one of the cardinal rules for sustainable, healthy eating: don't go through life deprived! I've never met a person on Weight Watchers who didn't love food. I've also never meet a person on Weight Watchers who has kept their weight off for a long time who still doesn't love food. The trick is to love food that loves you back.

Cheers,

David

Cheer up!!!

2012-01-25T09:01:00.002-05:00

For all those who commented on my last post, many thanks. It was a great discussion that is worthy of continuation.

The reactions to Tara's article and some of the columns it has spawned has been varied and often negative. Two particular types of reactions touched me because I can totally relate to them.

Reaction #1: If it's really hard to keep the weight off for a host of reasons, am I doomed to ultimately fail?

I think about this a lot as it relates to my own weight. I do this even though people I know think I'm a bit of an unmitigated freak given that I've been at goal weight for nearly three years. They wonder (usually aloud and within a foot of my face) what exactly I'm worried about? "You look great. In fact, you should go eat a sandwich."

As I have said on so many other posts, I more or less always feel that I'm a week of bad food away from spiraling into a horrific abyss of crushing weight gain. I feel that as soon as I let go, everything will slip away. I always feel like I'm living on borrowed time and that it's only a matter of time before I fully revert to a stuffed pizza & breakfast burrito fueled weight escalation. I'm doomed! And I never learned to read!

These kinds of personal histrionics are frankly exhausting.

Logically, there are reasons that I harbor these seemingly crazy fears. I know that I suffer from food lust. I know that I would be perfectly happy to eat three to four pounds of cashews every day. I know this because I sometimes find myself being a little out of control, and I know what that feels like. I know what's it's like to be in the mental grip when everything in my peripheral vision disappears, and all I can see is the food that I am shoving into my mouth as fast as it will go. It goes without saying that every time I do get out of control, I beat the living crap out of myself.

Yet in more lucid moments, I try to ask myself the question: what exactly is the big deal? When I spend a day living healthily, I feel great and I'm not even hungry. I remind myself that I really do like the better-for-me foods that I now eat. I remind myself that fried food generally gives me a bad case of indigestion, and I don't sleep well afterwards. So there you have it: the healthy life makes me feel great and leaves me fully satisfied while the I-need-an-exorcism unhealthy life makes me feel like dirt. So why am I tempted by temptation? I will leave this to religious scholars and philosophers to sort out, but it is comforting to know that it is, on some level, all in my head.

If it is in my head, I know that I need to be careful about who else I let muck around inside my skull. If I keep telling myself, or let someone else tell me that I my healthier life is deprived and terrible, then living healthy will seem really hard and unsustainable. If I listen to the truth and not the words that have passed through my personal distortion field, I can then take a deep couple of breaths and take comfort in my happy, healthier life.

I can also take comfort in knowing that because I operate on a level of heightened alert, I can very cued into knowing when I'm falling by the wayside. Early intervention helps because it means I have less to recover from when I do stumble. The worse thing I could do to myself is to live in denial when I am falling headlong and backwards into my old life.

By the way. If you are achieving success in making a change in the path of your life, try not to lose sight of the bigger picture. You completely rock the house! Whatever angst I may sometimes feel about all of this maintaining my healthy life, I would not in 1,000 years give up the successes I've had to throw in the towel and quit. It may be a challenge and sometimes even hard, but it has been completely and utterly worth the effort.

Reaction #2: if you are actively maintaining your weight loss you must have a bad relationship with food

Well, you can't win for losing (sorry about the pun). There is always someone out there who is perfectly happy to judge someone else, and this topic is no exception. Let me just be clear. The people from the National Weight Control Registry who are being poked at are being criticized because they are vigilantly working to keep their weight off. Let see... They are actively making sure that they manage portion sizes. They are keeping a food diary to try to avoid mindless eating. They are making sure to exercise an hour each day (btw, this is the official recommendation of the US government on activity). They are very careful about managing their interactions with junk food. Damned them!!!!

We live in a world in which we are surrounded by lots of unhealthy food choices and temptations. It's called an obesogenic environment for a reason. Until someone can make it all go away, and I'm not holding my breath on this, we all have to find a way to manage while we still live in it. If you lived in a neighborhood with rampant crime, you'd lock your doors and be careful not to wander around the park in the middle of the night. You would not blithely walk around in an oblivious state on the assumption that the police will keep you safe no matter what. How is protecting ourselves in an environment of junk food, fries and soda any different?

It may feel frustrating that it has to be this way, but for many of us, me included, living healthy requires effort and a certain amount of vigilance. It requires managing our personal environment so that we do not have to constantly test ourselves in the face of temptation. It requires establishing habits and routines that make us more aware and mindful of what we are doing. Most of my food vices are the result of mindless habits and actions. I know that I have to create triggers and stimuli to help me manage them. This is why I take advantage of tools and support to help me handle these challenges. Tracking is the biggest tool hanging from my healthy life utility belt, but I use many others as well.

If there is one mindset we should all endeavor to embrace in this very difficult topic it should be one of empathy, not judgement. There is no room to judge those who suffer from obesity, and there is certainly no room to judge from those who try to do something about it. Perhaps we should all focus on fixing ourselves and supporting each other in the process, not telling each other what to do or standing in judgement.

So here is my final proposal for consideration. For all of us who are trying to hold onto our progress in making a healthier life for ourselves, let's take a few deep breaths and then give ourselves a well deserved pat on the back. We may slip, trip, fall and stumble, but we can and will get right back up. We can watch where we're walking so we don't trip as often (this happens to me a lot), and we should never feel badly about that (!). BTW, if you are proud of what you have achieved, don't be shy. You should be proud. If you are feeling badly for have stumbled, don't sweat it. It happens to the best of us and all of us. Know that you are not alone and that there is no shortage of people who are willing and want to help.

Cheers,

David

Is weight maintenance challenging? It's not in your imagination...

2012-01-16T10:32:00.002-05:00

Tara Parker-Pope

I have long been an admirer of Tara Parker-Pope, a journalist/columnist/blogger for the New York Times. My memory of her goes back to when she was at the Wall Street Journal at which she wrote an article (circa 2001) that gave me my very first quote in a major publication. She has one of the most powerful voices in the world of health, which is a function of her intelligence, command of research, curiosity and passion. With all of this gushing enthusiasm, it was with great interest that I read her long piece in the New York Times magazine a couple of weeks ago, titled “The Fat Trap”.

“The Fat Trap” makes a number of important points that should be part of the broader dialogue on this very important topic. For those who haven’t read it, I recommend it however counter-intuitive that may seem given my role at Weight Watchers.

Here is the original article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html?pagewanted=all

Here is her follow-up interview (equally recommended)

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/behind-the-cover-story-tara-parker-pope-on-obesity/?ref=magazine

I won’t attempt to re-write the article (she’s a far better writer than I), but I will list some of the key takeaways. Let me first start by saying that my first reaction is that this article can be read as discouraging. While I totally understand that reaction, I think there is something incredibly positive to take from it. I would also say that Tara's article focuses on a particular set of arguments focusing on the difficulty of weight maintenance, and it would seem to be more than a little down on the notion that we can sustain our weight loss. Of course, I have met many, many people who have lost weight, and kept it off, albeit often with some ups and downs.

However, given how many people who have encountered disappointment with weight regain, I think they can take some important and ultimately positive messages away.

#1: Maintaining weight loss can be hard

All of us who have had weight issues, present company included, know this on a deep and personal level. We ask ourselves why we struggle to suppress our desire to eat foods we aren’t supposed to. We wonder why we cannot seem to kick the mind numbing desire to slaughter a heaping of our favorite trigger foods. In her article, Tara does a nice job of summarizing some of the recent research suggesting some of the leading theories as to why:

Some people are genetically pre-disposed to suffer from obesity. There is a lot of great research that has been published and more that is in process that suggests that certain DNA markers (e.g., the FTO gene) make us more likely to eat foods we shouldn’t and eat too much of them.
A recent study in the NEJM suggested that after losing weight following a Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD – in other words shakes) certain hormones (ghrelin’s) that trigger hunger increased and stayed higher. As a result, the subjects of the study felt more deprived even a year after they had lost the weight.
Other studies have shown that after losing weight, our body attempts to retain its remaining fat stores by lowering our metabolism. Therefore, to maintain our weight loss, we may have to stay at a lower daily calorie target than someone else who was at that weight, but didn’t have to shed pounds to get there.
Other studies using MRI technology have shown that people with weight problems have brains that light up like Christmas trees when they are staring down their trigger foods (btw, I’m one of them). This doesn’t happen to nearly the same degree with people who do not suffer from obesity.

So what does all of this suggest? For me, it says that if you are a person with weight problems, you are wired to respond aggressively when functioning in our now obesogenic food environment. It suggests that there may be biological functions that cause you to do this.

#2: For the 10,000th time, can we please dispel the notion of willpower

It’s pretty amazing how misunderstood obesity is and how grossly over-simplified the challenges are. I cannot tell you how many times I hear people say something along the lines of “You just need to eat less and exercise more. It would be simple if people would just take responsibility!” The assumption is that if you have a weight problem you are somehow lazy and of weak moral fiber. This is completely inane.

As Tara puts it, no one wants to be fat. The reason we struggle is because it’s hard. What we now realize is that the difficulty of maintaining our weight loss is not in our imaginations. There seem to be a host of biological factors that make it all that much harder.

I know fully that I will always struggle with my weight. I know that I will always have to be careful. I know that I will have to get in my hour of exercise each day and every day. I have a condition that requires treatment. With 34% of the American public classified as clinically obese and another 30%+ overweight, most of us do. I’ve met some pretty amazing, driven and powerful people who are also significantly overweight. Does this mean they are weak? Of course not.

When we stop treating obesity as a simple equation that only requires a little elbow grease, we will be way ahead of the game. For me to maintain my weight loss, I have had to work at it. I’ve worked to build healthier habits by creating routines. I’ve had to work to create a personal environment that makes it harder for me to indulge my unhealthy habits. I no longer blow through a tub of ice cream because I make sure that said tubs are in the downstairs freezer where I don’t have to see them every time I open the door. The biggest problem I have with the notion of willpower being the key to solving obesity is that it’s essentially a lie. If I have to stare down my ice cream because I’m supposed to have the “willpower” to ignore it, I will fail.

Let me be clear. Establishing healthy habits and getting rid of bad ones is not easy. Period. I believe it can be done, but it bugs me to no end when I see people trivialize this process.

#3: We need to manage our expectations

OK. I’m a Lifetime member, but I would also remind everyone that I had to lose less than 20% of my weight to get to my goal weight. In other words, I didn’t have as far to go.

One of the most important changes at Weight Watchers in recent years has been the degree to which we now focus most of our conversations with our members on goal setting on getting to a 5% and 10% weight loss. Remember, a 10% weight loss massively improves your health and vitality. It’s not about becoming the next swimsuit model. Also, remember, that a 10% weight loss looks pretty good too.

#4: We need to cut ourselves (and others) a break

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of watching someone struggle with their weight is the way to react when they find that they have re-gained weight. It is horrible to watch people go through a ritual of self-character assassination and other forms of self-flagellation when they fall back on old habits or succumb to temptation. I know it because I’ve been there.

For many or most of us, we should expect that we will periodically fall down. We still have to live and survive in an obesogenic environment. There are going to be times when it just wears you down. Knowing that there may be biological triggers that make it worse can perhaps give all of us some comfort that when we do trip, it’s not because we are bad people. It’s just nature at work.

Oh by the way, knowing all of these challenges can also help us have that much more empathy for those who struggle with their weight.

#5: Ironically, knowing it is a challenge can actually make us more successful and happier at the same time

At no point in writing her column or in any of her many follow-up interviews did Tara say we should all throw in the towel. Rather, my take is that she is creating the possibility of breaking out of an all-too-familiar doom loop:

Feel bad about being overweight
Lose weight
Regain weight
Hold ourselves in bitter contempt
Repeat

If we know that we are going to periodically trip and skin our knees, we can accept the fact that we can pick ourselves up and try again. We can skip all of the drama and self-abuse. We can recognize that this is a process that we have to work at forever. If all of that sounds a little grim, consider 1) the alternative, which feels even more grim and 2) everything we gain when we succeed. Further, if we know what we are getting into, we can be all the more positive and feel even better when we do succeed. Because we can.

While it is absolutely possible to lose weight and keep it off over time, it’s not necessarily always easy. Back-tracking happens, and that is totally normal. Dealing with a weight issue does require effort that must be sustained for a long time. It can be frustrating, but for me personally, it has been completely worth the sometimes struggles.

2012: end of the world or new beginning?

2011-12-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

It's been a little quiet on this blog for the past month, so apologies for my distractedness. December was a whirlwind month with many elves spending many hours getting ready for January (our Christmas). I finally clocked out Friday, December 22, celebrated Christmas and got on a plan with my family for a week in Mexico. It was a great trip, which was oddly educational. We spent most of the time traipsing on old Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and visiting villages and cities on the Western part of this Mexican state. After that, we had two days of R&R on the Caribbean coast. It was an amazing trip, and there is now one more culture (the Mayan) of which I am now only mostly ignorant.

Right around 12/22, I got weighed, and I was very much at goal weight (yay me!). From there, I had three days of Christmas merrymaking followed by seven days of Mexican/Maya cuisine -- lots of homemade tortillas and tortilla chips. I was disallowed from exercising for SIX WHOLE DAYS. Fate was indeed cruel. I was not able to start getting back on physical activity until this past Saturday. This was longest stretch without a workout in the better part of 10 months. I was half convinced that my failure to exercise was going to accelerate the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world.

Dear Earth: I'm sorry that my failure to
work out for six days caused a planetary event.
Will try harder next time.

Yet, I am still breathing along with all of the other Earthlings, so I guess my lack of working out did not actually cause the planet to plunge into catastrophe. I have not been weighed in yet, but I am guessing about a 3-5 pound gain. Hardly another reason to predict the end of the world.

As a side note, my tour guide to the Mayan ruins informed us that the Mayans never said the world would end on Dec 21, 2012. They merely had to reset their odometer and use it to mark a new beginning. That sounds much more encouraging than the whole planetary destruction thing.

This vacation I did my noble best to try to force myself to disconnect from job, diet, and workout routines just a little bit. I even managed to go a full day without having my iPhone in easy reach. This is not small achievement for yours truly.

But now it's January, and it's time to get my game ON.

There are many who would criticize the premise of January resolutions as useless or bad. I am not one of them. I love treating January as the start of a new year and the opportunity for new beginnings. I personally believe that any time we can create an internal trigger to stimulate a new behavior change effort, why not. As long as we keep the resolution in perspective and not get down on ourselves when we don't completely change every single aspect of our lives in the course of three weeks, resolutions can be a very good prod.

So I start this new year 2012 with the best of intentions and the most positive of beliefs. I try to keep my resolutions pretty basic, so here you go:

Getting my food patterns back on course. I want to make sure that I have a good stable of menus and meal ideas as I go into the new year so I can resist the temptation to stray little-by-little into less healthy territory. I've got my tracker out this morning, and I'm going to try to keep it out for the next few weeks. It's a great course correction tool.
Continue working on my efforts not to snack after dinner. Made good progress on this at the end of 2011, and I have a great opportunity to build on that progress. My primary tool here will probably be some more public commitments via Twitter where I mark my progress at the end of each day for a week. Worked great the last time I did it.
Find someway to up my exercise output by 10% to 15% by adding some new activities. Planning here is still nebulous.

My biggest New Years resolution has nothing to do with weight. It has to do with my outlook and what I show other people.

My #1 2012 resolution: smile more.

What do you have loaded up for the new year?

Cheers,

David

Father Weight Watchers: Part 2. The other side...

2011-12-13T10:10:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I talked about my aspirations to be a useful role model to my kids in promoting a healthy and sustainable lifestyle -- all good stuff and all the right intentions. Yet, I am also cognizant of the fact that I need to check myself in front of them.

There is no doubt that childhood obesity has become a major health issue that seems likely to get worse. However, it is also the case that eating disorders also represent a significant and growing issue among kids. It sometimes feels that we parents are navigating between two perilous health issues, both of which can have a debilitating effect. My only hope and dream for my kids, and all kids for that matter, is that they can find a balance in a healthy and sustaining lifestyle. It's a difficult balancing act for parents, and I've found it to be a difficult one for me.

Let's start with me and how I am. Everyone who knows me well would be pretty quick to point out that I can tend to be a little over-the-top in how I approach life. When in doubt, my inclination is to charge up the hill with both guns firing. I am also pretty vocal and open about what's on my mind and how I'm feeling. I am very much one who wears his cardiovascular system on his sleeve.

This has certainly been the case when it comes to my weight. For the most part, the behaviors I am modelling tend to be pretty good ones. My kids see me eating healthy meals while also finishing the great majority of what is on my plate. They see me going to the gym, going for walks, and going for bike rides. My operating assumption is that this is a big net positive.

However, I am also aware of the fact that I can be a bit obsessive about my weight. I am no stranger to vocal self-flagellation after a bad weigh-in. I am also aware of the fact that I do talk about losing weight and keeping weight off. I worry that my kids can see me becoming anxious if and when I'm falling off program.

Me in my kitchen...

I am also no stranger to the twisted world of body image. Like a lot of people who have lost a bunch of weight, I cannot help but be somewhat enamored of looking better than I used to. One way this manifests itself is in my preening about in tailored fashion gear. I know that I will occasionally sneak looks at my reflection in a street-side window wondering if my pants make my derriere look fat. For the most part, these are fleeting thoughts that come and go pretty quickly, almost always without verbal commentary. But what if my daughters could read my mind? They do know me awfully well. Am I inadvertently setting a criteria for how they should look rather than how healthy they should be?

All of my concerns are amplified by knowing what kind of environment my kids live in outside of our home. They live in a town where obesity is far from the norm. They, in fact, live in a place sometimes referred to as Stepford, CT. I see their schoolmates, and they are almost universally thin and fashionable. It sometimes looks like Mean Girls, the massively extended version. Blond and thin is very much the aspiration in my town. I cannot help but believe that the peer pressure the girls in their schools face is to look a very particular way. I cannot help but recognize that this peer pressure has a truly unfortunate side that manifests itself in a host of negative ways.

So there you have it. My daughters live in a very thin town, and their dad is the CEO of Weight Watchers and who is prone to bouts of self-obsession about how he looks. Pretty scary, and something I really need to be aware of and to take seriously.

The good news is that I am unbelievably lucky to have two daughters who are confident, independent and not afraid to laugh at themselves. I cannot imagine having half the confidence they possess when I was their age. I am also lucky that they routinely laugh at and deride me for all of my many peccadilloes. They know that I am a walking midlife crisis, and they routinely mock me for it. They can never know how grateful I am for their goodhearted scorn.

For my part, I do my very best to keep my weird obsessive thoughts locked in my weird head, because frankly, most of them really don't need to see the light of day. When I do talk about food, I studiously attempt to talk about it as fuel the leads to health. I NEVER ride them about eating too much, and I try incredibly hard to be careful of the whole "eat your vegetables" routine. Frankly, my wife is better at that this than me, so I let her take the heavy lifting on this topic (among many others).

Ultimately, as a father, it's my responsibility to be a healthy role model for my kids. It's also my responsibility to be a father, not a peer who shares every self-doubt in front of them. My aspiration is to demonstrate common sense and confidence. When I'm with my kids, my job is to not be selfish and self-absorbed, but rather to be present for them. I am a thousand miles from perfect on this front, but I know it's important and I know I need to work constantly to seek to achieve this state. If I can, then maybe they will forgive me my fancy threads.

Cheers,

dk

Father Weight Watchers: part 1

2011-11-29T16:32:00.001-05:00

One of the questions my wife routinely gets asked goes along the lines of: "So. What's it like being married to the CEO of Weight Watchers." Maybe it's like being married to a preacher where she is expected to also be a model of health rectitude. Perhaps there is also a presumption that I must certainly scrutinize every bite taken and every food choice made.

In truth, my wife has always been a more responsible health person than me, and she has become even more so over time. Unlike many these days, she regularly cooks, and she is pretty spectacular at it. She has a gift of taking a normal recipe and putting it on a diet while still having it come out sublime. She's incredibly active with a healthy mix of working out, walking our anxiety-ridden dog and playing lots of team racket sports. If anything, her continuing advantage over me is that she is much less obsessive than I am.

That said, I do understand that with the label of "married to the WW CEO" comes its own set of pressures. I have to say that she handles them very well.

Perhaps a better question, and mostly definitely a thornier one, is this: what about my kids?

I want to takle this topic in two separate posts: one focusing on the good and other focusing on the watch-outs.

First off, for those who don't know me, I have two daughters, now aged 11 and 13 with birthdays at the end of February. They are both incredibly tall, willowy girls who by all accounts are happy and well adjusted despite having a strange man for a father -- their mother gets all credit for they're being well adjusted.

In terms of how they feel about having me work for Weight Watchers, they seem to like it a lot. My youngest daughter routinely wears Weight Watchers logo ware (e.g., "Because it works!" or "Walk-it Challenge"), which I find endlessly amusing. Whenever we have a new TV spot on the air, they definitely make a bit of noise and make me feel good by putting on a good show of support.

Exactly the way my family looks at me!

What I find the most gratifying is that if asked what I do, they always respond that I work for a company that helps people. Their understanding of Weight Watchers is that it helps people learn how to become healthier by learning how to eat better and how to exercise more. I cannot think of anything more important for a father than having his kids respect and appreciate his life's work. I don't take it for granted, and it is by itself reason enough for me to come into work every day with a full head of steam (not the angry kind).

I also take some comfort in knowing that my daughters have grown up in a house where they see their parents making good food choices and trying to live healthily. My kids don't live like puritans, and they are wholly unafraid of attacking a pizza or getting their candy on. This said, they already have better eating habits than I did at their age. They are perfectly fine measuring out two pieces of Halloween candy, and being as happy as if they had good sense. Their father would have had a hard time stopping at 15 pieces when he was their age.

I also take some comfort in that they see me exercising pretty much every day. I'm only gone for an hour or hour and a half each time I go, so they are not getting a window into a nut. However, they do see someone who has found a way to work in exercise as a basic part of his life. It's just a normal thing to do. My girls are not yet at the age where "working out" is particularly necessary or appropriate. They get their exercise through sport. However, when they get older, I can only hope that they will have memories of what active life looks like for a grownup perspective.

I write all of this with optimism and hope because I truly believe that as parents, we need to be healthy life role models for our kids. The most important lessons we teach them about food and exercise will be those that they observe of us rather than receive in the form of nagging and lectures. Much of the burden for this role modeling has historically fallen on the shoulders of moms. I believe that dads need to step up just as much. If we as fathers cannot be bothered to seek a healthier life, then why should we ever expect our kids to do so?

In my ideal world, my kids will see me as a father who works for a decent organization that's trying to make the world better by helping people become better themselves. They will see me as a person who strives to be healthy in both his relationship with food and his commitment to activity. If so, I can think of no better reason for me to enter the new week with refreshed resolve to stick to the healthier path.

Cheers,

dk

My mother had my back

2011-11-20T10:29:00.001-05:00

In the backdrop of all of the discussion about the rising obesity rates is the recognition that the environment around us has changed fairly radically since the 1970s. There has been a lot of research and analysis over the past number of years to better understand why we have suddenly become so much heavier. Why is it that obesity rates in the 1970's were about 15% of adult Americans while today they are over 30%? Is it our increasingly sedentary lifestyle? Is it the food supply? Is it both?

In an interesting bit of research from the Lancet (The Lancet, Volume 378, Issue 9793, Pages 804 - 814, 27 August 2011) in their obesity special this past summer, a team of researchers performed analysis that looked at trends over the past 100 years, considering both our relative activity and food consumption as a society. They suggested that obesity rates stayed in check from the period of 1910 to 1970 despite the fact that our society was becoming more mechanized and motorized (i.e., more sedentary). Their theory was based on the observation that amount of food that was available during this time actually decreased somewhat. During this time, Americans started eating less wheat due to there being fewer manual labor jobs, and foods with lots of added sugars and fats had not yet begun to proliferate. Starting in the 1970's, the food supply in American began to swell with the introduction of new food items in the grocery store resulting in a commensurate increase in food consumption and ultimately obesity. Below is a chart that makes their point...

To put a finer point on it, the amount of food available in the American supply chain has increased by the equivalent of 600 calories per day since the early 1970's (source: CNPP Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010). To be sure, it is not the case that we have dutifully eaten all of these extra 600 calories per day as some of that food goes to waste and other ends. However, other research does suggest that actual energy intake is up roughly 200 calories per day for the average adult American. It doesn't seem like much, but those extra 200 calories per day are the difference that can create an obesity epidemic.

Smart people can have smart debates about the causal factors of the obesity epidemic today, but my own personal experience leads me to believe the authors of this Lancet study. I would certainly suggest that all useful knowledge of the universe can be properly derived from my own personal sample size of one, so please allow me to further enlighten the discussion.

It all comes back to my mom.

When I think back about my own weight progression, it comes in three fairly distinct phases:

Being held prisoner in my home (age 0 to high school graduation)
Getting a sailor's shore leave in the brothel of endless food (ages 18 to 34)
Getting a grip (ages 35 to date with periodic shore leaves interspersed)

In phase 1, I was disturbingly skinny. At one point I was 6'3", but I only weighed 170 pounds. That's a BMI of 21. For my frame size, that was incredibly thin, bordering on entirely too gaunt. I then promptly gained 40 pounds my freshman year of college, and I then ultimately went on to pick up another 30 lbs in the years that followed.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what got me heavy, but I haven't spent so much time thinking about what kept me so skinny in those early years. Certainly some of it was the fact that I was growing and had a still fast metabolism -- one that I would gladly sign a multi-year deal with the devil to get back. However, I think it has had much more to do with the way that I was fed during all those years, and in the environment of my house.

I had the food fortune of growing up in a non-obesogenic environment. I didn't binge eat or graze much as there was no suitable food stuffs to fulfill the ecstasy. To give a better sense of what this meant, I have tried to reconstruct a typical meal plan was I was growing up:

Breakfast: cereal and skim milk (reconstituted powdered skim milk at that)
Lunch: cheese & mustard sandwich, banana, and 6 ounces of chocolate milk. No extra treat.
Dinner: normal portions of whatever my mom cooked that night served on a plate that would seem laughably small by today's standards

What about dessert? I got it once per week. Even then it was usually low-fat ice cream (then known as ice milk) served with a single 12 ounce soda.

What about restaurants? We went to McDonald's about 4-6 times per year, and every single time as a spectacular, glorious event. I was also taken to a nice restaurant on my birthday (kind of a family tradition), and every once and a while we would get chinese food or have pizza. We loved restaurants, but frankly my parents couldn't afford to take all four kids to them too often on the salary of a hard working government scientist.

What about the great big drawer in the kitchen filled with all manner of chips, crackers and cookies? It literally did not exist in my house. Sneaking in my house was about as fun as sneaking in a Siberian gulag commissary. Short of thawing frozen meat and preparing it, there just weren't a lot of options.

As a result, I just didn't have a lot of options to make spectacularly bad food decisions. The available calories per capita member of my family in my house was roughly on par with that of the Great Depression. I never had to deal with temptation, because it simply did not exist in any meaningful way.

So what did I do about food as a young lad? Simple. I ate at meal times, consuming normal and healthy portions of food. I didn't snack much between meals, and eating out was a special occasion, not a four times per week ritual. Hence, I stayed really skinny without much deviance in weight until I left my perfectly controlled anti-obesogenic environment and landed in the free-for-all known as college.

I think about this because I find it to be a useful way of reframing the manner in which I manage my eating and my health. I can focus my energy on developing mental muscle power to withstand the attack of my food-dense environment, or I can focus my energy trying to re-engineer my environment so I won't be so constantly tested. I can't always fully control my environment unless I'm willing to never leave my house, which feels like a bad career and social decision. Therefore, it is still useful to learn ways to master temptation when it comes. That said, I can certainly help my plight greatly if I do seek to control that in my environment which is controllable.

It's simple: if there is little temptation, that is little to tempt. I guess my mom had it right all along.

Cheers,

Bad habit intervention week

2011-11-03T12:51:00.000-04:00

So much progress, yet sometimes it feels that I’ve made so little.

In so many parts of my life, I have been able to incorporate healthy habits that I can almost take for granted. Eating a healthy breakfast, not eating a foot long sub for lunch, exercising like an Upper East Side socialite are just a few examples. So it can be all the most disheartening when I find myself struggling with the same set of vices. A few of my big ones:

Going on steady-state feed mode throughout the afternoon on weekends
Saying “yes” to everything served on an airplane
Getting overly ambitious with appetizers at social events
The biggest of them all: mindlessly eating after dinner

If I think about all of the caloric damage of the above four, number 4 is clearly my Waterloo. This not very good habit manifests itself in a few ways, but the timing is always the same: after dinner. Some examples:

Assaulting the bags of nuts in the kitchen cabinet. For a while, we had a Costco container of cashews sitting openly on display. BADDDDD!
Having two Weight Watchers ice cream treats in a sitting.
Quietly knocking back seemingly innocuous slices of cheese
Eating a handful of cereal straight from the box
Hotel mini-bar excursions

We all have bad habits to lick.
I really wish I could send my dog
to this school for hers...

There are few of these that don’t come with a 4-8 PointsPlus sentence in the penalty box. However, what makes me particularly crazy about these is that I always feel badly about myself afterwards.

It’s the latter point that I’m particularly interested in. Why do I beat myself up when I fall victim? I suspect it is most because it just seems so dumb. I’m not really hungry when I do these little raids. I cannot say it’s completely mindless because I am at least somewhat aware that I’m doing it. The fact of the matter is that it seems mostly like a compulsion. I’m so used to doing it that I think that I have to do it. I find myself looking at my dinner and thinking that it couldn’t possibly be enough food to hold me over until morning. Yet, I intellectually know this not to be true.

For myself, I have always found it easier to DO something healthy than to STOP from doing something unhealthy. I was born with too much nervous energy, and I have a hard time stopping inertia and momentum. Eating a healthier breakfast was only a function of replacing unhealthy foods with healthy foods. Exercising was a process of finding the time to do something new. Stopping a bad habit requires a completely different approach.

I was getting pretty frustrated, when I decided to try an experiment last week. I decided that I wanted to grab one bad habit and see if I could make some progress on addressing it. I made the conscious decision not to try to address my full laundry list of vices all at once. This go around, I wanted to have a little bit of focus.

The Plan

My plan was to have a one week challenge for myself in which I wouldn’t eat anything after dinner. I could have as much dinner as I wanted, but once the plate was done, I was done. To try to put some teeth into the challenge, I also made the decision to share it publically and report on my progress every day on Twitter.

The Outcome

I did not eat once after dinner for seven days.

What I learned

Making the public challenge announcement with public updates was really helpful. It was nice to have a consequence that I could fall back on if I was feeling at all like having a minor break down. Knowing that I would be Tweeting each morning was enough to give me that extra bit of focus and personal accountability by making myself accountable to others.

I also learned that I did not go to sleep hungry once. I really didn’t need to eat after dinner to feel just fine. I was particularly proud of the fact that during this week, three of my evenings had me in a hotel room with a minibar topped with a small mountain of highly snackable treats. There would have been no witnesses to my crime.

Finally, I learned that I felt really good about myself for having completed the challenge successfully. I felt much more in control, and I realized that killing this habit was a real possibility.

Going forward

One 1-week challenge does not vanquish a bad habit. I view this habit as one that I will need to proactively work on for some period of time (and maybe forever). My thinking is that I might do a “pulse” every few weeks in which I do a one-week challenge. Over time, I suspect I can get to the point where I start to ritualize the process of not mindlessly snacking after dinner.

My one open question with this is the degree of how far I take it. The notion of never eating after dinner does not feel even vaguely realistic, so I think it would be a mistake for me to define success as never eating after dinner. There is nothing wrong with dessert after dinner nor is it a crime against nature to have a piece of candy on Halloween night (I had two). Therefore, I think I would be well served into defining for myself what is OK and what is not. I need to think more about this one.

Feel free to jump in with the one habit you’d like to abolish forever. Maybe we can create a planet-wide movement to kill our one least wanted habit?!

Cheers,

David

Tracking: salvation, not purgatory!

2011-10-23T11:17:00.000-04:00

I've been doing the Weight Watchers thing for well over a decade now. In reflection, I sometimes shudder to contemplate how many foods I've tracked. However, if I think back a little more thoughtfully, I can realize that tracking has played a number of different and important roles for me in my efforts to reform my eating and exercise habits.

Early years (2000 to 2003ish)

What can I say? I was a nutritional idiot. I sometimes think back on the shear volume of ignorance I had about food, and it is terrifying to behold. Examples include:

Kung Po Chicken is good for you. It has chicken.
Big bowls of granola are an awesome way to lose weight.
Fettuccine Alfredo is super good for you because it has broccoli.
Salad with a cup of blue cheese dressing is much better than that piece of steak.
All wraps from the sandwich store are a great bet because all wraps are definitionally diet-y.
Tuna salad is what you eat when you are being super disciplined.

Believing these things and following up on them is what I believed would balance out the time when I knew I was gorging (deep dish pizza, omelets the size of a VW, etc.).

Suffice to say, the day I started tracking POINTS was a giant wall of cold water. Everything I knew was largely wrong, and every day I tracked was an education.

Portion size was also a big revelation for me when I started tracking. The notion that a full entre of Chinese food might be a bit too much for one person in one sitting was also a rude awakening.

It is impossible for me to express the full degree to which tracking my POINTS was the game changer in the way that I live. For the first time, I was making food choices with knowledge and discipline. There is zero doubt in my mind that the exercise of tracking was the biggest reason I started losing weight.

Final (?!) weight loss: 2007

At this point, I had lost a bunch of weight my first time around, and I was pretty consistently down 20 pounds from my peak of 240+. However, I was still about 15 pounds from where I really wanted to be. I started the year with tracker in hand (or on computer to be more specific), and I kind of waged war. I once and for all re-did my breakfast and lunch routines with full knowledge of my POINTS each day. I significantly reduced inter-meal consumption (at least before dinner), and I jacked up my Activity POINTS. Finally, I reached my goal weight, became Lifetime and entered into maintenance.

During this time, tracking was the diligent routine that allowed me to make a bunch of these hiugh impact lifestyle changes.

Maintenance: 2007 to present

OK, it's now been close to 12 years from the first time I started tracking POINTS (now PointsPlus) values. I will be the first to admit that I do not track on a regular basis. My tendency is to eat the same things from breakfast and for lunch, and I know what those meals ring up. I really don't eat during the day (on week days anyway) outside of an apple, a fat-free Greek yogurt or perhaps a Weight Watchers mini-bar. My days are largely controlled, and at this point, tracking won't add much to the equation.

This begs the question for grizzled veterans like myself: is there any need or point to tracking anymore? The answer is yes, and I just need to embrace it, but in a very specific way. Here is how I'm now thinking about my tracking applications:

Course correction: sometimes after multiple weeks of travel, excessive socializing, etc., I can feel my better lifestyle start to slip away. Intuitively, I know that if I ignore that this is happening then I will definitely start adding weight. I now know myself well enough to know when this is slipping effect is starting to happen. During these times, I can/will pull out my iPhone and start tracking away. It gets my head back into the game, and it refocuses me on applying reasonable restraint.
Will power: I have a basket of Weight Watchers mini-bars that sits outside my office. They are largely for visitors and to encourage colleagues who might otherwise be afraid of me to at least walk by my office. There are times that I look at that basket and seriously consider plowing through 3 to 4 of those little guys. Mini bars are meant to be eaten one at a time and not by the bag full. It is amazing to me how much my Tracker protects me from this temptation. If I know that I will need to track the PointsPlus values of these little 4 second snacks, I will almost always divert myself to my refrigerator where I keep a collection of apples. In this context, my tracker is kind of like my home security system.
Attacking persistent weaknesses: I am the first to admit that I am a million miles from perfect on the program. I can go pretty far off the reservation on weekends, particularly when it comes to grazing. I still struggle with mindless munching, bordering on binging, after dinner, both home and away. I also know that if I ever want to address these weak spots, I need a tool to help me get there. In this context, I have recently been thinking about focusing my tracking on weekend days and post-dinner. Per #2 above, I know that if I make myself track it, I will be much less likely to mindlessly munch. If I can keep this going for a long enough period of time, then I have a real shot at establishing some healthier habits.

Conclusion

Friend or foe? I say definitely a good buddy.

There are two ways I can look at tracking:

A tool for servitude (i.e., the wrong way): This is when I look at tracking as a sentence of misery. If tracking is something I have to do to its own end, it can be a pretty depressing thing to think about. "Mr. Kirchhoff, the court has sentenced you to a lifetime of tracking with no hope of parole." Looked at it this way, tracking is little more than a basic diet. Who wants that?
A really awesome tool to help me achieve something bigger (the right way): When I think of tracking this way, it's very much like my iPhone or iPad. They are super cool gadgets that let me do more stuff with more success and more ease. I think of my tracker as my tool to help me achieve the changes in my life to which I aspire. I really want to stop this post-dinner grazing thing once and for all. My tracker can be an invaluable tool to help me get there. The point is not the act of tracking by itself. The point is achieving a higher level of personal performance and establishing better and healthier habits. The tracker is simply the tool that makes me much more likely to get there.

In summary, tracking isn't really something to graduate from. It really just a really great tool that I can use in different ways depending on where I am at the time. When I look at it this way, it's my friend not my master.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it!

Cheers,

David

Will the real Dave please stand up?

2011-10-05T16:05:00.000-04:00

I haven’t been posting as frequently recently, through a combination of being overly busy and because I have been noodling on a new territory of self-scrutiny. Get ready of a long, circuitous and somewhat odd post.

Still reading?

One of the aspects of maintenance that I struggle the most with is the following thought in the recesses of my mind: that any day I will receive the following notice:

Dear Mr. Kirchhoff,

We have reviewed our records, and it has come to our attention that your visa in our beautiful country has expired. You are now in violation of our laws, and we are beginning steps to have you immediately deported.

Thanks for visiting us.

The citizens of Thin-landia.

That’s right. I am afraid that I will be discovered as an intruder and not a native citizen of the land of naturally thin people. Now they want to send me back to where I came from, Heavyopolis.

Who Am I?

It’s strange how we rigidly define ourselves based on how we once were, particularly when it comes to body image. It makes us second-guess ourselves, and it convinces us that we are ultimately doomed to trudge through life as the never-changing version of our former self. It is though we see ourselves as being rubber band people who will inevitably snap back to what ever form we previously occupied. While there are some arguments that are made on a biological underpinning of some of this, I also wonder how much of this elastic effect is in my head. Like a lot people, I have a tendency to see myself a certain way, and I assume that image of myself must represent some inherent truth.

Over the past couple of years, I have taken an interest in studying up on Buddhist philosophy and it’s intersection with psychology. Light reading, right? Given their history of spending the last 3,000 years pondering and analyzing why people think what we think, I find the Buddhist perspective to be a fascinating one. One concept I have been particularly intrigued by has been “reification”.

What is the definition of reification? From Wikipedia:

Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.[1] In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something which is not a real thing, but merely an idea.

Huh?

Here is my take on the concept as it applies to how I (and possibly others) think. There is a natural tendency to construct an image of oneself, like a giant statue carved of stone, based on who I think I am. I let others weigh in on the statue design by allowing them assign labels and identifiers that I gladly incorporate along with my own labels and identifiers. I continue to develop this statue in my mind as an identity that must have some undeniable truth. I convince myself that there is a “self” that is permanent and concrete and that any deviance from it is bound to crumble. From what I understand, Carl Jung referred to this as the “shadow self”, a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts (again, thank you Wikipedia).

Buddhists would tell us two things: 1) this so-called self is not really real and that it is full of distorted thinking and self-misconceptions and 2) the process of then clinging to it ultimately makes us miserable. They then go into their fundamental belief that there is no “self” and that we are all inter-connected beings struggling with the same basic stresses and sufferings. People and things all change, and clinging to something or some self-image as permanent is fraught with frustration. Their point is to suggest that the only path to happiness is to have compassion for our fellow planet-mate and to let go of our notion of this fake self.

At this point, it would be totally fair for you to say some combination of the following: 1) “Dave, thanks for your attempt to compress an incredibly intricate philosophical framework in a paragraph, and doing it in an only marginally accurate way.” 2) “Dave, this makes my head hurt”, 3) “Dave, you are a strange man. BTW, can I borrow some Patchouli oil?” or finally 4) “Dave, what does this have to do with your weight?”

My social and professional self-portrait gallery

As I wallow in self-examination, I realize that over my life I have periodically constructed identities/portraits of myself and that I have assumed to be true and set in stone…

When I was very young: “I am not a smart person.” I am slightly dyslexic, and I very much struggled throughout much of elementary school. I assumed that others were much smarter and that my life would be somehow limited.
Middle school: “I am not a foxy guy.” What can I say? I was really tall and really skinny, and I had a face that looked like a pepper spray assault. I didn’t help that I wore fashion-backward Toughskin jeans from Sears, and that I only had one eyebrow. I was cute girl anti-matter. I did receive a consolation prize: I somehow found a way to manage through my dyslexia, and I started getting good grades.
College: “I’m a slacker.” My skin had long since cleared up, and I gained enough body mass to no longer be a flight risk in a stiff breeze. I also learned how to make one eyebrow turn into two. Enjoying my new found status as a normal and socially activated person, I settled in for the identity of town idiot. It was hard to find me without a beer in my hand, and I was not a model student. I kind of assumed that I would ultimately end up being a fun guy with an uninteresting career.
Work: “I’m a hard worker, running from my past.” I eventually got a little fed up with playing a supporting role in a college hijinks movie, and I found my work ethic again. I worked my rear off in graduate school, and I somehow finagled my way into a job at a fancy consulting firm. I have always thought it completely ridiculous that they took me in, so I worked my tail off there too. Interestingly, my general feeling of being an unworthy imposter has been a useful source of fuel in my professional development. Now, I am the CEO of a public company, and let me assure you, I wait everyday for the imposter police to storm into my office and shoo me back from whence I came. All I can do to avert it is to work hard and do the best that I can to serve my company, the people that work for there and the members and mission that it serves.

As I look back, my education and professional development has been impacted by seeing myself in a particular way and assuming that however I developed would be temporary because I was deviating from some “true self”. I have continued to assume that the citizens of the country of Successville will ultimately cast me off their island because I wasn’t born there.

My weight and body image self-portrait gallery

My weight and body image have interesting parallels to my professional development. My body can be comprised of three phases of identity:

Emaciated man: this was the period of age 4 to 17 in which I was disturbingly thin. Ribs could be counted and weight could not be gained. Ichabod Crane was I.
Big man: this is the period of age 21 to age 34 in which I gained roughly 70 pounds at peak from where I was at age 17. I became a big guy who was doomed to clean his plate of giant food as well as whatever was left on his neighbor’s plate (even if those leftovers were at a different table in the restaurant).
Temporarily fit man: this is age 35 to present. This is the period in which I have been nursing my weight loss, becoming a pretty diligent exercise person as well as a reasonably careful eater. I say “temporary” because I think I still assume that I am “big man” underneath this temporary state. I assume that it is in my nature to eat compulsively because that is “who I am”.

So here is my point. There is no firmly defined “me”. I am a collection of choices that I make each day, and I am constantly evolving, growing and changing. I am not bound by who I was when I was age 7, 17, 21, or 34. I am not bound by who I am today. I can make choices each day that are wholly divorced from choices I made 10, 15 or 20 years ago. I can either be unbound with a world full of possibilities and growth or I can calcify.

I am fortunate to live in a country of immigrants. We all came from some place else, even the Pilgrims. Our future can be defined only by the choices we make going forward.

Therefore, in response to the citizens of Thinlandia, I think I might stick around a while. I have extended my visa, and I think I’m going to apply for permanent residence.

Cheers,

David

Do I commit fruit abuse? I claim complete innocence!

2011-09-24T12:23:00.000-04:00

How much fruit can a man eat?

I had a chance to be on FoxBusiness on Friday to talk about obesity and healthcare. While I was getting miked-up, one of the guys on the Fox crew pulled me aside to share that he was a Weight Watchers member. As you know from previous posts, I always enjoy the chance to meet fellow-man travelers in the world of Weight Watchers. We are a brave group of pioneers, and our numbers are rapidly increasing. This particular guy shared with me that his one concern about the program was that fruit had zero PointsPlus values, and he was nervous about binging and perhaps had done a little of that.

I shared with him the advice I always give when asked about this. I talked to him about the fact that it is pretty hard to go crazy on fruit. If you look at it, while fruit does have natural sugars, it is also filled with fiber and water. As a result, it's naturally filling. It is also helpful our bodies have a way of reacting to fruit binges through vigorous feedback from our digestive system (enough said). Finally, I told him that while fruit had a zero PointsPlus value, as do most vegetables, we encourage people not to go crazy on it and treat it as a mindless eating/binge food. The golden rule in weight management is to not suspend reality. It is, in fact, hard to lose weight while eating 73 apples a day.

It takes a ton of oranges to make much less than a ton of OJ

Just as a fun math check, consider the commercial for Tropicana orange juice. "16 oranges to make a bottle". That's 16 oranges for a 59 ounce bottle. That works about to 2.2 oranges for an 8 ounce glass. Sit down and feast on 2.2 oranges along with the rest of your breakfast, and tell me if you still feel hungry.

I always come back to the reason why Weight Watchers made the decision to give fruit a zero PointsPlus value. We are trying to encourage people to make the healthy food choice rather than the processed cookie choice. The example I often give is this: the 3 PM snack.

Old Points program: it's 3 PM, I can choose an apple (2 POINTS) or a 100 calorie snack pack of Oreos (also 2 POINTS). It would not surprise you to discover that many people would say "There is no way on Earth that I'm wasting 2 POINTS on a piece of fruit, give me the cookies or I will bite your arm off."
PointsPlus program: it's 3 PM, I can choose an apple (0 PointsPlus value) or a 100 calorie snack pack of Oreos (now 3 PointsPlus value). All of the sudden that apple is looking pretty good. It's also healthy and filling. Good bargain, good satisfaction and good health. That's a nice hat trick.

Feeling very self-proud of myself for espousing the righteousness of our approach to fruit, I stepped back to ask myself the question: am I a fruit binger?

I've been on Weight Watchers since I joined the company 11 years ago (I have gray hair now). Fruit has always been a big part of how I follow the program. It was always a pretty good deal, and now it's a great deal. As a result, I have grown to LOVE fruit. It's almost an unnatural love. I thrive on apples, and I can even tell the difference between varietals (I'm a particularly big fan of Fuji). I love all manner of berries. I like a good banana, as long as it's not brownish. I have more recently discovered the mango, which pairs nicely with my old friend the pineapple. If binging starts with love, I am an ideal candidate. But am I a binger?

So here is my daily fruit round-up:

Breakfast: This is my primary fruit eating meal. I mix in a banana and a half a cup of blueberries or rasberries into plain oatmeal. I also mix in about 1 1/2 cups of grapes in with zero fat Greek yogurt.
Lunch: I might or might not have an apple with my salad.
Snack: I grab an apple, particularly if I didn't have one for lunch.
Dessert: my most healthy desert is mixing in frozen berries with zero fat Greek yogurt. I haven't done this in a while, and writing this post is reminding me to consider getting back into that habit (i.e., instead of low fat ice cream).

Therefore, a typical day for me is about 5 servings of fruit. Just for fun, I was curious how many calories I was picking up. Here is the tally:

Grapes: 1.5 cups = 90 calories (22 g carbs, 2 g fiber, 1 g protein, and 0 g fat). Like most fruit, the grape is mostly water and pulp.
Banana: 1 large = 121 calories (32 g carbs, 3.5 g fiber, 1.5 g protein, and 0 g fat). Bananas are a bit of a watch out food for me because I know I can eat one in about three to four bites. They go down a little too fast, so I usually only eat them sliced up in my oatmeal.
Blueberries: 1/2 cup = 41 calories (10 g carbs, 2 g fiber, 1 g protein, and 0 g fat). These guys are a pretty great deal. Rasberries are an even better deal (32 calories for the same 1/2 cup).
Apple: 1 medium = 95 calories (25 g carbs, 4.4 g fiber, 0.5 g protein, and 0 g fat). One of the aspects of apples that I find most helpful is the fact that they take a while to eat. I also find them pretty filling.
My total for the day: 347 calories (89 g carbs, 12 g fiber, 4 g protein, and 0 g fat).

If I were attempting to lose 1.5 pounds per week, my target calories per day would be slightly north of 1,600 assuming that I was doing zero exercise given my height, age and weight. This would suggest that my 347 calories in fruit would be about 22% of my total caloric intake, which doesn't feel crazy to me. In fact, the latest US Dietary Guidelines suggest filling half your plate with fruits and vegetables. My 22% is right on target.

Looking at all of the above math makes me feel even better about how well the program works for me. All of that fruit is an awful lot of food, and it's a big reason why I don't spend my days starving to death. For the volume of food it represents, the above fruit is a pretty great deal for me (i.e., calories per bowl of food). This is true even though I am a pretty big fruit eater. I'm probably two standard deviations about the population average, but that's a stat I should probably check.

Moral of the story for me? It's nice to know that my not particularly planned fruit regimen is very much on target. It is also a good lesson that zero PointsPlus value fruit does not mean throwing mindfulness out the window. Tracking can be good even when adding up a bunch of zeros.

Cheers,

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

2011-09-06T16:43:00.000-04:00

True confession time. I have a love/hate relationship with my body.

I know that I work pretty hard to stay in shape and eat healthily, but the interesting question is "Why?". Officially, I lift weights because it is a good healthy practice, and muscle burns more calories at rest. In truth, weight lifting promotes muscle growth, which can look pretty excellent. Officially, I perform vigorous cardiovascular exercise because strengthens the heart. Unofficially, I do it because it helps balance out every (or most every) mindless eating indulgence and thereby keep me thin(ish). So there you have it. One of the reasons I try to live on the healthy path is so I can, as they say, look good naked. If I can simultaneously be super healthy with improved prospects for a long life, it's a definite win-win. Right?

Sometimes when I see my birthday-suit self in the mirror, I'm pretty OK with what I see. Mostly, that's the case when the light is dim, and I haven't eaten in hours. I also think I look OK when I'm lying on my back -- gravity is amazing at creating a flat stomach. However, I would say that most of the time when I look at my body, my reaction is either 1) "My body is weird" or 2) "Criminey, I suck". I see all of my imperfections on display, and I can tell you where every single pocket of fat is not-so-effectively hiding. In fact, most of the time when I look at a mirror, I'm pretty much only seeing the imperfections. Throw some grey hair on top of my head, and the guy who's looking back at me from the mirror is some middle-aged guy. And I don't think I like looking at him very much.

Fortunately, most of these mirror reactions are fairly split second, and they dissipate pretty rapidly. Also fortunate is the fact that I intellectually recognize that I'm an idiot. In a rational and self-reflective moment, I realize that I look comparatively just fine, and the degree of scrutiny that I put on myself is unmatched by any other human being in the known universe put on me. All of the little imperfections that I see go unnoticed either because a) most people could really care less what I look like and b) I wear clothes. Yet, like so many others, I choose to subject myself to the bright fluorescent naked torture light of doom.

What to do? The best place to start is a useful scapegoat -- I blame part of my body image problems on people who illustrate comic books and cartoons. Most human bodies do not look like the ones found on Aquaman, Batman, Superman or any of those other goons from the Hall of Justice. Perfectly etched abdominals and excellent muscle separation combined with unnatural chest-to-waist ratios don't really exist without the benefit of an airbrush pen. They certainly are not found on many mid-40's guys, no matter how well-intentioned they are. Yet, I am convinced that they have somehow become the subconscious norm that have ultimately found their ways to the covers of upstanding periodicals such as Men's Health. Just like our female friends, we guys are now subject to ridiculous body image comparisons.

The real one may have a gut, but I wouldn't want to try outrunning him...

In truth, most bodies are kind of funny looking. We humans are a widely varied bunch, and we come in lots of shapes, sizes and body-types. To put a finer point on it, I was recently thinking about the most manly of all primates, the gorilla. I did a Google image search of gorilla photos vs. gorilla cartoons. the results were pretty telling. One is a so-called idealized image, fully equipped with finely tuned musculature, and the other is a real, living and breathing animal. The real one, by the way, is in pretty good shape. Of course gorillas don't sit around cross-legged and look sadly at their protruding bellies. They are too much alpha members of the jungle for that kind of nonsense. This is a human failing -- or at least one of mine.

So what to make of this?

It seems that women no longer have the monopoly on applying a harsh self-critique in front of the mirror. I suspect that many more men than just me indulge in exactly the same nasty exercise.
I would guess that my tendency to do this can be traced all the way back to my childhood underneath some nasty rock that should never have been kicked over. Simply telling myself "just don't beat yourself up every time you look in the mirror" is probably not totally practical advice in that I will inevitably still keep doing it.
I should periodically remind myself that I am, in fact, an idiot, and that I look just fine. There are terrible things happening all over our planet. There must be something more constructive for me to worry about.
Probably none of the guys who wrote all of those old comic books even vaguely resembled the pictures that they drew -- that's why they drew them that way.
I should give myself a little bit of a break for being prone to superficial impulses.
While I should work to aspire to letting go of my body image mishigas, I should also recognize that being less obsessed with it is not a great reason to run out and eat a refrigerator full of Chubby Hubby ice cream.

The part I struggle with more is this: my desire to look good "bare" is one of the reasons I stay on plan. Is indulging my vanity and self-image wants an evil that is useful for keeping me healthy? When I write it out, the answer is clearly (or should be) "no". The problem is that it's easy to be self-reflective and thoughtful in a blog. It's hard to do in real life.

Then again, maybe I'm over-thinking it all. I do that.

Cheers,

Another summer of depravity survived

2011-08-30T15:22:00.001-04:00

I just got back from vacation to a hurricane (actually, not metaphorically).

Vacation was great and totally helpful. Life is crazy, and sometimes I need to force myself to sit still for a period of time and get needed rest and thinking time. I find it much easier to think about the long view when I'm not running through the rapid-fire paces of regular life.

From a health and wellness perspective, here is how the vacation went...

Breakfast: good. On plan.
Exercise: hit the local gym and got in some good miles on my bike. I also managed to get in about an hour of walking just about every day.
Lunch: surprisingly good. I ate at the house or packed a lunch most days. I had lots of fruit around, so I never felt the need to pack a bag of chips.
Snacking: well... too much dip makes Dave a weak-willed boy. There was some minor binging here.
Dinner: not terrible.
Dessert: I was definitely a little weak-willed here as well.

Interestingly, I kept feeling like I was being terribly gross and slothful. Yet everything I went back over the day, I realized that I was actually making pretty decent choices. I find it interesting that when it comes to my own self-appraisal, I'm guilty until proven innocent.

We got in Friday night to the threat of impending doom in the form of some ill-tempered woman named Irene. She was a very unpleasant sort, spewing rain, wind and calamity everywhere she went. She came and went. My little town in CT was hit fairly hard as was the case with much of my state. Lots of flooding (I'm on the coast) and seemingly infinite power outages. More than half of CT was without power by Sunday night, a sad, new record. Over the weekend's ravages, I found myself performing day-in-and-out of manual labor, slugging around bags of sand, hauling big, dead branches and shifting around lots of outdoor furniture. [Sadly, I couldn't help but think about all the Activity Points I was picking up.] We made it through in one piece, un-flooded and still with power (we were among the lucky 30% in our town).

Now the weather is strangely beautiful and I'm back in the office. It's fall! Well, technically, it's still Summer, but it's Fall to me. I always see this as a great time of year to really get back into a good routine and focus on Program adherence. Summer always deals a minor weight gain, and this one is no exception. Getting back on routine is a great way to nip it in the bud. I'm off to a good start, and I hit the gym Monday and Tuesday morning with a furious vengeance. I'm also throttling back mindless snacking, which is a feat made easier by being a lot more busy.

Adding more to this post for the first entry yesterday (Tuesday): I'm now on day three, post vacation and post-hurricane (it's Wednesday). As noted, I always feel like my vacation/summer time feels a little out-of-control and overly mindless. I have to say that it really does feel better to be back in the flow of things. Indulgences are down significantly, exercise is up, and frankly I'm feeling great. I sometimes forget how good it feels, physically and emotionally, to be fully back on plan. I'm liking it!

All-in-all, it's good to be back!

How was your summer?

Cheers,

Ye olde healthy vacation check list

2011-08-10T14:08:00.000-04:00

This has not been a pretty summer. I have been working like a crazy person from the first thaw of Winter's snow. Tons of travel and lots of work has clearly made Dave a dull boy. At minimum, it has made staying on program something of a challenge, particularly the travel bit. This course of events has not been desirable. I normally count on building up a big reservoir of healthy living chits before I head off toward vacation. Right now, my healthy bank account is pretty much empty -- though at least I'm not in a debtor position.

I'm REALLY hoping my beach isn't this crowded.
Not a good frolicking scene..

As of Friday morning, I'm on vacation for two weeks. To be completely clear, this fact is beyond awesome. I need the rest, and I need to get in a giant heap of quality time with my dear, understanding wife and kids. Yet, I feel the inevitable ominous feeling of going into wild nutritional waters, replete with fried seafood, ice cream and beer. I'm also slightly stressed about the fact that I have to get the family car packed and ready to roll early Friday morning.

How should I handle all of the stress, fear, uncertainty and doubt? Get a plan!

I already started my packing plan by building up an impressive spreadsheet with every item I could possibly need, including lint. It's a little anally retentive, but I hate that feeling of driving off toward the destination with the nagging feeling that I've forgotten something. A nice plan and a nicer list is a very nice way of proactively dealing with this.

My approach to my healthy living survival stress for the next two weeks follows the same basic theme: have a plan. So here it goes:

Exercise (this one is pretty easy):

Find a local gym that will sell me a two week pass. Done!
Bring my bike. Will be done!
Take advantage of the fact that I naturally wake up at silly hours of the morning and get workout in before family arises. No problem. I live my life this way.
Put in serious walking time on the beach. No hardship here.
Frolic in the waves with my kids. Sold.

Food (more challenging):

Grocery shop as soon as I get to the rental house. Arm the house with healthy snacks, fruits, etc.
Stick to my oatmeal/fruit/Greek yogurt breakfast routine.
Pack lunch from the kitchen (not the sandwich shop) when possible. Avoid buying big bags of chips. Getting individual packs instead so I can avoid mindless beach grazing.
For dinners, we are planning on cooking and grilling many of the nights we are there. That's always a good environment for good choices. We will also definitely be hitting some dinners out, and that's OK. My standard guideline for vacations is to loosen up a bit for dinner and not be too obsessive (not easy for me).

My brain (the most challenging):

Challenge my vacation paradigms. Why shouldn't I imagine vacation as a time in which I don't gain a single pound? Why does it have to be a binging splurge? Why should I feel the need to get nervous about the notion that I will somehow turn into a garbage eating beach freak?
My strategy is therefore to take a deep breath and imagine myself sitting on the beach, feeling healthy and balanced not gross and bloated. Mental rehearsing they call this.

Of course, there is always the stop-gap measure of taunting a shark and then letting it chase me to squeeze in a few extra Activity Points.

I may blog from the beach, but not promises!

Cheers,

David

Fitness over food. Doing stuff vs. not doing stuff.

2011-08-01T18:05:00.000-04:00

New trip, same story (but perhaps a new insight)...

I returned home on Thursday night after a week long trip to China. 2011 has proven to be a tough travel year with (so far) three Asia trips, multiple Europe trips and I don't know-how-many domestic trips under my belt. I feel like every time I get back from a trip, I say the same thing: "I was good about exercise, but not always so good about food choices." How did this trip compare? Remarkably similar! It's almost as though there is a pattern at play here! I'm feeling like quite the detective.

So how did it go?

On the exercise front...

Bless me, I'm disciplined! I almost wrenched my arm cleanly out of its socket patting myself on the back after all my exercise this past week. I arrived in China on Monday night after a 15 hour flight. I somehow managed to get some (maybe four hours) sleep, and I was ready to roll the second the gym opened at 6 AM. I lifted weights for an hour and then headed over the exercise bike for 30 minutes of additional cardio. I did the same thing on Wednesday morning. By Thursday morning, I had already finished my four day weight split for the week, so I was in cardio-only mode. I cranked in another 45 minutes of reasonably intense action on the bike. I arrived back home Thursday night, and I was back in the gym again for more cardio on Friday morning. I even made myself workout again on Sunday even though I was feeling kind of sick. It was truly a display of sheer willpower.

Or was it? In truth, I was waking up on my own in China around 3 to 4 AM each day due to heinous internal clock issues. What else was I going to do at 6 AM? I had already done a ton of work, email, calls from my room, and I didn't feel like watching yet more CNN. It was easy to make the decision to jam in a workout because simply stated, that's just what I do these days. It's pretty automatic.

On the food front...

Typically spotty food behavior reigned once again. I tried to be good at the breakfast buffet and choose healthy stuff (on balance, I may have had a bit too much healthy stuff). I was pretty solid on my choices during the day because I was too busy to be bad. Dinners degraded a little bit, but I guess they could have been worse. However, what's up with the Budweiser & Snickers mini-bar routine right before bed time? Very NASCAR of me.

Some other lucky person's airplane meal.
Is this worthy of Clean Plate club status?

Airplanes are, as always, a completely different and altogether worse story. The only way to get to Shanghai from JFK non-stop is via China Eastern. It's a relatively newer airline that was spun off of the Chinese national airline. I give them credit for flying a fairly new aircraft on their NY route, so the seats aren't bad. I cannot, however, give them much credit yet for the quality of their cuisine. The food wasn't still moving when I ate it, but it was several thousand miles away from being haute cuisine. Yet I ate it all. Everything. Every crumb. Pieces of the serving tray.

Therein lies the story of my life. Mindless grazing after meals and gorging on aircraft. How many times have I decried my own inadequacies in these situations with bold promises to fix them? Right now, my best solution is to never fly again and to eliminate all snack food from existence. This would obviously be a great plan except for its divergence from reality -- unless I flee society and open up a small shack somewhere in the mountains of Montana.

All of this got me thinking? Why so good about exercise and yet still so stumped about food?

My latest theory! I'm wired to do stuff. I have a hard time not doing stuff. Huh? It's easy for me to get a spark of motivation or a whiff of impulse to jump off the couch and go do some exercise. I've got lots of nervous energy, so this feels like the most natural action in the world. Exercise and I were made for each other. True love!

I have a much more complicated relationship with food. If it is on a well-worn habit tread, like breakfast or lunch, I can nicely make the proactive decision to order up something healthy. A good breakfast is no longer a decision, it's merely something I do by habit. However, not snacking requires not doing something. Not eating wholly unappealing food on an airplane requires saying "no thank you!" and then watching someone else eat it. It requires not doing something. As I said, I have a lot of nervous energy, so not doing something does not come naturally.

I guess I am the human embodiment of entropy. This works well for exercise but not so well for food restraint.

This got me thinking even more. What if not doing something, like mindless eating, could be reframed into doing something? How can I make the act of not acting on a food impulse an actual action? I'm starting to wonder if I should identify these not-so-healthy habits and create some kind of tracking mechanism that allows me to get credit for not falling prey to them. I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I'm going to give it a try.

Does anyone else relate to this, and if so, what's worked for you?

Cheers,

David

Can't fight the burger and fries lust. Better to avoid the fight in the first place.

2011-07-19T11:05:00.001-04:00

I continue to be fascinated by my recent readings from behavioral economists (Thaler, Wansink, and Lowenstein) around the topic of the unbeatable force of the environment. Every time I see myself failing, it is in the context of a lustful bought of food love. The concept of a "Hot State" (Lowenstein) is something I wrote about a couple of months ago. In such a state, one finds oneself overtaken by a gripping frenzy in which no food can be saved. I sometimes mock my dog, Gabby, who goes through a similar process every time she eats. See my post from April 2009 to watch a music video of her in action:

http://manmeetsscale.blogspot.com/2009/04/food-rush.html

As I noted then, I'm no better than she is when I find myself in the grip of the food frenzy. There is no doubt that there are particular trigger foods that bring out the frenzy in a way that makes me feel like I can relate to meth addicts (this simile inspired by one of my fav shows, Breaking Bad, which is back on the air).

Last week, my youngest daughter was in town for a week between sleep-away camp sessions. We were doting on her with reckless abandon, and we had her in town to see some live music (Gomez). Her only request pre-entertainment was to go for a proper burger, so we headed off to a place called 5 Napkin Burger, just off of Time Square. 5 Napkin is not a place for PointsPlus lovers. All burgers clock in at 10 ounces, and something tells me that they are not shy about marbling their meat with fat. What's a man-on-maintenance to do? Lighten up, be a good sport, and make my perfect little girl happy on her night out in the town.

The original 5 Napking burger: not for the faint of heart,
but definitely able to cause the heart to become faint

I put my program-related reservations about restaurant choice to the side, fired up a beer and placed my order. I tried to tell myself that I wasn't being completely debauched by ordering the "Burger Salad" and the sweet-potato fies. I knew perfectly well that the dressing on the salad was worth at least as many PointsPlus values as the bun that they replaced. I also knew that the fried sweet potatoes were not really that much better, if at all, than their yellow Idaho counterparts. I was happy to bask in my delusions of health and pretend that I was being kind of responsible.

After the meal, I made it a point to think about how my brain felt while I was eating. The answer was that it was locked in a temporarily state that prevented me from recognizing any external stimuli not emanating from the food in front of me. Conversation and external noise disappeared from my consciousness. I felt like a Major League pitcher blocking out distractions while standing on the mound. My fork, knife and fork did not finish their furious dance until there was not even a tiny scrap of food remaining. I blew through it just as fast as my dog would blow through a bowl of her food.

I finished my meal with the slightly remorseful feeling of having gone through another food bender. I was irritated with myself for losing control and not pacing myself. I was again slightly frustrated that I could not remember to not finish everything in front of me and save a little for the restaurant trash can. I was bluntly forced to reckon with the fact that I didn't have the will power to master my situation. I put it all in the back of my mind and went about the rest of the night and had a good time. However, I wanted to make a note for myself to try to find the object lesson.

So what is the lesson? The lesson is that yet again, my belief in my willpower is my undoing. It's hard to fight the hot state. At least in my case it wasn't a hot state causing me to send an inappropriate text message (is sending a picture of a naked burger -- no bun -- inappropriate?). Nonetheless, I don't particularly like falling prey to the feeling of being slightly out of control.

In contrast, I was at a business dinner last week in Minnesota. I found myself talking quite a bit, as one does at these dinners. I ordered on-plan food, and I clearly had more on my mind than just eating. Lo and behold at the end of dinner I hadn't finished my entre. My mind never got into food vapor lock. Same basic environment, but a totally different outcome.

What are the lessons for me?

Be focused on something other than eating. Examples might include socially-oriented activities such as taking an interest in the people around me. Engaging in conversation while eating seems to work well rather than pretending the food on my dish is slop in a trough.
Know that certain foods will always bring out the worst in me. Saying I'm only going to eat half my fries just doesn't work for me. Better to not order them in the first place.

The biggest lesson for me is that the kind of willpower necessary to be healthy is in being willing to plan and create an environment that reduces temptation for falling to food lust. Better to focus my energies on avoiding hot states than to try to fight them once they set in. It's kind of like avoiding the riptide instead of trying to swim against it.

Cheers,

David

Courage defined: one man's 300 pound journey

2011-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

I’m proud of the weight I’ve lost and prouder still that I’ve been able to maintain the loss, particularly over the past three years. At my heaviest, I weighed about 40 pounds more than I do today, and my official weight loss with Weight Watchers was 32 pounds. As proud as I am, I have always been in awe of those who have lost multiples of this.

I remember very clearly in one of my first Weight Watchers meetings in the year 2000 when I first saw a member who had lost over 100 pounds. Her leader was celebrating her effort, and the support and cheers from her fellow members was an inspiring sight. I always tell people that this day was the first day in which I truly began to understand the power and mission of the company I had joined. It was the day I learned that Weight Watchers was unlike any organization I had ever known. It was the day I heartily drank the Kool-Aid (sugar-free) and become a Weight Watchers zealot.

I’ve thought a lot about that member for many years. I have often wondered how I would do if I had that much weight to lose. I have wondered if I could have summoned the courage to walk into the door of a Weight Watchers meeting and ask for help. I have wondered whether I would have just given up and accepted life as a morbidly obese person. How would I have handled things if the goal had seemed so far away?

The answer, of course, is that I don’t know. I do know that the strategy for most of the folks who lose a tremendous amount of weight (e.g., 50 pounds or more) is not to focus on a distant goal, but rather to set manageable near-term goals such as 5% or 10 pounds. The second strategy is to re-frame the weight loss process into one of gradual and small changes, not crash, siege-like dieting.

The other day, I received an email forwarded by our regional field staff in Indianapolis. It was a letter from Derrick, a young guy in his 20’s, who had just reached the milestone of losing over 300 pounds. I was completely blown away by his accomplishment and his courage, and I was also moved about the very real effect that this process had on his life. Rather than re-telling the story, I will let his words speak for themselves:

The day I walked into a Weight Watchers meeting, I was trembling with fear. I hadn't been weighed in years. No scale would weigh me. I had absolutely no idea how much I weighed. I stepped up on the scale, only to weigh in at an unfathomable 529 pounds. The meeting leader, Cyndi Portteus, could not have been any more positive. I said to her, "Can I really do this? This seems impossible." She smiled at me, took my arm and said "Derrick! You can do this! I know you can!" And I haven't looked back since.

Life was very different back then. At 26 years old, I was on two blood pressure medicines. My doctors were practically begging me to have Bariatric surgery and I slept with a CPAP for severe Sleep Apnea. My seat belt didn't fit me in my car. I couldn't sit in booths in restaurants. Every chair was my enemy. Would I fit? Would it hold me? I couldn't go to concerts or any public event that had stadium seating. It was out of the question. Flying was a dramatic, terrible ordeal. Everywhere I went, all eyes were on me at all times. I was the biggest person everywhere I went. My back constantly hurt. I was wearing a 6X shirt and size 64 inch pants. And special ordering clothes from a catalog was the norm. Going to the grocery store was a grueling ordeal.

But that was two years ago. I went down 20 pants sizes. I have lost over 26 inches from my waist alone. I can buy clothes anywhere I go. I have been taken off all my blood pressure medicines and no longer have high blood pressure. My blood work is stellar. After a sleep study last year, I have absolutely no symptoms of Sleep Apnea and no longer sleep with a CPAP. I can fit in any booth, seat or chair. I have participated in eight 5K's with 3 more scheduled this year. I have even dropped a shoe size!

My entire life has changed, and changed dramatically. Weight Watchers saved my life. Presently, I am only 1 pound away from losing 300 pounds and am inching closer and closer to Goal. I can see Goal and Lifetime, and it's only a short distance away. I finally see it can be done! At the time that my doctors were telling me what a perfect candidate I would be for Weight Loss Surgery, I knew that would never be for me. I knew if I was going to do this, I was going to do it. I knew Weight Watchers worked.

[Note: as of this blog posting, Derrick informed me that he had reached a total loss of 302 pounds.]

I can never know the kind of courage that Derrick had to summon to walk into that door. I can never know the kind of perseverance and determination that it took for him to see through a 300 pound loss. I can, however, acknowledge and celebrate his success and enthusiastically tip my hat to him. I can also acknowledge and thank our local staff, particularly Derrick’s Leader, Cyndi, who supported him through his journey. Most of all, I can thank Derrick for reminding me, once again, why I love working for Weight Watchers.

Derrick’s success is entirely his own. I’m just glad we were able to help.

As I write this blog entry, I’m sitting in a Frankfurt hotel room early in the morning. I’ve been blitzing through Europe for the past three days, and it’s been a great trip. My eating habits have been a C+ effort, but I’m trying to compensate by keeping my exercise pace up. After I make this post, I will dutifully put on a pot of coffee and head over to the gym next door. I will do my best to keep it sane today and the flight home. I will also take comfort in the fact that I’m back on my home routine for a couple of weeks. This process always has its great weeks and not so great weeks. If one many can lose 300 pounds, then another can keep focused while on maintenance. Derrick’s story reminds me that healthy life is a process, not a sprint. His story also reminds me that the benefits are worth the effort.

Thanks Derrick!

Cheers,

David

How much I weigh and other scary secrets...

2011-06-23T09:23:00.000-04:00

The other day, I got a follow-up email request from a reporter writing an article about Weight Watchers. He casually requested if I could provide him with my height, weight and BMI. Apparently, he had read on my blog that I had gained six pounds about a month ago, and this got him curious about how much I actually weighed. How did I react to his email? Frankly, it kind of freaked me out.

Perhaps a little more context is in order. The reporter is a guy who is working on a long lead piece, and I had already spent a bunch of time with him. He's a very nice, interesting and curious guy, and I certainly didn't think he intended to do me any horrific harm when I got his request. I think he was understandably perplexed when I told him that I didn't want to send the information via email, but preferred to share it via the phone. As he said, it wasn't as though he was asking for my social security number.

Upon reflection, I was, in fact, being a little bit weird. The fact of the matter is that although I'm at my goal weight, I'm still self-conscious about writing my weight down. This got me to wondering why I am so uncomfortable with this? Prevailing wisdom suggests that men are very comfortable talking about how many pounds they weigh. Or are they?...

So for those curious about how much I weigh, here it goes (deep breath...):

I'm 6'3"
When I got weighed last week, I was 204 lbs, one pound over my goal weight of 203 lbs (this is with clothing -- in fact, I was wearing chain mail armor)
This puts me at a BMI of 25.5

[BTW, I made reference to a six pound gain in a blog post about a month ago. I am happy to report that five of those pounds have been vanquished. Yeah me! It's also worth noting that at my heaviest, I was 244 pounds. Double-yeah me!]

Though I'm down 5 lbs, I would guess that I still weigh more than the witch and the duck. That doesn't make me a warlock, so put your pitchforks away.

One reason I'm self-conscious about my weight is that I am 0.5 above the clinical definition of the lower end of the overweight BMI range of 25 to 29.9 (obese is 30+ -- I was in that range at one point). For me to be at a BMI of 24.9, I need to get down to about 199. So how is it that my officially sanctioned Weight Watchers goal weight ended up four pounds above this?

When it came time to setting my goal weight, I first had a conversation with my leader, Liz, and I expressed that 199 felt way too skinny for me to sustainably maintain. In fact, I've been at 199, and that's the weight where people start telling me that I look a little gaunt -- I finally learned to stop taking that as a compliment. Liz suggested that I talk to a qualified healthcare professional to determine a truly healthy weight for me. So I made an appointment with the Chief Scientific Officer of Weight Watchers (What can I say? It's a perk of the job.) She checked a couple of extra facts about me when helping me find my goal weight, including:

My waist size, which is 34", well under the target of 38"
My body-fat percentage as measured by a commercial grade impedance device. I came in at 16% body fat. I tested it again last week and I was at 17%. According to the American Council on Exercise, 14% to 17% qualifies as "fitness" and 18% to 25% qualifies as "acceptable". I usually bounce around from 15% to 17%.

Based on all of this, she felt comfortable that my goal of 203 was definitely at a healthy weight, so I was able to get a waiver on the BMI 25 so that I could qualify for Lifetime Membership.

Not to sound like too much of a cliche-ridden man, but I do lift weights pretty frequently (4X per week), so I have built up some muscle mass (which is totally apparent when I squint into the mirror). Further, I'm convinced that I come from farming stock -- I'm pretty large framed. OK, maybe I am a cliche-ridden man.

In truth, there is no perfect measure of healthy weight, and this subject is not without controversy. Weight Watchers regularly scours the research, and despite any imperfections, BMI is still the most easily used and maintained measure that is highly predictive of health risk factors. However, because BMI is not perfect, Weight Watchers allows its members to get written permission from their doctors to qualify for Lifetime Membership as long as their BMI is below 27. I'm one of them.

There. I have now broadcasted my weight, and it's out there in the world. Even writing this in my blog entry gives me a vague feeling of uneasiness. Why?

I have never had any problem talking about my weight loss (30 pounds), but I have never been as comfortable talking about my absolute weight. Most people guess that I weigh less than I actually do (I think that's a good thing), a fact that makes me feel all the more self-conscious about the actual number. I do understand that I am overly obsessing about a number, and too often ignoring observations such as my skinnier, post-weight loss clothing still fitting and that I am looking vaguely the way I should look. More importantly, I am still living very much of a healthy lifestyle, so that is clearly the most important consideration. Yet, I still worry about that little number. What can I say? I have an in-grained need to keep score on myself.
I feel accountable to the people I work with, particularly given my role in the organization, to be the walking, breathing example of Weight Watchers. I am happy to be at my weight for myself, but I feel obligated to make sure I stay there for others. I'm not sure this is an entirely bad thing. Feeling a sense of accountability for our health for others can be a useful and effective motivator (at least for me). It is certainly a good will gesture for my family, who would like to see me around for a long time. I also believe that the success of each of us can help motivate others to do the same. It has often been written that obesity is contagious: if all of your friends are over-weight, you are statistically more likely to be overweight yourself. I'd like to think that the opposite is also true.

This is one of those blog posts that I write knowing that it can be kind of a touchy subject for a lot of people. It certain has been for me writing it. Then again, maybe I'm over-thinking it all. I do that.

Cheers,

David

Little plates make full tummies. Better not throw away my daughters' old tea set.

2011-06-14T14:24:00.000-04:00

Very recently, the Center for Nutrition Policy & Promotion (CNPP), a joint department shared between the Department of Agriculture and HHS, revealed their new icon for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. They took the bold step of throwing out the head-scratching food pyramid for something we can all relate to: a plate. On this plate, they have half of it dedicated to fruits and vegetables and the remainder dedicated to lean proteins and whole grains. On a personal level, I like the new icon a lot and see it as a huge improvement over the old food pyramid. Why? Two reasons:

I like what it says. I really like the way that the more cutting edge advice in food choices is becoming pretty simple and common sensical: focus on eating real foods that have real nutrition. I am obviously biased as this is what PointsPlus is all about, and it reflects the way I eat (or at least aspire to) these days.
I like how it says it. Call me odd, but I have never had occasion to serve my food on a serving dish laid out like a pyramid. I've known about the food pyramid since its introduction almost 20 years ago, and it never once has caused me to re-think how I eat. The plate on the other hand is something I definitely relate to. Visualizing what I'm putting on my plate makes a lot of sense to me. I also really like the basic message of filling half my plate with fruits and vegetables. Nothing like a simple message to penetrate the severe bone density of my skull.

However, there is another message of the dietary guidelines (and PointsPlus) that doesn't really find its way onto the new plate icon: portion control. How big a plate are we talking about? Hopefully not a platter.

I'm assuming that the Lego disciples were able to
make do with little Lego plates

There was a very amusing study published last year that looked at artistic renderings of the Last Supper over the past 1,000 years. Using some sophisticated computer analysis comparing the size of plates and loaves of bread to the size of heads (I'm glad I wasn't in the paintings -- my gravity inducing noggin would have distorted the results), they were able to measure how artistic views of serving sizes had changed. Lo and behold (pardon my religiosity), over the past millennium, plate sizes have increased an average of 66% with the biggest gains being scored around the year 1500. I guess no one can blame Coke and Pepsi for that one.

More recently (i.e., the 90's), plate sizes have increased from 10 inches to 12 inches, an increase of 20%. Does this matter? According to our new friend Professor Wansink (I'm starting to feel like his PR coordinator), it matters quite a bit. Time for another game of human experimentation.

Experiment #1: At an ice cream social (the opposite of a Weight Watchers meeting), the researchers gave their test subjects either 17 oz bowls or 34 oz bowls. Those who were given the larger bowls served themselves up 31% more ice cream. When given a larger scoop to go with their great big bowl, they served up 57% more ice cream.
Experiment #2: Test subjects served a medium-sized hamburger on a smaller plate (a saucer) estimated their burger to have 18% more calories than when it was served on a regulation-sized plate.

Basically, the point is that our eyes can get us in trouble as we use other objects to ballpark the size of our food. Maybe this is why overly fancy restaurants are often accused of skimping on food: they put normal portions on huge plates.

For myself, I have two observations...

Appetizers can be pleasant surprises. I was recently at a lunch where I was on stage (in fact, being grilled -- pardon the pun) with a bunch of Wall St types. They were at the lunch to hear about what we were up to, so that meant it was time for me to talk. As a result, I didn't bother ordering a main dish, but instead I asked for an appetizer serving of tuna tartar. It was a nice serving size, but was clearly an appetizer. That said, it did look more impressive on its smaller dish. Combine this with my having to talk non-stop, and I ended up feeling pretty satisfied after lunch and wasn't hungry again until dinner. Moral of the story? Talk more and order smaller sizes.
I am not wired for empty plates. It's the soon-to-be-starving, fight-or-flee caveman that lives inside my stomach that disallows me from doing anything other than cramming food on my plate. My choice is either to fight this urge or simply to use a smaller plate. The latter seems much easier than relying on will power. Moral of the story? Use salad plates.

How many of you have reverted to using your grandmother's old china to solve this problem? What else is working for you?

Cheers,

David

The origin of the Clean Plate Club. or, It's not my fault, I blame the vikings

2011-06-05T14:38:00.001-04:00

I'm continuing my man-crush on Cornell economist, Brian Wansink, whose book "Mindless Eating" is continuing to provide excellent insight and amusement.

"Give us your small, snack-sized livestock or I will smite thee!"

Given the topic of my blog, ManMeetsScale, I want to use at least some of the time to talk about various pressures and incentives men have to make not-so-good eating decisions. On a personal level, I am very much inclined to ascribe all of my own behavioral failings to hidden societal pressures dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. Really, if the Assyrians were a little more thoughtful, they would have established a culture and ethos of healthier and more mindful eating which then would have spread over Greece, then Rome and ultimately the parts of Europe that were worshiping trees at the time. Instead, men in the times of yore were perfectly happy to eat until they had to vomit. The Romans were quite good at this. Heaven knows the Vikings were big feasters. Give them a leg of mutton, and they were happy to sack another English village. No doubt their own military adventures brought some of that Viking meal assault culture which then led Henry VIII to gorge on food on endless banquet tables. From there, the next stop was the Superbowl.

The thing about Romans, Vikings and British kings is that they ultimately became role models for would-be gladiators and monarchs everywhere. In other words, me. I would have been an excellent Viking, and I'm sure I could have a rocking beard if I gave it half a chance. For a long time, I definitely ate like a Viking, the approving nods of my buddies.

Then I discovered Weight Watchers. Now I turn up my nose when faced with the meat buffet. I rarely eat a sandwich, and I like salad an awful lot. Clearly a sissy of epic proportions! Real men eat sides of beef all at once, and they surely don't eat quiche. Actually, I don't eat quiche either because it has way too much butter in the crust and is full of hidden calories. Gracious me. Am I so far on the unmanly eating scale that I'm to the left of the quiche eater? That is troubling indeed.

Think I'm making this manly eating stuff up? Witness yet another fascinating experiment by that clever Wansink over at the Cornell school of test subject deception. He and his colleagues have done a number of experiments in which they observe people eating popcorn in movie theaters. In one experiment they found that when women paid attention to how much popcorn they were eating, they ate less. Makes sense, right? Apparently, not for us super-smart men. When guys indicated that they were paying attention to how much popcorn they were eating, they ate more. Seriously.

However, his second experiment was even more telling. They did an ingenious experiment in which they wrote a script/story of a guy on a date. They randomly assigned people to read one of two versions that were different from each other in only one seemingly minor way. In one version, the guy in the story ate a couple of handfuls of popcorn. In the other, he ate almost all of his popcorn. They conducted the survey with 140 college men and 140 college women. Here were the results:

College men: the guy in the version of the story that ate almost all of his popcorn was consistently rated as stronger, more aggressive and more masculine than the two handfuls guy. In fact, when asked how much they thought he could bench press, the full popcorn guy could bench an average of 21 pounds more. Holy Toledo. The popcorn was not even a central point of the story, which was a fairly detailed account about a guy on a date. The seemingly subtle difference on how much popcorn he ate was enough to give him a 20lb bench advantage. I am doing a chest workout tomorrow morning, and I'm seeing a movie with my kids today. I just might have to check this out.
College women: They didn't rate either version of the guy as either stronger or more masculine. In other words, the notion that women care about how much we guys eat seems over-rated, at least in this experiment.

So what does this little experiment tell us? I have often heard that women work out and dress nicely to impress each other, not the men in their life. Is it possible that we men are inclined to clean our plates (and sometimes eat them too) in an effort to impress each other? Is this the fast food version of moose rutting?

While this is mostly pretty amusing, I cannot help think that it represents at least one significant barrier preventing men from taking hold of theirs weight issue: we worry about how we think our brothers will react to our doing something about it. Statistically, men are 50% less likely to do something about their weight (and therefore their health) than women. While women feel pressured by body image and the media to lose weight, it seems that men have the exact opposite incentive. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it would be a good thing for men to become slaves to body image, though I sadly see this happening in pockets. However, it is also not a good thing for men to feel pressure to eat like a starving lion in an effort to impress others.

I've been doing Weight Watchers and dealing with my weight for so long that I'm mostly past caring what my guy friends think about my dainty food choices. However, I do, from time to time, feel a little self conscious when everyone else orders a steak served with a blue cheese blanket, and I'm asking for the simply grilled salmon with fresh spring vegetables. According to Mr. Wansink, my concern over college frat guy approval is warranted. Apparently, I can take some solace that at least the girls, or at least my wife, don't care.

Cheers,

David

The perils of endless food

2011-05-30T11:33:00.000-04:00

When it comes to the world of weight management, the word I despise the most is "willpower". It bothers me that there is a presumption that if we were just "better" people that there would not be an obesity issue in this country. While it is true that dealing with a weight issue requires attention and some elbow grease, I wholly disagree with the notion that our failings are due to a lack of character.

With this in mind, I have been greatly enjoying a book that I have been meaning to read for a long time, "Mindless Eating", by Brian Wansink. Brian is probably the last guy on Earth that you would think would write one of the most interesting on weight loss on Earth. Why? He's not a psychologist, but rather he is a PhD economist who is a professor of applied economics at Cornell University. What makes Brian's work so fascinating is the massive number of experiments that he and his colleagues have undertaken to understand why we consumers do the things we do around food. Wansink has a weird combination of intelligence, statistical rigor and a slightly corrupt sense of humor.

The gist of this book, which I highly recommend BTW, is that humans underestimate the degree to which they can successfully resist a tempting environment. I completely agree with his conclusion that the secret of mastering our obesogenic environment is not to summon mythical heaps of willpower, but rather to learn how to change our environment to help nudge us toward healthier choices. Over my coming posts, I will try to make it a point to reference the results of some of his experiments as I continue to examine my own nutritional failings as well as my plans to address them.

I'd like to start with one of my favorites. Wansink's belief is that very few people stop eating because they are full. Rather, they tend to stop eating when they receive certain visual or other types of external cues. In one particularly twisted experiment, he asked a bunch of test subjects eat soup until they were full. All of us members of the Clean Plate Club (I'm a charter member) use the existence of an empty plate to signal that we must be full. In his clever soup experiment, Wansink and his conspirators rigged some soup bowls so that they were automatically refilling. His subjects would either get a normal bowl or they would get one that was secretly and automatically refilling. He served soup in a large 18 ounce bowl and asked people to stop when they were full. Here were the results:

People in the normal -- if 18 oz can be considered normal -- bowl group ate an average of 9 ounces of soup. When asked to estimate how many calories they thought they consumed, they guessed 123. It turns out they actually ate 153 calories. In other words, they underestimated by 24% -- a cautionary tale for us all!
People in the bottomless bowl group ate an average of 15 ounces (!) or 67% more than the normal bowl group. Apparently a few ate over a quart. When asked how many calories they guessed they had eaten, they replied with an average of 127 -- about the same as the normal bowl group. In fact, they had eaten an average of 268 calories. The underestimated by 111% how much they had eaten.

What should we take from this? Humans are terrible at guesstimating calories, particularly if they don't have a visual cue to help guide them. One of the reasons for this is that most research indicates that it takes the stomach about 20 minutes to inform the brain that it's had enough food. I don't think I've ever taken 20 minutes to eviscerate a plate of food in my entire life.

One important conclusion of this is to remind ourselves why keeping track of what we eat is so important. Countless research has shown that people have a STRONG tendency to underestimate how much they eat by 25% to 30%. That is more than enough of an error to result in consistent weight gain if not frustration at a lack of weight loss. Even when we track, we have a tendency to underestimate portion size or to miss tracking bites/licks/tastes, but the act of tracking has been demonstrated over and over and over and over and over again to give us a huge advantage of those who do not.

So what does this have to do with me and the size of my waist? Last night, our neighbors invited us over for a BBQ. They are wonderful and givings hosts, and they had a full spread of food more than adequate for the six adults present. In fact, I would say the spread was solidly bountiful, particularly on the chips and guacamole side of the table. With such a large basket of chip and a huge bowl of guacamole, I couldn't hope to make a dent in it despite my best mindless grazing efforts. If I'm just being honest, I have no Earthly idea how much I ate other than the fact that it was a heck of a lot more than I could ever hope to guesstimate.

What would have been a better strategy? Easy (in practice). Rather than pick off the finger food trays, the much better strategy would have been to plate out everything I planned to eat onto a dish. I could have easily lingered and nibbled off the plate, but I would have had a visual cue when I was getting to the end. Asking for a paper plate would have only been slightly antisocial and weird, and I don't think my good friends would have used this as a convenient excuse to never have me back -- they have much better, substantive excuses for that.

One other nice benefit of pre-plating snacks is that it forces you though a series of steps that are slightly more involved and deliberate than merely opening the back and shoving my head inside of it and then breathing deeply. If I make myself use a plate, there are times that I will not be able to motivate to go to the trouble of grabbing a plate and then putting it in the dishwasher. Never underestimate the power of laziness!

This week, I'm going to try pre-plating all of my snacks so I can actually keep track of the PointsPlus values. I will let you know how it goes.

Cheers,

Denial. Bad. The story of my crummy weigh-in.

2011-05-22T11:46:00.000-04:00

Allow me to remind the world for the 39th time that travel is hard on my regimen. This is particularly the case for my biannual trips to Australia. Though native Australians love to complain about their national airline, I have to tip my hat to Qantas for running a pretty tight ship. In particular, I still hold that they serve the best airline food around, though this is an admittedly low bar. Combine their almost-haute cuisine with 24 hours of non-stop travel time, and it's a recipe for eating disaster. I tried my noble best to not careen completely off the rails, but I was only marginally successful. I exercised hard this past week, but there is only so much working out before the crushing tide of too much food overwhelms. Basically, I just got back from a cruise.

In general, I have to say that the past few months have been pretty rough from a staying on-plan perspective. I don't ever recall a time in my professional life with quite as much travel and work socializing as I have experienced over the past few months.

All of this is a lead-up to 6 PM last night.

Fun fact about my house: we keep a Weight Watchers grade Tanita professional scale in our house that was acquired from a medical supply shop several years ago. Its presence means that I can have a Weight Watchers worthy weigh-in any time I like. Yet, for the past few months, I have avoided this hideous device like the plague.

I was in three consecutive Sydney-based Weight Watchers meetings this past Tuesday, and I could have weighed-in at any of them. I didn't.

Why? The very obvious answer is that I really didn't want to know the truth.

So at 6 PM last night, I was fishing something out of the guest-room closet where I keep our Tanita scale, and I had the sudden impulse to man-up and step on the scale. What ensued felt a bit like being hit with a club. 6 pounds over goal. Ugh. I proceeded to toss myself into a one hour tail spin replete with rampant self-abuse and prolific self-cursing. In an effort to further propel my self-flagellation, I grabbed my waist and shook it, cursing myself all the way. Boy did I suck.

Two observations about this little hour of sunshine and the time that led up to it:

One: What's with avoiding the scale? There is something so dumb and self-destructive about my avoiding weigh-in's. I know that I'm slipping, yet somehow denial will make it all the better. In the process, I miss the opportunity to more quickly self-correct and get back to a more sane and healthy choices. Avoiding the weigh-in results in a building cycle of not so awesome choices followed by further avoidance. This my friends is how I successfully gained six pounds.

What's the definition of denial? Courtesy of Wikipedia (courtesy of Pyschpages): "Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence."

There is some really interesting research that has come from a project called the National Weight Control Registry, run by some really sharp academics. This research project has studied a large group of people who have lost significant weight and have maintained their weight loss for many years. One shared trait among them is that they weigh themselves or get weighed regularly. When they see their weight creep up, they use this as an early indicator that they are falling back on old habits and they course correct. This is how they avoid gaining back 30, 50 or 100 pounds. Usually the tolerance for re-initiating is about five pounds. For these folks, this is not being a slave to the scale, but rather using the scale as an objective lifestyle feedback mechanism.

Lesson for me? Take advantage of the Weight Watchers meetings I am already attending for work purposes, and get a weigh-in.

Two: What's with the self-flagellation? There is a widely held belief that men don't get emotional about their weight. I don't know who came up with this theory, but based on my own giant sample size of one, I find this to be wholly ridiculous and untrue. I believe that the only difference between men and women on this topic is how they express it. My theory, based on my own self-observations, is that men have a tendency to bottle it up and try to put it into a safe little box in the back of their minds. Based on my own experience, this is not a good practice -- at least not for me.

I've been at goal, not moving more than 2-3 pounds in either direction for well over two to three years. It is only natural for me to be disappointed and irritated with myself now that I have significantly deviated from this. Owning this publicly, either on this blog or at a Weight Watchers meeting, is a better way to exorcise the demon by being honest about the fact that I slipped up. It is the full opposite of denial.

This said, my self-flagellation was pretty over-the-top and definitely distorted. I mean really, six pounds on a six foot three inch man is not worthy of a bridge jump. I do realize that I tend to be a little ridiculous about this kind of stuff. What can I say? Don't do as I do!

So how to re-frame all of this? First off, I need to be relieved that I finally stepped on the scale and confirmed what I already knew to be true. Better to find out at six pounds than twenty. Secondly, slapping myself repeatedly about the facial region is wholly unnecessary. This isn't complicated. I just need to break out the old tracker and get back on program. Give me a month, and I can easily be back on goal. Again, this is not a cause for stress, but rather it's a relief.

In summary, denial + self-abuse = unhelpful. Proactivity + self-belief = good outcomes.

I get to spend an entire week in my normal routine (i.e., no travel). Seems like a good opportunity to get back to basics.

Cheers,

dk

New area of focus: my flabby brain

2011-05-15T22:52:00.000-04:00

I find myself writing this as I sit in the American Airlines lounge on a four hour layover enroute to Sydney, AU from NYC. I love Australia, Sydney and Australians, but I hate the flight that gets me there. 24 hours of commuting is always a bear, followed by a few days of rough jet lag. Perhaps I need to be reminded of the ridiculous hardship that this journey would have spawned had I made it 200 years ago. Scurvy seems like a rough travel affliction in comparison to a little sleep deprivation.

As always, I don't have high expectations for my nutritional intake in the 16 hour leg from LAX to SYD. That said, it's only one day, and I've been living the straight and narrow for the past couple of weeks. I will be fine once I get to Sydney. I've already found my gym (Fitness First), which will let me buy day passes. I find it sad how relieved this makes me feel.

Browsing through the American Airlines magazine, I was reading an article about Naomi Watts, who is now an ageless 42 years old. She's had two kids, and she leads a pretty kooky schedule and lifestyle. According to the article, she works out pretty consistently, and she tries to take in decent nutrition. She also made of a point of saying how she avoided depriving herself of any foods because she claims that this act causes her to crave. She seeks moderation and balance.

I have to admit that every time I read an interview of a beautiful (and thin) celebrity talking about how they don't "diet" that I am always a bit skeptical. What else would they say?

In this case, I am hoping that everything she said was true. Why? I am starting to relate to it -- or at least I aspire to.

When I hear people talk about living their healthy lifestyle, they often talk about balance and not over-stressing about food. There is something about them that sounds a bit like a Zen monk who has found balance and grace in the world of overly abundant junk food. I'm jealous of them because I'm not there.

My issue with food always seems to come down to the fact that I'm a pretty compulsive eater when I let myself go. When I start on food my head gets buzzy, and I find myself in a frenzy of food lust. One of these days I am going to video tape myself eating a meal. My guess is that it will look a sped-up video with a person eating at 3X speed. I literally have to focus on slowing myself down or I run the risk of eating through my plate and possible the table beneath it. Does it matter? There is certainly research that suggests that eating to quickly does not allow your body time to tell you it's full.

I also tend to be a pretty compulsive eater when I'm bored. I have immense nervous energy. It's hard for me not to play with things constantly, and my office is full of small gadgets and toys. When I'm in the kitchen, that energy can quickly get channeled into grazing and drinking. For example, I almost always have two diet Mountain Dews for lunch during the week. Why two? Frankly, I have a hard time stopping at one. Ironically, this just gives me more caffeine which in turn creates more nervous energy.

At this point, you should be picturing someone who is a thousand miles away from being a Zen monk -- more like a Tasmanian Devil. In truth, of all of the dimensions of a well lifestyle, stress management is one of my big unfinished projects. I'm not a deep breather.

I've started my own exploration into finding a more centered approach to life. Over the past couple of years, I've begun to poke around Eastern philosophies, and I've even tried meditation (which I actually found surprisingly relaxing). My premise is that just as there is fitness for the body, there is also fitness for the mind. I have found a way to exercise my body just about every day of the week. It seems only logical that I should do the same for my brain.

I am gradually approaching the realization that a model for taking care of myself is one that encompasses sound nutrition, sound body and sound mind. It is increasingly clear to me that it's hard to really achieve the nutrition and body bit without the mind part. Just as I take time to get my body fit, it seems only reasonable to endeavor to keep my mind fit as well. For some people, mindfulness comes naturally, but for most of us, it requires effort and training. So I hereby aspire to get my mind seriously fit. I just wish I could sport it in a swimsuit once I get there.

Cheers,

David

Manning up the nerve to talk about food

2011-05-07T18:06:00.000-04:00

We first launched Weight Watchers Online for Men about four years ago. Prior to that, the Online product was unisex other than the fact that it had lots of articles that arguably had a feminine slant (Stress Eating? Take a Bath Instead!). Weight Watchers Online for Men basically took all of the same tools, but packaged them around articles and features more suitable for a mannish lifestyle. All the usual cliches applied such as beer, grilling, etc. We developed a nice base of dude subscribers, including me.

The only thing missing was the little issue of not really telling anyone about it. Lots of guys kind of assume that Weight Watchers is only concerned about women, so it doesn't even dawn on them to look for something designed for the hairier sex.

It made my heart glad the other morning when I saw a Weight Watchers Online for Men ad pop up while I was eating my oatmeal and watching CNN. The male race had finally arrived in the world of Weight Watchers, and Weight Watchers was finally spreading the good word to the other 50% of the population.

Here is one of the spots...

I like this spot a lot mostly because all three guys are actual subscribers who have had great success, and they get the whole Weight Watchers thing. And they're pretty funny to boot.

However, there is also a part of the ad that is arguably a little sad. The spot has to get into things like BEER and GRILLING and other overtly mannish signaling devices as if to say "Hey guys, jump in! The water's fine!". It also pokes fun at the unseen other guys who were clearly teasing one of the three guys for doing Weight Watchers. It seems a shame that the ad has to go out of its way to prove that Weight Watchers is OK for guys, and that it's OK for guys to deal with their weight issues.

The reality is that many guys still don't feel comfortable talking about weight issues let alone doing something about them. We still need to be convinced that it's OK to consciously make healthier choices and to burn more calories than we take in. The advertisement is merely a reflection of this reality, and it does its noble best to begin to break down some of these calcified perception issues.

Men are very happy to blog prolifically about their exercise routines and share notes all the time on matters of biking, running, lifting, etc. However, they rarely seem to share notes on food choices, managing portion sizes, and they certainly don't get into the emotional aspects of eating.

Do a search of weight loss blogs, and see what percentage have female scribes vs. male ones. I'd have to guess that 95% of the weight-oriented blogs are written by women. Men just don't talk about this stuff. In fact, the reason I first started writing this blog was that I believed that there were not enough men out there talking about weight, weight loss and healthy life. I'm grateful for every other guy who does the same, even this guy out in California named Jack Sh*t, who likes to make fun of me.

I certainly write about my own experiences. Do I talk about them too? Most definitely, but usually with the women I know. That said, I have some dude co-workers who are willing to engage on the topic, but mostly to make fun of each other. Frankly, teasing beats silence, so it's something. Outside of work, most of the guys I know almost seem embarrassed to talk about what they eat or what their struggles are. They usually don't get much further than making fun of themselves for being out of shape and having a belly.

Does it matter? I am starting to think it does. If we guys feel self-conscious about talking about eating more healthily and eating less, then we may feel the same way on actually carrying out healthy behaviors. Is it actually embarrassing or unmanly to eat healthily? I hope not, but I do worry.

Talking about food choices and nutrition should be the most natural thing in the world for a guy to do. We share notes on cars and gadgets all the time. We obsessively track stats from the sports pages and stock market. We love keeping score. Why not talk about the fact that scallops have practically no PointsPlus values, yet they have tons of protein. Why not talk about the fact that a bowl of fruit is a huge amount of food that keeps you full, but it has relatively few calories compared to most processed foods.

I'm not preaching here, because I have been (and sometimes still am) one of those guys who feels a little shy about the topic. I think that the shyness comes from not wanting to admit that I'm on a "diet". The shyness comes from feeling badly about not having enough "will power" to conquer my food demons. The fact is this: there are still lots of stigmas and emotional issues around weight and weight loss, and none of them are helpful. This has always been the case for women, and it's increasingly the case for men too. They just come in a different form.

In my utopian view of the world, we would all treat weight, healthy lifestyle and obesity as a math problem to be solved. On some basic level it is just that: the first law of thermodynamics. Use more energy than you take in, and fat stores go down. It's all numbers and keeping score from there. When we look at the topic in this construct, there is nothing whatsoever about it that is deserving of embarrassment or shyness.

Btw, here is a fun little fact about the men who subscribe to Weight Watchers Online: in our satisfaction surveys, they rate the product at least as high as their female counterparts. More importantly, they have some pretty impressive weight loss results. The simple truth is this: counting and keeping score works in weight management. Nothing un-masculine about that.

Cheers,

Beware of the hot zone

2011-04-26T11:51:00.000-04:00

I find myself in the midst of a book first published in 2008 that has been completely captivating me. The book is Nudge, written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Thaler is a economics professor at the University of Chicago and Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard (formerly at the Univeristy of Chicago).

If you will indulge me a little bit of geekery... I went to the University of Chicago to get my MBA, and I fell in love with the place. It was the first time I was every truly drawn into intellectual pursuit [my days of overly socially stimulated campus Falstaff (see two posts ago) were now firmly behind me]. In particular, I found myself fascinated with economic theory. More than most business schools, Chicago placed a lot of emphasis on economic theory and math, and it was known as a pretty nerdy place. I fit right in.

The University of Chicago is known as a pretty opinionated place when it comes to economic theory. Underpinning much of this economic theory was the concept of the economic man, a mythical fellow who always made rational decisions. I wanted to think of myself as an upstanding economic man, so this too had much appeal to me.

Around the time I was attending, this horribly sacrilegious guy named Richard Thaler was joining the faculty. He completely flew in the face of the at-the-time prototypical Chicago economist in that he focused much of his energy in how humans made flawed or biased or herd-like decisions on a range of subjects including savings, investments, etc. He had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the fully functioning economic man was not necessarily a model for how humans act in all circumstances. I refused to take his class as I saw him as kind of a theoretically impure degenerate who failed to hew to the economic man model. I didn't know of Sunstein, but given that he was in the law school, that's not a total shock.

Nearly 20 years later, I find myself fascinated by Thaler and his area of exploration. It would be hard not to given my last 10 years plus at Weight Watchers. Thaler is part of a new generation of behavioral economists who are breaking open fascinating ground in a wide range of subjects.

Which brings me to the book. The basic tenant of the book is that by better understanding the biases that humans put into their decision making process, one can seek to design systems that nudge them toward better outcomes. We at Weight Watchers come from a long line of nudgers, so how could I not now see him as a kindred spirit?

One topic the authors delve into is the subject of Automatic vs. Reflective systems of the mind. Basically, it states that the mind operates on two levels: one is instinctive and automatic and the other is planned and analytic. We need both as we would otherwise have no way of making the many thousands of decisions we make in our incredibly complicated day-to-day world. Taken at the extreme, I'm very glad that I don't have to weigh the pro's and con's of breathing or whether to laugh at a good joke. At the same time, if I was instinctive 100% of the time, I would probably be running through the streets of Manhattan naked right now.

When it comes to food, it's pretty easy for me to see my Automatic system in action. It is the part of my brain that leads to mindless eating.

In one particularly fascinating part of the book Thaler and Sunstein refer to cold states (i.e., food is not in front of us) vs. hot states (we have a bowl of nuts in our lap) of the mind. As they delicately put it, "For most of us, however, self-control issues arise because we underestimate the effect of arousal." They continue, "When in a cold states, we do not appreciate how much our desires and our behavior will be altered when we are 'under the influence' of arousal." This is what another economist, George Lowenstein, labels the hot-cold empathy gap.

Say what? My interpretation: we humans place too much stock in our own sense of will power. When we get under the spell, we can often fall to pieces. Want an example? As always, I'm happy to oblige with one of my favorites...

I was flying back from Brussels to NY this past Thursday. I told myself the following things before I got on board: no wine, not nuts, only low-fat dishes, and NO CHEESE PLATES. I got sort of far. I didn't graze in the airport lounge. I said no thanks to the pre-flight drinks. I had a diet coke as a pre-lunch drink. Then something happened. Every single person around me ordered a glass of wine. Then the flight attendant put a small bowl of nuts in front of me. What did I do? I did what I always do on transoceanic flights. I totally succumbed to my "arousal state". I had everything they gave me, and then I fell asleep. My hot state showed its complete and utter dominance. My only redeeming quality was that I said "no" to the snack offered at the end of the flight.

What's the moral of all of this? I can't try to beat my own brain. If I test myself too much, I'm going to periodically run into trouble. Herein lies the value of controlling my environment. I can't get aroused by what I don't have in front of me. The best way to avoid a "hot state" is to surround oneself with cool, icy objects.

Business class on an airplane is borderline unsolvable for me. The whole process of being strapped to a chair for 8 hours and then surrounded by other people succumbing to their own hot states is an awful lot to overcome. Frankly, that's OK. I travel a lot, but the total number of meals involved are manageable if this remains my primary weak area. I will keep at trying to address this issue, but I suspect I should prioritize my efforts on fixing the other parts of my environments that are more controllable.

I got home to CT that night to an empty house (family was in North Carolina). The first thing I did was jump into my car and outfit the house with a bunch of fruits and healthy snacks. I stayed "cold" for the next few days, and felt much better for it.

My golden rule in weight loss and maintenance (for myself, anyway) is to accept the limitations of my own will power. I cannot rely on it always being there for me. Planning and environmental control are the keys to my long term success. That and apparently taking more cold showers.

Cheers,

David

Functional healthy food: beauty is skin deep, inner beauty is everything. Seriously. Really.

2011-04-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

When does healthy food get weird or creepy?

The other day, I had a meeting around lunch time with a colleague. As luck would have it, I had a half hour window ahead of the meeting to have my regular lunch concoction. My colleague later came into the meeting with her assortment of sushi. As she sat down, she announced, "I'm so glad that you are already finished with your weird protein meal. It kind of freaks me out." You would have thought I had just eaten a plate of monkey brains.

It got me wondering whether my regular lunch is kind of weird or is best suited for weird people. I will let you come to your own conclusion. Here is what I normally get courtesy of the Pump Energy Food (a small NYC healthy food carry out/delivery chain) (their ingredient descriptions, not mine):

Baby spinach
Shredded turkey
"Grass fed" cheddar
Steamed sweet potatoes
Caramelized peppers and onions
Basalmic marinated mushrooms
Non-fat honey mustard dressing

The nutritional's on this are as follows (courtesy of their online nutrition calculator): 9g fat, 26 g carbs, 33 g protein and 5 g fiber. Total PointsPlus value = 8.

I get this plus a grilled eggplan and zucchini soup nutritional's of: 5g fat, 2 g protein, 12 g carbs, and 0 g fiber. Total PointsPlus value = 3.

That works out to 11 PointsPlus values for the entire meal. Why this meal and what's the theory? First and foremost, it's a boatload of food, bulk wise. Secondly, it's got a nice slug of both protein and fiber, which is appealing for workout geeks like myself. Thirdly, I happen to think it tastes great. I'm a giant fan of sweet potatoes, and I love getting a minor cheese indulgence thrown in.

This is my ideal of the perfect lunch meal. Tastes good, lots of nutritional benefit, and it keeps me completely full. I may grab an apple at 3 PM, but I'm otherwise good to go until dinner.

Not gorgeous, but definitely yummy.
And big (hard to see in this photo)!

So why all the grief? OK, I will admit that the aesthetics are not spectacular. There are no pretty colors to make it pop out and say: "Look at me! I'm pretty!". It has the unmistakable look of functional food, and it would certainly be home in a pre-capitalism USSR restaurant. Do I care? No. It is hard for me to describe the degree to which I am not moved by food visuals. When I eat with my eyes, I eat for the spatial dimensions, not the pretty colors. Seeing a ton of food for only 8 PointsPlus values is beyond sexy in my simple proletariat mind.

Why else? I suspect part of it is that it comes from a place called the Pump Energy Food. I LOVE this little chain, but I will admit that it's name is still closely linked to it's early days as a bodybuilder feeding stall. I guess the theory is that if bodybuilders like it, it must be disturbing and steroid-like. Anabolic turkey anyone? In truth, the Pump has changed a lot over the years, it's kind of become a groovy little place that's reminiscent of Chipotle, only much safer calorically speaking. Nonetheless, the name is probably not doing them any favors in escaping their heavy metal roots.

This said, what is this ridiculousness that overtly healthy food should be stigmatized for not being fashionable? What is it about walking into a health food store that makes so many people sad? What is it about eating food from a place called the Pump Energy Food that makes people feel a little sheepish? Why can't functional, healthy food be seen as the new culinary Prada?

For me, I think some of it comes from the notion that eating this kind of food from places like the Pump still feels a little bit "not normal." It's not where everyone else goes, and it sends out a signal that seems to say "I'm a self-depriving food freak. I eat food that only other scary people like bodybuilders would eat." It's also kind of like ordering the salad when everyone else is firing up a Rueben with fries. The salad tastes great, it's better for you, and you feel better after eating it. Yet, there is a natural instinct to feel a bit like a weirdo or a sad person when you don't join the carnage.

Having gone on this whole diatribe, I suspect I know what my colleague would say if she read this post: "You think about this stuff too much. I wasn't making a grand statement. I just think your lunch looks kind of gross."

My response: food beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is nothing foxier than a giant bowl of grub with very few PointsPlus values. I may need to take a cold shower just thinking about my lunch.

Am I alone in being sheepish about eating weird healthy-people food?

Cheers,

99 Bottles of Beer on my frame. How I gained weight in college.

2011-04-09T13:34:00.000-04:00

It all came rushing back. Suddenly I remembered the collegiate version of myself: town idiot.

This past week, I had the opportunity to do a market visit in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. For those not familiar, this is the triangle of Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham. It also contains a number of other towns such as Cary and Wake Forest (which oddly enough does not house Wake Forest University -- moved to Winston-Salem in the 50's). It is also home to my beloved Alma mater, Duke University.

By complete coincidence, the night I was going to be arriving happened to be the night of the final game of the NCAA Tournament. My Blue Devils had already been summarily blown out in the Sweet 16 vs. Arizona, and UNC met a similar fate one round later to Kentucky. Therefore, any huge rivalry that might otherwise be swirling around Tobacco Road had largely drifted away. Given the less war-like atmosphere, I made the decision to spend the night in Chapel Hill. Why? It's more fun and more college-y than Durham.

I called on an old friend and fraternity brother who now lives in the Chapel Hill area to watch the Butler/UConn game. We decided to watch it at a traditional Chapel Hill college bar, Top of the Hill. I will admit that it was a little surreal for me as a Duke fan to watch UConn (whom I despise) play Butler (whom I gloat over) in a UNC (for whom I have great distaste) bar.

It was a beautiful Spring night in North Carolina. It started harmlessly enough as I found myself happily working through a nice piece of salmon served over cheese grits. It went South (no pun intended) from here as I somehow got lost in a bottomless glass of beer watching the game. After all, here I was with an old college buddy in a college sports bar immersed in hoops. Just like old times.

The next morning I was reminded why it's not a good idea to dive into a bottomless glass of beer -- I had a headache delivered by a rusty ice pick. The only cure for this is exactly the antidote that my local team supplied: that true North Carolina delicacy, pork BBQ. Just like old times, I happily shoved my snout into a plate of pulled pork BBQ (Eastern style), Brunswick stew, baked beans and... hush puppies. Only later did I discover that hush puppies carry the heavy excise tax of 5 PointsPlus values for two. It should go without saying that I had many more than two.

So this is how I gained 40 pounds my freshman year! Doesn't seem so surprising now that I think about it. But it does beg another question. What the heck happened to me in college?

Pre-college, I was a pretty hard working young man. I woke up every morning for about four years to deliver the Washington Post newspaper -- a fact my children will never live down. I studied hard. I lived a clean life, at least until senior year of high school -- and even that was pretty tame.

College came, and I kind of lost my mind. I quickly found myself hanging out with a great group of dudes, and soon joined a fraternity full of goons and degenerates. Next thing I knew I found myself on a close to four year bender of beer and horrifically caloric food. I literally had no self-restraint whatsoever. I turned into Bluto from Animal House, but less funny and less charming.

So this is why I couldn't get a date in college...

In many respects, college was the ultimate obesogenic environment. Back in my days of college, the drinking age was 18/19 so acting like a drooling buffoon was a fully accepted practice [this comment inserted in case my kids read this and need to be reminded that the drinking age is now 21]. Every Thursday night we had kegs at the fraternity. In fact, there was pretty much no night of the week other than Sunday that someone wasn't having kegs somewhere. The college itself (yes, an otherwise prestigious academic institution) would regularly allow events where a huge tractor trailer would pull up on campus and tap 40 kegs of beer and supply a band to go with it. There was a reason to go out pretty much every night of the week. Combine the cheap beer landscape with all-you-can-eat cafeterias, BBQ joints, pizza and every other nasty food I can think of, and it is no wonder I burst out of my frame.

I used to drink these warm. Sad...

I often wonder how many PointsPlus values I racked up in a debauched college day. A twelve-pack of Goebels or Milwaukee's Best beer (yes, I was a craft beer connoisseur) alone would be 60 (12 X 5 per 12 oz). I had to easily be breaking 100 many days, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a 150 PointsPlus value day. Frankly, it's a wonder that I didn't weigh 80 more pounds than I did. There is little I wouldn't do to retrieve my youthful metabolism.

How I ever graduated in one piece remains a mystery to me (and to my parents who watched my transformation in near horror). In the years following college, I was able to resurface the work ethic I had in high school. By the time I went to business school at night, I was a completely different person. Maybe the fact that I had to pay for it myself gave me adequate incentive not to act like a complete idiot.

These days, I am kind of a control freak when it comes to my lifestyle. I sometimes wonder if this is due to my knowing how easily I fell into depravity during my college years. Maybe I'm afraid that if I let my guard down I will find myself slouched in a broken-down Lazy Boy chair, donned in a mustard-stained T-shirt watching TV with beer cans and pizza boxes served on top of a stained carpet. Attractive!

I wonder if everyone else who is tackling or has tackled a weight issue feels that they are constantly on the razor's edge of falling into the abyss of their old, less healthy life. I am much more confident about handling my health than I used to be, but I also worry about gradually getting slack. One little slip leading into another, seemingly unnoticed until they accumulate into a complete reversion. Yikes. Glad I worked out on this fine Saturday morning. That would not have happened in college. I'd still be sleeping.

Cheers,

dk

My terrible breakfast secret.

2011-03-31T16:38:00.000-04:00

No. It does not involve cannibalism.

About a week ago, I was flying in on a redeye to London on a Sunday morning. As the plane was approaching London, the crew came around offering breakfast. Due to what I can only assume was a mind-distorting lack of sleep, I found my resolve melt away, and I went off the healthy breakfast reservation. I had eggs. And some meat. I may have even had some toast with butter and jam. The horrors of it all!!! Given recent events around the world, this does not really seem to qualify as a source of national tragedy or even worth a tear-filled confession. Yet, I still felt more than a little guilty and down on myself afterwards.

I have been on a breakfast roll for almost four years. I am the self-proclaimed king of breakfast discipline. I worship at the altar of regular oatmeal with fruit, 0-fat greek yogurt with grapes, and coffee. While I have loudly touted my breakfast awesomeness for the past few years, I now have a confession to make. I do once-a-weekend cereal splurge.

I grew up a big cereal eater. When I say a big cereal eater, perhaps I should say a big bowl cereal eater. As a kid, I used to hide the largest bowl in the kitchen (think small mixing bowl) so I could have it for myself to fill to the brim with cereal. By the time I filled it with milk, my Oats of Cheery (see previous post on my use of generics food stuffs) would be spilling over the top. Of course, I would compensate for the tastelessness of my fine generic cereal by using heaps of sugar. It became my huge bowl of fake Captain Crunch. And I loved it so.

Once a cereal eater, always a cereal eater I suppose. Like all good Weight Watchers people, I discovered much later in life that a third of a box of cereal actually contains a great deal calories and that a third of a box should not be confused with what the manufacturers refer to as "serving size." [As a side point, for whom is this serving size appropriate? I'm guessing fasting Leprechauns.] Like many dutiful Weight Watchers people, I made the shift to Oatmeal, and I've been very happy and satisfied with the change.

It doesn't look like such a terrible vice...

However, once a week, it seems I needed a secret splurge. Most Saturday mornings I have a big bowl of cereal. Second confession: up to today, I haven't had the guts to calculate the PointsPlus values. I was afraid just how many PointsPlus values would be in this huge serving. It was time to man up and accept the consequences. Here was the damage:

two cups Special K Red Berries cereal: 6 PointsPlus values
1/2 cup Cracklin Oat Bran: 3 PointsPlus values
one cup of 1% milk: 3 PointsPlus values
Total damage = 12 PointsPlus values

This compared to 3 for my oatmeal with fruit. Frankly, I thought the cereal damage was going to be worse, so I am somewhat relieved. Nonetheless, it's obviously not an every day splurge. Frankly, it feels a little disturbing to admit to inhaling 2 and 1/2 cups of cereal. It's a little gross. My only point of redemption is that I always get in a workout before I do the damage.

This weekly indulgence aside, I have to self-administer back pats over the number of breakfast items that are now on my verboten list that used to be on my every day list:

Breakfast burritos. My all time favorite early morning indulgence.
Omelets with meat & cheese served with breakfast potatoes and toast. I haven't tried to calculate the PointsPlus values on this and frankly I'm afraid to.
Muffins and pastry of all sorts. This was a big change for me when I got serious on Weight Watchers. I used to knock back muffins the size of Brontosaurus eggs. I was once a completely unrepentant coffee cake trollop, until I discovered that the crunchy top effect was achieved by infusing gelatinized butter with a gravel made of sugar. Scones were another big favorite that I later learned were about 500 calories a pop.
Toast. Childhood favorite recipe: spread butter on bread, coat with sugar-cinnamon mix and bake in the toaster oven. It was my very excellent poor man's pastry. These days, toast sort of feels like empty calories without enough taste (outside of the jelly) to justify.
Granola. This one made me sad. I freaking loved granola. But. It. Just. Had. Too. Many. Calories. And no, I cannot be happy eating 1/4 cup of it and calling that a meal.

These days, I almost always treat the items on my verboten list as though they were heroin. One shot and I'd be re-addicted, so I avoid at almost all cost.

It's funny. I write out the list of things that I now avoid like a bad case of the plague, and they don't seem nearly as appealing as they once did (except the breakfast burrito). That said, I do question the all-or-nothing approach I sometimes take toward certain foods. It feels as though I should be better at managing my indulgences, and that I should not have to be so black & white.

Maybe I'm over-thinking all of this (try not agree to quickly). Frankly, I like my oatmeal breakfast. It's a lot of food, it tastes good, and it easily keeps me full until lunch. It's not as though I am deprived -- far from it. It just sometimes feels that way when I put foods on the banned list.

What about my cereal splurge?

Here's the thing for me. I just weighed-in today, and I'm now 3 years at Lifetime at goal. Throughout the past year, I have been having my little cereal blow-out once per week. It obviously hasn't had any effect, so maybe I need to be a little less freaky-deaky (to use a technical term) and stop secretly beating myself up for this apparent vice. I might also take a moment to laugh at my own ridiculousness for sweating an over-indulgence of Special K (you know, the diet cereal). I mean really Dave, get a manly vice.

In summary, I think I'm good with my effective ban on the aforementioned breakfast calorie bombs. I'm also good with my weekly giant bowl of cereal. It's a sad and un-masculine vice, but it's my sad and un-masculine vice.

My learnings from this.

Don't be a baby when it comes to calculating PointsPlus values for known indulgences. Knowledge is power, and hiding my head under a blanket won't make the bad numbers go away.
Openly acknowledge and incorporate my indulgences. I recognize that if I ate my responsible breakfast seven days a week, I might run the risk of throwing the whole bit away.

There. I got the confessions off my chest. Thanks for listening!

Cheers,

David

I scream. You scream. We all fear the ice cream. (sub title: my Waterloo food)

2011-03-23T13:21:00.004-04:00

Not too long ago, I was some how able to blame many of my over-eating failings on my dear, sweet and unsuspecting mother. She took it in remarkably good spirits, mostly because she didn't buy any of my arguments. Her failure to accept her blame has in turn led me to look for a new scapegoat in my over eating chronicles. What about my dad? He's much less agile than my mother and is therefore less able to defend himself. There must be something about my unhealthy habit inventory that I can lay on his door step.

And there is. Ice cream.

Can the sins of the father be passed along to the son? I say: most definitely.

My mom and dad came through last weekend to watch my older daughter perform in her middle school play (she was excellent, BTW). We were having our normal Saturday morning coffee chat when we started talking about the blog post I used to heap blame on my mom. We talked about how weird food habits seemed to be formed at a young age. They both talked about the fact that I was a chronic food sneaker even as a little kid. Their favorite story:

Once upon a time, there was a remarkable seven year old boy named David (OK, the "remarkable" adjective was my contribution)... Mom and dad were getting ready to go out for the evening. They had not quite closed the door to leave the house when they heard yours truly call out: "Hey guys, mom and dad are gone. Let's sneak!"

Fine. Guilty as charged. I was a seven year old food larcenist. Apparently, I was not a particularly bright one at that. My folks have gotten more mileage out of that story than I could ever hope to convey. Yet it all begs the question. From where did this sneaking habit originate?

My dad was confessing this past Saturday that he still raids the ice cream coffers when nobody is around. Apparently, to this day he cannot help himself. If ice cream is in the house, it is wholly unsafe.

Lots of us sneak. What I find interesting is that I have EXACTLY the same weakness. Ice cream. If ice cream is in a large container in the house, I will attack it like a crack-addled hun. The second I pull the lid and wield my spoon-weapon, I get all fuzzy in the head. My pulse jumps up to 140+, and I completely lose myself. It starts innocently enough with a single layer removal. Then I have to dig for a golf ball of cookie dough. Then I have to evenly eat around the hole I just made. Then I take another layer out. And so it goes until at least half of a container is gone. The sad part is that it does not even matter what size the container is. When I was in high school, I actually ate an entire half-gallon of ice cream in a single sitting.

Could I eat this in one sitting? Yes. And I'd eat

these two jokers if they got in my way.

I really cannot think of a single other food that has the same kind of narcotic effect on me. I really just cannot control myself around ice cream, particularly if it is in bulk form. For the life of me, I cannot explain why I feel this way. It almost seems animalistic when my ice cream frenzies happen. Sure ice cream tastes great, but lots of foods taste great. Ice cream has a unique emotional hold over me that I will never be able to explain or understand.

So how do I handle it? I really push to make sure we do not have big containers of the stuff in the house, and certainly not in plain sight. If I have an ice cream, it is almost always in the form of a Weight Watchers pre-packaged ice cream treat. Even then, I often find myself having two. When I take my kids to the ice cream shop, I almost never order my own cone. Why? I don't trust myself. If I shoot up ice cream once, won't I become an addict?

I now treat ice cream a little bit the way ex-smokers treat cigarettes: with as much avoidance and zero tolerance as can be mustered. When I see an ice cream cone, I try to make myself think it is 423 PointsPlus values. I may have to resort to imagining it being covered with elephant waste. Clearly gross and immature, but whatever it takes, right?

Fortunately, ice cream is pretty unique in that I almost have to treat it like a DEA Schedule III controlled substance (you know, like crystal meth). It's kind of sad really, because the stuff really does taste good. I generally don't endorse the practice of banning food groups, but sometimes desperate measures are required. For this, I blame my dad for whatever horrible mutated DNA strand he passed along to me.

So that's my kryptonite. What's yours?

Cheers,

dk

Weight maintenance and the Art of War. Using competition to keep my discipline on.

2011-03-13T16:40:00.000-04:00

I was in Chicago this past Friday to do an interview. As I usually do, I made my way to the hotel gym in the morning to get my day started. Normally, exercise on Friday mornings means my fav spin class, but not when I'm on the road. I walked into the hotel gym, and lo and behold, there stood a bonafide spinning bike. I was happy that I would be able to do my normal spin class with me as instructor and student. It was a decent workout, but at the end, I did not find myself heaving and gasping as I usually do in the actual class. I just couldn't replicate the intensity. What's up with that?

I have no doubt that there are people out there who are fully self-motivated and have the in-born engine to push themselves without external pressure. These people irritate me. Why? Because I'm frigging envious, that's why.

So on Sunday morning, I was able to fight against Daylight Savings Time and make my 8:30 spin class. I worked my tail off, and did everything I could to throw myself into cardiac arrest. So what was the difference? Throughout the class, I kept looking around to see who was working harder. Who was sweating more. Who seemed to be actually using their resistance knob on the bike and not faux turning. When my awesome neo-fascist spin teacher asked people to bump up their resistance, who was actually doing it. Who was better than me.

The great thing about a good spin class is that it has more than its fair share of obsessive exercise freaks, mutant cyborgs who seem to have no regard for their own pain and suffering. People who grimly plow through each hideous workout. Why is this a great thing? Because it gives me human benchmarks. When they push themselves, I push myself. When they have the resistance so high that they can barely turn their cranks, I try to go to the same place.

In another example, I was flying back from Chicago Friday night. I was upgraded to the front of the bus (there has to be some perk for travelling incessantly). The flight attendent started the beverage and meal service. I immediately found myself looking for the trim, hyper-disciplined looking serious lawyer types who would never deign to accept a glass of wine or a tray of junky airline food. When the flight attendent got to me, I proudly said "Diet Coke, nothing else thank you!" Well, I did eat the nuts she gave me (sadly without consideration for their unruly PointsPlus content), but I did say no to the calorie bomb meal service. Just like that, I was able to be one of those hyper-competitive puritan freaks. I felt good, responsible, and in control.

So here is the deal with me. I work at Weight Watchers, and I fully embrace the concept of group support. There is nothing I wouldn't do to help a fellow member in a meeting. However, if I'm just being honest, I need a little blood sport with my weight loss/maintenance. I need a little competition. I need to surround myself with people who seem to have their act together much more than myself. When I have it, I work harder, I push myself more, I stay engaged, and I stay focused.

The critical darling of its time...

I remember reading that Michael Jordan used to read the New York press before the Bulls played the Knicks so he could get irritated with the trash talking and then get fired up to play. I get this implicitly. I love competition. It gets my juices going. I love competition in just about everything I do (I can even beat you at being lazy -- don't test me!). I love it mostly because I like to be challenged. I need it to stay focused.

My love of competition does not mean I want to lose more weight than everyone else. It's just that I can't stand the idea of people being better at it than me. And believe me, lots of people are better at it, and their mere presence keeps me in the game.

Maintenance can seem like a long time. I need those stimuli to keep me interested and to keep me engaged. Sometimes it's the truly superficial (e.g., swim suit season is coming!), and sometimes it's for the right reasons -- I want to live a long time. Competition is just another little tool in my motivational arsenal that I find pretty consistently helpful. Applying it to my weight loss process seems a little weird, but it works for me. I guess it's my inner Ares.

I'm told that the use of competition in weight loss is particularly popular amongst the men folk. Our inner tribal warrior frequently gets the best of us, so the least we can do is to try to use our beastly tendencies for the good of our health. Beyond the women are from Venus and men are war mongering freaks stereotypes, I suspect that many of us use competition on some level to keep our motivation going.

As an interesting side point, I'm having a minor cat fight with @JackSht over college basketball while I write this blog. Duke just won. And Carolina just lost. This pleases me greatly. Now it's Final Four time. Competition is in the air like a fresh Spring breeze. Just in time for swimsuit season.

Superficially yours,

Dk

Keeping the wolves at bay. Deterrence and the art of grazing control.

2011-03-06T14:02:00.001-05:00

Sometimes, I really have to take a moment to laugh at myself and my own little bizarre methods to maintain a grip on eating reality.

For those that have been following my little chronicle of maintaining my weight loss on Weight Watchers, you have heard me talk about the fact that I have "mastered" the healthy lifestyle in many places, but that I still have my perilous zones. One of my biggest is a special little cabinet in our kitchen that principally houses various ingredients for baking plus a few snack items. This is the place where I go when I'm either getting home from work (before dinner) or when I'm aimlessly wandering in the kitchen on the weekends.

So what specifically is in this magical cabinet? It's full of nuts, chocolate chips for baking, and most recently a very large bag of M&M's, also intended for baking. My DSW is an active and proficient chef, presiding over Chez Kirchhoff. Recently, my two girls have joined her staff, and my 11 year-old has developed a love for baking cookies. It seems that I have a love for pilfering her ingredients.

Which brings me to my story. For quite some time, there has been a very large bag of M&M's sitting in the magic cabinet which was intended to be used for cookies for a school bake sale. For some reason, there was a change of plans, and the M&M's went untouched. Fortunately for me, they were sealed. You see, there is a code among thieves, and I do not steal from un-open bags of ingredients. Rather, my preferred method is to gradually take imperceptible quantities of chocolate chips and nuts in delta force-worthy sneak attacks. However, if the bag stays closed or VERY tightly sealed, I leave it be. This all works very well until the bag gets opened, which it did. Sure enough I started making a routine of grabbing a small handful of M&M's ever three to four days. Not terrible, but this is exactly the kind of grazing habit I'm trying to quit.

Help us! We're trapped and can't get out!

What could I do given that the bag of M&M's was fairly giant in size? In a moment of utter brilliance, I put a bag of flour on top of it as a deterrent. Seriously, I did this about a week ago, and I haven't had an M&M since. It was as though the bag of flour would be heavy enough to ward off any mid-afternoon weekend raids. Kind of like a safe. Seriously. How old am I? What's more embarrassing is that this actually seemed to work. Apparently, seeing the bag has been a useful reminder to me that I should not sneak. Maybe I need to put little Post-it notes on each piece of snackware that says: "Not for David to eat!!!!"

I guess it takes all kinds of efforts to control one's little private obesogenic environment. This got me thinking. Maybe I should also be more actively calculating PointsPlus values for my little evening indulgences. I will be the first to admit that I can track with the best of them in the morning and afternoon, but that after three years on maintenance I have a hard time keeping the thread in the evening. Particularly, those post-6 PM bites, licks and tastes. Definitely a challenge on weekends. At minimum, forcing myself to at least acknowledge the PointsPlus impact of these excursions could be helpful.

So, off I went this Sunday morning to fully accept the consequences of my actions by reminding myself of the number of PointsPlus values for some of my favorite not-so-friendly indulgences. What are those these days? In no particular order: almonds, bourbon, wine and, in a special guest appearance, M&M's.

I keep forgetting how much of a giant bad deal liquor is on the program these days. Quite some time ago, I developed a fondness for an evening glass of bourbon on the rocks. I can nurse my one for the night for well over an hour, and it just seems so civilized and restrained. Should be no problem from a PointsPlus perspective, right? Apparently not. It seems that one of those short glasses, stuffed with ice, is still enough to hold 1/4 cup of bourbon. What's the price? 10 bloody PointsPlus values. Crud. It makes the five ounce pour of wine at a 5 PointsPlus value seem like a bargain. [Note: thanks for the comment from Anonymous showing me my glaring math fail. 2 oz bourbon is only 5 POINTS. I had inadvertently plugged in 4 oz. All is good in the world again!]

But it seemed such a small bag?!

What about almonds? They're healthy right? Well, they are most definitely healthy, but that are also disturbingly dense with energy. I started getting the pre-packaged Trader Joes almonds thinking that this could help me avoid my eat-em by the handful habit. While this is true, a small pre-made bag is still enough to hold 38 of the little buggers which knocks up a 6 PointsPlus hit. Not terrible if this is the ONLY thing I'm eating beyond dinner, but not really the stuff intended for a mindless bite before dinner.

The whole exercise was all a little sad, but I suppose that knowledge is power. This gives me an extra reason to look into alternative strategies for both snacks and drinks. I've been meaning to re-allocate my liquid allowances to light beer, and I now have a good incentive to do so. I think it's also time to think about moving away from almond grazing forever and find some less energy dense evening snack alternative. It's just not worth the hit.

Thanking you for joining another episode of Dave's Navel Gazing Adventures!

Cheers,

dk

Life lessons from skiing. Loosening the coils of my inner spring.

2011-02-27T11:43:00.001-05:00

It's Sunday morning, and I just got in from my family ski vacation late last night. The vacation was fantastic, and the quality time with family and friends was superb. That said, I have to admit that I always look forward to getting back into my regular, if not somewhat OCD, routines.

From a health perspective, I would say that the vacation was a solid performance on the personal responsibility front. As planned, I ate a pretty healthy breakfast every day, even on the flights to and from Utah. I was fairly responsible for lunch, and as planned, I lightened up for dinner. I didn't really eat much, if any, junk during non-meal time. I also kept it pretty reasonable in terms of being non-obsessive and even allowing myself indulgences such as dessert and (horrors!) non-light beer. I know, what a wild and crazy guy! I had fun, and I'm not returning feeling like a horribly nasty person.

Wait. This was a ski trip, right? Yes it was. Utah got absolutely dumped with snow last week, putting on roughly four feet over an eight day period. For the powder freaks (not me), it was manna. For my part, I got on the slopes five of the six available days. I spent one day off nursing a head cold and cranking out some accumulated procrastination work. It was good exercise, and it was great to be outdoors, head cold or not.

As I noted on my earlier post, I am still a pretty inexperienced skier with this being my sixth year out on a mountain for any appreciable time. It's not easy to pick up this sport at my older age (my rationalization, anyway), and I only get in one week per year. As a result, I am not what anyone would call an effortless and proficient slope god.

In an effort to try to elevate to a higher level of competency, I did what I always do. I looked for professional help, and I secured the services of a ski instructor. I told him my goal and wish was to simply be able to cruise down the blues and double blus without a care in the world. It was through the process of trying to improve my skiing game that I learned a little more about myself.

I was pretty envious as I watched men and women of all ages effortlessly swooping down the mountain, barely moving their bodies. It was as if they were born with skis attached to their limbs. They were able to ski the way I was able to ride a bike -- without even thinking about it. Me? I approached skiing with the intensity of an astronaut attempting to land on the moon for the very frist time. Every muscle was tensed and on high alert. I was always fully aware of the exact instructions being sent to my left and my right ankles. Each new turn was a completely new thought process. I would wrench my skis each time thinking that there was no possible way that they would respond and I would be sent barreling off a cliff into an endless abyss. As far as my stance goes, I was tightly hunched over my skis, convinced that if I pulled myself up, I would fall over backwards.

My instructor watched me and said, "you must get really tired when you ski." It's true, my quads would have a nice burn on every steep(ish) run. He tried to convince me that I was relying too much on my muscles rather than my skeletal structure resulting in a massively inefficient and energy intensive process. Sadly, my first reaction was: awesome, more Activity Points! Regardless of my obsessive want for calorie burn, I was there to learn. I reluctantly started to stand up more and started using more of my ankles and knees to keep my torso pointed down the hill. It was easier and it worked. Go figure.

Next came the skis. My default approach to turning was to treat each turn like a hockey stop, literally pulling my skis up so I could swing the tails out. My instructor's next course of business was to get me to start using the tips of my skis to turn rather than the tails (it seems so obviously to write it, less so to do it). He encouraged me to relax and to take more patient turns, letting the skis do the the work. What do you know? That worked too! I'm not going to say that I was graceful by the end, but I looked less like a broken erector set snow plowing down the mountain.

I have to admit that I was pretty hard on myself for not being a better skier. My instructor then reminded me that he had been skiing since he was 18 months old. It was natural to him. Me? I was firmly stuck in my head and was completely over-thinking the entire process. My natural instinct was to dig in harder, edge more aggressively, and use every possible muscle I could find to overpower the process. Therein lies the story of me.

I don't even want to think about
what my K is ...

Most people who know me would fairly describe me as a pretty tightly wound and intense person (please stop snickering!), particularly when I'm immersed in what I consider to be an intense activity. I naturally obsess and stress. It's part of what has allowed me to achieve the things I have achieved. However, I have increasingly recognized that it's also a bit excessive and unnecessary.

I will admit to the fact that I have taken the same kind of intensity and anxiety into my effort to become a healthier person on the Weight Watchers program. I will admit to treating each meal selection process to the same kind of hyper-intense thinking that I put into each turn of my skis. This approach was helpful to helping me avoid from wiping out on the mountain as well as from wiping out on the dinner table. However, it's frankly exhausting and not really necessary anymore. Eating healthily and exercising regularly need not be an olympic sporting event. For me, I always run the risk of getting too much into my own head in staying on program.

I am now entering my third year of maintenance. My goal for myself is for this process to become increasingly effortless and natural, not a high wire act. With this in mind, I will seek to enter this new week with a calm resolve to simply track my PointsPlus values and to hit the gym. I will simply make common sense and healthy food choices, and I will try to be mindful of mindless eating. Simple. Easy. Common sense. Exhale.

Of course, I second guess myself in healthy life for the same reason I second guess myself in skiing. I have only been living this way for the past five to ten years just as I have only been skiing for the past six. I didn't put on my first pair of skis at 18 months, nor have I lived healthily since leaving the nest. Therefore, my tendency has been to assume a spectacular wipeout in both eating and in skiing, even though deep down I knew that I could calmly avoid it in either.

My ski instructors last words to me were this: "You know how to ski and you know what to do. Get out of your head, and start enjoying yourself." Good advice for skiing. Good advice for living.

Cheers,

David

I need a vacation! I also need to not gain weight...

2011-02-13T14:43:00.001-05:00

After all of the ensuing debate following last week's post, I'm kind of bushed. I think I have now figured out why most CEO's don't write blogs where people can post and comment at will(!). That said, it is more than worth the occasional bloody nose so I can have a whole new way (in addition to going to meetings) to stay grounded on what's going on out there. In any case, I really do appreciate the feedback, both the better and the less better.

I've got one more busy week in front of me with a quarterly earnings release, a trip to visit some meetings in Baltimore, and a bunch of other stuff. As of Friday night, I rush home to finish packing so I can take off with my sweet, understanding family for some quality non-work time.

I'm rolling up to my second year anniversary as a Lifetime member in good standing. I'm in a very good place, and maintenance has never felt better. The 3 PM apple-snack trick has been just one example of my happy food place. It's not as though I haven't had my lifestyle challenges. The Superbowl last Sunday was a particularly brutal example of how to be a thousand miles away from on-plan utopia. Who knew that I would love pimento cheese dip quite so much?

If I have one particular habit that I really owe my maintenance success to, it is clearly exercise. Food lapses come and go, but exercise has been my constant OP buddy. I've been getting at least an hour in for six, and sometimes seven, days per week now for as long as I can remember. At this point, it really is just habit. I would characterize my workout frequency more as an example of my captivity to ingrained routine than to any lofty notion of discipline. When I don't get my workout in, I just feel kind of off. It's kind of like walking out of the house with a shoe missing (not that this doesn't happen).

I have been able to form my religious Rube Goldberg workout routine because I am largely in control of my environment. I can almost always find a way to navigate to a weight room for my four day lifting split. Finding a piece of cardio equipment is usually a pretty manageable task. I am pretty good at picking hotels that either have a decent gym or are located close to one that allows me to buy a day pass.

All this comes to a crashing halt next week, and I will have to rely on all different exercise options. We're going skiing.

Really hoping I don't end up like this...

I didn't even start skiing until about five years ago as I was entering my fortieth year. Now we go once per year for a week, enough for me to get a little better each year. Learning to ski at an older age is not for the feint of heart, particularly for those of us who do not cherish the idea of embracing a tree at high speed. You would be hard pressed to identify anyone else on the mountain who looks quite as tense and un-fluid as yours truly. The best visual I can give you is that of a person with terrible constipation wearing restrictive knee and back braces.

So do I find skiing fun? I think so, but I cannot be totally sure. I am more than a little envious of those people who can effortlessly glide and swoop down the slopes without a care in the world. For example, my kids. It is an exercise is complete humility for a so-called industry leader executive-guy to be routinely humbled by a 10 year old little girl. She doesn't actively dress me down with insults and taunts, but it's almost more sad that she periodically has to wait patiently for me to catch-up with nothing but a sweet smile on her face.

Do I enjoy skiing? Yes. I like trying to get better at it each year, and it's definitely a worthy challenge. I also appreciate the fact that it's a great workout. Terrible and risk adverse skiers like myself get an exercise advantage over all of you pros. Why? Because we have to take three to four times as many turns to get down a slope. That's work.

This gets me to the point of my post. I have ever increasingly become a big fan of active vacations. Sitting on a lounge chair with a frozen drink keeps me happy for about two, maybe three days, and then I start climbing the walls. I love a vacation where I can hardly stay up past 8 PM because I am so physically wrecked. So no, there will be no weight room for me for the next week, and there will be no two wheeled vehicles. Yet, I have no doubt that I will have more than enough AP's to keep me going in good health.

From an eating perspective, I will follow my usual vacation plan: keep breakfast healthy and OP, stay sane for lunch, and let it hang loose a bit more for dinner.

I'm not sure if I will get back to post another one of these before I get back, but I will be thinking of all of you!!!

Cheers,

dk

2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans now out in the wild. The recommendations look curiously familiar...

2011-02-06T12:12:00.000-05:00

Last week the US government through a joint effort between HHS and USDA published the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). They are required by law to update these guidelines every five years. This is a huge effort that has a lot of very smart and knowledgable people combing over mountains of scientific studies using a method called systematic evidence-based review methodology to answer roughly 180 scientific questions related to the way we should eat. They have now published the results of this, which can be found on their website (http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/dietaryguidelines.htm). For those curious about such things, it is actually a pretty easy and interesting read, and it is a nice place to find a lot of fun and interesting facts and analysis, all nicely collected and collated.

The primary audience for the DGA is professionals that use the recommendations to help shape policy, nutrition programs and educational materials. The Center for Nutritional Policy and Promotion (CNPP), the group that publishes the DGA, will at some point also put out some materials intended for the consumer audience (i.e., all of us). This is where the famous food pyramid first came on the scene in 1992, though the USDA published its first food guide in 1917. The first Dietary Guidelines were published in 1980.

I have a vague recollection of being a teenager and hearing about such recommendations. I recall something about eating so-many cereals and grains and that many fishes and meats and X fruits and vegetables and maybe not quite so many sugars and fats. I suppose that many of these guidelines were somehow incorporated into the nutritional education I vaguely recall seeing in school from time-to-time. Nonetheless, I did grow up with a notion that somewhere out there was an official guide on the correct way to eat. In truth, I think it would be hard for me to say that any of this had a huge influence on what I should eat other than the very clear message that fat was bad.

Over the years, there have been a number of iterations on the pyramid. In truth, I personally found the visual somewhat confusing. The stuff at the top of the pyramid was foods to restrict, but isn't the top of the pyramid supposed to be awesome stuff (i.e., the pinnacle of food)? Further, I could not for the life of me ever remember what was in those pyramid bands. Nor could I remember how much of what kinds of food I was supposed to eat. Frankly, the whole thing was kind of confusing for me, so I never paid it much personal attention.

According to some, it's a good thing I didn't pay too close attention as the food pyramid has come under fire from various places over the years. It was perceived as being too heavily focused against fat while ignoring the impact of excessive carbohydrates. Nutritional science is a very political and controversial topic area capable of spurring brawls among academics, journalists, politicians and food companies.

So lo and behold, we now have new Dietary Guidelines. So what's in them? Mostly, common sense, and that is a good and welcome addition. The 2010 DGA can be summarized as having two primary recommendations:

Maintain calorie balance over time to achieve and sustain a healthy weight. Translation: don't eat too much and exercise more to lose weight and sustain the losses.
Focus on consuming nutrient-dense foods and beverages. Translation: eat more food that is high in nutrients and low in calorie density. Translation of translation: eat mostly food that's good for you.

The DGA then goes on to give a summary of foods to limit, mostly recommending that we limit sodium and only use a small portion of our calories on foods with added sugars and fats (i.e., junk food). More interesting to me was their summary of foods to focus on. For the latter, here are their guidelines (their words, not mine):

Increase vegetable and fruit intake.
Eat a variety of vegetables, especially dark-green and red and orange vegetables and beans and peas.
Consume at least half of all grains as whole grains. Increase whole-grain intake by replacing refined grains with whole grains.
Increase intake of fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products, such as milk, yogurt, cheese, or fortified soy beverages.
Choose a variety of protein foods, which include seafood, lean meat and poultry, eggs, beans and peas, soy products, and unsalted nuts and seeds.
Increase the amount and variety of seafood consumed by choosing seafood in place of some meat and poultry.
Replace protein foods that are higher in solid fats with choices that are lower in solid fats and calories and/or are sources of oils.
Use oils to replace solid fats where possible.
Choose foods that provide more potassium, dietary fiber, calcium, and vitamin D, which are nutrients of concern in American diets. These foods include vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and milk and milk products.

One simple mnemonic they have already introduced is to fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables. Frankly, I am hoping they stay with the visual of the plate rather than the pyramid as it seems much more intuitive and easy to remember.

Even in it's simplified form, along with any good visuals that they might introduce, it's one thing to know what we should eat. It's quite another to put it into action. Therefore, the 2010 DGA finally goes on to encourage people to put into place eating patterns that reinforce all of the above guidelines.

What if there was a system that used the principle of budgeting and keeping count in a way that supported the kinds of healthy choices by promoted by the 2010 DGA? Such a system might use some form of simple measure that allowed us to know how much we were eating and stick to a budget each day. It would further use a currency that rewarded healthy choices. It would also allow for indulgences, but it would help us to make more informed choices by making them a little more expensive. It might even get behind the half-your-plate of veggies & fruits by assigning a value of Zero to fruits and non-starchy vegetables. In summary, said system that would promote vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains and low fat dairy, but do so in a fairly simple and straight forward way.

Sound like a system we know? It's PointsPlus. As I read through the 2010 DGA, I realized that I've basically been eating this way even more since I started following the new program.

I know this post sounds horribly self-congratulatory, but I can't help it. I'm flat out proud of the program that my co-workers developed and that our Leaders and delivering. If the 2010 DGA is the goal, then PointsPlus can be the path. It's nice to be on the right path.

Cheers,

Learning to master the mysterious Chinese food wheel. Field report from Shanghai...

2011-01-30T17:48:00.000-05:00

One of the most interesting parts of my job is having the opportunity to attend lots of Weight Watchers where I don't even understand the language. Given my lack of language skills (typical American, I'm afraid), one might find it strange that I am often asked by my local co-workers, "What did you think of the leader?" Interestingly, you can tell a lot about a Weight Watchers meeting by just watching people's faces, listening to their laughter and observing a free wheeling discussion. I am always amazed by how much Weight Watchers meetings are alike from country-to-country around the world. Members are members and Leaders are Leaders.

There are huge cultural differences across countries, yet I would observe that people fundamentally are more alike than different in their needs, wants, hope and dreams as they relate to weight management. They may eat different foods in a different way, but their fundamental approach to adopting a healthy lifestyle is remarkably similar. We all eat for emotional reasons, we all graze, and we all struggle to make healthy choices in an increasingly unforgiving food and activity environment.

This was all on display during my trip last week to visit our new office in Shanghai. It was the second time I had been in the past few months. As always, jet lag in China can be brutal (I averaged about 4 hours of fitful sleep each night), but it is always an energizing experience to be there.

Jacki's meeting in SuperBrand Center in Pudong

I had a chance to get to a meeting my first night at one of our local centers. Sitting in that meeting, I was observing what was unmistakably a bonafide Weight Watchers meeting. The rhythms and emotions of the meeting were identical to what I have seen in so many meetings around the world. The Leader (Jacki) was an absolute star, and her members were clearly energized by her. It was also a thrill to see a member achieve Lifetime membership in the very meeting I attended. Just like they do it in NY!

Yet, following the Weight Watchers program in China is a very different and somewhat more challenging (at least initially) experience. First off, China's nutritional labeling requirements are pretty sparse, so it is not easy to find out what is in the food on grocery store shelves. Second, Chinese in the big urban cities tend to eat out very frequently, often one of the most challenging places to make well-informed choices. Just to keep things interesting, the Chinese often partake of family-style eating with a spinning wheel in which new dishes are periodically dropped into the mix.

In this context, try to imagine keeping track of your Points! A spoonful of this and a spoonful of that. These aren't foods that show up on the website of a fast food chain, perfectly portioned and precisely measured for calories, fat and fiber (let alone protein, carbs, fat and fiber). Yet, despite all of this, we have scores of members who are in fact learning how to use Points to manage their lifestyle and as their tool of choice in learning healthier habits.

How could this be? For starters, the local Weight Watchers team undertook the painstaking process to build a 20,000 food database, the majority of which are a wide variety of restaurant dishes. They worked with local chefs to make many of them and then measure it's nutritional content. China has eight distinct regional cuisines with multiple sub-cuisines including the big eight: Shandong, Sichuan, Yue, Fujian, Hunan, Anhui, and Zhejiang. Our team has developed dishes covering all of them.

The wheel of mystery! Chinese family style

So, if you are a member in China, the data is there. What about portion sizes? The Chinese tend to be quite a bit less precise in how they serve and portion their food. It tends to be a spoon here and a spoon there. This is particularly true in family style. Therefore, our Chinese members learn to estimate by keeping track of spoonfuls and by grouping (e.g., four vegetable dishes, three meats, etc.) to make the process more intuitive and manageable. This is much of what they learn in their Weight Watchers meetings, and these are the tips they share with each other.

I had my own family style experience last Wednesday night when I had dinner with the local team. Sure enough, there was a parade of dishes, few of which I recognized, making their way through the table. My Chinese colleagues talked me through how to keep score, and even my easily distracted brain was able to roughly keep track. What could have been a very intimidating experience for someone on program was actually very manageable.

I came away from the trip with a couple of themes floating through my head:

The greatest value of tracking PointsPlus values is in the mindfulness, not necessarily the precision. For me, 75% of the battle in tracking is simply doing it. The process alone is enough to make me aware of how much I'm eating and what I'm eating. Whether the final tally is 11 vs. 13 PointsPlus values is frankly going to have less impact on my long term success on the plan. The Chinese use estimation all the time, and our members there are having weight loss success very similar to what we see in other countries.
If you are in an environment where you are eating new and different foods all the time, you learn to loosen up. It's been periodically very easy for me to fall into a rut of eating the same meals over and over because it is a safe and easy practice. Yet, the work that is actually required to introduce new dishes onto my menu is not nearly as onerous as it seems at first blush. I really should mix it up more. If I can stay OP in family style meals 8,000 miles away, I can certainly try a new lunch order. Variety keeps it all interesting.

Should you find yourself wandering in Shanghai in need of a meetings fix, check out the website (www.weightwatchers.com.cn) and stop by. You're always welcome no matter what country you're in.

Cheers,

dk

How I got heavy. My eyes deceived me.

2011-01-23T14:10:00.000-05:00

Picking up where I left off last week (i.e., placing the blame for all my food issues on my dear sweet mom), I was thinking about how I went from being terribly skinny to quite stout. As I have mentioned on my prior posts, by senior year in high school I was 6'3" but only about 170 pounds. Skinny. Very skinny. By the end of freshman year in college, I was clocking in at around 210 pounds. Not a bad weight for me, but it was indeed a 40 pound gain.

To what do I attribute this impressive weight achievement? Change of metabolism? I sincerely doubt that anyone's body chemistry can change that quickly in 12 months (of course, did not stop me from proclaiming it was a change of metabolism). So what did it? Beer? I'm sure this didn't help. However, I suspect most of it came from a very simple change: unbridled food consumption. Not a very complicated explanation.

In college, I finally found full access to the food outlet that I cherished the most: the cafeteria. Here's the deal with the younger version of me and cafeterias. I LOVED THEM! Some people might find the thought of warmed-over food left too long under heating lamps served with giant ladles icky. Not me.

I can still remember the first time I ever went to a Smorgasbord-themed restaurant when I was about 14. For the kid who felt deprived of bad food, this was a revelation. You could eat as much rubbish as you could possibly jam into your gullet. Seeing an infinite selection of deserts was beyond my comprehension. The visual impact of the whole thing was dizzying for poor little deprived me.

As a side note, how is it that the country that exported the Smogasbord, Sweden, has much less of an obesity issue? Maybe it's because they only eat there on special occasions. Interesting!

Smorgasbord/cafeteria style all-you-can-eat (AYCE) was not an issue from a weight/nutrition point of view when I was still at home because my interaction with these kinds of places was pretty infrequent. Then college happend. I spent my freshman year eating in AYCE cafeterias every single day of the year. I think back now to the amount of food I ate at a single sitting, and it's frankly disturbing. I clearly remember eating gigantic salads heaped with egg fragments (the awesome reconstituted kind), bacon-like substances, blue cheese and at least a cup of blue cheese dressing on top. And then I had a burger and fries. And then I had desert. I must have been plowing through at least 80 to 100 PointsPlus values a day. The fact that I didn't end freshman year at 300 pounds was a miracle that I can only attribute to still having a rabbit-like metabolism.

I kept my love of the megadeath buffet for many years. I was always a fan of the huge Sunday brunch spreads at hotels. I cannot remember ever going to one where I didn't have seconds or thirds.

So what was it about these roman food orgies that I found so appealing? I have a theory. Over the past five or six years, I still have had occasion to indulge a Sunday brunch binge. Every time I would look at the huge desert spreads, my heart would begin to pound. Yet, every time I eat what looks like the best looking piece of pie ever, it never failed to let me down.

There you have it. Buffets look awesome, but the food itself rarely delivers. My theory is that my love of buffets comes down solely to visual impact. There seems to be some sort of link between my optic nerve and the part of my brain that makes me act like wild animal shoving its snout directly into the food platters. Yes, I'm one of those horrible people that will eat food directly from the platter because my table is entirely too far away for me to wait.

In contrast, reading a menu has a totally different effect on me. I cannot actually see the food, so I tend to make much saner choices.

For the most part, I have now trained my brain to recognize that huge displays of shiny food will rarely deliver the joy I think they will. Therefore, I am much better at navigating buffets and making good choices. That's good as I'm going to be in a hotel for most of next week. Maybe I should wear a blindfold.

Cheers,

dk

A man and his messed up relationship with food. Oliver Twist gets a paycheck and look what happens!

2011-01-17T11:45:00.001-05:00

So from where did my sometimes uncontrollable food lust originate? Call me strange (you wouldn't be the first), but I find self-examination fascinating. I consider myself kind of a freak at heart, so I find the process of understanding the origins of my freakishness to be an incredibly interesting exercise. This is the case for numerous aspects of my life, but it is very much true for my relationship with food.

Time to break out my armchair Dr. Freud and get into some deep exploration. Why do I have strong impulses to overeat when I'm around food?

Well, it couldn't possibly be me. There must be someone I can blame. There must be some despotic figure who waged a campaign early in my life to create my unnatural tendencies to binge on food. I know! It's my mom!

Just like Coke!!!!

Lest you think I'm an awful person, I think the world of my mother. She didn't have much to work with when it came to me, and I think I turned out pretty OK. She did a great job raising me, and she has been an excellent role model for parenting. Yet, it is impossible to parent without inflicting at least two or three unforeseen consequences on your offspring. As a parent myself, I often wonder about the myriad of ways I am unknowingly messing up my kids. So I feel a little bad for publicly teasing my loving mom, but I really can't help it. Some stories just need to be told.

The most important bit of context about my mom is that she is incredibly frugal. She had to be. My dad spent his entire career as a basic research chemist working for the US government (NBS/NIST and DOE for those curious), so we lived on a middle class government salary (contrary to anything you might have heard on Fox News, this is not the way to become a millionaire). She was taking care of two kids while my dad was getting his PhD, with literally less than two cents to scrape together. Ultimately, she was taking care of four kids. My parents put all four kids through college, including their ungrateful third child (me) into an over-priced institution in Durham, NC. She worked full time as a typist, earning practically no money so they could cover tuition. It is also worth noting that my mother's mother was a product of the Great Depression. She was even tighter. Given all of the above, my mother's frugality would give the most hardened Scot a run for his precious money.

When it came to frugality, there was no better evidence than the food in my house. A few notable examples come to mind:

Lunch bags. Other kids got those cool, pre-cut lunch bags made explicitly for carrying their lunch to school. I got whatever large brown shopping bag happened to be around. I kind of looked like a homeless person carrying his belongings in a tattered brown bag.
Bread. We never got fresh bread from the store. Instead, we stocked up on day-old bread that was on sale, and then stored it in the downstairs industrial strength freezer. I didn't complain as much as my siblings (my recollection, anyway), so I tended to get the heals, not the normal slices from the middle. That's right. My sandwiches were made out of day-old, frozen-then-thawed heal slices. Wonder Bread you ask? Heck no! Always generic.
Cheese. Did I get those awesome tasting processed cheese slices that the cool kids got? Please. Bologna? Never! I got Safeway brand longhorn cheddar cheese. Therefore, my prehistoric crust sandwiches were served with basic cheddar cheese. And mustard. That's it. Some days I did get PB&J.
What else came in my cavernous lunch sack? Usually a brown banana.
What about a treat with my lunch? No. I was the kid that literally had nothing good to trade at lunch in the cafeteria. Oh, the shame of it all!!!!
What about buying my meal from the cafeteria? Maybe 3-4 times per year.
OK, lunch was sad, what about breakfast? Anything tasty and sweet on the menu? No. My family was early adopters into the cult of private label. In those days, Safeway sold a private label which was literally a white box with black letters with catchy derivative names like "Oats of Cheery". No Lucky Charms for this young man.
A personal favorite example was milk. We got the huge box of powdered skim milk. Just like the astronauts!!! I don't think I tasted full-test whole milk until I was 16 years old.
Dinner was usually a reasonable portioned, healthy dinner. Fortunately, my mom was a good cook, so this was the eating highlight.
What about fast food? I probably ate out 5 to 10 times per year. McDonalds was reserved to the trips to and from vacation.
What about the drawer in the kitchen full of tasty treats and cookies? Didn't exist.
Did I have desert ever? Yes. One night each week, I got the "Treat of the Week". It was usually a Black Cow, constituted of private label (Cragmont) root beer and private label ice milk (not to be confused with ice cream).

So how did this affect me as a young guy growing up? First off, I was REALLY skinny. By senior year in high school, I was 6'3" and about 170 lbs. You could count ribs on me up to the age of 17. [In my next post, I will tell you how I miraculously gained 40 lbs in about eight months in college.]

How did this affect my attitudes toward food? Frankly, I used to always think about those kids that had full and unfettered access to branded, processed foods, not to mention frequent access to fast food. I looked at their kitchens, and all I could think was that they had the good life. They had luxury. They had dining extravagance. I felt like the poor kid wearing my Sears Toughskin jeans (which I did until my old brother pleaded for fashion clemency on my behalf), carrying my big brown shopping bag with a crusty cheese sandwich and a brown banana.

To this day, my palms get sweaty when I see branded food. I still cannot stand the idea of buying generic food. Why? The most expensive food must certainly be of higher quality. Right?

I think some people grow up with frugality, and they carry it with them. Others rebel with all their might. I clearly fell into the latter camp. For me, there is something comforting about being able to have and buy any food I want, whenever I want it. This was particularly the case for many years when it came to eating out. I used to rock a mean Big Mac back in the days after I left home.

Just like the Armani kind!!!!

In retrospect, my mother created a pretty healthy environment for her kids. It's not like I was hungry growing up, and I was clearly not obese, nor malnourished. Most of the indulgences I dreamed of are exactly the types of foods that are now being vilified in the war on obesity, particularly childhood obesity. Maybe my mom was just ahead of her time. However, I think that I somehow formed a link between the Oliver Twist food I had and the social status and wealth indicators that I so badly wanted. Acceptance came from wanting to fit in with the mainstream of my school, no matter how unhealthy that mainstream might have been.

What about the Toughskins jeans effect? Same bloody thing. I love pretty clothes now, and I spend too much money on them. Frankly, I went through a period of time when I didn't even like buying clothes on sale. Somehow, it made me feel less worthy. I'm over that, though I still like a nice set of threads (channeling my Greg Brady here).

So that's the story of how one man developed an unhealthy relationship with food. It had nothing to do with food itself, but rather my own perception of social acceptance and worth. Strange, isn't it?!

Cheers,

dk

What do airplane nuts have in common with tissues? Bring on the emotional eating!

2011-01-08T16:58:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I catch a reflection of myself in the mirror, and I realize that I'm a guy who works for Weight Watchers. Even more, I'm a mannish Lifetime Member who works for Weight Watchers. Granted, I fancy myself a pretty modern and sensitive dude, I am still a guy. One of my primary reasons for writing this blog in the first place was to use it as an opportunity to explore the endlessly rich topic of weight management from a man's perspective.

The operating assumption is that when it comes to weight loss, men are from Mars (like the candy?) and women are from Venus. In particular, there is a frequently cited belief that men are not emotional eaters. We eat because we are hungry, not because we are sad. Or do we?...

The past six weeks have been pretty crazy, and they have certainly not be devoid of stress. New program launch, new marketing campaigns, annual budgets, etc. etc. Rewarding and exciting, but more than a little intense. Last week was particularly so. Take the nuttiness of the first week of January when we get crazy busy and add on top a few unforeseen personal dramas, and I was a slightly over-wrought little puppy. As I sit here on Saturday, I've already forgotten and/or put into perspective most of the things that were causing me stress. What I do remember very clearly is how I channeled my emotions.

For example, I was flying down to Dallas, and the nice flight attendant offered me a cup of warm nuts (and I love nuts). I didn't need them, but dammit, I had a tough day. I deserved this food that I didn't need. I came home late from work another night, and I was a little wrecked and exhausted. There was a nice piece of fudge in the fridge. I wasn't really hungry, but dammit, I deserve a nice piece of fudge (don't we all).

In the broad context, I had a pretty good week in most of my eating choices, but I found myself being fascinated by these little food salves that I was applying to my wounded soul. Holy cow. I was self-medicating with food! Put on some Barry Manilow, throw in a box of tissues, and I could have let loose a pretty respectable cry. This was no good! I was at risk of being kicked out of the Little Rascals He-Man-Woman-Haters-Club (please don't shred me if you've never heard of this 1930 cultural reference). I am already bracing myself for the abuse I will likely get from some of my friends who read this blog. [Then again, they are reading a weight loss blog, so who are they to judge?]

Yet, I have a sneaking suspicion that more men are emotional eaters than would like to admit. "I had an awesome day working the stock market. I deserve a steak!" "I lost all my money on the stock market. I deserve a steak." "It's Friday, the work week is over and I deserve to eat an entire still-living bovine. With a nice Bearnaise sauce." "I'm bored. I want to chew off my finger tips." "I just got dumped. I want some ice cream." What? You don't think men say the last one? They may not say it, but it doesn't mean they don't do it.

So! Professor Plum in the Library with a Wrench!
The Limbic System made me eat the cake!

As a guy, if I can't admit that I use food to deal with a mood, then I will be doomed to a harrowing and tragic life of unneeded airplane nuts. Hyperbole, but you know what I mean. With the application of a nice dose of rational hindsight, it seems kind of ridiculous to use food as a form of cheap anti-depressants. Why? For me, it's basically using food self-indulgence to justify emotional self-indulgence and self-pity. It's bad enough when I'm bummed out or stressed. Why make the feeling worse by compounding it the regret from a minor food binge?

So what to do? Cognitive behavioral therapy would seem to suggest that I find a way to recognize in the moment when I'm reaching for the food "medicine". For the short term, I need to remind myself that what ever is polluting the Limbic system of my brain (the part of the gray matter that houses the weepies) is not best cured by the self-pitying food grab. Proactively and thoughtfully analyzing the underlying problem and source of the emotion seems at least slightly more useful. And it's certainly less caloric.

Here endeth my self-applied therapy session. Thanks for sitting in!

For any of you other guys who want to come clean about emotional eating, this blog is a safe place devoid of harsh judgment. Also, as I've now made the case that emotional eating is not a gender-specific issue, all women inclined to share should freely do so too!

Cheers,

dk

My super-optimistic and massively upbeat plan for 2011

2011-01-02T11:47:00.000-05:00

"I feel completely gross" were the last words I uttered as I fell asleep on New Years Day.

The holiday break started great. I had a weigh-in on a Tuesday night meeting in Manhattan on December 21st. I clocked in exactly at goal weight, which I thought was a pretty fabulous way of entering the holiday week. I was sticking to my plan, and I did not act like a complete food crazed freak during the week leading into Christmas. I was feeling strong and cocky.

Per the plan, I started to loosen up on Christmas Eve, and I went completely off the healthy food grid on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day, I hit the gym in the morning for an hour of weights followed by a one hour spin class. I was so proud that I wrenched my shoulder patting myself on the back. I was rocking this Christmas plan.

Then I got hideously sick with the stomach flu for about 24 hours. The nasty part of the bug was pretty fast, but I was definitely a little weakened for the next couple of days. Nonetheless, I was a good soldier, and I hit the gym anyway during the recovery days. I really didn't have much of an appetite, so I stayed true during these couple of days. Throw in the Activity Points from digging out of a nasty little blizzard, and I was still in good form.

Then I got better. I got all the way better. I felt GREAT. What to do with all this euphoria? Run for the sugar plum hills! I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday whooping it up as if I couldn't even spell W-e-i-g-h-t W-a-t-c-h-e-r-s. What the heck, I was a saint for the past seven days. I'm invincible!!! All that stocking candy that I was planning to eat one piece per day for the next three months? Let's work that inventory down by 50%! Wine? Yes please! Seconds? You bet!

In truth, you really can't do that much damage in three days, and I knew that I was going to be fully back on plan starting Jan 3. Still, I was beating myself up about being such a nasty dude. Nothing like a little self-flagellation to put the icing on top of 72 hours of food indiscretion.

Today, I was reading an article in the Sunday NY Times titled: "Why a Budget is Like a Diet -- Ineffective." There was one quote in particular that struck a chord with me.

"As a species, humans are notoriously poor at following through with their plans. Sticking to a budget -- a dirty word even among many financial planners, who prefer the more euphemistic 'spending plan' -- feels too much like dieting. And we often fail at both for the same reasons: too much focus on the restrictions, not enough on fun. So it's not surprising when people end up on bingeing later, more than making up for the dollars not spent or calories not consumed."

The column then went on to lay out a bunch of strategies that sounded very much like the same strategies I hear in our Weight Watchers meetings all the time. They mostly focused on a common theme: set up broad goals with a positive outcome in mind.

With this in mind, I am laying out my 2011 long term goals (not to be confused with short-lived resolutions, he writes hopefully).

Recognize that the over-the-top events I think will make me happy actually make me feel like doo-doo. Every binge I have had this year literally made me feel sick. Not just mentally sick, but physically ill. A huge food splurge inevitably gives me a nasty case of indigestion, and I sleep terribly that night. Further, these binges never seem to have the hedonistic dividend I think they will. How exactly am I depriving myself by avoiding the binge if the binge itself is all downside?
I want to fully embrace those habits that make me feel food, physically and mentally. When I eat good, real, healthy food, I feel physically great. It really is true. I have more energy and my gastrointestinal tract is much happier with me. I sleep better too. In other words, I want to eat better for purely selfish reasons: it will make me feel better and result in better days and nights. I am done with the concept of eating healthily because my deep-rooted Calvinistic origins say that I should suffer like the miserable puritan that I think I should be.
I want to fully embrace the awesome fact that the healthy food tastes just as good as the gross food I used to eat. I like a nice piece of fish just as much or more than a 24 oz Fred Flintstone brontosaurus burger. I like fruit mixed in with Greek yogurt as much as ice cream. This isn't a blind hope, it's actually true. There is a degenerate, Rasputan character that lives in my brain who tries to convince me otherwise, but frankly, he's an untrustworthy creep. And he's wrong.
I want to eat when I'm really hungry, and not eat when I'm just bored and fidgety. Even better, I want to find ways of not being bored and fidgety. I can't remember the last time I had a period of boredom and said at the end of it, "That was such as awesome experience! I can't wait to be bored again!"
Mostly, I am done thinking of healthy life as a slog. It's a gift and a better way for me to live.

My next step is to put some firmer plans in place to realize all of the above. For me, it's mostly about getting my head straight and putting it into an even more positive and hopeful place.

The past couple of years have been challenging for many of us. The recession was about as much fun as having our finger nails pulled. Thinking that the banking system was melting followed by a nasty economic hangover was no day in the park.

However, it's time to move forward. There is great work to be done, and there is a life full of possibility to be enjoyed. This is why I love the line of our new 2011 campaign: It's a New Day. I cannot think of a time better suited for this simple idea.

Let's rock 2011 and have fun in the process.

Cheers,

Buddy the Elf wanted for breakfast violations. Just one Grinch's opinion.

2010-12-20T12:33:00.001-05:00

I spent Sunday night with my family watching one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies: Elf. It still makes me a little weepy when they will Santa's sleigh back into flight by singing.

However, in my official capacity, I was horrified and upset. What sort of horrible lesson is this movie trying to teach unformed and easily impressionable minds such as my own?

Over at Weight Watchers, we find ourselves in a new glorious era of a PointsPlus program that encourages vegetables, fruits, lean meats, whole grains and low-fat dairy. By contrast, the four basic food groups of the Christmas Elves are apparently:

Candy
Candy canes
Candy corn
Syrup

It's one thing for Buddy to eat used gum off the railing at a subway station (not very many points at all), but his breakfast choices were truly unconscionable. How bad you ask? In one morning alone he had (in a single bowl):

Spaghetti (3 cups by my estimate): 15 PointsPlus values
Maple syrup (looked like 1/2 cup): 12 PointsPlus values
Marinara sauce (the bargain of the lot): 3 PointsPlus value
Chocolate chips (1/2 cup): 12 PointsPlus values
M&M's (conservatively one bag): 6 PointsPlus values
Chocolate syrup (1/2 cup): 14 PointsPlus values
Pop Tart (one): 5 PointsPlus values

plus
2 liters of Coke: 23 PointsPlus

That's 67 PointsPlus values for the breakfast and another 23 for the drinks. This is simply not responsible behavior.

It goes without saying that we are not targeting our new program to the denizens of the North Pole. What about my house? How do I coexist with PointsPlus during the holiday season?

I have to admit that I thought I was going to have a mild nervous breakdown yesterday. My wife was in over-heated kitchen duty, creating Christmas treats for friends, teachers, etc. Among her creations were Nutter Butter's ground up into balls coated in melted milk chocolate and then chilled. She did the same with Oreos and white chocolate. Then there were pretzel-peanut butter rounds, coated in chocolate and then by peanuts. For the healthier touch, she made cashews with rosemary. Of course, she wanted me to try them all to taste test, and I did. It goes without saying that they were all fairly spectacular, particularly the pretzel-peanut butter-chocolate things.

Having enjoyed the samples, my wife and I looked at each other and said the same thing: we've got to get these out of the house. Fast. They are being packaged and delivered today, and my home can again become a safe place.

So really how much of a horrible combination of Scrooge/Grinch am I? What's wrong with a little holiday indulgence? Why can't I lighten up a little bit?

In truth, Buddy the Elf is alive and well inside of me. I love the decadent stuff, particularly this time of year. When it comes to eating this kind of food, I know myself well enough to know my own limits. If I am surrounded by chocolate delights for weeks upon end, I will eat them for weeks upon end.

On Christmas Day, I have no intention of either tracking my points or hitting the gym (really!!!). I just don't want the week that follows or the one the proceeds to feel like a mind numbing bender.

For some people, the introduction of the new PointsPlus program in the midst of the holiday season was stressful. I can totally understand that. For me, (obvious bias caveats apply) it was a complete blessing. I've been tracking my points most days, exercising like a nut, and I'm at goal right now. That makes me happy and proud. I can afford to lighten up at select moments over the next two weeks, but I just don't want to completely freak out and find myself sleeping in a damp gutter of junk food and sweets.

So, my holiday plan:

Track this week up until Friday night (I LOVE Christmas Eve)
Do not track on Saturday (Love Christmas Day even more)
Slowly re-enter responsible life on Sunday
Fully back on program as of Monday with some grace for the fact that I have the week off (kind of)
Exercise LOTS (I no longer consider this a hardship -- I like it!)

I want to hit January 3 feeling strong. At the same time, I really am trying to leave my inner Grinch safely locked up. As they say, moderation in all things, including moderation.

What's on your docket?

Cheers & Happy Holidays!

David

Multiplicity of topics: call centers, last week and holiday fun

2010-12-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

Wow. I'm finally getting a little bit of time to settle down with my blog again, and I'm looking through all of the comments from last week. Great stuff (even the harsh stuff) from all of you! Weight Watchers folks are definitely not shy and understated!

Topic #1: I am a bad responder...

The official ManMeetsScale.com call center:
Slackers!!! Get back to work!

For better or for worse, I really do write and manage this blog as a solo act. I don't have a small army of elves that can pay attention to it 24/7. The good news is that you get a real life version of me (at least I think that's good news). The bad news is that I cannot spend nearly enough time on my blog to manage a full time conversation. The way my schedule goes, I usually write my post on the weekend. Once the workweek starts, I get completely slammed, and I am challenged to get lunch, let alone spend time on the blog. The upshot of this is that I am not set-up to answer questions on the fly.

It may not be totally realistic, but my original intent of this blog was to have a place where I could be a member (which I am). For the past two years that I've had the blog, most of the ensuing conversation on it has been member-to-member, which I (and hopefully others) have really enjoyed. To the extent that I can hold onto that ethos, that would be great.

All of this said, I should also tell you that I read every single comment that has ever been posted on every single post I've ever put up. I have taken note of all of your comments & suggestions over the past two weeks, and they are now firmly etched in my mind (e.g., desire for free eTools for Lifetime members -- got it!!!). Therefore, feel free to keep firing them in there from time to time as long as 1) we can generally aspire to keep this as a place where we share our experiences as fellow members and 2) there isn't an expectation that I will respond to each one via this blog.

For those who are looking for a place that is ready made to provide help and support, I would always suggest:

Your meeting and your Leader
If you are an Online subscriber, the message boards on our website are a fantastic place to share and get ideas

Oh. For all of you who had a great week, you have no idea how much your comments filled me with unbridled joy. I practically broke into tears a few times, which would have been a little embarrassing. For those of you who struggled a bit or bridled against the change, I cannot emphasize enough that working the transition will be totally worth it for you. We saw more than a few of our beta testers take two to three weeks to get their sea legs, sometimes gaining weight during that time. We saw those same people start to make great progress once they 1) fully committed to the new program and left the old one in the past and 2) worked their new routine and rhythm. Hang in there!!!!

Topic #2: Last week

On to my navel gazing...

Last week on PointsPlus was pretty great. I know that I'm biased, but I really did have a good week. I think that if I were hating following PointsPlus, I would find some way to talk about something else, like how rain makes me feel sad sometimes.

What made last week great? I really was making different choices, consciously and subconsciously. [As a side point, how can anyone be conscious of a subconscious point? I will ponder that a while.] When I found myself going for the fast bite/snack, I was hitting the fruit. Rather than dipping pretzel thins into my Bobbi's bean dip (which I am loving), I was pulling out the bag of baby carrots and dipping those instead. When I was stuck in conference rooms overflowing with trays of food, I was grabbing a small plate and getting my honey dew mellon on. When I went for a Weight Watchers ice cream treat, I had one instead of two. Still a little irritated about the wine, but I am learning to happily coexist with a single glass.

Every time I found myself making one of these choices, I would weigh the cost of the alternative. The alternative always seemed like a rip-off, so it was really easy to take the righteous path.

I was able to easily stay within my 43 PointsPlus value range. Truth be told, I did not eat all my Points each day. I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, so I hewed to the Weight Watchers recommendation of eating until I'm satisfied and not until I'm stuffed. Even doing this, I felt like I was eating a lot of food, and I wasn't hungry. Ever. This pleased me greatly.

Final tally? Down a pound. This puts me basically at goal weight, which I think is pretty great for this time of year. Yeah me!

Topic #3: Bring on the eggnog, except hold the eggnog

So now, December 12th, I ready myself to enter the zone of nutritional doom and despair. Holiday time is here!!!

Looks like BIG fun. Probably a wear-black-&-white themed holiday party

I went to a big Christmas party last night. I'm happy to report that I practiced safe eating. In particular, I made it a point not to finish each of the plates of food served. For some people, this practice comes naturally, but for me, turning of my internal industrial strength vacuum clean is far from a guaranteed practice.

This week, I have:

My neighborhood holiday party last night
My office holiday party on Wednesday night
I am spending the day in DC on Tuesday
Yet more Christmas parties on Saturday night

That's a lot of dangerous ground. I'm thinking my strategy at each is going to be to only eat those things which are beloved by PointsPlus, preferably Power Foods. If I add to that the don't-finish-my-plate-o-food trick, I am feeling like I will be in good shape. I'm also thinking that I am going to ratchet up my workout intensity a bit this week to provide some extra margin for error.

How are all of you holding up in the Bermuda Triangle of holiday food extravaganzas?

Cheers,

Week one on PointsPlus: happy, full and in control. Maybe even a little taller.

2010-12-06T12:57:00.001-05:00

I'm just wrapping up my first week on PointsPlus, which for me started in earnest last Monday. I went to my GSS on Sunday, but really, start a new program on a Sunday? I think not.

So how did it go? In short, great!

Here's what I have to work with: 43 PointsPlus value for my Daily Target Points (DTP) plus the standard 49 PointsPlus values for my Weekly Points Allowance (WPA). All these acronyms almost make the whole process sound a bit like a public works project, but what better way to show off to your friends than dropping a few well timed in-the-know alphabet soup references.

For those who have not memorized my normal breakfast (roughly 6 billion people), my standard fare is:

Quaker regular oatmeal: 3 PointsPlus values
Fage 0% plain yogurt: 3 PointsPlus values
1/8 cup Fiber One (mixed in w/ the yogurt): 1 PointsPlus value
Grapes: 0, baby
Banana: 0, baby
Blueberries: 0, baby

That's a lot of babies and only 7 PointsPlus values.

My lunch (or I should say my most typical lunch)...

Salad from Pump Energy Food that includes: spinach, steamed sweet potatoes, balsamic marinated mushrooms, slow cooked turkey, shredded cheddar, fat free honey mustard dressing

A cup of fruit salad

The Pump is kind of enough to have a groovy nutrition calculator when you build your salad online. The total nutritional make-up of my salad works out to: 32g carbs; 36g protein, 9f fat and 9g of fiber, which calculates to 8 PointsPlus values. The fruit is 0.

Snack: usually an apple (0) and/or another Fage 0% fat yogurt for 3 PointsPlus values.

Therefore, my typical pre-dinner day has worked out to 18 PointsPlus values leaving me another 25 left over to cover dinner.

For exercise, I'm getting the following:

Weight lifting (4X per week, 50 minutes per session): + 5 Activity PointsPlus values (is that an APPV?)
30 minutes of stationary bike (time permitting on lifting days) at a pretty hard pace: + 7 Activity PointsPlus values
50 minutes spinning on non-weight lifting days: + 12 Activity PointsPlus values (nice!!!!!)

OK, so far all of this is great. What about less pleasant surprises? In a word, wine. Holy Toledo. The nectar of the gods has become a luxury in more ways than one. In truth, the rampant inflation on the Weight Watchers price of wine is a useful reminder to me that one glass should suffice. Aspirationally-speaking of course.

Dinners have also been fine save for the two flights to and from San Francisco. When I tallied up the damage, I had blown 26 PointsPlus values on my flight from JFK to SFO. My first day was a 52 PointsPlus day -- ouch!!!. While I had enough AP's to cover it, it was still a bit of a wake-up. I since made adjustments for the rest of the week, and I was able to comfortably stay within my range.

So my first impressions of being on the plan. Fantastic (and I'm not just saying that because it's in my interest to do so). Here is why this plan worked for me in week 1:

I already eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, so this part of the math works in my favor
Knowing the inflation on certain foods was definitely steering me toward better choices
I'm liking the more favorable math on activity points
Not once did I feel hungry or sad
In general, I really loved my week and I particularly loved the way I lived my week. Feeling healthy just feels healthy. If you know what I mean.

I weighed on Saturday AM, and I am back to within 2 pounds of my goal weight. And I never weigh in on Saturday (for obvious reasons). I'm happy to be tracking again, and I am feeling much more in control. Changing over from old Points to new PointsPlus values was not a big hassle, and I'm enjoying seeing the interplay of carbs, protein, fiber, and fat in the way the new values come out. Then again, I'm a WW geek (and proud of it).

[For those asking how much weight I lost during the week: I don't know. I was too chicken to get weighed after Thanksgiving despite attending four meetings last week. Sad and un-courageous.]

What else helped me with the transition? For starters, seeing four different meetings from four fantastic Leaders across the country helped me get my head straight. Having access to eTools was a godsend. Finally, I worked the iPhone app hard, and it performed like a champ. I didn't have too much trouble getting my eTools favorites ported over. My DSW has had an account for about 10 years, and she probably has well over 100 recipes and user-generated foods on the system. She indicated that it was a bit of a hassle to move stuff over, but she didn't throw a dish at my head knowing that I'm to blame for many of these changes. Which was good.

BTW, my general policy is not to comment on official company business on this blog -- it's all Dave all the time around these parts. That said, for all of you loyal Google supporters out there, I will say this: it has not passed our attention that Android is growing like a weed, particularly over the past 6 months. Doing a full blown app for that platform is not an overnight job (multiple O/S versions and platforms), and our talented and over-worked tech team has been completely slammed getting the launch ready (it's hard to describe the amount of work that's been happening behind the scenes). We also don't want to give you anything half-baked. So with caveats entered, all I can say is that we're on it (!). Good things come in Spring...

This is the part where I now ask you how your week 1 went. Some of you are going to say it went GREAT. To you I say: rock on! For those who had a not great week 1, I say:

Please don't freak out. It's a big change (there's a reason we haven't done this in 13 years)! Give yourself time to get the hang of the new program and DO NOT BEAT YOURSELF (or me) UP!
Check the website and your meeting for comments and thoughts on potential transition challenges. Some culprits can include: a) eating a mango grove all at once, b) mixing Points values from the old and new program (does not work), c) having someone secretly put their toe on the scale when you got weighed, etc.
Ask your Leader for help if you go to meetings.
Consider going to a meeting so you have a Leader to ask for help
Check the website. There are a TON of resources around the site on helping people navigate the transition. The message boards are also a good place to go for ideas.

That said, how was week 1?

Cheers,

New again... What I want for myself from the new PointsPlus program.

2010-11-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

At this point, I think I've written four or five different columns and pieces describing my official view of the new Weight Watchers PointsPlus Program, which launched officially today in the US. For the latest, and most comprehensive manifesto, click this link...

Our new program: Taking Weight Watchers to the Next Level

Therefore, rather than provide yet more official love for this rocktacular new program, I thought I would use the time instead to reflect on the role I want it to play in my own life.

Background:

I'm still within five pounds of my goal weight, even after the debacle of Thanksgiving weekend. I think knowing that there was a new program launching on Monday gave me license to indulge. I swear I ate about 7 pounds of cashews and almonds. In additional full disclosure, I had leftovers every day of the long weekend.

Emerging from my holiday binge, I went to a meeting in Stamford, CT on Sunday morning to get the new Getting Started Session for the PointsPlus program launch. It was a big, busy meeting with about 20 more people than usual. It was amazing to watch the atmosphere in the room change over the course of 60 minutes, going from fear-stricken to excited and optimistic. For me personally, I've been involved with this new plan for close to four years in it's various incarnations of development. There wasn't anything new in the delivery for me, yet I wanted an official kick-off anyway.

Our Leaders and Receptionists have been doing the PointsPlus plan for the past two months. They have soldiered without the benefit of electronic tools, most notably eTools and the iPhone app. They are now new veterans of the plan. Was I right there with them? Errr. No. I just couldn't make myself track on paper.

Therefore, I am officially announcing that as of today, I am now doing PointsPlus all-in. I just tracked my breakfast and morning workout. I found out that I have an insane Daily Target of 43 (!) (it's a tall man thing). I am learning about the new values for all the things I normally eat.

So what do I hope to get out of the new program? Two big things:

1) A reconnection with Points

I have been "doing" Weight Watchers for over 10 years now. I was an early POINTS person. Yet, if I am being completely honest, I have not been regularly tracking for quite some time. These days, I only track POINTS when I'm sure that I am falling off the program in spectacular fashion. For the most part, I have been happily eye-balling foods and staying generally aware of their POINTS value, but I have been far from rigorous in actual tracking.

Is this a problem? It hasn't been a huge problem as I've been at or close to goal for over two years now. However, I cannot help but feel that I'm really starting the fudge my estimations and therefore my choices. Funny how my eye-balling seems to be perpetually favoring the lower end of the estimation range. It must be a special form of astigmatism. As a result, I have this feeling that some non-awesome habits have been creeping back into my daily routine.

2) Cleaning my diet and snacking habits

One of my long term objectives is to continue shifting my food choices toward more non-processed food and to increasingly cut out junk foods. As many of you know from my earlier posts, one of my ghostly habits is grazing. I almost always graze on foods like baked chips, dips, etc. I now do this with less caloric and lower fat versions of them, but I know intuitively that I would be better served if I replaced those choices with more use of fruits, vegetables and their derivative products.

For me, what I like about this new program is that it makes the following kinds of foods a great deal: vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains and low fat dairy. It makes high carb and high fat foods much less of a good deal. In my own case, I think knowing this will get me to start nudging my regular choices, particularly snacking, toward the foods which are a great deal. This will then result in more of my total caloric intake coming from foods that are loaded with nature-fed nutrition as being better at keeping me feeling full. That seems like a good outcome.

People who are extremely healthy and active often talk about "eating clean". They seem to use most of their calories on vegetables, fruit, fish, white meats, whole grains and low fat dairy. They seem to eat a lot of it, and they seem happier and healthier for it. Getting to this place is my aspiration. PointsPlus will be my path for getting there.

As I look over the coming months, I feel like I get to be a new member again. Of course, there is the nervousness of being a new member, but there is also the feeling of constant discovery as I learn this new plan. I'm already learning how to ball-park grams of carbs into PointsPlus Values. For me, this is the fun part of doing a new program. I am a Lifetime Member, so I want to make sure that I avoid falling into a rut. Therefore, bring on the new stuff!!

How will you use PointsPlus to take your own efforts to the next level?

Cheers,

dk

Cage match: my weak mind vs. Thanksgiving

2010-11-21T05:04:00.000-05:00

Where am I??? Oh yeah, I'm in London now. I was in China last week, and I got into London late Friday night. After five consecutive nights of 4 hours of sleep (Asian jet lag always gives me a beating), I slept for 9 hours last night. Feeling very much the new man right now, I'm looking forward to spending the day bombing around this awesome city after I get my workout in. Then I'm off to a three day wall-to-wall meeting blitz, flying back to New York late Wednesday night. This in turn rolls me right into... Thanksgiving!

How do I think about Thanksgiving?

Politically correct answer: Thanksgiving is a time for spending excellent quality time with family and friends. It's a time for slowing down, reconnecting and being thankful for the fact that the Pilgrims were able to avoid the temptation of slaughtering the local denizens of Massachusetts for a nice moment of detente. Really, the food is a there to to be a symbol of celebrating everything I'm thankful for.

Factual answer: The part about spending time with family and friends is actually true. I will have been out of the country for close to two weeks, and I miss my family terribly. That said, I'm also thinking a lot about eating food. My mind is on a continuous loop of clicking through each rich dish on the menu. I'm thinking about wine, and I'm thinking about creating a giant depression in the couch while watching a feeble football game. The Lions? Really, why does this have to be a tradition? [Actually, I'm liking the additional night game, and getting both a Jets and a Saints game is pretty great.]

There is nothing particularly wrong at all with enjoying a big food day on Thanksgiving. I've been pretty good this past week on the road, which is always challenging for me. One benefit of not sleeping is that it's given me time for some ridiculously involved workouts. Other than a sleep-deprivation induced room service food bonanza last night, I've also been pretty disciplined/good on my food choices. Therefore, I'm not really worried about Thanksgiving day.

However, spending lots of time thinking about what's on the menu for Thanksgiving day has led me to a very sad conclusion: my brain is broken. It seems to be stuck on a an endless do-loop (raising my geek flag here) of visualizing and obsessing about things I am going to eat. It's an extreme example of something I do all the time: I obsess about my next meal.

I have a sneaking suspicion I'm not alone on this. I sometimes wonder if we humans are wired to constantly think about the next thing we are going to eat. I just finished breakfast 10 minutes ago, and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch. Frankly, I already know what I'm having for dinner, but I'm thinking about that too. Why do I do this? Is it because I am channeling a past life as a cold, emaciated hunter wondering where to find that damned mastodon herd?

It makes it a lot harder for me to think about eating in a normal and restrained way when I'm constantly thinking about eating. I have a feeling that naturally thin people don't really think about food that much. I resent them all!

My brain is an overwrought and undisciplined place. I would do anything to be much more in control of what I think about. This is certainly true about food. I believe it is what makes living the healthy life such a challenging journey. It is why I get so frustrated when I hear people criticize others for not living up to the challenges of losing weight and then keeping it off. It's difficult because our brains are unruly.

So what to do? Increasingly, I find myself constantly reminding my brain how much happier it is when I make good choices. I remind myself how irritated my brain gets when I over-indulge and binge. I am starting to believe that my brain is capable of being gradually re-shaped over a period of time to reduce my obsession with food and therefore the reduce the likelihood of spectacular lapses in judgement.

The best tool I know of for this is planning. So therefore, here are my two options for Thanksgiving:

The less good option:

Before dinner is even served, there will be a huge layout of appetizers in the form of dips and cheeses. I will transform myself into a factory robot with my mechanical arm constantly lowing and raising from the spread until I'm pretty full.
Then I will ignore the fact that I'm full and start heaping as much Thanksgiving dinner on my plate as I can possibly fit. Are you a vegetable? I'm sorry, there's no room for you on this paltry 12" plate. Only starches are allowed for this trip.
Dessert? You bet. With three different pies available, it would just be rude not to have some of each.
From here I go home feeling totally bloated with a hideous case of heart burn.

The better option:

Avoid the appetizer tray. The Pilgrims didn't nosh on dip, so I'm not offending history if I don't either. That said, there will be a shrimp cocktail tray, and I will definitely hit that.
For the actual Thanksgiving dinner, I will have a bit of everything, including the vegetables. They create a nice volume barrier on the plate so I don't have that fifth scoop of stuffing.
Dessert? You bet. One normal slice of the blue ribbon winner of the pie contest should suffice.
From here I go home feeling happy and well fed, but not like a goose headed for the fois gras factory.

And my brain? I suppose my best option is to re-channel its obsessive tendencies toward hashing over my "better option" plan. They call that mental rehearsing. I hear it works.

What are you doing to fix your respective brains for the holidays?

Cheers,

A thousand little dishes: friend or foe?

2010-11-10T14:33:00.000-05:00

I got back from a weekend conference in San Francisco this past Sunday night. I kept thinking about the words of a colleague as I was getting ready to leave New York in reference to one of my planned stops that weekend: "For crying out loud, please have the common sense not to blog about it..."

To set the context of my tale, my wife kindly joined me for the conference. She was a good sport to come, so I sought to reward her with a bucket list event on Saturday night. We went to a "little" restaurant in Napa Valley called the French Laundry. For those not familiar with it, the French Laundry is an over-the-top Michelin 3-star restaurant that has been blowing the hair of foodies back for many years. It was started and is still run by one of the most creative chefs on Earth, Thomas Keller, who was reportedly the inspiration for the Pixar film Ratatouille.

The French Laundry. It seems harmless enough from the outside...

For people who love good food, this place is a shrine. They only seat 16 tables a night, and every dinner is a three hour culinary marathon. It is horribly expensive, and almost impossible to get a reservation under two months in advance. In fact, the general manager shared with us that there was a 900 person waiting list for that Saturday night (!).

So why did my colleague urge me to keep this little adventure to myself? Either because she thought that I would sound like a complete spendthrift, blowhard-showoff (fair point) or that it would be a strange thing to share in a blog about weight loss. Perhaps one could compare a weight-concerned person going to the French Laundry to a heroin addict touring poppy fields. I have a very different view.

First off, the experience was amazing and surreal. Nine perfect courses with incredible wines paired accordingly. Every single bite was spectacular and amazing. By the end of the three hours I was stuffed, yet I literally soldiered through the last petit four served. It all seemed like fairly delinquent behavior for a member (let alone President) of Weight Watchers. But was it?

The thing about a place like the French Laundry is that it truly is a bucket list experience. The restaurant shared an interesting data point with me: off all the people who go, only 3% come back more than once. It's not because it isn't spectacular, but it's because it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This isn't the kind of dining experience that I would call vaguely normal. I'm not at risk of becoming a multiple-time per week (let alone lifetime) visitor given the minor and inconvenient fact that it would bankrupt me. Beyond that, I think some of the magic would be lost in the process.

The second aspect about a place like this is that the food just isn't normal. I tried cooking a full three course meal from a restaurant like this once (from Rick Bayless's original cookbook from Topolobompo in Chicago). It took me 1.5 days to prepare, and it was about 45% of the quality that the chef would have served, and I had a wicked backache for my trouble. Every single little dish that I had last Saturday night was a painstakingly prepared piece of cooking perfection. It was as much artistry as eating. Again, it was an experience, not a regular occurrence.

A third notable point about the meal last night was that each dish consisted of about 4-5 bites. It was enough to savor and taste before the point of sensory dullness. In my mind this is the way food is meant to be enjoyed. Whether nine such dishes is really appropriate is a subject for a different debate.

For me, being healthy and on Weight Watchers is not about becoming a monk who swears off the celebration of food. It's about living an existence that largely consists of healthy choices and real food. To be clear, I did not save my Weekly POINTS Allowance for the occasion. I just rolled with it. I'm glad I did, and I'd do it again. Maybe in 10 years.

All of this has spurred me to publish my field guide to restaurant decadence:

Fast food: I rarely eat fast food. When I do, I always go for the best option, usually salad with a low fat dressing. I had enough Big Macs in my youth to last for my entire life.
Breakfast and lunch joints: I stay on the straight and narrow here. I rarely blow out my POINTS on breakfast, and I don't like to do it for lunch either. Again, I'm pretty disciplined if I see it as a regular meal stop.
Nice restaurants (dinner): I will loosen up a little bit here, but I will still seek the least-bad option. I might have dessert, but it is often just a few bites of a shared portion. Seafood is usually my go-to option in these places.
Bucket list restaurants (like last weekend): No holds barred. I have whatever and as much as I can handle. I define a bucket list restaurant as a place I go to once every three to four years.

I like that I follow a program that affords me flexibility to live my life and occasionally enjoy once-in-a-blue-moon crazy restaurants. In my book, losing my mind once a year is not being off program. We Weight Watchers people love food, which is precisely why we love Weight Watchers.

Postscript: I weighed-in on Tuesday, and I was up 3 pounds. If only there was some new program coming out that could help me wipe that slate clean...

What constitutes a lose-you-mind-and-forget-your-WPA worthy dining event for you?

Cheers,

dk

What to do when zombified flesh eating death candy attacks.

2010-10-31T16:42:00.000-04:00

To the breach! Defend yourselves! Hide the children! Doom is eminent!

That's right. It's holiday time. Today is Halloween, the official commencement of the 60 days of eating bad food until you get sick. Truth be told, it kind of snuck up on me this year. There was chatter in the background by the kids talking about their costumes. Some time last week, I came home from work and found the front yard decorated in a giant mock-spider's web along with a large image of a blood sucking zombie in the living room window. Yet, my distracted mind was not able to focus on the underlying significance of these trappings and decorations: it's candy time.

I didn't wake up until today when I took my DSW out to lunch to our favorite neighborhood place. We grabbed a couple of stools at the bar for a nice meal, and there it was right in front of me: a bowl of candy on the bar. It almost looked odd and alien, like a bowl of peanuts that had been strangely transmuted into small chocolate bars. All the favorites were present: Reese's (love these), Three Musketeers, Snickers, etc. It was seductive, yet terrifying and horribly evil all at the same time.

I was about three seconds from pulling my jacket back and doing a quick-draw move on a few of these little guys. Somehow I was spared the abyss by a last minute thunderbolt of clarity: this is where it all falls apart. This is where I look at the next two months and casually say: screw it. This is where I dive right into a two month calorie binge, telling myself that it will all be better in January (10 pounds later). The thought of this kind of abysmal collapse bummed me out. I didn't fall prey to it last year (not too much anyway), and I wasn't going to do it this year.

This Halloween, I'm going to say NO to candy that really doesn't taste nearly as great as it costs in POINTS values. This Halloween, I'm going to look at candy like the villainous, horrible demon spawn that it is. I need a flamethrower and a chainsaw! I'm going to hunt zombie food, kill it all and send it flying back into the vortex of eternal fire!

I admit it. I loved the old pixilated version of this game.

OK, I'm being completely over the top, and only about 83% serious. Yet for my own sake, I have a point. My best strategy when entering treacherous times is to make an overly dramatic statement in an effort to gird my loins. [For those who enjoy a good idiom, I'm intending this expression in its militaristic form (see Wikipedia): "The term "gird one's loins" was used in the Roman Era meaning to pull up and tie one's lower garments between one's legs to increase one's mobility in battle. In the modern age, it has become an idiom meaning to prepare oneself for the worst."] I simply choose not to go into the next two months with a losing attitude.

So what commitments must be made as of today? Simply stated, I need to choose not to steal from my kids' loot bags that will be hanging around the house for the next two months. This is the third or fourth time that I have used this blog to proclaim that I will not commit larceny against my sweet, awesome kids. Sad that I need to use a public podium to not commit theft, but hey, whatever works.

The way I look at it, most of these dwarf bars are about two POINTS values, the same as an apple or a non-fat greek yogurt. That strikes me as a truly crummy deal. Particularly in a recession!

This is my strategy, but that doesn't mean it should be your strategy. My feeling is always this: know yourself. In my case, starting with a few small Snickers can lead to a bag full of misery. Therefore, it's best for me to avoid the whole thing all together. Many of you have much greater self control around candy than me, so using your WPA to cover a chocolate pop per night might work famously well.

Further, I also know that I'm traveling pretty much every day in November, and there is a Thanksgiving thrown into the mix for good measure. Right now, I just can't afford the Halloween failure. That doesn't mean I can't have fun.

Happy Halloween!!!!

Cheers,

dk

In broad daylight

2010-10-22T14:18:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about my first time going to a Weight Watchers meeting in January of 2000. I was incredibly nervous for two key reasons.

The whole process seemed a mystery, and I just didn't know what to expect
It felt weird walking into a place that helped people with real weight problems.

On the first point, my initial concerns were pretty quickly dispelled. Frankly, by the next meeting they were gone. I was totally comfortable, and the people who ran the meeting were unbelievably nice, welcoming, accepting and helpful.

On the second point, it took me a lot longer to get passed those initial anxieties. Why was I worried? Was I worried for how I would see myself, or was I worried that I would be seen by someone I knew? I suspect the answer is both, but the second was probably the bigger issue. As a guy, you can imagine that it felt particularly strange to me as there really weren't any other dudes to speak of (other than my meeting leader!). That said, I'm sure lots of people, women and men, feel that way. The question I have been pondering is this: why?

The last time I checked, 70% of the US adult population was overweight or obese (1/3 in the case of the latter category). My weight issue hardly made me unique. In fact, I was actually doing something about it, which is more than many people could say. Why wasn't this a point of pride?

The world has changed rapidly over the past 20 years. When I was a kid, most people weren't heavy. Worse, heavy people got teased or dismissed. I am sad to say that this still happens, but that fact that it does seems bizarre. Most of us are now a product of our environment, one which surrounds us with junk food and bad TV. Today, most of us are just trying to figure out how to navigate our new world and find a way to live more healthfully and lose weight in the process (order of these two reasons might be switched depending on person).

Back in its early days, Weight Watchers centers were hidden on purpose. People who were seeking to manage a weight issue wanted privacy. Back then, this desire made sense because people with weight issues were in the minority. It's not that way any more.

BIG SIGN (St. Louis)!!!

(Ribbon cutting ceremony with my rock star colleagues in Tampa)

Interior shot...

Recently, Weight Watchers began installing new centers in two test markets: St. Louis and Tampa. We purposefully chose highly visible retail locations with great big signs that jump out and say HELLO! These centers are brightly lit and brightly colored. To me, they are emblematic of the way we should all start thinking about how we deal with our weight issues: with pride, with volume, and in the open. The more people see us doing it, the more they will join us.

Weight Watchers is coming even more into the bright light of day. It's time for all of us to come into the bright light of day. It's time for us to recognize that addressing a challenge and seeking personal growth is not a source of embarrassment. It's a source of pride and a sign of strength and a demonstration of courage.

I big into publicly revealing and sharing my challenges now, so clearly I've drunk the exhibitionist Koolaid. Why not join me!

Cheers,

dk

Iron stomach. Wherefore art thou?

2010-10-10T11:44:00.000-04:00

Every summer marks the the Famous Nathan's hot dog eating contest. This year, Joey Chestnut managed to ingest 54 hot dogs (and buns) in 10 minutes despite a heatwave. Each year, I find myself repulsed and curious all at the same time. How do they do it? Training! It's a bizarre form of athleticism, but eating tremendous quantities of bad food is apparently hard work.

The infamous Weiner Circle: home of the vegetable garden hot dog

I personally encountered this challenge during one of my stops on my whirlwind September travel blitz. I was in Chicago for the weekend with my wife. Chicago is where we started dating and ultimately married back in the early 90's. This was the time of grunge, Pulp Fiction and many other visceral pleasures. For me, it was the time of big, bad food. Dogs, stuffed pizza, giant cheese burgers, cheese fries, Chinese food, giant breakfasts, huge Mexican, and many other glutenous delights. Despite having my late 20's metabolism (read: higher than my middle age metabolism), this was the time that I really packed on the weight.

Muskies: little joint close to my old apt. Remember: late-night, post-beer cheese fries are never a good idea...

I have a lot of fond memories of that time of unbridled eating (though subconsciously, I think I was starting to get a little sad about the emerging Buddha belly). I rarely eat that kind of stuff any more, so it was with a certain bravery that I gave myself permission to completely blow the doors out on my return to the scene of the crime, Chicago. I gave myself one day to binge like Sid Vicious in a heroin factory. No counting. No POINTS. No good choices. [One confession: I did put in a big workout before I got started.]

First stop: The Twisted Spoke. Located at the corner of Ogden & Grand, we stumbled upon this somewhat indescribable joint when it first opened in the 90's, about a year before we moved to DC. So how would I describe the Twisted Spoke? Kind of biker bar colliding with a burger joint with a serious dose of attitude. We were particular fans of the brunch, which showcased their truly bizarre and inspired Bloody Mary. It is called the Road Rash Mary. It's basically a heavily spiced Bloody served with a spear of deli meat and peppers. Served with a beer back. I had two. Though this could have been a meal by itself, I also treated myself to the Mex Scramble (3 eggs, chorizo, cheese, home fries, toast). And I ate it all. I did this while they were showing Japanese game shows on their TV's. Surreal but fun.

Road Rash Mary: horseradish, meat, peppers with a dash of tomato juice. And a small beer.

So how did this workout for me? Badly. I spent the next 8 hours feeling like I had swallowed an acetylene torch (hotter than a propane torch, in case you were wondering). The entire upper half of my body felt like it was coated in stomach acid. Frankly, I was fairly miserable. I tried to work it off by spending the next 3-4 hours walking through all of our old neighborhood haunts and apartments. It helped a little.

About 9 hours later, I thought I would be ready for more self-abuse. We tried to get into Gino's East (stuffed pizza joint) at 9 PM, but discovered it would take an hour for our pie to be ready. Even I'm not dumb enough to eat a stuffed pizza at 10 PM. Instead, we went for a sweet Wagyu burger served with a heaping of fries. I was only able to eat half the burger and half the fries. Frankly, I felt even worse.

I returned to my hotel defeated by bad food. Back in the day, I could have polished it all without a twinge of bad feeling. I would have owned that bad food. Today, I just don't have the chops for that kind of stuff.

In retrospect, I'm really glad that I indulged this experiment. It's nice to know that I am physically incapable to eating the way that I used to. It's nice to now that this much bad food makes me feel physically ill. It's a bit like a smoker trying a cigarette after 10 years after having quit. They seem to invariably be repulsed by the experience. That's kind of how I felt about my delinquent Chicago day. For me to go back to the bad food place would require diligence and training. Maybe I should apply those efforts to some more noble cause.

Cheers,

David

Road trip! Fear and Loathing in an airplane, hotel room, train, airport, etc.

2010-09-27T16:49:00.000-04:00

I’m finally home. Three weeks on a crazed road (flight) trip to some pretty disparate places: Sydney, Chicago, Barcelona (for 5 hours), Madrid, and London with a few one-to-two day NY breaks in between. A few fun metrics from this blitz:

107 hours of commuting time, including airplane seats, train seats, taxi seats, and airport seats
10 nights sleeping in hotels
3 nights sleeping (kind of) on planes
6 time zones (including the layover in LA)

I’m really not looking for sympathy as it was a FANTASTIC trip. I tremendously enjoyed my time with colleagues from around the world. I went to Weight Watchers Leader conventions in three different cities, and the energy was undeniable. I was able to spend time in some of the most beautiful and exciting cities on Earth. I even got to see Real Madrid play Espanyol Barcelona in Madrid, which was a tremendous opportunity and experience (particularly for a Yank).

However, I’m whipped! Even for me, this was a crazy trip. It reminds me of my favorite travel maxims: I love being places, I just hate getting there. One of the reasons is that its really hard to keep on the straight and narrow of a healthy life at this kind of topsy turvy pace. 107 hours of commuting is a lot of time surrounded by a lot of bad food choices.

For some reason, all of this reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A road trip mixed with a strange city can lead to a temptation laden environment resulting in not good choices. At the extreme (understatement here):

"The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon." Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

[BTW, I realize that Fear and Loathing is everyone's cup of tea, so I appreciate the indulgence in allowing me to quote from a book that made me laugh violently during my college years.]

OK, the hotel mini bar is not quite the same thing as the trunk of Hunter S. Thompson’s Chevrolet Impala convertible, but I found the circumstances uncomfortably similar. If you spend too much time away from normal, it gets harder and harder to keep the bad choices at bay.

On the food side, I found myself slipping a little bit more as the trip progressed. I started strong and resolved, and I convinced myself that I was a grown man who could make responsible decisions no matter where he was. Right up until they asked me if I’d like the cheese plate as a desert on my flight to Sydney. Soon, I was accepting any and all cups of nuts on my flights. By the end of the trip, I laid siege to the mini-bar twice in London, demolishing two bags of salty rice snacks, two largish bags of cashew nuts, and one bag of Whoppers. Not exactly illicit drugs, but cashew nuts are certainly one of my drugs of choice.

I finished the trip slightly damaged, but still undaunted. During times of stress, you learn what you go-to healthy habits are. As was gratified that I was able to keep the faith in:

Sticking to a healthy breakfast
Eating a pretty healthy lunch
Ordering fairly healthy dinner options
Most importantly, I exercised every morning I possibly could regardless of how little sleep

I don’t think I did any permanent damage, and I may not have even really gained any weight. Yet I came out knowing where my strengths were and where my weaknesses were still evident. Frankly, I was a little mad at myself about the whole mini-bar fiasco as I usually resist this temptation. However, I also recognize that I'm not perfect, and it's perfectly alright for me to fall off the program in spectacular fashion from time-to-time.

Most importantly, I am finally back on my home turf where I know how to live healthily. Therefore, Monday is a new day, and my tracker is out and blazing with POINTS-friendly entries. I’m looking at the last three weeks as a freakish road trip that was an aberration, not a new reality. I have a full month until the travel madness begins anew, and I need to get back on track. Redemption is mine!

Cheers,

David

True confession: do I eat Weight Watchers stuff? Answer: yes. And apples too.

2010-09-17T10:56:00.000-04:00

Periodically, I get asked the question: do you eat Weight Watchers branded products? Generally, the subtext of the inquiry is whether I eat food that has been processed in any way, shape or form including those that carry my company’s brand.

With further elaboration ahead, the answer is yes.

First off, let me address this topic by strictly speaking to my own personal evolution and my own personal choice rather than embarking down the path of “official Weight Watchers point of view”. I will also seek to avoid using, as I always do, this blog to submerge myself into the sometimes knotty subject of food politics. This said, I am happy to talk about my personal views as a Weight Watchers member who has been on the program for roughly 10 years.

Maybe a more useful question is: do I eat processed food as a regular snack? Generally and increasingly, the answer is not as much. Allow me to elaborate on this apparent paradox.

My personal definition of a snack has evolved greatly since I originally became a Weight Watchers member 10 years ago. For most of my life, a snack was an indiscriminate lump of food whose sole purpose was to occupy my stomach and reward my desire to put food in my mouth. Any food would do – so long as the time between impulse to eat and actual consumption was less than 23 seconds. Good examples? Tortilla chips (they’re healthy, right?) and some sort of dipping substance was always a crowd pleaser. Fist-fulls of cheese were too.

When I first started doing the Weight Watchers program, my first step was to ramp down the calories of my snacks, but to still stay close to the type of food I liked. A good example of this was going from full-test tortilla chips (i.e., with buckets of imbedded oil) to baked tortilla chips. Further, I monitored how much I ate, and I reduced frequency and portion size (i.e., personal revelation #32: eating an entire large bag is a less good choice). Another example: rather than eat hand-fulls of nuts, I started getting the pre-packed ones from Trader Joes. I was able to significantly reduce caloric intake through a series of small adjustments.

During this phase of choosing lower calorie alternatives and reducing portion size, there were a number of Weight Watchers products that played a crucial role for me as snacks. Two-POINTS bars and our salty snacks (love the Cheese Twists!) were incredibly helpful to me. They had more good stuff like fiber and less bad stuff like excess sugars and fats. Further, they were portion controlled, which I very much needed to start learning the right amount of food to eat as a snack.

Now on my 10th year on the Weight Watchers program, I’m continuing to evolve my choices. In particular, over the past year, I have started to significantly alter my snack strategy. These days my go to snack has become: the apple. A piece of fruit is a healthy, nutritious, vitamin carrying little meal. Frankly, I love apples (and all fruit for that matter), so personal taste plays a big role as well. If I’m really hungry, I might throw in a small container of non-fat Greek yogurt. The two in combination are 4 POINTS values, which I can afford on my maintenance allowance. My snacks are starting to look like small meals. Further, I find that my snacks take a bit longer to eat and give me a rewarding and satisfying eating experience.

OK, this is hardly revolutionary insight, and most of you were probably way ahead of me on this. However, when I first started to clean-up my lifestyle as a new member, I wasn’t ready to jump from oily chips to angelic apples. Frankly, that was a bridge too far. I needed to make a series of small changes over a period of time, and I needed in-the-middle food choices to serve as a bridge. For me, this was similar to my exercise transformation process: I didn’t start working out 6-7 days per week on day one. I gradually added exercise over a period of years.

So do I still eat Weight Watchers branded products? The answer is still yes. Counter-intuitively, my go-to Weight Watchers products now tend to be mini-bars, pop-corn and ice cream products. “Heretic,” you scream! “That’s the most junky, sugary stuff!” My reply: exactly!

I still need my indulgences, but I need better indulgences. Man (or at least this man), cannot live a puritanical organic apples-only life. Sometimes I need a candy bar or some ice cream. Juvenile? Maybe. Realistic? Definitely.

I guess my thinking about this (again, as a 10 year veteran member) has evolved to the following personal point of view: my indulgences are not my snacks or vice versa. I now see my snacks as mini-meals. Indulgences speak to my sweet tooth, and my sweet tooth deserves some attention. Just, not all the time. A Weight Watchers chocolate pretzel mini-bar is a much better choice for me than a full-test Snickers bar. A Weight Watchers ice cream cone is a much better choice than a pint of ice cream.

In addition to these indulgence products, I also enjoy a host of other Weight Watchers products which I categorize as food staples including breads, bagels, cheeses (great snacks BTW), and others. Further, I will still go for a Weight Watchers 2-POINTS bar or salty snack when I’m on the go, and I don’t have easy access to my new produce friends.

If there is one broad insight I take away from this, it is that adopting a healthier lifestyle has been a series of small changes that have taken place over a long period of time. For me, it’s been a marathon, not a sprint.

How has your thinking about snack foods evolved?

Cheers,

dk

Obesity and Income (part 2): poverty = obesity. Enter Lose for Good 3.0

2010-09-05T18:32:00.006-04:00

Part 1 of the two part series on obesity and income looked at the interesting, but comparatively trivial example of how the affluent stay thin and make themselves stay thin. As was pointed out in some of the comments, the well-to-do have access to every tool and resource to achieve a healthy lifestyle. This is not to minimize their weight challenges, but they arguably have many more advantages than most of the population in living a healthy life.

For me personally, I'm now 18 months as a Lifetime Member in good standing, having lost 32 pounds vs. when I first joined Weight Watchers back in February of 2000 (as noted in earlier posts, I had a few up's and down's on my way to Lifetime). I feel good about my loss, and I feel better about how I've maintained it. I have truly changed my life for the better, and I am very much a changed man. That said, I recognize that I too am fortunate to have so many resources to help me stay on track: access to a great gym, my bike (whom I adore), a sweet new Whole Foods, healthy restaurants in the city, etc. In my case, a healthy life has been very possible because of what is available in the environment surrounding me.

All of this brings me to Part 2 of this series. What about the other end of the income distribution curve? What about the impoverished areas of our country?

This all came into focus for me again this summer when I volunteered at City Harvest http://www.cityharvest.org/ , a fabulous organization in New York City. City Harvest operates a fleet of 17 refrigerated trucks and 3 bikes that collect food from those who can give and immediately donates it to those who need. City Harvest specializes in fresh produce collections and donations. I had the opportunity to volunteer at one of their innovative Mobile Markets, this one in the Bronx in the midst of a large section of low income housing projects. The morning I volunteered, City Harvest gave out about 19,000 pounds of produce to roughly 500 people, enough to last them for two weeks. It was an inspiring display by an excellent organization.

Yet, I was shocked and saddened by the fact that this neighborhood even needed a Mobile Market. The fact is that we literally could not find a single piece of fresh produce in a single store in a ten block radius. Even those who were able to afford produce had to take a bus to buy it.

This sad state happens all over the country in which low income neighborhoods literally do not have access to healthy foods. Obesity experts have come to call them "food deserts". To be clear, you can buy food in a food desert, but only if you use a loose definition for the word "food". The only food that is available in these neighborhoods is the processed, sugary, added-fat kind. There are calories to be had in food deserts, but they are almost exclusively empty calories. Adding insult to injury, the US (and other countries) has become a place where processed food has gotten cheaper, while unprocessed food has gotten more expensive. Therefore, it's easier to fill a hungry stomach on junk than it is with real food.

Hence this sequence of events has led to the phenomena where those without resources are forced to spend their food allowance on energy dense, caloric foods with little to no nutritional value. In the process, obesity has thrust itself into places where people have few options and alternatives. Obesity and poverty have become two sides of the same coin. Diabetes and other conditions are on the rise. No where is this more evidence than with kids. Frankly, it is a deplorable and heart breaking situation.

What can be done?

Fortunately, there are organizations, like City Harvest, who are laser focused on finding ways of getting nutritious foods into impoverished populations. For the past two years, Weight Watchers has proudly supported two such organizations dedicated to this noble fight:

Share Our Strength http://www.strength.org/ : 17 million children in the US faced hunger at some point last year. Share Our Strength (SOS) has the simple, but beautifully elegant goal to end childhood hunger in this country. Period. Founded by brother and sister Billy and Debbie Shore in 1984, their wonderful organization has already raised $200 million since their inception which they have given to over 1,000 organizations. They fundamentally believe that solving childhood hunger with nutritious food and education is the only way.
Action Against Hunger ACF-USA http://www.actionagainsthunger.org/ : Action Against Hunger (ACF) has the audacious goal of eliminating global hunger, and it specializes in emergency situations of conflict, natural disaster, and chronic food insecurity. Fully one billion people in the world are now going hungry. In no place is this more heart breaking and damaging for our collective global future than childhood malnutrition. ACF has been a leader on the ground in some of the hardest hit countries such as Western Chad, Pakistan, and Niger. This organization has already had a tremendous impact on childhood nutrition and in reducing malnourishment through programs such as Plumpy'nut. This amazing peanut-based meal replacement bar has been demonstrated to save children's lives from starvation within a mere month.

Enter Lose for Good

For the third straight year, Weight Watchers, its meetings members and Online subscribers are doing their part too. For a seven-week period beginning today, we will be donating money for each pound lost by our members, up to a $1 million donation to be shared between Share Our Strength and Action Against Hunger
ACF-USA. While we are doing this, we are encouraging our members to make food donations equivalent to the weight they lose during this time to their local food banks. These food drives are being organized by local Weight Watchers volunteers throughout the country. Last year, our members donated over 2 million pounds of food across the US.

The beauty in these food drives is that they allow each of us to see our weight loss in the form of food. 10 pounds of weight loss may not seem like much until we carry it in a bag, and walk around with it for a while. It's an excellent visualization tool. The fact that we can them give that nutrition to someone who needs it is all the more beautiful. Lose for Good was a simple, beautiful concept invented by a Weight Watchers Leader in the Seattle area (Deb Hugo -- who rocks BTW) several years ago. It's motivating for the member in all the right ways: help your health while you help a neighbor in need.

(My 32 pounds of groceries. Yes, I am in fact rocking some Weight Watchers logowear. More men should!)

For my part, I went shopping today for my annual Lose For Good contribution. I bought my 32 pounds of food, which I will be donating to my local food bank, Person-to-Person in CT. Holding these bags was a stark reminder of: 1) how significant my weight loss actually was and 2) how really glad I am to no longer have that much weight spread across my body.

For interest, this year I had a new shopping strategy: wholesome food for five families. The per family food donation worked out to:

17 servings of oatmeal
PB&J for 17 servings
15 servings of rice
7 servings of whole grain pasta with marinara sauce

32 pounds of food: my Success Wall for this year

It seems like the proverbial drop in the bucket, but I'm only one of millions. If millions did it (and I hope they will!), that's a whole lot of drops of water. Which means we're going to need a much bigger bucket.

Please do join me for the next six weeks in making a difference for ourselves and others!

Cheers,

dk

Obesity and income (part one). Did the Stepford Wives have it right?

2010-08-29T12:55:00.002-04:00

First of a two part posting, observing the topic of obesity and weight control at two very different ends of the economics spectrum. This week: affluence and attitudes toward weight loss. Not being either judgmental or instructive here, just making a few observations on this endlessly fascinating topic...

What is the relationship between obesity and income? From a broad macro perspective, obesity is a - pardon the pun - mass issue. There are 1.6 billion adults around the world who are overweight and another 400 million who are obese (i.e., BMI > 30). The World Health Organization is forecasting this number to increase to 2.3 billion overweight by 2015 with more than 700 million obese. This would suggest that obesity affects most people, not just poor or wealthy people. Further to the point, in the early 1970's in the US:

21% of people below the poverty line in the US were obese
12% of people who were 2X above the poverty line were obese (i.e., 8 percentage points lower)

In the period of 2001 to 2004:

35% of people below the poverty line in the US were obese
31% of people who were 2X above the poverty line were obese (i.e., 4 percentage points lower)

In other words, the obesity gap between poor and less poor over the past 30 years appears to have narrowed. Sadly, obesity has become more of an issue for most people.

If all this is true, what's the deal with the town I live in? Herein lies today's blog topic. Affluent people and their weight.

First off, a little public disclosure is in order. I didn't grow up in a town like the one I live in today. I grew up an extremely middle class kid with a father who was a lifelong basic research chemist for the US government (National Bureau of Standards and then Department of Energy). His was a noble calling, but hardly a lucrative one. That said, I didn't grew up poor either. As a result, the lives of people who had little and people who seemed to have everything was always an abstracted reality to me. It was something I could read about, but never knew personally.

My first exposure to wealthy people was in college when I was fortunate to get accepted to Duke University (I am still assuming as the result of a fortunate clerical error). Since that time, I've worked hard and had more than a little good luck. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have the job that I have and to be able to provide the life I can for my family. Said differently, I live in a town in Fairfield County, CT.

My town in Fairfield County, CT is part of what has been historically known as the Gold Coast of CT. This stretch of towns along Long Island Sound (Greenwich, Stamford, Darien, Westport, etc.) is filled with people who commute back and forth to largely well paying jobs in NYC. I live in a place where affluence and abundance is largely the norm. There are obviously many places like it across the country, so what I say about my town would certainly apply to both upscale bedroom community and fancy urban setting alike.

From an anthropological observation perspective, living in my town is fascinating, particularly as it relates to my job. Why? Most people who live here are thin. In the case of my town, they are also mostly blond (real or otherwise). They dress well (depending on how one feels about whale pants), and they drive nice cars. But I'm always struck by the observation my parents made when they first visited me here 10 years ago: "where are the heavy people?"

It is telling that the original version of the Stepford Wives was filmed in a Fairfield Count town. Maybe all the heavy people of my town were replaced by robots? More likely, I would attribute the thinness of my town to the metaphorical lesson from the Stepford Wives: peer pressure plays a massive role in how we live. In my curious town, it seem that it's just expected that one be thin.

There is a research basis for all of this. There have been a number of ground breaking research papers exploring the role of social networks and obesity based on the findings of the epidemiological data from the half-century and counting Framingham Heart Study. This research showed how close relationships between people, particularly women, can predict incidence of obesity. If most of your close friends are obese, there is a good chance you will also be obese, even when controlling for other factors such as income.

As I look around my town, it seems the opposite is also true. If all your friends are skinny, you want to be skinny too. There is an old expression/truism that women dress for each other, not for their spouses. If one lives in an affluent town, one wants to be able to rock a Chanel dress because one's friend can rock a Versace dress (in the case of Fairfield County, maybe the a Lily Pulitzer dress). It's how affluent people maintain a sense or order in their community. In the case of my town, the affect of peer pressure seems to be an issue for virtually all the women and maybe 10% of the men -- it seems that golf fashion does not require an innate level of fitness or thinness. Even the women of my town who do not count themselves as "thin" are frankly completely healthy from a BMI/health risk factor perspective. Most of the women who live in my town are way beyond worrying about weight for health reasons. Looking good and feeling accepted is the driving consideration. I suppose in this sense, Fairfield County, CT is no different than the upscale parts of Manhattan, LA, San Francisco or Dallas, TX.

Again, I'm not judging this kind of motivation as good or bad. I'm merely making an observation. From my personal point of view, health and well being has always been by far the biggest reason to drive toward a healthy lifestyle. It is what gets me motivated to come to work each day. Yet, vanity and acceptance have played a role (for better or worse) when it comes to weight management for decades.

There are of course, the extremes. From Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe did an excellent job describing and categorizing what he called the Social X-Ray woman (Urban Dictionary definition: a very thin/anorexic female socialite). I recently heard a new label for it: the lettuce and Chardonnay crew. It is a lifestyle of perpetual hunger, combined with hard hangovers resulting in a certain base level of harshness in social interactions. From what I can see this is much more stereotype/anecdotal than reality, even in my crazy little town. Most of the women I know in my town seem to strike a reasonable balance. They are definitely careful, but they haven't gone off the deep-end.

So what defines the lifestyle of a woman in my town? First off, they workout like convicts. They scoff at the US Physical Fitness Guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate activity per week. This crowd does a brisk business in yoga, pilates, spin classes, bootcamp death classes, personal training, tennis, etc., etc., etc. They pretty much work out every day, and they often workout hard. They are competitive and intense when it comes to their exercise, and they take no prisoners.

From a food perspective, they eat 90% clean. Fish, chicken and salads are their mainstays. They watch their portion sizes (even when they claim to be gorging -- "I ate a whole sandwich! I'm so bad!"). They keep their deserts in check. Just a few years ago, we had people in town with "Bring Whole Foods!" bumper stickers (a few eventually came). If they have one source of caloric vice, it's probably in their wine.

Again, is this bad? It's easy to make fun of this crowd ("Eat a sandwich!"), but allow me to re-characterize their lifestyles: they exercise a lot and they watch what they eat. Not a bad way to go as long as not taken to the lunatic (and potentially dangerous) extreme. In fact, if the entire country exercised a lot and ate clean, we would not have the runaway train of rising health care costs. Obviously, I fully recognize that affluent communities have access to any and all of the resources to help them stay on a healthy lifestyle. Gaining access to healthy choices is a much more difficult process for the great percentage of society, and it borders on nearly impossible for the impoverished portion (see next week...).

One interesting possibility from this little anthropological survey is the hope that adopting a healthy lifestyle could become a population-wide trend. A moderate amount of peer pressure to make healthy choices could help. I'm not advocating for a nation of Social X-Rays and Hollywood celebrities. I'm advocating for a society where people take a vested stake in their own health. What if healthy became fashionable and the thing to do? I'm also not advocating where peer pressure is used as a stick or source of punishment. A balancing act is in order, and focusing on healthy choices, not six pack abs is a good place to start.

What about me? I exercise all the time, and I also try to eat clean. I go for the salad (dressing on the side thanks!), not the steak. I kind of like to buy pretty clothes (flat front trousers rule!). Holy smokes. Have I become a Fairfield County mom? Well, one male friend has started calling me Skinny Bitch (SB for short). If I can be healthy and fit as a result, I'm OK with that kind of teasing.

Next week: Part 2. The very real (and obviously much more important) issue of obesity and poverty.

Cheers,

dk

Man meets bike. On vacation. Man loves bike. On vacation.

2010-08-13T12:01:00.001-04:00

My last post outlined my excellent game plan to stay in shape on vacation. I laid it out with outstanding diligence and detail. And I was gently mocked, both on this blog and outside of it. I think the gist of the message was: lighten up (no pun intended), it's a freaking vacation. Sound advice, I must admit.

Yet, not posting on this blog is making me feel unfulfilled. Either that or I am needing to satisfying my OCD-like need to publicly navel gaze about, well, my navel. So at the risk of attracting more derision and teasing, here's my vacation week so far.

Eating: not bad, far from perfect, but far from descending into the ninth ring of eating Hades. As promised, I am keeping it together on breakfast and lunch. Dinner, as always, is not bad while not perfect. I have tried to snack on fruit, with many apples and peaches consumed. I am still a bit prone to mindless grazing on salty, refined, nutritionally bankrupt snacks, but it hasn't been at extremely disgusting levels. And I've been sneaking ice cream (I know, what mid-40's person really needs to "sneak" ice cream -- sad).

Exercise: hit the gym for weights three mornings this week, and I've only completely blown off exercise completely one day. I've done a good bit of running around on the beach with the vague notion of keeping up with the kids. Walks on the beach have been reasonably frequent.

But the best news on the exercise front has been my new/old friend, my bicycle. I am an early riser by nature, and I'm often up at least one to two hours before the next biped stirs. The last two mornings, I've hit the bike trails with a nice little vengeance. The joy of outdoor exercise cannot be understated, particularly at the crack of dawn. At 6:30 in the morning at a beach town, there is hardly a moving vehicle to be found (in stark contrast to an August afternoon). Going fast in peaceful silence is an amazing, almost meditative experience. Further, the pleasure of blitzing through a long bike trail, and to then emerge on a brilliant, blue ocean is almost surreally beautiful. It's all a nice reminder that exercise does not have to be a chore, but can be a form of unabashed amore.

My bike. Is it weird to love an inanimate object?

I don't know what I'd do now without my exercise, and I'm grateful that I found it and made room for it in my life. My navel is equally grateful.

Cheers,

dk

Getting activity POINTS by evading sharks. My pre-vacation check list.

2010-08-02T14:00:00.000-04:00

All good things come to those who wait. After a hectic summer, I am finally getting geared up for VACATION beginning this coming weekend. Two weeks at the beach with family is really all a guy can ask for. Accordingly, it's time for me to write-up my pre-vacation check list. I know I've done these on this blog before, but truth be told, I write these check lists as much for myself as for anyone reading the blog. There's nothing like a little bit of forced accountability through public disclosure.

As I've noted in past pre-vacation posts, this special time is often a nutritionally perilous time. Most significantly, clicking on the "I'm on vacation" neon sign in my brain is tantamount to turning on the "I can do and eat anything I want" sign. Therefore, it's useful and helpful for me to remind myself that respite does not have to equal nasty fried food.

So here I go. Let's start with Danger Zones to manage/avoid:

Evil snacks: it's pretty easy to load up the rental house and beach bag with enormous bags of chips and assorted food rubbish. Unless I don't.
Fried food: my beach zone is in Massachusetts, home of the fried clam. Fried food always looks awesome pre-mouth entry, tastes OK, and feels terrible post-mouth entry. Why continue to repeat the sins of the past? Stick with the grilled fish.
Ice cream: it's a danger zone, but one worthy of partaking on some sort of semi-reasonable basis.
Slothdom: in theory, vacation creates the risk of non-movement. However, I'm far too hyperactive to not exercise, so it's not a terrible danger zone.

Moving on to my I-don't-want-to-gain-10lbs-in-two-weeks Action List:

Find a gym: I have already worked the interweb to find a local gym that will sell a two week package. I agree that it's sad that I find this so awesome. Nonetheless, I find this awesome. I wake up before the rest of the family anyway, so why not jam in a solid workout.
Find a bike path: I also looked this up online, and there are lots of trails where I'm going. It's not mega-death hill climbing, but there are plenty of flats for a nice 45 minute semi-sprint. Also makes for a good family activity.
Try something new(ish): I found a local surf school that teaches standup paddle boarding (SUP), which I already tried and liked this summer. This plus body surfing and swimming is both fun and active. Which is good.
Pre-scout healthy food options: Again, I've worked the web to find some good fresh-stands, farmer markets and organic food options. I plan to load up on having a ton of good, fresh food kicking around.
Plan on a healthy breakfast and lunch each day.
Don't go crazy at dinner, but don't over-think it either. Nuff said.

Said differently, when entering a new environment, a little research, planning and mental rehearsing goes a long way. As always, I don't expect to fully adhere to the above guidelines, but hitting at least 75%-80% will make for a healthy, un-gross vacation experience.

Scanning the recent local news, I recently learned that Cape Cod is now having an outbreak of both rip currents and Great White shark infestations. This should make for some vigorous swimming. It's nice when the survival mechanism can also benefit the caloric equilibrium.

I'm guessing this guy doesn't count POINTS,

but I'm still curious how many POINTS I would be?

For those who did your vacations already, how did it go? For those still planning, anything to add to the list?

Cheers,

Your brain on drugs. Errr. I meant food.

2010-07-26T18:27:00.000-04:00

As referenced in an earlier post, I had the opportunity to attend the recent International Congress on Obesity in Stockholm, Sweden a couple of weeks ago. There was some research shown that demonstrates what our brains looks like when we're hungry. It's a fascinating new angle on understanding obesity that uses the technology of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI's). Said differently: brain scans with cool colors that show neural activity as it is actually happening.

Researchers have used this technology to attempt to better understand the parts of the brains that get activated by different systems and pathways. Some researchers now theorize that there are two pathways that show how brain activity relates to feelings of hunger:

Homeostatic: this is basically the control mechanism our bodies use to manage our energy balance. They largely rely on hormones to either stimulate or suppress hunger depending on whether we have excess energy stores (i.e., have eaten enough). Leptin levels are elevated to suppress hunger while grehlin levels are elevated when we need food. Said differently, this system was designed to help us figure out when we need food or not. It is not to say that the system works perfectly in guiding people to their swimsuit-fantasy selves, but it generally works on some level.
Hedonic: appropriately named, the hedonic system is theorized to stimulate people to consume "highly palatable" foods (and drugs) through dopamine release through something called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. Basically, when you see a picture of chocolate cake your brain goes fuzzy. And you eat. Or you really want to eat. Badly.

Recently, there has been research done that demonstrates that the hedonic system goes into overdrive for people who struggle with their weight vs. people who don't. Apparently, those of us who are challenged with excessive food intake (like me) have brains that light up like a Christmas tree when we see something yummy. Apparently, the naturally thin do not have this neural-fireworks display to nearly the same degree.

Interesting, there has also been research that seems to indicate that those who have lost weight and kept it off have a different part of our brains that also lights up when we see something yummy. It is basically, the part of the brain (the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in case you were wondering) that helps us regulate against our impulsive behaviors. A friend of mine asked me if such a part of the brain could be implanted or purchased. Presuming that medical technology for this kind of quick fix does not yet exist, it sounds like the way to get this part of the brain activated may be more like developing a new muscle, presumably through practice and training.

So what's my professional take on all of the above? fMRI is a hot new area in obesity research that holds a lot of interesting long term promise. It's still new technology (as it relates to obesity), and the brain is a complicated piece of equipment. As a result, curiosity into these studies is definitely warranted, but a wait-and-see scientific patience is as well. It's very new stuff.

So what's my personal take on all of the above? I totally relate to these theories. My brain totally gets fuzzy when I see my favorite trigger foods. I cannot look at a muffin without my heart skipping a beat and my head getting a weird buzzing sensation. To be clear, I haven't had a muffin in years, and I still have a frenzied response when I see one.

At the same time, I seem to have gotten pretty adept at not eating said muffin. Therefore, it's possible that my self-restraint brain biceps have gotten at least a little bit toned. That said, if I were locked in a closet with a blueberry muffin for a day, I would surely eat it. So I cannot rely on my restraint muscle completely. I also need to keep myself out of harms way by avoiding being around those foods that make my brain-heart go pitter-pat.

It's all common sense stuff, but it's interesting to see how it's correlated to neuroscience. Does that mean it's not brain surgery? Let's hope surgery isn't required.

How do you manage your own dopamine pathways to keep yourself from spiraling into a food frenzy?

Cheers,