Fast food optimism...

The other morning, I was watching the news, and I saw the CEO of the company that owns Hardee's and Carl's Burgers complaining about the cost of healthcare.  I had to admit that my first reaction was to be slightly irritated given the role of obesity in driving healthcare cost.  While it is hard to deny the impact of eating giant cheeseburgers to expanding waist lines, perhaps loading all of the responsibility for the obesity epidemic at the door step of fast food is a bit severe.  Reasonable people can disagree on this point.

Nonetheless, all of this got me thinking about how I generally feel about fast food, particularly as it relates to the way yours truly currently lives his life.  In truth, it's pretty unusual for me to darken the doors of a traditional fast food establishment these days.  It's not really a conscious decision that I make each day.  Rather, fast food just isn't really part of my daily patterns any more.  Again, this is not a value judgement, but rather a simple observation of what I do.

It wasn't always this way as my relationship with fast food has evolved quite a bit over the years...

• The early years:  When I was a kid, we didn't go out to a lot of restaurants.  My folks were tending to a litter of four kids on the salary of a government scientist.  As well, it's important to remember that we were still in Olden Times when I was a kid.  In those days, people ate a lot more of their meals at home.  For me, fast food was generally equated with McDonalds, which I got to go to about four to five times per year.  Each of those visits was a wonderful, glorious occasion filled with Big Mac's, shakes and fries.  It's hard to describe how much I loved burping Big Mac's over the hours after a McDonalds trip -- it was like getting to go over and over again during a course of hours (I admit that this is a gross recollection, but I dare you to deny feeling the same way). 
• College:  Fast food was a constant.  These were the years of Super Size gone horribly wrong.  I will admit to sometimes stepping up to a double Big Mac order.  These were also the years in which I worshiped at the alter of fried chicken (I went to school in NC after all).  Bojangles was a particular highlight.  There was nothing like fried chicken and a biscuit w/ sausage gravy to erase an evening of beer soaked hijinx. 
• Early years of work, up to the day I started at WW:  I still hit fast food from time to time, but my menu tended to move to more sit-down-service burger joints.  Frankly, these were probably worse, nutritionally speaking, than any of my fast food indulgences. 
• The healthier years (i.e., today):  As noted, I really don't see a lot of traditional fast food in my life other than the occasional visit during a road trip.  It's almost as though the frequency and occasions have returned to what was the case during my early years.  

So with all of the above in context, I started to think about how I do and could handle fast food today.  After feeling a little critical of the Carl's Jr burger guy, I went on their website to see what normal options could be had.  In fact, Carl's sells salads with low fat dressings.  This is the case for most fast food places.  In other words, if you need to go, you can absolutely stay on plan.  Pretty much the only places where I haven't figured out how to do this are the true dens of hedonism such as 5 Guys, IHOP and Dairy Queen.

From a broader social perspective, the basic value proposition of fast food is that it is:

• Convenient:  fast food is everywhere
• Inexpensive:  certainly compared to other dining out options
• Tasty:  depending on your taste, they deliver a lot of satisfied taste buds.  

 It's the last bullet point where people have gotten into trouble with fast food.  Most of the stuff on the menu is not really ideally suited to be part of an every day healthy eating plan.  Most of the menu (I would guess 85% to 90%) is great for a treat or a splurge, but not really for five days per week.  The biggest issue with fast food is that while you can make the healthy choices (e.g., the grilled chicken-no mayo, the salad w/ low fat dressing, etc.), these good choices represent a narrow part of the menu, and most of us are tempted to fall into the choices that aren't so hot (nutritionally speaking).

My way of handling this kind of temptation is to mentally rehearse my order before I walk into the store.  I really don't want to be making my choice on the fly and at the counter -- too much risk of rash decision.

From a societal perspective, I think we can safely say that fast food is here to stay, so we cannot wish it away.  Further, I would not discount the value of convenience and price that these outlets provide.  My hope is that the big chains will step up and transition their platforms to much more fully embrace healthy choices on their menus, ideally representing 75% or more of what they sell vs. 10 to 20% today.  Is this wishful thinking?

View of the future?

Let me call attention to a relatively new chain, the Energy Kitchen, which is based in NYC.  The Energy Kitchen was founded by Mike Repole after he sold the Vitamin Water business he founded to Coke.  His plan is to open up 40 stores over the next two years.  Of note with this concept is that nothing on the menu is over 500 calories.  The Energy Kitchen has become my new go-to lunch spot in NY.  The food is great, and my lunch clocks in at 6 PointsPlus values for a cobb salad with a side of creamed spinach.  It's a great bit bunch of food for not a lot of calories.  BTW, it tastes great.

What I particularly like and admire about the Energy Kitchen is that they are trying to prove that you can sell nutrient dense, energy light food that is also great tasting and convient/fast.  I can only hope they these guys find success beyond belief and serve as a role model for the broader restaurant community that good taste, great nutrition, convenience and value can all be part of the same equation.

Cheers,

dk

Little epiphanies from my vacation

I'm always a little amused with myself, as I continue to live my healthier life.

I'm on vacation this week with my family, on a ski week in Utah.  As I have written about many times, I like active vacations that hold the promise of both activity and relaxation.  I suppose it is a little odd and obsessive that I need activity when I take a week off, lest I suddenly gain 53 pounds in seven days.  In truth, I could easily take the entire week off of exercise, and my world would continue to spin on its axis.  However, it's not only obsession that makes me appreciate an active vacation as I truly do love to run around for a whole host of reasons beyond the size of my midsection.  Among other things, I do believe that ski vacations are among the best ways to get truly quality time with my family.  There is nothing like being stuck on a ski lift to make a 14 year old daughter talk to her dorky dad.

But what about the food on vacation?

Our first day here, we went to a nice restaurant in Park City for lunch that had a pretty spectacular and fairly indulgent menu.  My first reaction was to pull on my body armor and get prepared to make the proper Calvinist self-denial choice.  My eyes quickly went to the "cold seafood sampler" consisting of very sea creatures untouched by heavy sauces, served with a cocktail sauce on the side.  Safe choice!  Meanwhile my family was debating between cheese burgers, quesadillas, and other seemingly less responsible routes.

At this moment, I had a sudden bolt of recognition:  I was being a complete downer. I'm at goal weight.  I've been good all January/February.  Really, was a cheeseburger going to be the end of me?  I remembered my advice to myself:  when you are going to splurge, make it matter.  This restaurant was a place where I could definitely get a lot of bang for my splurging buck.  I "boldly" changed my mind and ordered the cheeseburger.

I am a pretty cheeseburger.  You can love me.
Just don't love all of me.  

Let me be clear.  This particular cheeseburger was a sight to behold.  It was made with high grade beef, a Gucci bun and a side of thick cut fries coated in parmesan cheese.  I had chosen well, and I was glad that I was able to let go and act like a normal person on vacation.

Then something else interesting happened.  My normal course would have been to inhale the meal in about 73 seconds, and then spend the next four hours feeling like crud with a case of bad indigestion (not to mention holding myself in disregard).  Instead, I reminded myself that swallowing the burger whole would make me feel pretty nasty afterwards.  So I took my time, and I stopped eating at about the 60% complete mark (of both burger and fries).  I actually managed to not clean my plate.  On vacation no less.  This is no mean feat for yours truly.  

Afterwards, I felt great.  I got a great, indulgent meal that tasted unbelievably good.  I was also rewarded with not feeling physically ill afterwards.  Finally, I had ZERO remorse.

This little experiment is giving me a new idea on how to manage my clean plate club habit, which I would really like to shed.  There was a super interesting article in the NY Times magazine this week "How companies learn your secrets" , talking about how retailers use information to learn how to get their shoppers to change habits.  What caught my eye in this article, however, was a section on habit change.  It argued that one key to establishing a new habit is to create a new reward the follows a new routine so that your brain will be pleased when you follow a new habit pattern.

So here is my thinking on a new No-Clean-Plate-Club habit profile:

1. Cue:  knowing that when I sit at a restaurant, I will be given a plate with too much food
2. Routine:  go through a mental process where I try to imagine what it will feel like to over-eat and/or eat too quickly
3. Reward:  thinking about how I will feel when I don't over-indulge

This is a little over-simplified, and I think I need to put some more meat on the bones (so to speak).  However, this little vacation lunch was a nice reminder that I can still live in the world, and not have to choose between crazed food binge and monk-like chastity.  With practice, I can continue to learn a middle way...

Cheers,

David

Size matters redux

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!!!

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...

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:

1. 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.  
2. 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.  
3. 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.  
4. 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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.  
3. 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...

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

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

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:

1. Being held prisoner in my home (age 0 to high school graduation)
2. Getting a sailor's shore leave in the brothel of endless food (ages 18 to 34)
3. 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,

dk

Bad habit intervention week

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:

1. Going on steady-state feed mode throughout the afternoon on weekends
2. Saying “yes” to everything served on an airplane
3. Getting overly ambitious with appetizers at social events
4. 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