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Buffy says...

Oct 13, 2009

Sucking Eggs & Kicking Rocks

A couple days ago my internal dialogue went a little something like this:

Morning

Mind: I'm so not feeling it right now. Let's leave the morning exercise routine for later.

Self: You know it's so not going to happen later, but I'm going to trust you on this.

Night

Mind: Oh well, too late. Let's skip it, watch tv and eat some ice-cream. It's Soy Delicious, that's not so bad!

Self: Forget you. I'm walking to the gym to get in the workout that you skipped out on this morning.

Clearly my mind is finding it harder to con myself.

Like me, I honestly think that every person in America has wondered/struggled/obsessed/been concerned with their weight at some point in their lives. We live in a country that despite all our medical advances, has one of the highest rates of obesity on the planet. Not the Western Hemisphere or even North America people...the entire planet. That is so not cute. Growing up in Jamaica, I had no idea how a microwave even worked until my parents got one when I was in high school. Even then, we hardly ever used it. There was one (1!) Burger King on the entire island and a couple KFCs...3 at most maybe. There was no McDonald's (the lawsuit that prevented the Golden Arches from coming to Jamaica is a whole other story) and my brother and I did not grow up loving that perfectly neat blend of salty/sweet little potato slivers that come packaged in the red sleeves.

Even though (much to my parents' dismay) I was never a skinny child (or adult for that matter), I was always healthy and full of energy. The term morbidly obese was nowhere in my consciousness, though it accurately describes me now. Sheesh! Then I moved to America. Talk about culture shock. The television, magazines, billboards....everywhere I turned was the message that if I didn't look like the women in the pictures, something was seriously wrong with me and I needed to fix it, quickly. Never had I been more self-conscious about my size and appearance until I was living in this country. Then there was the food...everything I could ever imagine was right in front of my face and so cheap! In Jamaica, food from America is sold at a premium. Whenever my parents brought home a couple American apples we were so excited. They were expensive, but they were from America! Whoo hoo!

To make a very long and predictable story short, I started living a very sedentary lifestyle and began eating all the wonderful junk food at my disposal. I disposed of it all right...right down into my mouth! Even when I knew it wasn't good for me, I'd still eat it anyway. Who knew that so much of that stuff is chemically engineered to make you crave it? Oy vey! I didn't stand a fighting chance. Ok, so back to the short story: I gained over 100 pounds since I started living in this country. Not just the cute little "Freshman 15" or the "baby weight" from carrying a child. All my extra weight was like carrying around 2 first graders all the time. (I know since mine weighs approximately 51 pounds.) Reality bites.

Like many people over the years, I've tried diets and workout plans and all kinds of ridiculous nonsense to make all the weight that was not there when I went to sleep the night before, go away. Yeah right. Every day, every month, every year, every decision, in some way added to my extra first graders. There was the time on Atkins when I lost almost 50 pounds in 3 months without 1 day of exercising. Carbs were the enemy. Or that time on Weight Watchers counting every point like food comes out of the ground knowing that it's worth exactly 2 points in X category. Whatever! I've been so over it for a good while now. I'm one of the biggest health nuts you'll ever come across. The granola crunching, tree hugging, green juice drinking, raw food eating kind...with the occasional splurge here and there, of course.

Since last August I've lost close to 60 pounds (not sure what the exact number is because the scale is still my mortal enemy) and have gained a whole bunch of muscle. I wake up in the morning and check to see if my biceps are still there. I can hardly believe I can actually see them with my 2 eyes! However, all the healthy eating in the world was not enough. So I started off very simply doing little 10 minute walks here and there. Every week I pushed myself a little bit more. Even the skinny girls at the gym can't keep up with me on the elliptical machine now and I'm STILL heavier than them. Hee! Hee! There are days I don't feel like going and I have to talk myself into it. There are also days I don't feel like going and I talk myself out of it. However, I haven't stopped. Last year I read that if you stop working out, after 11 days your body goes right back to where it was before you started. That was all I needed to hear. On 2 occasions I came "thisclose" to crossing that 11 day mark, but I didn't. No siree Bob, not happening.

Mark Twain said, "Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” Discipline requires training yourself to do something in a controlled and habitual way. Willpower, which most people associate with trying to lose weight is just going to get you to decide to take action. You cannot count on willpower to carry you through. That is where discipline comes in. Nowhere in the dictionary does it say that you have to like it or agree with it. Neither does it say that you're just going to be perfect overnight. Did you get that? There is no one, nobody, nothing to blame if you're not comfortable in the skin you're in. Training is of course going to take some work and it's most definitely not easy, but the decision and the responsibility are ultimately yours. It's going to take time. I tried and tried and tried, then failed and failed and failed; too many times to count, but finally got to the point where I've had to make moving my body a habit. Working out sucks eggs, big time; but just like taking a shower or brushing my teeth, I don't have a choice. Well actually, I do. However, I'm not about to mess up my 11 days and start all over again.

After all these years and all this time, I'm following a very simple credo: Be disciplined. Eat less. Move more. But I'm sure you already know how that works...

In case you're wondering, here is my super duper top ten list of things to ponder if you think working out sucks eggs and willpower can go kick rocks:

1. Do 1 thing at a time. Losing weight should not be on your list of New Year's resolutions. There's just too much going on. So whether you're going to commit to walking 10 minutes 3 times per week or drinking 8 glasses of water per day, just do 1 thing at a time.

2. Don't beat yourself up. If you mess up, just start over...immediately. Not after the weekend or on Monday morning bright and early. Give yourself 21 days (which people think is some kind of Jedi mind trick to form a habit) to make that commitment a habit. If you can make it past the 3 weeks my friend, you're pretty much official.

3. Stop stressing. Whether at work, home or school. Stress produces cortisol which causes fat, the not cute belly kind. Meditation, visualization, prayer, woo sah...whatever you need to do to keep your stress level down.

4. Sleep. Our bodies do amazing things when we're sleeping. All kinds of cool rejuvenating stuff that's not going to happen if you're exhausted. Get some rest.

5. Don't pay attention to other people. Especially the ones in the magazines. Photoshop is amazing...they don't really look like that.

6. Food is not religion. There is no food heaven or hell. The more you tell yourself you can't have it, is the more you're going to want it.

7. Stop looking for the magic pill. There is none. It does not exist. There are no quick fixes, pills, or weight loss in bottles or packages. (Even though I'm still waiting on "Exercise in a Bottle".)

8. Write your plan down. Look at it every single day. Even the days you just know you're not up to it. I have sticky notes up in my closet and bathroom, on the fridge...you get the idea.

9. Don't treat yourself. No extra slice of whatever or new shoes because you've been good, or any of that nonsense. If you need those things, go right ahead but don't tie them into your efforts. Do you treat yourself every time you take a shower or brush your teeth? I don't think so.

10. It's not about losing weight. It's about being healthy, energetic and comfortable in the body that YOU have. So even though I'm not my "ideal size", the less I've focused on "losing weight" is the more I've lost and the healthier I've become.

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markschulz says...

Jul 07, 2009

Say No to Raw Cookie Dough

Eating raw cake or cookie dough has long been a guilty pleasure, but now it turns out that Grandma was right to snatch the bowl away.

At least 69 people have become violently ill — 34 of them hospitalized — after eating uncooked Nestlé’s Toll House cookie dough. At least nine of those victims suffered kidney failure, as a result of a virulent form of E. coli. Nestlé USA has recalled more than 300,000 cases of the product since, even after cooking, the E. coli could remain on hands or survive in softer, undercooked cookies.

Coming after problems with tainted tomatoes, peanuts and pistachios, this is another warning about the weakness of the nation’s food safety system and why Congress needs to fix it. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently approved an excellent bill that would strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s powers. The full House and the Senate — with White House support — need to move this package forward.

That House bill gives the F.D.A. more money and authority, including the much-needed power to recall products quickly instead of waiting for the manufacturer to do so voluntarily. It would also make it easier for the agency’s inspectors to see a company’s food safety records or consumer complaints.

Nestlé voluntarily recalled its dough after the F.D.A. found E. coli at its Danville, Va., plant. But Nestlé, like other companies, routinely refuses to share safety data with inspectors since it is not required to by law. In the recent salmonella outbreak at the Peanut Corporation of America in Georgia, the F.D.A. was forced to use its antiterrorism powers to get data.

Even the improvements envisioned in the House bill will never make the food supply 100 percent germ-free. And the F.D.A. is warning once again that E. coli can appear in unexpected places. Dr. David Acheson, the agency’s associate commissioner for foods, warned consumers — especially those preparing for summertime picnics — to follow the rules for handling all food safely. That includes such basic advice as keeping cold food cold, hot food hot and eating nothing raw that should be cooked.

via nytimes.com

bummer

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markschulz says...

Jun 23, 2009

How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: June 22, 2009

As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents and battled Congress and Big Tobacco. But the Harvard-educated pediatrician discovered he was helpless against the forces of a chocolate chip cookie.

In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn’t plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.

“Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?” Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. “Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain? I spent seven years trying to figure out the answer.”

The result of Dr. Kessler’s quest is a fascinating new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” (Rodale).

During his time at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Kessler maintained a high profile, streamlining the agency, pushing for faster approval of drugs and overseeing the creation of the standardized nutrition label on food packaging. But Dr. Kessler is perhaps best known for his efforts to investigate and regulate the tobacco industry, and his accusation that cigarette makers intentionally manipulated nicotine content to make their products more addictive.

In “The End of Overeating,” Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.

via nytimes.com

So...my chocolate chip cookie obsession is explained. It's not my fault.

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markschulz says...

May 23, 2009

The Power of Distraction

Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, writes about Walter Mischel's studies of successful people and predictions that can be made in childhood. Forget willpower, it's about distracting yourself.

Walter Mischel at Columbia University is probably best known for the marshmallow task. It's a very simple experiment he did at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University between 1968 and 1972, where you bring a four-year-old into the experimental room, and he'd say, "Kid, you can have one marshmallow right now, or if you can wait for about 15 minutes while I run an errand, you can have a second marshmallow." And he offered the kids marshmallows or cookies, pretzel sticks, and what he found was that there's tremendous variation in terms of how long kids can wait; every kid wants the second marshmallow or the second cookie, but some kids will eat the marshmallows before the scientist leaves the room. Some kids will wait two minutes. The average waiting time is about two and a half minutes, and some kids can wait the full 15 minutes.

The question is, what allowed some kids to wait? And it wasn't that these kids wanted the marshmallow any less or that these kids had more willpower. It's that these kids knew how to distract themselves. These are the kids who would cover their eyes, turn their back, sing songs from Sesame Street, pretend to fall asleep.

My favorite kid is a boy with neatly parted hair, and he chose the Oreo cookies, and you can watch him. He's just really struggling with it. It's an agonizing, agonizing wait, and he carefully surreptitiously looks around to make sure no one's watching him. There's a large one-way mirror right to his left that he conveniently ignores. He picks up the Oreo cookie, carefully unspools it, licks off the white cream filling, puts it back together, puts it on the table, and then he could wait 15 minutes, no problem. Mischel notes that the kids who can wait what they’re better at is the strategic allocation of attention. They know that my willpower's weak and if I'm thinking about this yummy, delicious marshmallow, I'm going to eat it. What I have to do is not think about it; I need to distract myself.

Then you do this longitudinal study, and you find that the kids who could wait at the age of four — and this is the most predictive test you can give a four-year-old, much more predictive than an IQ test — it predicts their behavior in school, how likely they'll do drugs, their body mass index. The SAT score of a kid who can wait is 210 points higher than the SAT score of a kid who can't wait. It's an incredibly predictive test. Here's this very simple experiment, this very simple protocol you give to four-year-olds, and it turns out to explain a lot about their behavior as teenagers, adolescents.

Mischel and his collaborators are now flying 55 of these kids out to Palo Alto — they're now in their 40s — to put them in brain scans, and to see the different brain areas that underlie this ability to exert willpower, but the larger lesson is that what we think about willpower is actually completely wrong.

People think about willpower as gritting your teeth, but willpower actually is profoundly weak; no one can really resist a marshmallow if you're thinking about how sweet the marshmallow is. What these people are better at is — and this is how the scientists describe it — is the ability to control their thoughts, to control the contents of working memory.

Some people are much better at that, and that's a crucial life skill that allows you to — my favorite television show's on, but I need to study for the SAT, I need to do homework. How can I resist this temptation? It allows you to control your temper, to not lose your temper when someone calls you a name. It really is a very, very important life skill, and that's what Mischel was able to measure at the age of four.

I've been thinking a lot about that, and now Mischel 's trying to go back into the schools to see if he can teach this to kids. Once kids leave kindergarden, we stop thinking about them in terms of character, in terms of these personality traits, but it turns out these are crucial things, and schools shouldn't just be in the business of teaching algebra, of teaching literacy, teaching spelling.

They have to be in the business of teaching kids how to think, teaching them these metacognitive rules. Teach kids how to structure their thoughts, how to do a better job of controlling their mind, and that's going to have a huge payoff in terms of academic skills later on. I've been thinking a lot about that. Mischel's just a magnificent and very meticulous scientist.

via edge.org

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markschulz says...

May 09, 2009

The Stream Pool is Java-Free again

For the umpteenth time in my adult life, I have stopped drinking coffee. Though I do not recommend it, I went cold turkey and have been on the wagon for about two weeks now. Candidly, the espresso machine came down with the small appliance equivalent of atherosclerosis and it just seemed like another sign that it was time to move on (again).

Our most recent liaison ran about two years and at the high (low) point, I was gulping down a quad espresso, staring back at the curious and judgmental faces of those around me and giving them my best Cheney-sneering "What?!"

Recently, I talked my non-coffee drinking mother into tasting a straight up espresso. After taking a tiny sip, she gagged, nearly spit it out, made a terrible face and and then exclaimed "ick, it tastes like dirt!"

In that same spirit, people will sometimes ask, "why do you like coffee?" My standard flip answer: "Other than causing brown teeth, bad breath and headaches when you stop drinking it, what's not to like?"

I suppose that defensive response deflects from the deeper truth that I have no idea why I like it. Why do we lay out in the sun, keep our money in banks, talk on the cell phone while driving, eat french fries or watch The Hills?

So will this breakup last? Who knows. Last time I kicked, I pretty much stayed clear of arabicas for three or four years before the shiny new (supposedly self-cleaning) espresso machine lured me back to regular and possibly excessive consumption of...ok...dirt juice.

In the meantime, it looks like the interim official drink of the Stream Pool is now our old standby...Green Tea. Antioxidants, you know.

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Lee says...

Feb 12, 2009

My Battle With Addiction

Don't worry, I'm not into smack, crack, coke or anything like that. My demon is caffeine.

I've given it up because I've been having trouble sleeping. I never slept much anyway but lately it has been getting ridiculous so it is time to act. I drink far too much coffee, tea and I'm rather partial to energy drinks like Red Bull.

I thought it would be easy because I honestly didn't believe it was *that* addictive and I had no idea that I had such a hankering for it. Oh how wrong I was. Only on my second day and I'm getting snappy with work colleagues, I feel exhausted and have had a headache for two days. On top of that, I'm finding it incredibly hard to concentrate on my work. Ironically this is like an amplified version of what I'm like when I've had very little sleep. Funny how addictions do that to you... When you try to exorcise your demons they hit you with everything they can to try to convince you that you're better off with them than without.

I'm trying to stave it off with ginger nut biscuits and decaffeinated coffee. Also drinking loads of water but right now I just want a proper coffee with proper caffeine in it.

I must be strong.

Just one won't hurt.

Don't do it, Lee!

One little cappuccino...

NO!

Crikey this is actually very hard but if I can do this... Cigarettes watch out. You're next!

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nataliekresen says...

Nov 21, 2008

What Is It With Will Power?

Many people mistakenly overestimate the role of will power...

-- Carl G. Jung

My friend works out. She works out hard, running, lifting weights, going to the gym. She's strong and disciplined and devoted. She called me the other day, a hint of sadness in her voice, ' I can't stop eating at night. During the day I am so good but at night I reach for potato chips, dip, cheese, brownies, whatever is around.'

It's like as soon as we say 'I can't' something else takes control and drives us. I once told a guy, I can't talk to you anymore and then I waited a few hours, maybe even a day before I reached out to him. Can/Can't Yes/No-- what's so wrong with the grey area? It's all fuzzy in there, nothing is defined, anything and everything can happen in the

shit,-I-don't-know room.

The problem with that is the good, bad, and ugly can be in there too. A very adventurous friend of mine told me about a trip he took to a dark room. I, being my naive self, started asking him all sorts of questions like, how long did you wait to expose the film, what kind of chemicals did you use? etc, etc. Until his facial expression made me stop. What? I squeaked out, sensing I had misunderstood.

Apparently the dark room he had visited was a club where all the lights were turned off, everyone got naked and groped around for other bodies in the dark, using their fingers as a guide. Yikes.

Sometimes I feel that's what the grey area of life feels like. When you lose your will power, when you slip up, or unleash, or simply let go, you are suddenly naked, exposed, feeling through the darkness with nothing as your guide. Will you fall into a tightly toned decision or end up mashing your fingers into someone's lumpy back?

But as there are two sides to a coin, so too are there two sides to any situation. And while we can harness our will power and suppress our desires, they can still come out, and in funky ass ways. And besides, what's so wrong with fully living life, giving up control, enjoying the moment, and freeing ourselves of all the rules we adhere to everyday?

It's topics like this that tangle me all up, confuse and bewilder me and leave me struggling to chose. Should I or shouldn't I, lights on or lights off? Do those Clapper folks have it? When in doubt, change your mind? And with the clap of your hands, you'll be back in the white light, safe, stable, and at peace being good (but bored)...

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Here are posterous posts filed under willpower...

Sucking Eggs & Kicking Rocks

Say No to Raw Cookie Dough

How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains

The Power of Distraction

The Stream Pool is Java-Free again

My Battle With Addiction

What Is It With Will Power?