A Journey Toward Getting Lighter

May 17, 2012

A food expert shows a better way to lose weight than grief, guilt, and obsession, demonstrating that losing weight can be more than weight loss.

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A ”Fond Farewell” Article

When I changed Support4Change to a new format, I needed to delete some articles that didn’t fit in the new site but were too good to completely throw away. So I have moved many of them here to the blog, where they will still be available and people can find them by using tags.

This is the third of seven articles on the topic of weight loss that appear on Thursdays. See the Getting Lighter Weight Loss Program, on May 3,  to get you started.

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MY JOURNEY TOWARD GETTING LIGHTER
By Jill Place, MA, RD

So you’re probably wondering what to do now that you’ve let go of your belief that diets help you lose weight. And you’ve tossed away the latest diet book or the paper with those neat, cute little boxes on it.

Even if you’re just considering tossing your dieting beliefs in the trash, I applaud you for being brave. And trusting that there’s got to be a better way to lose weight than grief, guilt, obesity, and obsession. Now I invite you to look at weight loss in a whole new way. Even if it’s scary. As a matter of fact, let’s rename this whole process. The words “weight loss” are just too limiting. And consider what these words are saying to you. When you “weight” for something it never happens. And when you “lose” something you’re always trying to find it. So how are you going to reshape yourself when you’re waiting forever for it to change or always trying to regain it?

So why don’t you “Get Lighter” instead? The process of Getting Lighter involves a lot more than weight loss. When you Get Lighter, you not only lighten up your body but your mind and spirit as well.

My Getting Lighter Story

I’ve been moving toward Getting Lighter since I was born. I’ve been overeating all my life. I can’t remember when I didn’t diet. I did high-protein, low protein, predigested protein, Fit for Life, Unfit for Life, and Fat for Life. With each diet, my obsession with food grew until I found myself roaming the supermarket aisles late at night because I couldn’t sleep and scarfing up a whole cake and a box of red licorice on the way home.

My weight yo-yoed as long as I can remember. I was almost anorexic when I was acting. Every other actress was thinner and more beautiful than me. I was too afraid to eat. When I didn’t have a reason to be thin, I ate and ballooned. I’ve been all the way from 112 to 180. Size 6 to popping out of a size 16.

I was so obsessed with food that I became a Registered Dietitian. And as a Registered Dietitian, I ate myself into an awful state as the spokesperson for Health Valley Foods in 1993. I was eating endless samples of fat-free goodies nonstop for eight hours a day for a baking cookbook we were writing. When I found that I had gained TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS and was popping out of my size-ten suits, I freaked! Here I was going around telling people “Just eat fat-free and lose weight” and I was gaining instead! I made a conscious decision to Get Lighter instead of dieting. I lost the twenty-five pounds and have kept it off for almost ten years.

Before I was ready to Get Lighter, I did a lot of therapy. I healed some emotional wounds that I was stuffing down with food since I was a small child. Then I explored why I overate. So when I was finally ready, I used the principles of non-dieting and learned how to eat like thin people eat. I even had a boy friend around that time who totally ate like a thin person. It was difficult to plan meals around him because he only ate when he was hungry. I learned a lot.

The Getting Lighter Plan

I also learned that there are many books about non-diet weight control. But most of them talk only about the process of relearning to eat like a thin person. Few of them talk about the underlying reasons why people overeat. And if they do, they don’t talk about it in a sequential way so that you can work and rework all the steps to Getting Lighter. I wanted to create a real foundation to replace those diet books and neat, cute little menu boxes.

So I enlisted the aid of my friend and colleague, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT. I’m a personal veteran of Getting Lighter and have counseled eating disordered and overweight clients for years, but I felt I needed a therapist’s perspective. Together we came up with a step-by-step approach so you can find out how you feel about the world, how you feel about your life, how you feel about your body, how you feel about others, and how all that information relates to the way you use food. The first part of Getting Lighter is about you. The second part is about how you deal with food. When you Get Lighter, you not only lighten up your body but your mind and spirit as well.

Getting Lighter in Many Ways

Getting Lighter also shows you how to connect to your relationship to food in several ways. Most self-help books encourage you to process your feelings by writing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t process things in that way. Even though I write for a living, I’m also an actor and acting teacher who was has studied and taught Method acting and improvisation for many years. Because of my acting experiences, I’ve worked out a lot of the answers to my life questions and my relationship to food by moving my body, improvising, and imaging. Acting training is so healing that one of my acting students continually writes “therapy”, “ongoing therapy”, and “continuing therapy” on his checks. When I finally decided to Get Lighter, I connected with my inner process by using guided imagery to meet my ideal self and using movement to join with that ideal self.

That’s why there are four ways to help you to Get Lighter. Four ways to build a physical, mental, or creative bridge between the inner world and the outer world.

When you’re doing The Writing Way you’re answering the step-by-step Get Lighter questions by recording and journaling your answers, thoughts, and feelings.

In The Art Way you can answer the same Get Lighter questions by drawing, coloring, collaging, or any other artistic endeavor.

The Image Way uses guided imagery scripts to help you Get Lighter. Guided imagery is a powerful tool to help you change your mind by taking a fantasy trip to meet, for example, your ideal self or the part of you that overeats. When you do guided imagery you can get out of the thinking mode and into the feeling mode where change might take place faster and easier.

In The Moving Way, you can have a similar experience to guided imagery by doing the same exercise physically instead of mentally. For example, instead of picturing your ideal self in your mind, you can move like your ideal self or dance with your ideal self.

You can also use more than one way to look at a question or exercise. Whatever works for you. That’s the beauty of Getting Lighter. If one thing doesn’t work, try another.

The goal of Getting Lighter is to explore your belief systems one by one to find out what serves you or doesn’t serve you on your Getting Lighter journey. Once you can see your unique journey clearly with all its obstacles, traps, and potholes, you may have acquired enough knowledge to change your body once and for all instead of rollercoastering, yo-yoing, and those other things you do when you’re dieting. So I invite you to Get Lighter!

© Copyright 2002 Jill Place, MA, RD

Are You the Coffee or the Cup?

May 14, 2012

This inspirational story reminds the reader to keep perspective on what is truly important. 

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A ”Fond Farewell” Article

When I changed Support4Change to a new format, I needed to delete some articles that didn’t fit in the new site but were too good to completely throw away. So I have moved many of them here to the blog, where they will still be available and people can find them by using tags.

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ARE YOU THE COFFEE OR THE CUP?

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups – porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite – telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: “If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee in most cases, just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups . . . and then began eyeing each other’s cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee.

The jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee . . . enjoy your coffee.

— Author Unknown

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A Diet This Dietitian Never Gives Anyone

May 10, 2012

A registered dietitian discusses how diets are empty promises that are unsuccessful for at least 95% of those who try them. 

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A ”Fond Farewell” Article

When I changed Support4Change to a new format, I needed to delete some articles that didn’t fit in the new site but were too good to completely throw away. So I have moved many of them here to the blog, where they will still be available and people can find them by using tags.

This is the second of seven articles on the topic of weight loss that appear on Thursdays. See the Getting Lighter Weight Loss Program, on May 3,  to get you started.

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A DIET I NEVER GIVE ANYONE
By Jill Place, MA, RD

Ann, a medical assistant at a very busy HMO in Los Angeles, came to my office begging me to help her lose weight. She said that she had no problem eating a small breakfast of oatmeal and fruit. But from the moment she arrived at work, she overate nonstop until she went to bed at night. Then she did something I’ll never forget. She asked me for BREAKFAST menus. My immediate response was, “Why are breakfast menus so important to you? Breakfast seems to be the one time of day when you have no trouble with food.”

What is this fascination we have with menus and diets? I hear over and over again from clients, “I think I need STRUCTURE. A diet will give me STRUCTURE. Give me a DIET!” What they’re really saying is “I want an easy way OUT”. What they’re really saying is, “I want a MAGIC PILL. A magic pill that I can take and instantly end up 50 pounds slimmer”. As if the sheer act of holding the piece of paper with the diet on it might work that spell on us.

Diets Don’t Help Us Lose Weight

Those little pieces of diet paper don’t help us lose weight. They actually help us get heavier. Statistically, over 50% of the American population is overweight. And the diet industry, which brings in $45 billion a year to help us get lighter, has about a five percent success rate. In addition, 2/3 of us who actually lose weight regain it within one year, and virtually all of us regain it within five years.

Diets obviously don’t work. But most of us never ask why. We just try another diet. We’ve forgotten that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The act of dieting over and over again is probably why we get stuck in the belief that diets will help us lose weight…even if they don’t.

If you really want to lose weight, you might want to let go of the belief that diets help you lose weight. And finding out why diets don’t work may help you let go of that belief. Here are some of the reasons.

Why Diets Don’t Work

One of my friends once made a very astute comment that I’ll never forget. “I don’t understand that what I put in my mouth affects my body,” she said. You can call it resistance, misunderstanding, or brain farts, but most of us don’t really understand that doing a diet is a major lifestyle change. We think that if we buy the book or post the menu on our fridge that something will magically happen. In reality, dieting takes a lot of soul-searching, hard work, and problem-solving. And most of us are unwilling to do any of that for very long.

A diet is a bunch of foods we don’t like in portions usually too tiny for our appetites that we must eat at specific times of the day. NO ONE ACTUALLY EATS THAT WAY. I remember a diabetic client who was so confused by all the conflicting diet information he received that he was actually too afraid to eat. He got too thin. But he was unusual. The deprivation that most diets bring usually makes us eat more and put on weight.

One of the ways diets make us eat more is that they set up a “good food-bad food” scenario in our heads. As soon as we get that piece of paper and read about all the foods we can’t have, we feel deprived. We grow to hate the “good foods” we’re supposed to eat on the diet. And we can’t stop craving the “bad foods” that we’re not supposed to eat. That is, until we eat a ton of those “bad foods”—a whole cake or a box of cookies or chocolate bon bons. Once we think that some foods are “bad”, it may be hard to stop binging on them. So diets actually create and perpetuate bad habits…and weight gain.

When you diet, you also stop eating like thin people eat. You know them, the ones that can eat cheesecake and never gain weight. Thin people eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re satisfied. They have an internal mechanism that keeps them thin. You had the same internal mechanism too, once upon a time. But when you dieted, you felt deprived, you ate, and you gained weight. You began to obsess about food. And you lost track of the simple mechanism that thin people have that keeps them thin.

Diets also don’t work because what we’re really trying to do with dieting is change our lives. And become lovable. We think that if we change our body shape that we’ll have everything we want…money, a beautiful home, a beautiful spouse, a beautiful life. We’ll be eternally happy. But it doesn’t work that way. I’ll never forget standing in a checkout line right after I had lost a tremendous amount of weight. There was a mirror on the wall tilted to reflect the checkout area. I looked up and wondered who that skinny person was standing on line. It was me! I didn’t recognize myself. Instead of being happy about my foxy form in the mirror, I was terrified! Is it any wonder that I put the weight back on?

Diets also don’t work because the word “diet” has too much failure attached to it for the 95% or more who don’t succeed. The word “diet” has too much grief, guilt, and obsession attached to it. The word “diet” has the word “die” in it.

The Diet I Never Give Anyone

I know that diets don’t work. And I know why. So THE DIET I’LL NEVER GIVE TO ANYONE is the no-one-actually-eats-that-way diet. The one that comes in those neat, cute little boxes. The one that condemns you to a cookie-cutter existence of ½ cup of broccoli, 1 cup of rice, and a 3-ounce chicken breast. The one that condemns you to grief, guilt, obesity, and obsession.

I prefer instead to give people diet CONCEPTS. And ways to accomplish those concepts. These concepts sometimes come in those neat, cute little boxes. But I encourage people to think outside the diet box. I encourage them to make their own choices. If you take the information, make it your own, and find a way to make it work for you, you can bypass the grief, guilt, and obsession. And get right down to making positive lifestyle changes. For example, I told the diabetic who was too confused to eat that things like starches, fruits, milk, and sweets would raise his blood sugar. So it might be a good thing if he didn’t eat so much of these things. When he understood that it was okay to eat all foods, but he could control his blood sugar better if he ate smaller amounts of certain ones, he was starving! Then we talked about what he really liked to eat. He was a meat-and-potatoes man. So I encouraged him to immediately go somewhere to eat and have a BIG steak and a SMALL baked potato with maybe a salad on the side. He ran out of my office to the first steak house he could find. And in the next two weeks he put on ten much-needed pounds.

So please consider any diets in neat, cute little boxes merely information. THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. Make the information your own. And if you wonder how you’re going to survive without a those neat, cute little boxes or the latest diet book, please read next Thursday’s post, My Journey Toward Getting Lighter.

© Copyright 2002 Jill Place, MA, RD

Read a Front Page of Your Home Town Paper

May 7, 2012

Discover headlines around the world to see what newspapers think is of interest to their readers.

Once again I have the pleasure of sharing with you a website that can help “enrich your life and your your relationships, the theme of this blog and of Support4Change.

Renee, my loyal assistant, periodically finds interesting information on the web and thought I’d like Newseum. I think you will, too.

I can’t promise that your particular home page will appear on the site, but there’s a good chance that you’ll find a newspaper of interest to you. Here is what the site says:

“Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. The front pages are in their original, unedited form, and some may contain material that is deemed objectionable to some visitors. Discretion is advised.”

 You can’t copy the front pages (they are testing a watermarking system to prevent illegal downloads), but the print is large enough to read online.

By the way, did you know that you can increase the size on print on your screen by hitting the Control key and the =/+ key? It’s a neat trick when young web designers (who have much better eyesight than the rest of us) decide to use tiny fonts.

Unfortunately, there are far more newspapers in the world than the website covers (I imagine the paper has to pay to be included). So I couldn’t read the paper from Northern California that my sons would read, but I can see what my daughters read in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Lexington, Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Sculpture ”Zeitungsleser” (2001) by Kurt Laurenz Metzler

A New Way to Weigh Less

May 3, 2012

The Getting Lighter program can help you not only lighten up your body, but your mind and spirit as well.

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A ”Fond Farewell” Article

When I changed Support4Change to a new format, I needed to delete some articles that didn’t fit in the new site but were too good to completely throw away. So I have moved many of them here to the blog, where they will still be available and people can find them by using tags.

This article was the introduction in the health section on discovering how to weigh less by “getting lighter.” This is the first of seven articles on weight that I will post on the blog on Thursdays.

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INTRODUCING THE GETTING LIGHTER PROGRAM
By Jill Place, MA, RD

Are you dieting at this very moment? Or are you still tussling with those eight pounds that most of us gain during the holidays? And it’s eight months later and you just can’t bring yourself to diet, right? And cookies keep caaaaalling to you. Can you hear them call your name? Did’ya also know that diet has the word “die” in it?

Here’s some statistics about how well diets are working for us:

Over 50% of us are now overweight.

And the diet industry, which takes in $45 billion a year to help us get lighter, has a 5% success rate.

On top of that, 2/3 of us who actually lose weight regain it within one year.

And virtually all of us who lose weight regain it — and then some — within 5 years.

Diets aren’t helping us get lighter. Actually, they’re helping us get heavier. So how can you Get Lighter?

If you really want to weigh less, you might want to let go of the belief that diets help you lose weight. And the best way to do that is to Get Lighter, the new way to weigh less. Get Lighter is a lot more than weight loss. When you Get Lighter, you not only lighten up your body but your mind and spirit as well.

Get Lighter is the creation of Jill Place, a registered dietitian who has created a step-by-step approach that helps you discover how you feel about the world, how you feel about your life, how you feel about your body, how you feel about others, and how all that information relates to the way you use food.

The goal of this program is to explore your belief systems one by one to find out what serves you or doesn’t serve you on your Get Lighter journey. Once you can see your unique journey clearly with all its obstacles, traps, and potholes, you may have acquired enough knowledge to change your body once and for all instead of rollercoastering, yo-yoing, and those other things you do when you’re dieting. So I invite you to Get Lighter!

Check into the blog on Thursday for four more weeks
of information on weighing less by becoming lighter.