Pretty much all of us know that to lose FAT (not just weight) we have to eat less.
Being able to eat less though - well that's habits.
And a lot about good habits is making it safe for us to change our current behaviours. Change to our nervous system, especially around something as primal and survival based as food is pretty challenging.
Food is crtical to our survival; we're pretty wired to prepare for scarcity.
A lot of the best diet practices today focus therefore on habits rather than calories first, and making it safe for us to change from survival habits to aware habits.
Here's a guarantee that if you don't change anything else but make one change in the following categories, you will lose weight, consistently. The biggie will then be your persistence with this single change.
Here goes:
- 40% of food consumed in the states takes place in front of the TV
- 20% of food consumed in the states takes place in cars.
- Most westerners are chronically sleep deprived
- over the past 20 years, portiion sizes for food have gone up significantly. For example 10 inch dinner plates have been replaced with 12 inch plates; we won't even touch super sizing of fast food.
- Fewer and fewer meals take place deliberately - that is, sitting down simply to eat and converse rather than multitask
- Americans eat 154 pounds of sugar a year; Brits, 128. For brits that's a 1 pound bag every three days, per person.
So given the above, you could stop all eating in the car, in front of the TV, stop drinking all pop/fruit juice (yes fruit juice), go to bed at a decent time, quit eating lunch at your desk, and generally make all the portions of everything you eat much smaller.
That can sound daunting, eh?
SO here's the deal: help your body that's trying to help you in keeping up your calories feel safe about changing this food scavenging and storing behaviour.
Tell your body (yes talk to it as if it were a seperate you - this apparently actually helps), that you understand it's trying to take care of you - to make sure you'll have the fuel you need to thrive each day, but that what you know and it needs to learn is that it's safe to reduce that amount a bit. Food is plentiful and readily available.
So given that, here comes the Change One Thing Diet Plan:
Pick one of the above things you do - not get enough sleep, eat in the car or at the desk, drink pop, eat in front of the tv, and have a think about how many times you might do each of these in a day or a week.
And then, change One PART of One behavior. (and you though i was gonna say change that WHOLE behaviour, didn't you. Ha! )
For instance, if you eat five meals at your desk WHILE WORKING, commit to find a way to eat at least one of those meal away from your desk, sitting down and just eating - maybe with a friend or colleague. What do you need to let that happen? Pick a day it will work, put a PLAN in place to make that happen, write down what you'll do and when, and post that somewhere you'll see it for days in advance of doing it. Seriously. No joke. The way we're wired, this bringing attention to something that we've been doing habitually and at a survival level is really critical to this kind of change.
If you snack in front of the TV each night of the week PLAN AHEAD - (the planning is actually really important) to find a night you think will be safe not to eat while watching TV (and without overeating prior to this moment), and do that. Think about what you'll need to help you stay food free during this time you habitually feed. Put that in place so that it's totally SAFE to have a food free tv night.
Similarly, if you drink a soda or more a day, think about what day in the coming week you could plan to cut back your soda by one can. Same thing: write down WHEN you'll do this, and how you can make it safe for yourself to make this behavioural change.
If you always go to sleep too late and have to get up too early - the alarm has to wake you up - then plan ahead one night when you can make sure you can go to sleep at a decent time. THink about all the stuff that usually gets in the way of you getting to sleep at that time, and think of what you can do to clear it away just for one night. As before, write down your plan, the day you will do this, and stick with it.
After your plan is executed, keep a log of your success: chart your success. And keep doing it.
What's going on here?
It's no secret: to lose fat we have to take in fewer calories than we need for a day. Getting good habits around food intake - looking at when and how we eat to make it safe to eat less - takes effort and energy. Implementing any ONE of the above new habits well - so that it becomes habitual - takes practice.
As with learning any new skill, we need to bring our attention to that practice to learn it. Planning helps (a) make it safe to attempt the new skill and (b) gets in practice performing the new skill (c) brings attention to that skill.
Having a log builds up a basis for success.
You may say, heh, this is not gonna get me to lose weight - giving up one can of soda a week!
Well, first off, less is less, and that's what we're going for. And second, most diets fail because the planning to make it safe to practice them isn't there, and compliance goes in the toilet.
So do your survival you a favour and don't freak it out.
THink of it this way: if you've rarely been in a weight room, would you expect to just go in and start performing olympic lifts like the clean and jerk without learning HOW to do the move, and getting in lots of practice at lighter or no weights just to get that move?
If not, why not? Not safe? Stupid? Hurt yourself, and you may never go back? Hurt yourself and you won't be able to go back for some time even if you thought it was fun? Or if not hurt yourself get so freaked out you get turned off and don't go back?
It's the same thing with diet:
it's a skill and should be just as repsected in terms of learning the technique to develop life-long practice.
So start with getting this One Thing in the One Thing solid. We're not stupid: we know if we need to lose weight we have to eat less, but if it were easy in this environment of stress and abundance of food, we'd all be lean.
So give your survival you a break, and help it make that one small step for Lean Kind, and, as Beck calls it , our "thinner peace"
So let's begin:
Optimally, this plan needs four days advance warning. So rather than "I'll do it tomorrow", even if you're really keen, plan for it to be four days away from now. There are intriguing reasons for four days, but let's leave that for now. Suffice it to say, we get to practice preparing and making it safe for a system shift.
If this sounds like no big deal, that's great. Relax, enjoy that you have so little to do, and still do the excercise. You're rewiring your brain with this practice, just like learning a new dance step - or whatever other activity may take you effort to learn and practice to get to an effortless level of execution.
pick one thing of the above behaviours that you think will be easiest for you to initiate - seriously, this is not about challenging yourself: we want to build up a base of successes, so it's critical to pick the easiest thing you can that will be no worries to do. Eg, if you drink five cans of pop a day, and feel ok about cutting one out on one day, write that down -
So, something like 4 days from now, which will be Month/Day/Year, i will skip Daily Pop #3.
think about what you need to put in place to make sure that will happen, itemize that plan and write it down.
Eg: i know i've skipped my pop before on days when we have group meetings. I will plan to use that opportunity as my "skip" can.
Also, i know Phil is not at that meeting and we always get drinks together, so that will help.
I will have green tea which Ken keeps telling me about instead.
(doing something else to fill the space - as a kind of reward for that new behaviour is a Good Thing - so having a no cal drink that's low in caffeine but also actually has some evidence to support fat loss is a Good Thing)
stick this plan up somewhere you can see it for at least 4 days in advance of practicing it and read it every day. Get psyched up about the fact that you have a great plan and that this is an accomplishment.
Indeed, if you have someone in your life who is supportive of you, and your health goals, tell them about your plan and that you'll let them know how it goes - there's nothing like a hearty "well done" on successful completion of a task. Guess what? Feeling good about an accomplishment releases all sorts of chemicals in the brain that make us feel good about ourselves. So go for it. Reinforce that behaviour.
Stick with that One Thing Approach for awhile: get some practice under your belt. If next week you want to try for reducing two cans within your Pop Reduction One Thing Campaign, you have lots to play with: go for two cans in one day; or one can each for two days. But the guidance is the same: make a plan, write it down, do the check list, recite it each day for four days before execution.
Now if the plan is sleep - you only have 7 nights to play with and you may find it harder. SO that one may take more planning to make it safe to find ways to get in more than one good night a week. But there are ways :)
I recently sat down with a professional trainer who was SURE sleep was a big deal for him and he wasn't getting enough, and he KNEW this was a biggie for his performance goals. After some detailed exploration of those goals and what was happening in his life, in about 20 mins we had a great plan with practical guidance he could actually implement - suggestions he came up with himself - to make these changes safely, effectively, and most of all consistently. We looked too at what forces might make him think about compromising this practice and how we could murphy-proof these in advance.
it's all in the plan, stan.
Anyway, give the change One THing - really one part of one thing one week at a time a go, and let me know how it goes.
Really - start with the unbelievably super easy steps just to get in your reps, do it consistently even though it may sound trivial - you will build up great practices that willg et you where you want to be with your health.
This sounds slow right? maybe, but how's the other diets you may have tried worked for you? we have these bodies for the rest of our lives, so what's the rush? The goal here is to do the neural work that will let Lean Eating become effortless.
One Thing at a Time will do it.
let me know how it goes.
Here's one more thing for you to consider: if you're wearing glasses right now, do you really need to do so? The *less* we wear glasses, the more we can practice shape distinction etc without lenses, the more practice both our eyes and brains get at resolving information without lens dependence.