MCE

Do you know when to call it quits? To quit a meal, that is?


It’s 12:15 pm. Sad to say, your meal is over now.

I used to work with a recovering food addict (I'll call her Wendy) whose work station was about four feet away from mine. We both went to lunch in the company break room at noon every day.

Wendy had lost over 100 pounds in a 12-step program, but food was still of paramount importance to her. At 11:45 every morning, she would announce hopefully, "It's getting close to lunch."

At 11:55, she would announce ominously, "It's getting dangerously close to lunch."

At 12:00, she would announce triumphantly, "It's time for lunch!", spring out of her chair, and head for the break room.

At 12:15, came the final, regretful announcement, "Lunch is over."

Our coworkers found this daily ritual both amusing and annoying. Only another food addict (like me) could understand what was going on in Wendy's head as she looked forward to her noon meal and then mourned its passing.

What's the take-home message from this story?

Lunch is over. It has to be over. You must put down your fork and stop eating when your planned portion is gone or the instant you get a stop message. But what if there's still food left on your plate? What about the children in Armenia (all starving, according to my mother)? What about that leftover food?

1. Get up from the table (say, "Excuse me" if it seems indicated).
2. Put the food in a storage container, and put the container in the refrigerator, or throw the food away (down the garbage disposal, where you can't get at it, is best).
3. Take your plate to the sink and rinse or wash it.

Did I say "throw the food away"? In spite of the starving Armenian children? I sure did. I'm not going to tell the World Health Organization that you threw out the extra food. You can donate money to a food charity to help feeding starving children (you'll be able to afford a few bucks for charity because you won't be spending $50 a month on soda). God will not strike you dead for this, I promise.

Remember what Rhoda Morgenstern said to Mary Tyler Moore as she tore into a chocolate bar back in 1973 (or thereabouts)?

"I don't know why I'm eating this. I should just rub it directly on my hips."

So look at that plate of leftover food and ask yourself, "Should I roll in it, or throw it away?"

Lunch is over!

If you’re once a fatty, are you always a fatty?


THINK THIN, BE THIN
I think I’m well qualified to speak on this subject, since once upon a time my schoolmates chanted, “Fatty, Fatty, two by four, can’t fit through the kitchen door!” when I walked into the gymnasium for a physical education class with a teacher who, after weighing and measuring each kid, announced to her captive audience that Jean was the shortest and heaviest girl in the class. After which I was the last kid (once again) to be chosen for a volleyball team.
I believe that in order to become a thin person, we must learn to think like one. It’s a tall order, I know. You might as well ask my dogs to learn to think like cats (I’m pretty sure my cats can think like dogs, but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around, to the everlasting detriment of the dogs).
At the same time, I believe that we must never forget our inner fat person. If we do forget, the fat folks may burst out of us and take over again. I know mine did last year, for six months and 30 pounds of regain. She was aided and abetted by the loss of my beloved Lap-Band®, but once she was out of her cage, she took charge so fast it made my dizzy blonde head spin. That’s not a pretty sight when that head is busy gobbling all the food in the western hemisphere and the body attached to it is rejoicing, “Starvation has ended at last! It’s party time!” (which is what my gastroenterologist said my metabolism was doing, although not in those exact words).
I lost the weight I had regained, plus another 10 pounds. I know (or I hope) I don’t look like a fatty any more, but a fatty still lurks inside me somewhere. My fat demon is hidden from view, but she’s still my demon. Exactly what every girl needs, along with a good bra and a good hairdresser. Seriously, though, my fat potential lives on, mainly because obesity is an incurable, chronic disease that no surgery today can cure. As long as my inner fatty threatens to take over, it’s hard for me to think and act like a thin person. But I refuse to give up the quest for Thin Jean, and I strive every day to emulate her. I believe that practicing thin behavior will eventually teach me thin thinking, and I believe that practicing thin thinking will keep my body thin.
FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT
We have now arrived at the bad-tasting course in this home-cooked meal of advice. In order to practice thin thinking, we need to do things that we’ve done over and over again in the past without long lasting results, like making good food choices, practicing portion control, and exercising. I know that this concept frustrates many of us and infuriates some of us. Some people scorn the practicing part of the WLS journey. They say, “It’s just another diet.” A friend of mine declared a week before her band surgery, “I refuse to diet.” Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics or personal preference, but I persist in believing in the importance of practice because thin thinking and thin acting don’t come naturally to me. I wasn’t born with piano-playing skills. I had to take lessons and practice every day just to be able to play “Chopsticks”. Even famous concert pianists must practice every day. The same is true of being thin.
This reminds me of the “fake it until you make it” slogan repeated in 12-step groups. The 12-step tradition recognizes that sobriety or abstinence doesn’t come naturally to people with addictive tendencies. It doesn’t expect its members to leap from the first to the 12th step in one week, one month, or even one year. All it asks is that we practice desirable behaviors every day, day after day, while the struggle to do that gradually lessens and we gain some control over the undesirable behaviors. Eventually we discover that we don’t have to “white knuckle” it anymore because the desirable behaviors have become habits.
Assuming that you had WLS because you don’t want to be a fatty any more, I’d like to suggest that you begin by not eating like a fatty any more. You don’t have to do it perfectly, because you’re just practicing, right? As far as I’m concerned, you can leave the perfection stuff to God. All you need to do is do your best, day by day, to work with your strengths and work around your weaknesses. Even if practice doesn’t always make perfect, it’s got to help you with the fake it part until you get to the make it part. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but you can do it!

As always, a great article and a great dose of reality! Thanks for always keeping it real!

thanks for continue to write and post useful posts/threads
i always hope whomever reads it, it helps....hence why i read every thing you write

Great as always Jean! I can always see myself somewhere in your posts.

Does the reward & punishment approach really help your weight loss?


REWARD & PUNISHMENT
Yummy food rewards for good behavior, and severe punishment or deprivation for bad behavior, go back a long way in my psyche. With every good intention, my mom trained me using the classic reward-punishment technique from the time I was a very small girl. As soon as I was old enough to think for myself – at age 40 or so (just kidding!) – I applied the same technique to managing (or should I say mismanaging) my weight. Even a tiny infraction of whatever diet plan I was following at the moment was punished severely with hours, days, or weeks of self-loathing and recrimination which would be followed by much bigger eating crimes (I’m a hopeless screw-up because I ate a donut yesterday, so I’m going to eat a dozen donuts today) or by extreme deprivation (I ate a donut yesterday, so I’m going to eat nothing at all today, and if I’m a very, very good girl, I’ll earn half a carrot stick as my reward tomorrow).
I learned a bit about behavioral science in college, and goodness knows I’ve read enough self-help books and articles to have picked up a thin smattering of knowledge about it, but none of it meant very much to me until the past five or six years. As I moved towards my weight loss surgery decision, I had to admit that the good girl, bad girl system had not been working very well for me. I just couldn’t seem to responsibly give myself one “cheat” a week as recommended in women’s magazines. The authors of these magazine articles claimed that one serving of cheesecake on Sunday would keep me from bingeing out of desperate deprivation for the rest of the week, but one serving was never enough for me. I guess I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal, and for me, the only alternative to eating an entire cheesecake was to (mentally) beat myself with heavy chains and a medicine ball covered with spikes. Neither approach yielded the results I wanted, but what other way is there to live as a responsible, law-abiding adult? Without laws and law enforcement, don’t we suffer the chaos and degradation of anarchy?
POSITIVE & NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT
Sad to say, I’ve learned more about reward and punishment from living with dogs than from living with myself. I can plainly see that screeching at them for bad behavior is more likely to get them cranked up than to get them to behave. They have taught me that a positive or negative response to a behavior, be it good or bad, reinforces the behavior. We humans are not doing ourselves any favors by punishing our own “bad”, negative, or counter-productive behavior with more negative behavior. All that does is reinforce the bad stuff and use up all the extra energy we really need for the good stuff. When all we hear is an internal voice crying, “bad girl!” (or “bad boy!”), eventually we become resigned to being a bad girl (or boy, as the case may be), and the bad stuff goes on and on.
Nor are we doing ourselves any favors by molly-coddling ourselves after an eating infraction. You say you don’t do that? Well, I sure do. I eat five cookies off the plate on the break room table at work, sigh, and grab a sixth cookie while thinking, “It’s just too hard to resist those cookies, you’ve had such a trying day, you deserve a treat, you poor thing.” That kind of response also reinforces the very behavior that’s can keep me from maintaining my hard-won weight loss goal.
The reward-punishment cycle is hard to stop when it’s so deeply ingrained in us, but it is possible to end or at least reduce the occurrence of the negative stuff. One of the things that’s helped me regain control over my eating behavior (on many levels) is keeping a food log.
Entering my food intake (including time of day, amounts, the eating environment, my physical hunger, any eating problems, and how I felt emotionally before, during, and after eating) has forced me to put on my scientist hat. I’ve always thought of myself as an intuitive, creative person, not a scientific one, but sometimes when I act a part, I become a part. When I’ve written down all this data about my eating, it’s easier for me to see it with an objective eye. Patterns that are invisible to me when I’m in the middle of a situation become clear when I’ve backed far enough away from it. Things that I didn’t understand when they happened to me yesterday have new meaning when I study them today.
Things that I don’t really want to understand also become clearer to me when I see them in my food log. For example, after my weight loss surgery it became increasingly difficult for me to eat when sharing a meal with my elderly mother. Twenty years earlier, eating with her was a joy because we both loved food and the conversation that surrounds a meal. As she grew older, fussier, more confused, more demanding, the joy drained away and I found myself in the middle of painful stuck episodes every single time we ate together. A few hours after each incident, I would find myself seeking comfort in food, like stopping at Baskin-Robbin’s for a 670-calorie Cappuccino Blast after leaving Mom in the capable hands of her assisted living facility staff.
I loved my mom, I loved our old ritual of enjoying meals together, but it just wasn’t working any more. Time to make a change, Jean! After that realization, when it was time for a family meal, I spent the time fussing over Mom instead of trying to eat my own meal. I ate my meal later, when Mom was safely tucked in bed.
The take-home message here is this. Try to avoid the extremes of “good girl, bad girl” thinking, not just in your eating but in your exercise, work, parenting, and anything else you undertake. Sometimes a little bit good can be good enough, and a little bit bad doesn’t necessarily signify the collapse of western civilization. Try to be a kind, tolerant, but firm parent to yourself. Instead of screaming, “Bad girl!” when you fall off the bandwagon, give yourself a boost back up onto the wagon by saying, “That wasn’t good, but I know you can do better, so go prove it.”