Blog Posts

"Don't waste 95% of your life worrying about weighing 5% less"

6/5/2023

What a powerful thing to say.

An interesting study was done on people who recovered from being bullied and body shamed when they were young. One of the questions it asked was if they had a mantra or quote that helped them through their darkest days of being bullied and body shamed. About half of them did.

One woman said, "Don't waste 95% of your life worrying about weighing 5% less." She didn't want to let a little extra bit of weight ruin everything else in her day or her life.

This is touching. I suspect she did go through a lot of worry and pain before she came to this "Aha" moment.

It's easy to spot the one thing that isn't perfect in our life. While some people might think its makes them a perfectionist, obsessing on it is probably just going to make them less happy with the rest of their life.

There's a story of a man who's at a work meeting and the boss asked if there are any other announcements. The guy stands up, looks around the room, clears his thhrou"My wife just completed a 40 week body building program this morning," a man proudly announced one day at work. "It's a girl and it weights 7 lbs. 12 ounces."

There's a lot of amazing things to think about and focus on in your amazing life. If 5% of your weight is a concern, maybe it only deserves 5% of your attention.

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Using the Half-Plate Rule

5/28/2023

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Eating a balanced diet used to be easy when you were little. Your grandmother put a variety of things on the table, you’d eat a little of each, and – ta-da – that was nutrition! Since then, eating’s gotten strangely complicated, with the Atkins diet, flexitarian diets, paleolithic diets, velociraptor diets, and so on. Each one makes a magical case for why we should only eat meat, or never eat meat, or eat only vegetables, or eat only bananas or grapefruits or cabbage and so on. It makes it harder to eat nutritiously than it was when your grandmother said, “Make sure you take a little of everything.”

In June we published interesting study in the medical journal Cureus that shows there might be an easier way for people to eat called the Half-Plate Rule. Half of their plate had to be fruit, vegetables, or salad, if so, the other half of their plate could be anything they wanted. Steak, bread, pasta, foie gras, Pop Tarts . . . anything. They could also take as many plates of food as they wanted. It’s just that every time they go back for seconds or thirds, half their plate still had to be filled with fruit, vegetables, or salad.

Could a person load up half of their plate with Slim Jims and bacon? Sure, but they don’t. Giving people freedom – a license to eat with only one guideline – seems to keep them in check. There’s nothing to rebel against, resist, or work around. As a result, they don’t even try. They also don’t seem to overeat. They want to eat more pasta and meatballs or another piece of pizza, but if they also have to balance this with a half-plate of fruit, vegetables, or salad, many decide they don’t want it bad enough.

Nobody likes be told they can’t do something. With the Half-Plate Rule there’s nothing you can’t eat. You just have to eat an equal amount of fruit, vegetables, or salad. At some point, getting that fourth piece of pizza just isn’t worth having to eat another half-plate of salad. But, most important, you’re the one who made the decision.

Interestingly, what we found was that although it's easy to understand the Half-Plate Rule, it's not alway easy to follow if the only thing on the table is pizza or take-out food. There have to be fruits, vegetables, and salad in the house before you can eat them.

All my best in half-plate happiness and health.

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The Power of Three Checklist to Weight Loss

4/3/2023

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You almost have to be a Super Hero to make more than 3 changes in your life at any one time.

Over the years many people have asked me how they could eat better, snack less, avoid eating seconds at dinner time, not binge so much at receptions, lose their sweet tooth and so forth. One thing I discovered is that even if a person is given perfectly stylized, guaranteed solutions, even the most dedicated person has problems making over 3 changes in their life at one time.

That is why the Power of Three works. The Power of Three is finding three small changes you think would be helpful and easy for you to make to eat better.

The important thing to do is to focus at defusing your diet danger zone, whether it be dinners, snacks, parties, restaurants, or work. All you need to do is to choose no more than three small (100 calorie or so) changes in your daily food routine that you would like to make.

Why only three? Most diets fail because they ask us to do too much.  Three small changes is more reasonable.  If we make these three small changes, by the end of the year we will be as much as 30 pounds lighter than we would be if we did not make them. You start by first identifying your Dietary Danger Zone.

There are five Dietary Danger Zones that trip up most people (meal stuffing, snack grazing, desktop/dashboard dining, party binging, etc.). Most of us are guilty of all of them. However, at this specific moment, there is one of them that is most troublesome in your life.

The divide and conquer idea here is to only focus on this one specific area this month. Next, you choose three small changes you could make in that one area for 30 days. After that point, you tackle the next Dietary Danger Zone that is most problematic for you. It might be the same one or it might be a different one. You find three small changes to make, you keep them for a month, and after a month you can either stop doing them, or continue.

   For instance, say that you suspect that meal stuffing is the biggest problem you have. Simply decide on 3 little changes you could make at meal time that you think could help you eat just a little big less. That is, changes that might help you serve less, or help you not go back for seconds, or eat a little better.

   For instance, you might say to yourself that you're going to use smaller (9 to 11-in) plates, pre-plate your food before sitting down at the table, and use the Half-Plate Rule. You do each of these each night for dinner for a month. After a month, you go to the next most troublesome Dietary Danger Zone. You don't have to do any one thing for more than a 30 days unless you want to.

If you've decided which Dietary Danger Zone you want to tackle this month, you'll find lots of ideas on this website. Here's starting points for your home, your workplace, when you're shopping, and eating out. If you need more, Mindless Eating and Slim by Design have even lots and lots more. You might want to start your first month off by taking three daily changes off of our 10-point Kitchen Scorecard below.

It does not matter what changes you choose, just do not get over ambitious and choose more than three.  The more you try to tackle right away, the more difficult it will be to keep track of them.  The whole key is to keep this mindless.

   Good luck. I look forward to hearing how it goes.