Scale It Down

Has fighting City Hall all these years ever brought you success?

#1 Butt some people can eat whatever they want and never gain weight.

Yeah-buttal WE KNOW, it always seems that way. We could eyeball a thin person and console ourselves with the thought that they never had to worry about gaining weight because they were born that way. In our minds, there was never a reason, other than divine intervention, that they lived their lives in the Kingdom of Thindom to begin with. We hate to face it butt the truth of the matter is, those who really, really can eat whatever they want are very, very far and few between all of us who can't! Metabolism and genetics account for some, (and that's a very small SUM) of the blame, the rest is due to our own behavior. Take a second look at all those people you think can eat what they want to all the time - they're doing something different than you are in between all the pizza and beer. See Thin Tales for more insight.

#2 Butt I watch my weight and work out all the time and still can't lose.

Yeah-buttal Hmmmm, if you're doing a good job of that, then somewhere along the line you're sabotaging yourself. It's time to go on a fat fact finding mission. Where are your biggest culprits?

Eating Out How often do you got out to eat? When you do go out to eat, are you devouring the bread basket (with or without butter?), grazing on appetizers, drinking a lot of alcohol and/or topping the meal off with big desserts? If the amount of food you eat out is double and triple to what you'd normally eat at home, you're sabotaging yourself.

Eating In If going out isn't the problem, then what do you normally eat? You may be ruining your good intentions with the way you prepare foods, the type of foods you eat, how much you're eating and/or a combination thereof. Start making a note of what you're eating and track down your culprits - some of them will pop up where you least expect them to!

Working Out The type of exercise, duration, frequency and continuity all play key factors in getting the most out of your efforts. Execution, may also be your culprit - quantity and speed do not equal effectiveness. If sticking to your exercise agenda is giving you problems try the, getting-the-most-out-of-the-least-to-produce-the-max approach. Figuring out what the bare minimum was that we could do and still produce results, helped us develop a stick-to-it exercise program we could live with.

"…all the time" When exactly is "all the time"? Does your food and exercise week consist of 5 or 7 days? The problem with, I'm good from Monday to Friday so I can be bad on the weekends, is that it only works for a while. What always happens is things start popping up during the week - dinners, special occasions, and so forth. Before you know it your 5 days good 2 days bad becomes 1 day good and 6 days bad. Not to mention, that your exercise routine went out with the fast food trash in the meantime. The other pitfall to this system is that even when you stick to 5 good/2 bad, you end up sabotaging yourself at some point by eating so much more and badly over those 2 days, weight control will eventually turn into weight gain. "All the time", has really got to be all the time, with short stints off for good behavior.

How long is a stint? About as long as the 90/10 Rule: 90 % of the time you eat correctly and do your best to maintain an exercise program. 10% of the time you blow off exercising and eat whatever the hell you want to without beating yourself up about it.* The 90/10 Rule translates into about 36 ½ days off for bad behavior over the course of one year. If you knock out 2 weeks for vacation, and the week between Christmas & New Year's right off the bat, you'll have 15.5 days left to be bad. That's another 2 + weeks of 1-day-bads to spread across weddings, birthdays, parties and so forth - a very doable number of days, if you pay attention to it.

* For dietary guidelines and advice, check out Nutritionist, Joy Bauer's book: The 90/10 Weight-Loss Plan.

#3 Butt I don't have the time to eat right and exercise.

Yeah-buttal There's only 2 ways of thinking about this: EITHER, you don't have the time because you've decided you really don't want to have the time to begin with OR you haven't a clue as to where to begin. If you think it's OR, then we suggest you take a long hard look at the your lifestyle. What, when, where and why you do whatever it is you do over the normal course of a week will lead you to figuring out how you can begin to have the time to start eating right and exercising. Doesn't everything come down to time management? We're always complaining about finding the time for something or another, whether it's for family, work, domestic or self indulgent reasons. Sometimes we put off things till they get to the point of visual and/or emotional disgust and sometimes we studiously find ways to streamline tasks into little pieces to get them done. Regardless of the challenge, we're all great time managers on the whole when we want to be. The irony is that when the task of food and exercise comes up, we ignore the very skills we use all the time to accomplish and gain the things we want.

#4 Butt I absolutely HATE to exercise.

Yeah-buttal Yeah-butt who doesn't? Okay, maybe if you're an Olympic athlete you don't, but who can really say they love to exercise? What you do learn to like (love, is far too over the top in our opinion), are the good things exercise does for your overall health AND that it enables you to eat more and helps you to abide by the 90/10 Rule. Finding the right type of exercise may help you overcome your hatred. Try different things (that includes things you would never have thought twice about trying before) until you find the outlet you can like. And if you still can't find something, TAKE A WALK. Click Shvitz Factor for help.

#5 Butt I have a thyroid problem.

Yeah-buttal If you really do have problems with your thyroid or any other medical problem that prohibits you from exercising and eating certain foods, you are under a doctor's care. (And that is a big "if", because we've noticed that a lot of people like to say they can't do things for medical reasons because they just don't want to do them to begin with.) We're certain the doc would be happy to recommend diet and exercise alternatives to help.

#6 I start off with the best intentions butt always get derailed.

Yeah-buttal Think about the circumstances you keep putting yourself in. Are you always going to restaurants that have nothing but very fattening foods on the menus? Is food always the main attraction of your social calendar? Are you surrounded by people who don't pay attention to what they eat? (We mean that in a bad way.) Do you have negativity around you - individuals who would rather see you fail than succeed or say things to deflate your positive outlook? We all have bad days, regardless of the reason. No matter what, you've got to get back on track every time you fall off. That's every time and at the time - if you keep puttin' it off, the train will leave without you. Re-reading Yeah-Butt #2 will help too.

#7 Butt it's easy for you to say…

Yeah-buttal NO, butt , it really isn't. If you don't think we continually fight the same mental battles with food and exercise, then you must think that people who aren't overweight have got something over on you. Remember, weight control is a consistent process and there are a lot times we don't do a good job at it - the difference (now) is we keep working at it. Let's face it, the odds of completely changing into a health food nut, when you've lived a lot of your life with a fat food gut, aren't that great. That is exactly why this is a consistent process. Most likely, you've spun your wheels going on and off diets to lose weight (and that's just to lose the weight) . The missing spoke has always been that of maintaining the loss and staying within a normal weight range. Does any of us really like skyrocketing to blimpdom to the point of anguish and depression only to ultimately spiral downward into a free fall of wacky diets and food denials? Okay, the trip up is fun…until the weight gain comes back to haunt you. Retrospectively, the flipside is this:

Turning Point >>> It is easier and more appealing to perform the hard work of achieving an initial weight loss goal just once when you allow the results to produce a continual attitude toward weight control.

#8 Butt the only way I can diet is by "going all out" or not diet at all.

Yeah-buttal How successful has taking the denial approach really been for you? We "go all out" and start our diets with the best intentions - no bread 'n butter, no sweets, no salty junk food. And then we torture ourselves about it and can't wait until we lose the weight so we can have butter, sweets, and salt. Yo-yo on, yo-yo off. Think about it, when you suddenly start eating all the foods you deem to be good for you, stop eating all the bad food you crave and work out like a madman, how long do you think that approach is going to last?

We know, you want that quick weight loss jump start to get you in the groove - butt is it worth sacrificing long term success? We know of only one person who actually reached their weight loss goal on a protein diet and THEN began eating correctly afterwards to maintain the loss. Now that's, discipline! Can you follow through like that? Have you ever? We know we can't. The moral of this story is, stop denying yourself everything you crave and start managing everything you eat. Try Food Arsenals for help.

#9 Butt we've got 3 weddings, a retirement dinner and a surprise birthday party to go to over the next couple of months.

Yeah-buttal Congratulations on having the biggest BUTT! These are exactly the types of situations we always allow to get in our way ( aka LIFE ). It's like we have this internal mechanism that says, uh-oh, got a party to go to this weekend - since I'm going to sabotage my good behavior anyways, I better eat bad all week to prepare for it. When you tell yourself you're going to be bad over the next couple of months, you probably will be. The good news is, you've already demonstrated the power of thinking ahead. Retool it and tell yourself, I've got 5 days out of the next 60 that I'll have to compensate for ahead of time. When you manage your weight, you can put the fires out before they become raging infernos.

#10 The experts tell you what to do to lose weight butt where are they after that?

Yeah-buttal Exactly! Somewhere along the line, no matter how many books we read, how much weight we lost and gained and despite having an acute understanding of the basic dietary rights and wrongs, we still kept falling short. Why was that? The experts would say it's because we weren't committed to change. We say, it's because we really didn't get how to successfully approach the matter over the long term to begin with and integrate weight control into our lives. It's very easy to herald the do's and don'ts of dieting. The real challenge for those of us with chronic weight problems, is figuring out how to streamline the principles of better eating and consistent exercise into our personal lifestyles.