What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [99]
Exercise alone will probably not take off weight. Coupled with a diet program, it may produce a bit better long-term weight loss. Whatever, exercise has its beneficial effects on health, whether or not you lose weight. But there is a danger that coupling exercise with the discouraging enterprise of dieting may cause you to give up on exercise, too—once the weight starts to come back.37
The makeup of your diet. It may be useless to try to eat less food, but it is useful to eat less unhealthy food: Fat and alcohol are to be watched. In this century, what Americans eat has become about 25 percent fattier, and fat in our food gets converted into fat on our bodies. Fast food, chocolate bars, and ice cream are high in fat. There is little to be said for any but modest drinking of alcohol, and lots to be said against it. Alcohol is very high in calories, addicting, and brain-damaging.38
Changing the composition of your diet may or may not take off weight. It is not known if the body will, in the long run, make up for the calories lost by a low-fat or a low-alcohol diet, but the chances are that cutting back on both is healthful anyway.
Eating only when hungry. Overeating, consuming more food than you need to sate your hunger, is more of a problem than overweight. Unlike overweight, you can curtail overeating. Most of us are out of touch with hunger. We eat when the clock tells us it is time to, not when we are hungry. We clean our plates, hungry or not. We gorge when things taste especially good, hungry or not.
Overeating may be yet another untoward consequence of dieting. Recall that Pleistocene ancestor after a famine. Eating only when hungry is a luxury he cannot afford. He becomes a hoarder, an overeater. His surviving the next famine might depend on his stuffing himself after a big kill. He eats as much as he can whenever the opportunity presents itself. Former dieters become overeaters for just this reason. All the body knows is that it has once been starved. You change your approach to food, and overeat whenever lots of good food is available, even if you are not hungry. You have learned to ignore hunger in the interest of survival.
The Right Treatment
WEIGHT LOSS SUMMARY TABLE
Here are a few steps for how you can stop overeating and get back in touch with hunger:39
When you see something really tasty, ask yourself, “Do I need something in my stomach, or do I only want a taste in my mouth?” If just the taste, refuse.
Halfway through the main course, stop for a full minute. Ask yourself, “Am I full?” If you are, wrap the rest of the food and end the meal. If not, repeat this three-quarters of the way through.
Eat slowly and sip water frequently to slow down eating. Put your fork down between bites; this gives you a chance to consider if any more food is necessary to fill you up.
Finally, if you are an overeater, you probably eat all the food put before you. This is a very strong habit that must be broken. Excess food is essentially being thrown down the toilet or poured onto your midriff. I want you to do the flushing exercise to break this habit. Halfway through the main course of the next big meal you have at home, stop. Cut the rest of your food into pieces. Get the dessert, and cut it up too. Now flush it all down the toilet—this is where it will wind up, and this exercise allows you to skip the middleman.
Surgery for the very obese. Dieting has a poor outcome for the very obese. Most patients regain most of their weight in a few years, and this weight fluctuation itself carries a significant death risk. If you are very obese (double your “ideal” weight or more), you should consider surgery. The most successful operation is a stomach bypass (technically, a “Roux-en-Y gastric bypass”). This four-hour operation hooks your lower intestine to the