Keeping Weight Off Forever: Go Beyond the Diet

By Susan Macey PhD and Stefani Truyol

Taking back your power over food and stopping the nonsense of yo-yo dieting in three simple steps. Just because you have struggled to lose weight and keep it off does not mean you are broken. Dr. Macey has developed a full proof plan that lets you define your own steps for weight loss and maintenance giving you back your power over food. The con

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suasn Macey PhD
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732619517

Book preview

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank my clients who have shared their stories, struggles, and successes with me. Each of you has inspired me by enriching my practice, my perspective, and my life.

I give a big Thank You to Stefani Truyol, the artist whose creative insights captured the essence of Bariatric Betty in the delightful and telling illustrations throughout the book. You’ve taken my idea and vision and really brought her to life.

There are people who are placed in our lives at just the right moment, bringing something special to us. Unknowingly, they give you what you need right when you need it most. I owe a debt of gratitude to Steven Pate. He is a man who has offered his insight, knowledge, and support for this endeavor beyond all expectation.

I want to thank my kids, who had to endure helping me at the pilot programs and even did a bit of proofreading along the way. Thank you for your continued support.

And finally, I want to acknowledge the love and support of my best friend and husband, Paul Mannes. I have appreciated, beyond words, the time spent with me in the early hours of the morning, talking and musing about thoughts and ideas. Thank you for believing in me.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Section One: Defining

Chapter One: Defining the Tool

Chapter Two: Defining Your Food Lane

Chapter Three: Defining Your Behavior Lane

Chapter Four: Defining Course Correction

Section Two: Aligning

Chapter Five: Aligning Personal Power

Chapter Six: Self Image

Chapter Seven: I’ve Tried Everything Motivation

Section Three: Refining

Chapter Eight: Physical Drivers

Chapter Nine: Hidden Agendas

Chapter Ten: Chatter that Doesn’t Matter

Section Four: Wrap Up

Chapter Eleven: S.W.A.T.

Conclusion

References and Resources

Introduction

Can you imagine finding yourself circling the grocery store, seeking out free samples of food? Who does that? I do! When my children were young, I’d do just that. My perusing around the grocery store wasn’t just a random act. No! I made a B-line straight for the free cake. And I didn’t stop at one sample. I would circle the store and come back again. And then again, and again. After all, I thought, they are so small. How much could I actually be sabotaging my weight? How much could I be damaging my health? It was not as if I ate an entire cake—or even an entire piece of cake. Eventually, I got bolder and graduated from sampling to buying. It happened more often than I care to admit. The genius who came up with the idea to provide single slices of cake, nicely packaged with a single fork was a superhero to me. I would add one to my grocery cart, check out, and then sit in my car for a little me time. I would have been mortified if I had been caught. I started to worry about it: What if someone I knew came up to my car to say, Hi, or check to see if something was wrong? The grocery store parking lot was definitely not safe, despite the store name Safeway. No way was this safe, so I skipped the parking lot and headed straight home to eat my cake. Fearlessly.

Let’s face it: most of us know what to eat and what not to eat. We’ve been told and probably experienced in some capacity either by our own behavior or watching others that excessive consumption of anything including drugs, alcohol, or food is bad for our health. The issue isn’t what we know; it’s what we don’t know. We’ve been told that all we need to do is eat healthy foods and exercise more. The focus has been on changing our lifestyle by adding more things to do on top of an already busy daily routine. Eat less and move more is what we’ve been told. We haven’t learned to focus our attention on understanding our behavior and how to use real skills for lasting change. Behavior change is hard. I hear over and over again from clients, I don’t know why I can’t stick to a diet plan or exercise plan. I’m able to do many things and am successful at doing them, but I just can’t stick to healthy habits.

The Issue

The issue is the lack of knowledge and ability to maintain or sustain healthy habits for longer than the plan requires; hence, we go back to and repeat behaviors that sabotage our successes. We lose 10, 50, or 100 plus pounds only to regain them back and more. We join the gym only to let the membership lapse as quickly as it came into existence or worse, we keep paying for the membership and never go. Many people have even gone to great lengths such as weight loss surgery only to find themselves overweight, distraught, and feeling shameful. The issue is, most of us haven’t been taught real skills to understand the drivers behind our behaviors. We haven’t been taught how to develop a solid plan that is geared toward our lifestyle. Rather, we’ve been sold on meal plans and exercise regimens that are unrealistic for real life. Finally, the issue is that no one’s taught us how to develop a plan, something that will keep us on the road to wellness. We get sidetracked, hijacked, and lost in the weeds. The issue is we give up, give permission, and give in. We don’t know why we do this; we don’t know how to fix it, and we feel helpless and hopeless in our efforts. What is needed is a new plan and approach to weight loss and keeping it off forever. This book is just that, a new approach to keeping your weight off forever.

We’ve all been there countless times: that place where we know what we need to do but can’t seem to do what we need to do, that moment when we sabotage our weight loss efforts or even our health. Food is the perfect distraction from feelings of distress because it’s easy to get and cost-effective. Let’s face it, getting it is easy. Food is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on just about every street corner and available for delivery to most addresses. We rationalize our habits, give into temptation, and negate all our past successes in a single moment’s desire for comfort, relaxation, or even reward. The space between knowing and doing is vast and expansive, and learning to navigate that territory requires paying attention and having a plan - a process for navigation. After working with hundreds of clients struggling with weight loss, I realized all the knowledge in the world about nutrition, meal planning, and exercise would not help them in moments of weakness and distress. I had experienced this for myself when I was tired, scared, lonely, or bored: times when my need for distraction was so overwhelming that I would give into my desire for cake or cookies instead of taking care of myself in a healthy way and focusing on my emotional needs and what mattered most.

Life is dynamic, always changing. One thing is for sure: we can count on the unpredictability of life. In his book Triggers, Marshall Goldsmith talks about making behavioral changes in an ever-changing environment. After all, it seems more and more often we let the unexpected or the anomalies in life throw us off course. It might go something like this: taking kids to school, going to the gym, then off to the office. Then suddenly we get a call, Mom, I left my homework on the kitchen table. I really need it. We can choose how we let this interruption impact our choices. We can go with the flow, maybe work out after work, or we can throw up our hands and say, What’s the use! The truth is, life is unpredictable. Your environment changes constantly. You need to develop your own powerful process—a process that will be unique to you, one that with care and attention will give you back your power over food—a process, a way of thinking that will help you manage the ups and downs of life. On any given day, you fill multiple roles, such as mom, dad, caregiver, employee, boss, and friend. One day you’re the birthday girl, the next you’re not. During the work week, you may have one routine, another during weekends and another during vacations. We usually begin with a plan in mind. It may look like, Monday I’ll start my diet. Monday comes, Tuesday comes, and then Wednesday. The plan is interrupted by environmental warfare: the dog gets sick, your 7th grader forgets his homework, the report you thought due next week is due this week, your sister called, and finally your mother-in-law decided to come and visit for the weekend. This is environmental warfare; it is what happens in that space between planning and execution—the place between knowing and doing. Despite interruptions, even in this ever-changing environment, you can keep your weight off forever by changing your relationship to food and going beyond the diet.

Understanding the Tenets

This book is based on three tenets. The first tenet is we have a relationship to food not with food. The reason is that food does not have a relationship back. As relationships go, you need to determine the boundaries of your relationship to food by finding your food lane. Like other relationships, you may have a toxic relationship to some foods. This may require breaking up or eliminating that food. The second tenet is that our behavior, both constructive and destructive, is a choice. The choices we make are informed by our past experiences. How we’ve learned to cope with life today is a result of those experiences. We live in an imperfect world. Learning to make changes in an imperfect world is by its nature imperfect. Striving for perfection is not a realistic goal; however, striving for consistency is. The third tenet is that we manage our weight with our plate.

The Exercise Trap

A new theory suggests 80% of weight loss should come from what you eat and 20% from exercise. The reason behind this argument has to do with the difficulty of using exercise alone to reduce calories. It takes a 3500-calorie deficit to lose one pound. Running for 30 minutes on average will burn about 290 calories. If you run every day for thirty minutes, you would burn just over 2000 calories in a week or just over half a pound. Compare that to reducing your daily intake of food by 700 calories, which would reduce your weight by one pound in that same week. Seven hundred calories of food equates to skipping one cup of chocolate ice cream and one vanilla latte. That doesn’t seem all that difficult to cut out as opposed to finding 30 extra minutes every day to exercise.

Exercise and movement are essential and helpful for decreasing both physical and emotional pain. When exercising, you produce endorphins, which help to minimize the experience of both physical and emotional pain. When we get outside and hit the sidewalks or parks, we expose ourselves to sunlight, which helps increase serotonin. Serotonin is the feel-good neurotransmitter which enhances the feeling of joy and well-being. When we produce serotonin, we experience an improvement in our mood; we are happier and more joyful. When our mood is improved, we tend to handle daily stressors better and more effectively. Exercise can help maintain our bone strength and muscle mass, as well as improve our cardiovascular health. There are many upsides to exercise. Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle but not a reason to either gain or lose weight. The diet industry is a $60 billion a year industry. Every day, on any given talk show, news program or magazine rack, you are bombarded with information about diets and healthy living. However, despite all the information and tools available to help you, such as food trackers and prepared diet foods, losing weight and then maintaining weight is a challenge.

Going Beyond the Diet

The weight loss journey is complicated. In this book, Keeping Weight off Forever, I am going to help you understand elements of the journey you probably haven’t yet realized exist. This book is set up so each chapter offers exercises designed to help you identify the underlying causes for choosing foods that sabotage your goals as well as lead to overeating. You will be able to design a plan, what I call a powerful process, that will help keep you on track. The first section of the book focuses on defining the S.W.A.T. tool, your food lane, and your behavior lane. You will learn to use S.W.A.T., a thought-stopping method to help you examine the invisible drivers behind your behavior. You will examine your nutritional requirements and establish your best food choices for both losing and maintaining weight. We identify this as your food lane. While what you eat is important, defining your behavior around food will give you a powerful guideline and insight into your relationship to food. Finally, in Section One, you will learn about course correction. When we veer out of our food lane, what do we do? Course correction is designed to help you identify when you’ve gotten off course and the steps for getting back on track. Often we see a veer as a detour, but the truth is a veer is an opportunity to learn. It’s an opportunity to course correct. Section Two focuses on aligning your goals with your values. The exercises are geared towards understanding and changing your internal dialogue. While we know that weight gain and obesity as a general rule are caused by overeating, the underlying reasons for overeating in the first place are not discussed on reality shows, in diet books, or in weight loss seminars. In Section Two you will learn to tap into your personal power and create a positive self-image. With this new paradigm, you will be able to tap into intrinsic motivators which will power you through those times of temptation and feelings of weakness. Section Three focuses on refining your powerful process with more in-depth understanding. You will learn that nothing is just, that every behavior has a purpose. The purpose is often to get our underlying needs met quickly and efficiently. You will learn how our choices in food impact how brain maps are developed and how to change that mapping. Finally, you will learn how habits are formed and how your thoughts drive your behaviors.

The concepts in this book fill the gap in information between doing the diet and maintaining your weight loss. Most of us know that we can lose weight. In fact, all diets work. When asked, How did you gain your weight back? Most clients share that they went back to their old habits of eating. This book is different because it is designed to help you understand the drivers for behavior, stop it, and change it forever. The back and forth of dieting only serves to hurt you. It plays havoc with your emotions, self-esteem, and self-worth. The information contained in this book will give you a new perspective on your weight loss journey as well as introduce valuable tools needed to help you keep your weight off forever.

Before beginning this journey of self-discovery, take a moment and commit to yourself that you will do the exercises in this book. Each exercise is created to further your skill regarding the concept presented in the chapter. Not all chapters will resonate with you, and that’s okay. Just commit to giving them a try. If you need help working through them, go online to our private chat room on Facebook® @Susan Macey Ph.D.: Go Beyond the Diet and ask for help. The activities in the chapters may bring up emotions that are tied to past experiences and might feel uncomfortable. If that happens to you, pick up the phone and call for help. Call a friend, a family member, or a therapist who can help you process those emotions.

Listen up! Keeping weight off forever is no easy feat. It is a constant process, a never-ending journey that you will continue your entire life. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But I promise you, if you start this journey with me now, you will see rewards and experience personal benefits that quickly exceed the initial effort.

Section One: Defining

Define the Tool

Define Your Food Lane

Define Your Behavior Lane

Define Your Course Correction

The process of defining is essential. When we define the tool, our food lane, and our behavior lane, we are creating a powerful process for commitment, and ultimately, for change. Defining guidelines brings an awareness to ourselves and an understanding that is clear and specific. Defining is not about limitations; it’s about possibilities and opportunities. As you read this section keep in mind that how you decide to overcome roadblocks, define your food lane, your behavior lane, and your course correction is ultimately up to you.

Chapter One: Defining the Tool

I know what you are thinking: I have so many tools to help me lose weight; I don’t need another one. This is a different type of tool. Think of it as a method, a way to remind yourself that you can make the changes you want to make despite the past or current challenges. Look, I remember what it was like eating cake in my car, sneaking it home, or hiding chocolate bars in my room. It really wasn’t any fun. It made me feel awful. I realized that I needed something to help me when I saw that my behaviors were sabotaging my weight and health goals. I needed something to help me navigate the space between knowing and doing. There were times I was able to talk myself out of eating cake, but there were also times I wasn’t so successful. I knew I needed something to help me in times of weakness, a reminder to say, STOP! I needed a process to help me think about my behavior, something to remind me that I didn’t need food for comfort. S.W.A.T is a thought-stopping tool that can help you change behavior that sabotages your weight and health goals. S.W.A.T. is a four-letter acronym for a three-step process—a method for checking in with yourself. S.W. A.T stands for Stop What you’re doing, Ask yourself some questions, and Take action. By using S.W.A.T., I was able to take a step back and explore the reasons I was eating cake in my car. Along the way, I developed a set of questions to ask myself. Throughout this book, you will be developing your own set of questions based on the exercises at the end of each chapter. By employing S.W.A.T., I have developed a clear set of guidelines regarding eating for myself, so when I find myself tempted to eat foods that are not healthy for me or choosing to eat at times that are not my meal times, I stop to check in with myself. I work on paying attention to the purpose of my behavior and figure out why I make the choices I do. Using S.W.A.T. helps me slow down my actions and decide if the choices I am making are really the choices I want to make or if there is an alternative option or ways of thinking about something. The process of stopping my clandestine cake-eating took time, but eventually, I succeeded. However, I continue to use S.W.A.T. to help me make better decisions and choices. Like any relationship, our relationship to food is always evolving.

S.W.A.T.

It occurred to me that I was not the only one who needed a tool. While I was managing my own struggles with cake, it wasn’t until I began working with hundreds of clients seeking weight loss surgery that I found the full power of S.W.A.T. When I asked, What will surgery do for your current eating habits? the overwhelming response was, It’s a tool to help me eat less, or It will limit the amount of food I can eat. These responses are both correct: surgery reduces the size of your stomach so that you eat less and reduce your weight. And incorrect: surgery doesn’t help during periods of self-sabotage, weakness, or times when we give ourselves permission to eat whatever we want because it’s vacation, holiday, or birthday. My clients needed a tool that helped them work through moments of weakness, those times when they were faced with both knowing and doing.

The S.W.A.T. tool came about during a session when my client asked me, What can I do when I am at that moment of knowing versus doing? She explained that she knows which choices are better, but she continues to make the wrong decisions. Over the course of our sessions, she identified messages she told herself over and over:

Oh, well, I already ruined today by eating a pop tart, so I might as well eat whatever I want.

It’s hard work to make healthy choices.

I feel so out of control.

Sometimes there are no other food options available.

These thoughts were messages she kept telling herself, messages repeated so often that she believed them, so much so that she didn’t realize there are always other options available to her both in food choices and thought processing.

Finally, I said, Stop what you’re doing! We then took each statement and broke her thought process down into smaller pieces of information and then challenged them. For example,

I already ruined today by eating a pop tart, so I might as well eat whatever I want.

Stop what you’re doing! You know when you are telling yourself things that sabotage your goals. Stop what you’re doing and take a breath. In this moment wait, count to five and take a step back. So, what if you ate a pop tart? There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and it probably took you all of five minutes to eat that pop tart. Guess what? There are 1,435 minutes left in the day to get it right. All is not lost!

Ask some questions: Check in with yourself. Is the day really a bust? No, it’s not. What can I do?

Take action: Taking action involves answering your questions and moving ahead. I can eat a healthy lunch, stick to protein and produce and plan a healthy dinner. When we do this, we take back our ability to control our lives, and we access our own internal power.

This is so hard.

Stop what you’re doing! Take a breath and consider your