I am a horrible, traitorous person!

Well, maybe that's an over-statement.  Most days I'm a pretty nice person or at least I am able to intimidate people into saying that.

However, I have to announce a bit of a change.  I am changing blogging engines after three years, and I feel like a bit of a Benedict Arnold.  I started writing this blog on Blogger back in March 2009, and it's been my steady companion ever since.  However, for a variety of reasons I won't share for fearing of horribly boring you, I am making the switch to WordPress.  My technology and web colleagues at the company wanted me to do it, and I was malleable to the request.

To make the change worthwhile, they fancified the new blog a little bit and allowed me to put in all sorts of shameless self promotion for me and my book.  I found that part of the change VERY pleasing.

What does this mean for the people who are kind enough to check out my blog?  Not too much.  The main URL will still be:

www.manmeetsscale.com

However, it will now point to the following URL:

www.manmeetsscale.wordpress.com

We tried to figure out a solution for those of you on Google Connect, and we couldn't.  That said, the new blog site has a convenient email signup (Feedburner) for getting updates.  If you were getting email updates already, that should port over to the new site without you having to do anything at all.

Many apologies in advance for any hiccups along the way!

To Blogger, I wish you a found farewell and the best of luck in all of your future endeavors!

Cheers,

Dave

To Live and Die(t) in LA. This week's healthy travel plan

Big surprise for me:  I've got yet more travel in front of me.  It's a relatively longer trip that stretches over the weekend, so it's got my alert systems gearing up for a potential health wreck.  

With this in mind, I'm going to try a new(ish) practice:  actually writing down a plan and sharing it publicly.  The logic behind this is pretty straightforward, but for me, it's also pretty powerful.  Some time ago, I wrote about research around Hot States and Cold States.  As a refresher, here is what they are:

• Hot state:  when we find ourselves tossed into a situation full of temptation right in front of us and having to make decisions in a vulnerable mental state.  For example, if I were to fall into a large vat of mixed nuts, that would likely put me into a hot state.  I would deal with the situation by eating my way out of said vat-of-nuts.  Not surprisingly, research shows that people are less likely to be make smart decisions in a hot state.  
• Cold state:  This would be an instance in which we were developing a plan for which the subject of temptation was not immediately in front of us.  In a cold state, we can be much more calculating.  In this case, I might write a plan to ask for a life preserver when I get tossed into a large vat of nuts and have someone on hand to pull me out.  

The point is to make decisions when we are not feeling hot and bothered, so we can act responsibly.  Sometimes in life, we don't have a choice, and we unexpectedly end up in a so-called hot state situation.  I would argue that more often we can see the perilous waters long before we hit the water fall.  It's in times like these that we need to pre-arm ourselves and have a plan.  

I've known all of the above for a while, but sometimes my good intentions just seem to get misplaced somewhere in the fun house otherwise known as my brain.  This time, I am going to take a new approach by actually writing said plan down.  For many of you, this is probably not a big deal or revelation, but for me it is.  I am not wired for such activities.  I despise to-do lists and anything that generally resembles them.  I only do them out of duress.  In this case, I will do one to avoid later duress.  It's all a trade-off.  

So here's my new plan for this coming week (let's call it Dangerous Water Plan:  template 1.0)

Down and Out in Beverly Hills?
How bad could it really be?

Situation:

I'm hopping on a plan on Wednesday morning, and I will be attending a bunch of different meetings and conferences over the coming six days.  I return on a red eye on Monday night.  There will be a lot of socializing-type functions, and the conferences will no doubt be littered with food stations.  I will be a little jet lagged due to the three hour time difference, so I expect to be slightly sleep deprived.  Finally, I'm stuck in LA over the weekend sans family so I will be feeling sorry for myself, eager to tend to my brittle emotions with the loving salve of bad food.  

My plan:

Flights...

• Once and for all, I am going to attempt to summon every ounce of will power to ask the flight attendant not to offer me nuts.  In fact, I may ask her not to even offer before she offers.  
• I will order whatever seems the less unhealthy as part of the meal service

Hotels

• No mini-bar food excursions!  
• For the weekend, I might hit a local grocery story and stock up on some fruit in the room so I have alternatives

Breakfast

• Oatmeal 'n fruit 'n yogurt.  Pretty easy.

Lunch

• Whatever healthy thing is available.  At the conference, look to use smaller plates.

Dinner

• Order healthy and try to leave 1/3 of the food on my plate.
• Skip dessert

Snacking at conferences

• Only fruit
• Try to stick to coffee

Workouts

• This one is easy.  Both hotels have good gyms, and one is close to the gym I belong to (Equinox)

Selectively letting go

• Give myself two dinners where I will take the shackles off a little.  I'm thinking Friday and Saturday night.  Get back on plan by Sunday night.  

So that's the plan.  What is interesting about this post is that I really did write it 98% for myself.  Should you get anything out of it, that's great!  

Cheers,

David

Tales of travel and eating... testing myself at the extremes

I'm taking a break from flogging my upcoming book release this week, but don't worry!  More flogging to come!

I knew this was going to be a pretty brutal stretch of travel, and it hasn't disappointed.  Since March 25th...

1. Fly to Shanghai and spend the week there
2. Fly to London for weekend
3. Fly from there to Amsterdam on a Sunday night
4. Fly back to London
5. Fly back to NY on a Thursday
6. Good Friday and weekend to recuperate
7. Take train to Washington, DC on a Tuesday
8. Return to NY on a Friday
9. Weekend to recuperate
10. Fly to St. Louis last night
11. Fly back to NY (as I type --  love me some GoGo)
12. Have THREE whole days in the office
13. Weekend
14. Monday and Tuesday in NY (dinners in the city both nights)
15. Fly to California on Wednesday
16. Take red eye back six days later on a Monday night/Tuesday morning
17. Then I'm finally back in NY for seven contiguous days.  Yay!  

Will the airplane eat me or will I eat the airplane?

I've always had a goofy travel schedule, but this is much goofier than average.  I'm not at all looking for sympathy.  I've got a great job, and I'm grateful for it.  I love being places, but I hate travelling (flying) and I despise jet lag even more.  I'm incredibly fortunate to have the luxury to spend time with lots of different and incredibly interesting people, but I also miss my family terribly.  It's all part of life's many, many tradeoffs.  

Beyond all of the above, I was fully reacquainted with the way that travel taxes our efforts to stay healthy.  I've written about this many times before, but I wanted to again reprise the topic.  I like the travel topic because the extremes of it show how I get tested and how I (try to) navigate my path toward healthy life.  Over the past month, I've generally done pretty well, but I've also had a few amusing wipeouts.  

On the plus side...

• Stupid mini bar.  This has historically been a weak point for me, so I re-doubled my efforts to keep this bad habit in check.  For about a week (China to Europe), I made it a point to Tweet each day whether I had managed to avoid raiding the mini bar for snacks.  Result:  it totally worked.  This was not a small feat for me, so I was pretty pleased.
  
  Learning:  Always have a plan when I am facing a known trouble spot.  Pre-committing to the plan helped tremendously.  Disclosing my results helped even more.  BTW, I could have done exactly the same thing in a WW meeting with the same effect.
• Work the workouts.  I worked out like a nut, regardless of how little sleep I had each night.  My strategy here was my old standby to stay in hotels that either had great gyms (Shanghai) or hotels that were close to free-standing gyms (London, Amsterdam and Washington DC).  One perk to waking up every morning at 3 AM in China was that I had all my work done by 6 AM so I could jam a 90 minute workout each of those days.  Seems like a sad thing to be happy about, but it worked for me!  I think this is the first time that I had this many days traveling overseas without missing a single day in the gym.
  
  Learning:  Have access to decent facilities and make room for the gym on my schedule (in this case by not sleeping -- not by choice mind you)
• (Most) meals:  I stuck to standard breakfasts and lunches.  For dinners, I worked pretty hard to make a conscious decision not to polish my plate and try to leave about 1/3 of it.
  
  Learning:  For predictable meals (breakfast and lunch), stick to the routine.  For dinners, try to mentally rehearse a plan for how I would handle each meal.  

On the not-so-plus side...

• Room service = Satan's imp.  After not really sleeping at all for two straight nights in Amsterdam (for no fun reason whatsoever), I arrived in London a bit of a wreck.  I made the decision to have room service, and I promptly ate half the hotel.  Nero would have been proud.
  
  Learning:  Avoid room service always.  Period.  I simply cannot be trusted in my own room.  Frankly room service depresses me anyway.  I'm getting much more into the habit of going to a local restaurant at night and eating by myself at the bar, iPad in hand.  It's more social, and I'm much more restrained.
• Airplane food:  I did what I wanted.  I've pretty much given up trying to be a saint on flights over 8 hours.  On balance, I will go for dishes that seem less bad, but I simply cannot (and do not) say no to cheese and crackers when I'm strapped to a seat.
  
  Learning:  These events aren't that big of a deal for me, so I'm not losing sleep over this.

One side story that I found amusing.  I arrived in Amsterdam on a Sunday night, and the local team wanted to give me a nice little welcome.  They arranged for a big tray of food to be in my room when I arrived along with a map to the local gym.  The try was mostly fruit (good), but also had a bunch of seemingly healthy nut bars and a big bowl of mixed nuts (bad -- for me, anyway).  I stared at the nuts on and off for about two hours on Sunday night until finally I broke down and started grabbing some.  It was like water torture trying to resist the temptation.  I then did what I normally do by self-flagellating myself for my weakness, and I then hid the nuts and bars underneath my TV stand.  For the next two days, I didn't touch any of them.  

I have a few observations about the above:

1. Am I a four year old?  Who hides food so he won't eat it?  Me.  That's who.  
2. Why not just throw the food away?  I really don't know.  I felt guilty about doing that even though I knew that someone else threw them away.  I'm weird that way.  
3. I knew that if I put them outside of my sight lines that I would be much less tempted to eat them.  Out of sight, out of mind.  That worked.  I'm smart that way.  

I've got more travel in front of me.  The trick will be to keep planning for each trip, and importantly planning for each occasion/event that will be a trouble spot.  

Game on.

Cheers,

dk

Learning to practice safe food love

This series this month on “Why I wrote a book” has forced me to try to distill some of the hard fought lessons that have had the biggest impact on my unending efforts to achieve health and balance.  You can’t talk about weight management without talking about food, but I wanted to talk about a different theme:  learning to not be miserable.

Reason #3 (for the book):  Long-term weight loss isn’t easy, but it need not be a life of deprivation

I recently had my annual physical memorializing the completion of my third year at goal weight.  It’s a fact that I’m pretty proud of.  Suffice to say, I’m extremely happy about the fact that I’m healthier today than I was when I was in my 30’s.  Good blood work, low blood pressure, low resting heart rate, etc.  But wait!  There’s more!  I’m also not too proud to admit a SLIGHT bit of pride over being able to wear clothing intended for thinner people.  It almost makes me forget the impending age lines wrapping around my eyes and my rapidly greying hair.

So what horrible price did I have to pay for this treasure trove of benefits?  Do I now have to live a loveless life without any joy for eating any more or ever again?  Do I wander the earth like one of those ghosts from A Christmas Carol dragging a huge cinder block & chain, moaning my eternal life of deprivation and hunger?

No.

Just not unrequited love...

I love food as much as I ever did.  I just try to love the food that loves me back.  I’m done with the bad girlfriends of food.  You know the type.  Fast and loose, a little psychotic and ultimately bad for you.  They give you cheap thrills and then torture you.  I finally learned to settle down with great food I can live with that makes me happy, is good for me, and is still sexy as all get out.

All of the most important lessons I have learned about food have been about how to not live in deprivation.  The simple truth is that some food will fill you up while others will leave you wanting for more.  The beautiful and incredibly convenient truth is that there are no shortages of good foods that have a crazy combination of 1) being filling, 2) being full of nutritional awesomeness and 3) being low in energy (calories).

Everything I have learned about my current “diet” has been about cheating the devil.  I grew up liking to eat a lot of food, and I still like to eat a lot of food.  I’ve just learned to do it without the collateral damage to my gut.

This is one of the key messages I wanted to share in the book:  if you live in deprivation and hunger, you will almost certainly fly off the wagon.  The trick is to find a predictable set of foods, meals and strategies that you can live with.  Forever.  And happily.

Important announcement redux redux

Don’t forget.  Your book purchase helps a kid get a square meal.  All of my proceeds go to Share Our Strength.  They deserve your money more than I do.

Click to giant book picture in the upper right hand corner to learn more...

Cheers,

dk

Don't try to fight the Death Star -- Willpower is Over-Rated

Following up on last week’s post, I ponder the question:  so I wrote a book, but why???

Reason #2:  I’m pretty sick of hearing about will power

I wrote this book for every person who has ever had to listen to the sanctimonious admonition:  “Get some discipline, eat less and move more.  It’s simple!”

My response to this admonition:  put a sock in it.

It makes me more than a little crazy the way obesity is over-simplified.  Let’s start with some basic logic:  very few people struggling with obesity are particularly happy about that fact.  I know I wasn’t.  The notion that it’s easy if we were all just a little bit less lazy is a bad combination of being 1) wrong and 2) incredibly harmful.  If it was easy and straight forward, I think we can all reasonably expect that we would not have an obesity epidemic on our hands.

Fact #1:  obesity levels are much higher today than they were 30 years ago.
Fact #2:  the availability to food anywhere, anytime has expanded just as fast as our waistlines.
Fact #3:  We live in an environment that conspires to encourage us over-eat.
Fact #4:  our brains aren’t really helping the matter.

So if the answer is complicated, what can we do about it?

Most of what is written about dealing with weight is in the form of nutritional theory, usually in the form of regimented meal plans that are frankly hard to live with.  There is no shortage of diet books constantly streaming into the marketplace focusing on the finer points of nutritional theory.  Cut out fat.  No wait, cut out carbs.  Eat nuts.

Don't fight the Tractor Beam.  Find your
inner Obi Wan and shut the bad boy down.

This begs the question of why I bothered to write a book on the topic of weight.  My answer is that it’s not a diet book.  It’s a change your lifestyle/habits/brain book.  I would argue that the most interesting research happening in the field of weight management is much more in the territory of behavior and neurological science than it is in nutritional science.  Said differently, we eat for a thousand reasons that have nothing to do with actually being hungry.  We eat because we want a reward.  We eat because it’s an ingrained habit.  We eat, and we aren’t even fully aware that we’re eating.  When we get in the tractor beam of a trigger food, we find ourselves being yanked into the Death Star of eating mistakes.  What all of this research points to is a simple truth:  if we try to rely on willpower to stare down temptation, we will almost certainly fail.

Over the past few years, I’ve been pretty heavily influenced by a lot of different writers and researchers in this topic.  Some of them are the writers:  Tara Parker Pope, Mark Bittman, Michael Polan, and more recently, Charles Duhigg.  Many of them are behavioral economists and psychologists such as Brian Wansink, Richard Thaler, Kevin Volpp, B.J. Fogg and many others.

When it comes to what we really need to know about nutrition, I would argue that much of what we need to know is pretty uncomplicated.  The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (aka MyPlate) got it pretty right:  fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables and the rest with lean proteins and whole grains.  Have low-fat dairy.  Minimize junk food.  Watch portion size.  Exercise daily.  Repeat.

If knowing what we should ultimately eat is straight forward, knowing how to make it happen in life is a lot trickier.  It’s not easy to make those noble decisions when we are staring down our most dreaded food temptation.

This brings me back to the book.  I started writing the blog when I became a Lifetime Member of Weight Watchers (i.e., reached my goal weight).  Everything I’ve talked about or thought about over the past three years has had to do with learning to live with my new lifestyle.  It wasn’t until I got to maintenance that I really began to understand what was necessary to try to change my life patterns for good (and better).  In fact, if I knew what I’ve learned in the last three years of maintenance when I started Weight Watchers, it would not have taken me nine years to reach my goal weight.

Therefore, in this book, expect to hear a lot more about changing habits, managing our personal environments and establishing new healthy routines.  The promise is to make healthy decisions easier, and ideally automatic.

Important announcement redux

As noted in the last post, all author proceeds of the book go to Share Our Strength (www.strength.org) to benefit their No Kid Hungry campaign.

Here are the Amazon and Barnes & Noble have links active for pre-order.  I’m told there will be electronic versions as of the on-sale date (I’m still confirming this…)

Here are the pre-order links...

Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Weight-Loss-Boss-Losing----Control/dp/1609619013/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332511698&sr=1-1


Barnes & Noble:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/weight-loss-boss-david-kirchhoff/1108642892?ean=9781609619015&itm=1&usri=weight+loss+boss

Books a Million:  http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Weight-Loss-Boss/David-Kirchhoff/9781609619015?id=5325115807116

IndieBound:  IndieBound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781609619015

Cheers,

dk

My great big giant secret

I have a confession to make.  Over the past few months, I have to admit that my blogging has become a little sporadic, and I feel a little guilty about that.  As luck would have it, I do have an excuse.  It’s not that I haven’t been writing, it’s just that I have been writing in a different venue.  In fact, I just finished writing a book.

There you have it.  I buried the lead.

My very first ever, giant leap into the world of book publishing is about to come to life.  In fact, it’s at the printer as we speak, getting ready to be bound into real-life hard back books that will be found in real-life bookstores (electronic and otherwise).

And the title is?  Don’t laugh.

My face looks like I ate a bad piece of fish...

Weight Loss Boss:  How to Finally Win at Losing--and Take Charge in an Out-of-Control Food World

So what is this book?  Why write it?  More importantly, why read it?  Who’s it even for?

Allow me to answer in several blog posts leading up to (drumroll please) the book launch date on May 8.  Each post will make a case for why I wrote it and why one might be inclined to read it.  So here it goes, reason #1…

Reason #1:  To put my life on sordid display so that others may succeed

So who is the book is for?

I wrote it for anyone who is struggling or has struggled with weight – that’s most of us.  I wrote it with Weight Watchers peeps in mind, but I also wrote it for people who have never or even may never darken the doors of Weight Watchers.  Without pandering too much, I wrote the book for everyone that reads or has read this blog, and I definitely wrote for everyone who has ever posted comments on the blog (even the harsh ones!).  In fact, it was the people (you) who frequent my little blog that motivated me to write the book.

My motivation to write it came down to my recognition of a very simple truth:  none of us is alone in either our struggles or our victories.

I originally started writing the blog as a bit of an experiment.  I wanted to start writing about weight because I felt that too many guys avoided talking about the subject.  I felt that there needed to be more male voices talking about the challenges of living the healthier path, but most of us dudes were a little too sheepish to do so.  I made the decision to start opening up about my own challenges with weight, and I made the conscious decision not to write as the CEO of a big company.

What transpired over the next three years was both fascinating and ultimately critical in shaping how I would ultimately think about the struggle with weight and the obesity epidemic.  As I would start to share my demons in my blog posts, others would jump in and talk about how they experienced similar challenges.  People seemed surprised that the CEO of a big weight loss company would have so many of the same weaknesses and issues.  They also found it encouraging (or they simply liked watching me bare my soul), so I was egged on.  The deeper I got into my own self-examination, the more others responded in kind.

I originally thought that my blog would primarily appeal to male readers, but it quickly became apparent that I was off the mark.  I had many more women commenting and sharing their own experiences.   It seemed that the challenges that we face, man or woman, are much more alike than they are dissimilar.

All of this brings me back to that very simple truth.  For myself, when I’m having a bad day/week/month with eating, I tend to hold myself in bitter contempt.  I cannot help but beat myself up for all of my crummy habits that seem so hard to break.  I get stressed that this process of dealing with food seems never ending.  It’s easy to feel pretty alone, as if everyone else in the world has all of the answers and the discipline while I have none.  Yet what I have learned is exactly the opposite:  we all struggle with the same challenges.  When we share them out loud, we not only help ourselves, we help everyone in earshot.  Through this realization, we can learn to lean on each other and become stronger in the process.   None of us is alone.

So this brings me to the first reason I wrote the book.  If the CEO of a giant weight loss company struggles with all of the same issues and is willing to blurt them out loud, maybe others will be inspired to do the same.  So in the book, I bare my soul, my crummy habits, my peccadillos, and other bits of data that never needed to see the light of day.  I did it for myself, and I did it for anyone willing to toil through the book.

Next week.  Reason #2:  I’m pretty sick of hearing about will power

Important announcement

In making a decision to spend your hard earned money to listen to me blather, there is one important fact that you can take comfort in.  I made the decision to give ALL of the author (that’s me!) advance and royalties of the book to Share Our Strength (www.strength.org) to benefit their No Kid Hungry campaign.  You heard it right.  Neither I or Weight Watchers will make one red cent on this book.  Share Our Strength will spend the money much more wisely that I could ever hope to.

And yes, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have links active for pre-order.

Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Weight-Loss-Boss-Losing----Control/dp/1609619013/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332511698&sr=1-1

Barnes & Noble:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/weight-loss-boss-david-kirchhoff/1108642892?ean=9781609619015&itm=1&usri=weight+loss+boss

Books a Million:  http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Weight-Loss-Boss/David-Kirchhoff/9781609619015?id=5325115807116

IndieBound:  IndieBound: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781609619015

Cheers!!!!!

David