Brain-Powered Weight Loss, page 8
Perceived hunger can always be traced back to a trigger, be it positive, negative, or neutral. These are common triggers that people typically associate with unintentional eating:
•Daily routines and habits, such as popping open a beer and reading e-mail after coming home from work, or putting sugar and cream in your morning coffee
•Special routines, such as holidays, family events (reunions, weddings, etc.), and vacations
•Boredom
•Seeing and smelling food
•Talking about food
•Being in the presence of food, like when you buy items not on your shopping list at the supermarket
•Fatigue
•Being around certain people
•Time of day, such as eating when giving your kids an after-school snack
•Surprising news, either good or bad
•Celebratory events
•Being around sugary or fatty foods
•Participating in events related to food, such as going to a ball game or the movies
•Procrastination
•Difficult emotions, such as anger, anxiety, grief, and sadness
CHAINING: FORTIFY THE LINKS TO BETTER BEHAVIOR
Chaining is an exercise that enables you to take complex behaviors and break them down into a series of links in order to better understand why you ended up behaving the way you did. Each link in the chain sets the occasion for the next to take place. Every time you eat off plan or find yourself overeating, chain back through the links you missed that would have broken the chain that led to your unwanted behavior. It will help you better understand how your behaviors occur and the actions you can take to stop them. The following template will get you started. Begin the exercise in your journal or notebook. You can download more exercises by looking for the worksheet titled “Chaining” on my Web site, www.elizakingsford.com, and put them in your notebook.
How did I go off plan? What happened?
What was I thinking just before making the decision?
What was I feeling at the time?
Build five chains (actions) that could have changed the outcome:
What will I do differently next time?
The purpose of Chaining is to condition yourself to become mindful of all the decisions you make around food. People with a Healthy Obsession do it all the time. I do it. I love Mexican food, and I have a hard time resisting chips. As soon as I sit down in my favorite restaurant, I immediately tell the waiter not to bring the complementary chips and salsa. I’m familiar with the menu and know what I should eat, so I never read it. I also love bread, so I always refuse the bread basket in restaurants because I know I will have a hard time stopping at one piece. I don’t miss it when I don’t taste it. This is easy to do when you learn the many ways you can replace your unsuccessful thinking patterns with more successful ones—which is exactly what you’ll be doing in the next two steps, starting with learning how to be more mindful in the way you lead your life (in general) and make your decisions around food (in particular).
MASTER OF WEIGHT LOSS: Debra R.
She Was “Living in Black-and-White Thinking”
I wouldn’t call myself a master at weight loss, but I used to be a master at cognitive distortions, so much so that I could have been the poster girl for black-and-white thinking. However, that all started to change in late 2014 when I went to interview Eliza Kingsford for a story I was writing about weight loss.
I’m one of those people who others would describe as “she could stand to lose a few.” And it’s true. I wasn’t really fat, but I definitely wasn’t slender. I walked around carrying an extra 15 pounds—give or take a few—for more than 25 years. When Eliza first told me she “can talk anyone into losing weight,” my first thought was, “Not me you won’t!” And guess what? I was totally wrong.
As I listened to Eliza talk, I realized everything she was saying about how chronic behaviors and triggers sabotage weight-loss efforts made total sense. It was like she was talking about me and my weight-loss efforts for the past 25 years. I had been going on and off diets since I was 19 years old. When I was on, I was starving myself or depriving myself of something—carbs, fat, whatever was the fad at the moment. When I was off, I would eat anything or everything. I was constantly living in black-and-white thinking. If I made one slip (that’s me she’s describing in “Black-and-White Thinking” ordering the eggs Benedict), I’d figure the entire day was ruined and comfort myself with sinful foods until it was time for bed. The day before I’d start yet another new diet, I’d eat and eat like it was my last meal. And sometimes those diets didn’t last for more than a few days.
Several years ago, I just got sick of yo-yoing and decided to find out where I’d end up. Once again, you could’ve said, “She can stand to lose a few.” But not so anymore, because I decided to give Eliza’s plan a test-drive. As it turns out, Eliza really can talk anybody into losing weight. By listening to what she had to say and following the advice now detailed in this book, I dropped 13 pounds in 5 months. And I didn’t “go on a diet.” I didn’t even change what I eat, because I’ve always strived to eat healthy. All I did was change my behavior around food.
I got out of the habit of black-and-white thinking and a few other cognitive distortions she describes. I’ve learned to consider the consequences of my choice before I order something and almost always choose, as Eliza likes to say, “What serves me.” I never anymore allow a slipup to jeopardize my progress; now, it only makes me strive harder to stay on plan. I stay accountable every single day through MyFitnessPal app, and I make a real effort every day to get in 10,000 steps, even though it’s not always that easy. I know without doubt that these new behaviors have allowed me to achieve something I’ve never done before: Those 13 pounds are still gone, more than a year later.
STEP 4
Find Your Wise Mind through Mindfulness
Psychologist Marsha Linehan, PhD, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, teaches that at any given time, your mind can be in one of three places: an emotional state, a reasonable state, or a wise state—what I like to call your Wise Mind. Your ultimate goal in achieving Brain-Powered Weight Loss is to spend as much time in your Wise Mind as you can.
Your Emotional Mind is in charge when your thoughts and behaviors are controlled by feelings, which often can be impulsive and intense. When emotions are in charge, your mind can easily distort facts and make you behave irrationally. Reason and logic do not come into play. Things like getting angry at work (“I can’t stand working in sales—I’m quitting!”), acting impetuously (“Heck with the gym, let’s go get a banana split!”), imagining something has happened to someone who’s 30 minutes late (“What if he ran out of gas or, worse, got in an accident?”), and eating a cupcake just because it looks good (“I’m not even hungry, but I can’t resist!”) are all examples of an Emotional Mind in overdrive.
Think of all the times your Emotional Mind has led you to the cookie jar or to the freezer looking for ice cream. You didn’t really want to eat; your Emotional Mind made you do it. Every cognitive distortion you learned about in Step 3 comes about when your Emotional Mind rules your life.
Your Reasonable Mind rules when you are task oriented, thinking logically, paying attention to your surroundings, making fact-based decisions, and consistently being intentional about your behavior—like you should be when you’re driving a car. When your Reasonable Mind is in charge, you are ruled by facts, reason, logic, and pragmatics. There is no place in your decision for emotion; values and feelings are not important. Your unhappiness at work becomes, “I can’t quit until I find another job.” Forgoing the gym becomes, “There is never a reason for missing the gym.” Your worry over waiting for someone becomes, “He’s always late.” Being offered the cupcake is immediately rebuked with, “There is no nutritional value in a cupcake.”
A Reasonable Mind might sound like a good place to be, but when you let it rule, life can become much too rigid. When you spend too much time in your Reasonable Mind, you’re devoid of emotion. You act or react without considering the circumstances or consequences. For example, you find out your son didn’t do his homework like you’d asked, so you slap your hand on the counter and respond, “You’re grounded all weekend!” But where’s the context? Where’s the feeling? It’s quite possible he didn’t do his homework because he didn’t understand it and was too embarrassed to ask for help. If you would have injected a little emotion first, you’d have asked, “Can you tell me why you didn’t do your homework? Do you need help with it?”
If you lived solely in your Reasonable Mind, you’d find it hard to make and keep friends or bond in a loving relationship, because relationships are fostered through emotion. You’d find it difficult to experience joy and happiness. You’d get no pleasure out of eating and would consider food as nothing more than fuel for your body. You’d never be at peace with yourself because you’ve handcuffed yourself to rigidity, and most likely you’d eventually rebel—“This vegan diet could take me forever to lose weight. I want out!”
Thankfully, the Wise Mind emerges when these two minds overlap. It looks like this:
It takes the best of both your Emotional Mind and your Reasonable Mind to merge as your Wise Mind.
You are most authentic when you are in your Wise Mind. Being in your Wise Mind means you are thinking at your best, often responding to what is commonly called your “gut feeling.” You instinctively feel the difference between right and wrong. You intuitively recognize the difference between your emotions and your reasoning, and you have the ability to make the best decision and follow through, using a little of both. The desire to quit your job on the spot might instead look like, “So, I didn’t make any sales today, but overall I am really successful at selling.” The urge to skip the gym becomes, “Skipping the gym just because I don’t feel like going is not a great choice for me.” Worrying while waiting for someone to show up becomes, “I might as well work and make use of this time while I’m waiting.” The tempting cupcake becomes, “It looks good, but I don’t need or want one.”
When you’re in your Wise Mind, you are centered and grounded, and have your life and thoughts in balance. You are not making decisions based solely on emotions; neither are you devoid of them. When you are in your Wise Mind, you can refocus the urge for some ice cream by reminding yourself how crappy it’s going to make you feel afterward and how frustrated you’ll be with yourself for eating it. Or, if you are making an intentional choice to eat ice cream, it’s your Wise Mind that gives you the ability to accept your decision and get yourself back on plan—not tomorrow or Monday or on January 1, but now.
Living in your Wise Mind does not mean your life is always going to be easy. It does not mean that losing weight and maintaining your weight loss will be a breeze. However, living in your Wise Mind will give you the ability to handle life and whatever struggles enter it with intention, acceptance, and nonjudgmental awareness.
If you’ve been in a constant struggle with your weight, most likely you spend too much time leading with your Emotional Mind and possibly too little time making decisions with your Reasonable Mind. For example, it’s your Emotional Mind that sends you into a tailspin that leads to an all-out binge because you went off plan by drinking a milkshake, whereas your Wise Mind allows you to stop, slow down, and check in: “That milkshake tasted great, but I don’t feel very good about drinking it. I’m getting right back on track, where I know I’ll feel good eating foods that are in line with my goals.” There’s no black-and-white thinking, no disqualifying the positive, no mental filtering, no mind reading. Rather, you know you can’t change what just happened, but it’s totally up to you what happens next. You are being nonjudgmental (“Shakes happen!”), aware (“I can’t change what I did, but I can control what I do next”), and intentional (“I’m back on track”).
We all have the ability to learn to live mostly in our Wise Minds. The surest way to get there is through learning the practice of mindfulness, an effective and increasingly studied skill for resolving an array of issues, food being one of them. It’s an integral part of the brain-powered plan because being mindful means you are thinking with your Wise Mind—which brings me to Brain-Powered Pointer No. 8:
Practicing mindfulness helps you find your Wise Mind.
Mindfulness is one of the most important skills you are going to learn and one I encourage you to embrace and use often. Consider it your number one go-to tool for changing the way you think about and behave around food.
MINDFULNESS: THE PLAYBOOK TO A WISER MIND
Mindfulness is a highly effective form of attention-control training that teaches us how to focus and be present in the here and now and take each moment as it comes. It allows us to experience life as we are living it with awareness, clarity, and acceptance in the absence of judgment.
Mindfulness is an ages-old Eastern practice introduced into Western culture more than 30 years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD. In his seminal book Wherever You Go, There You Are, Dr. Kabat-Zinn calls mindfulness “the art of conscious living.”
Mindfulness is the antithesis of multitasking. When you are being mindful, you can’t listen to your kids talking about their school day while checking your to-do list, because your attention is solely focused on what your children are telling you. When you are being mindful, you aren’t eating your lunch while checking your e-mails, because you’re completely paying attention to the enjoyment of the food. When you are being mindful, you can’t jump to conclusions or initiate any of the other cognitive distortions that dominate your life. When you are being mindful, you won’t automatically find yourself in front of the freezer with a pint of ice cream in your hand because you are always in touch with what, when, where, why, and how you eat.
Mindfulness is integral to changing our thought patterns and the behaviors they create because paying attention to how we genuinely experience daily life is the foundation of change. It allows us to understand our feelings, thoughts, and emotions and how they interact with our world. It helps break the self-perpetuating cycle of cognitive distortions that cause us to overeat and thwart our ability to stay on track. Practicing attention control works because it gives us the ability to pause in the moment (passing by a tray of cupcakes) and then respond (“Thanks just the same, but I’m not hungry”), rather than react (“Just got to have one!”). Being mindful reminds us that we have choices. We can choose to either turn to food or deal with a situation without involving food.
Both Western medical and psychological sciences have embraced mindfulness as an effective tool because hundreds of scientific studies conducted over the last few decades have found it increases overall health and helps combat a long list of medical and psychological issues, including overcoming the inability to lose weight and sustain weight loss. Specific to overweight and the issues that impede weight loss, practicing mindfulness has been found to help:
•Strengthen our ability to regulate our emotions
•Foster positive thoughts and emotions
•Increase happiness and improve mood
•Ameliorate uncontrollable eating and preoccupation with food
•Decrease an interest in eating unhealthy foods
•Shield us from stress and emotional eating
•Reduce dependence on the triggers that cause overeating and binge eating
•Improve an awareness of satiety
•Decrease anxiety, anger, depression, fatigue, and tension
•Decrease negative thinking and avoidance behaviors
•Increase our sense of well-being
•Improve resilience, focus, and learning
All these remarkable mental changes are possible because repeating a practice over and over can change and create new neural pathways in the brain, a process known as neuroplasticity. For example, one study, conducted at Harvard University, found the area of the brain involved in emotional regulation called the insula grew stronger in people who practiced mindfulness. Another study, conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, found that practicing mindfulness thickens the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that controls the high-level skills known as executive function, and shrinks the amygdala, the area of the brain that initiates stress.
These studies were not conducted on monks dedicated to a life of meditation in a monastery, but on regular folks like you and me who participated in a formal 6- or 8-week course in which they learned mindfulness through meditation.
MINDFULNESS MEDITATION
Meditation takes little thought—and that’s the challenge. Our minds are typically racing with lots of thoughts like cars speeding over, under, and through the busy superhighways that traverse a large city. When you meditate, it’s more like meandering alone down a quiet country road.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of meditation. If you’re one of them, just put the word aside—don’t get lost in it. The type of meditation known as mindfulness meditation does not involve chanting, prayer, or adopting mantras. It is neither spiritual nor religious in nature. Mindfulness meditation is simply the practice of training the brain to be aware, nonjudgmentally and on purpose. Mindfulness won’t make life easier, but it will help you make managing its many challenges easier. It won’t make weight loss easier, but it will help you stick with your commitment. It may even help you achieve long-term weight control. Studies suggest that people who practice mindfulness meditation typically are at a healthier weight.
Attention training breaks the cycle of autopilot, the time you spend just going along with your day, unconsciously popping jelly beans in your mouth, for example, rather than making a conscious or intentional choice such as “I don’t want or desire candy.” As you practice focusing your attention, you will begin to become more aware of the unconscious thoughts that influence your behavior. You will be able to pause and reflect on what’s happening in the moment and notice the unconscious mental habits that have been driving your decisions and choices. As you build the skill to recognize these habits, it will become easier to take them in a healthier direction. You’ll notice you can handle change better, you’ll be less reactive, and you’ll be able to accept yourself for who you are. You will see life with more clarity.
