Why Are You Fat?

In order to lose weight and keep it off, you’re going to need to know why you’re fat.  Imagine you’re hooked on pain pills.  You decide you want to get off the pills.  You stop taking them, the pain starts to come back, and you sit there, gripping the edge of your chair with white knuckles, moaning because of the pain, unable to function or enjoy your life.

How long are you going to last?

Do you think this scenario might have a better outcome if you look around, realize you have been taking the pain pills because of the hammer that’s hitting you in the head every five minutes, and stop the hammer?

Special Occasions—Make it About the Friends, Not the Food

Imagine it’s your birthday, and you’re having a party.  Someone has brought a lovely cake.  One of your friends is allergic to wheat and you know she won’t be able to eat the cake.  What do you do?  Do you tell your friend to stay home because eating cake is the most important part of the day?

No.  You most certainly do not.  You tell your friend to come and eat what she can and celebrate the day with you.  The cake is there as a pleasurable indulgence for those who choose to partake of it, not as a gauntlet that must be run by every person at the party to prove their love for you.

Why Do You Hate Being Fat?

There are a lot of reasons to hate being fat, but it’s important to be crystal-clear about what yours are.  You need to make a list.  It’s your own, personal, custom-tailored inventory of misery.  If you’re obese, you have a list.  Get honest and write it down.

And no, I don’t care how “fat positive” you are.  Being obese carries with it physical, lifestyle, and social tolls that are unavoidable no matter how supportive your community is of your freedom of expression or natural body type (or whatever they want to call condoning your overeating).  Get honest, and write it down.

Here’s my list I wrote five days before I started my new eating plan:

Your Jiggly Floppy Body is Funny—Laughter Helps

So you’ve wrecked your body.  You’re never going to look like Angelina Jolie naked.  So what?

Seriously, so what?  You were never going to be as smart as Stephen Hawking, as athletic as Lance Armstrong, as famous as Neil Armstrong, or as kind as Mother Teresa, either.  You managed to let all that go somehow.

It’s time to let go of the dream of the perfect body.  Our media is very intensely bent on the idea that you should hate your imperfect body and keep spending lots of money to try to be less flawed.  Allowing our media to control your self-image is not going to serve you well, though.

Just One Bite—Destruction Testing

“One bite won’t hurt.”  Well maybe, maybe not.  The problem is, you can’t know if it will hurt until it has already hurt you.

You’re on your plan, you’re through the worst of the withdrawal, and you’ve lost some weight.  You’re starting to feel like you’ve got your legs under you again and you can do this.  Then there’s that food.  That delicious food.  One bite—what could that matter?  It’s hardly worth putting in your food log it’s so insignificant.  You eat it, and it’s delicious.

What happens after that?  For a small percentage of people, you say “yay, that was good, now back to my food plan.”  I won’t say there aren’t people who can handle one bite like it didn’t matter at all.  But are you one of them?

Handling Restaurants Like an Entitled Princess

“OMG what am I going to order at this restaurant there’s nothing on plan on their menu??!”

We can try to avoid restaurants, or only go to restaurants of our choosing, but eventually we will fail.  There will be a work function, or fat relatives in from out of town who reject your healthy eateries, or a first date who picks the restaurant and you don’t want to act like a freak about food.  What do you do then?

Don’t panic.  Bring a towel.

Just kidding about the towel.  But don’t panic.  The mental shift you need to make is this: a menu is never a list of dishes to choose from.  It is always a list of ingredients they have in their kitchen.

Know Thy Enemy—Understand the Science of the Plan You’re On

All weight loss plans are not created equal.  All of them that get any popular traction work, at least for some people who go on them.  But why do they work?

Low carb plans get ketosis working for you.  When you keep your daily carbs below a certain level, you enter a fat-burning state that speeds the process along.  If you’re on a low-carb diet, eating a lovely “healthy” piece of fruit can throw you off for 3 days, but eating some bacon would barely cause a blip.  Carbs are the enemy.

Calorie-restricted plans work a little differently.  The basic equation is: when (calories in) < (calories burned), you lose weight.  Calories are the enemy.  But you have to stay within certain parameters.  I could eat 900 calories a day on Medifast because it was nutritionally enhanced and kept me in ketosis.  But if someone ate a different 900 calories a day, it would shut their metabolism down into starvation mode and they wouldn’t lose weight at all.  There’s a calorie and nutrition threshold you have to stay above on a straight calorie-restricted plan.