From Fat to Thin Thinking

by Rita Black

  You don’t have time to exercise.

  One way to overcome your Inner Rebel’s resistance is to practice interacting with it. Create a good comeback for your Inner Rebel’s seduction. If you practice this ahead of time, you will be ready and able to counteract the seduction when the time comes with a more positive exercise seduction. Market exercise to your Inner Rebel in a positive light.

  Rebel Resistance. It’s warm in bed…

  Counteract. Think of how warm and invigorated I am going to feel when I am done with my morning walk!

  Rebel Resistance. You worked so hard today…

  Counteract. All the more reason to exercise and feel refreshed for later.

  Rebel Resistance. You don’t have the time to exercise…

  Counteract. I can make the time to exercise and feel better, even if I have only a few minutes.

  The more you focus on the positive outcome of exercising, the more you are engaging the reward neurotransmitters in your brain. Eventually your mind and body get hooked, and you begin craving that post-workout high. Let exercise become your drug of choice.

  Case Study: Conclusion

  By the time Tara and Gina showed up at the Shift Weight Mastery Process seminar a month later, they had both released weight. Tara had released eight pounds as she had expected, shedding two pound a week for four weeks.

  Gina had released a bit more than her expected four pounds. “I didn’t have a very social month, so I banked calories for weight release,” she said happily.

  In the year since, Tara has released almost 95 pounds, her blood sugar levels have improved, and the pains in her knees only exist a tiny bit in the morning when she first wakes up.

  Gina released 20 pounds, while keeping up with her social life. For the last eight months, she has been using exercise to maintain her loving and reasonable ideal weight.

  “What I love is that I am the one in control. I don’t feel so baffled about why the scale is or isn’t doing what it is doing. I also love the fact that I can live in the real world and don’t have to be a hermit, living alone and dieting with my carrot sticks.” Gina G. (Released 20 lbs., maintaining at 1 year.)

  “I am so proud of pushing myself past the negative beliefs that I could never exercise. Now I am someone who gets home, throws my running shoes on, and can’t wait to get out the door. On my walk, I feel my heart pumping, my body working, and my mind is singing, enjoying feeling so alive and free.!” Tara R. (Released 93 pounds and…still releasing.)

  WEIGHT MASTERY SKILL 2 SUM UP: Mastering Your Relationship With Exercise

  When you use exercise as a partner to achieve your weight release goals, you create a relationship with exercise that you own.

  You can use exercise to:

  Release weight at a faster rate.

  Bank exercise calories for extras, such as social events, eating out, and overages.

  Increase your Daily Calorie Budget for Weight Release, allowing you the flexibility to consume more food.

  APPRENTICE PAUSE: Are you feeling like you have had a big mental workout? Good! We are here to stretch your mind past where it stops. I love Albert Einstein’s quote “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” What you are learning is a new way of thinking about yourself and weight management. All of this will settle in and become familiar. For now, you are putting new wiring in your mind. Go with it, and be open to not having it all figured out yet.

  _________________________________________

  It is now time to finish out our weight skills with the all-important Skill 3, Creating a Powerful Relationship with Food.

  CHAPTER 26

  WEIGHT MASTERY SKILL 3

  Creating A Masterful Relationship With Food

  SKILL 3: Creating a Masterful Relationship with Food. This skill focuses you on building a sustainable way of eating within your body’s energy needs for weight release and maintenance. Honing this skill allows you to honor your tastes and lifestyle and feel satisfied and not deprived while you release and then maintain your ideal weight.

  Fat Thinking and Food

  I hear the same story over and over from my clients. These phrases swirl and swirl around in their minds and pound the shores of their weight struggle like a hurricane that won’t subside.

  “I hate food. I wish I didn’t have to deal with it.”

  “Brownies are bad. Kale is good.”

  “I am a hopeless sugar addict.”

  “I love food, but I hate what it does to me.”

  “I don’t know what to eat anymore.”

  When I struggled with my weight, I was confused by the conflicting information I heard and read. Like many of my clients, I had learned to fear food, often being not quite sure if what I was eating was “bad” and going to make me fat or if it was “good.” This led me to distrust food and myself.

  As we develop our struggle with weight, we tend to develop a fat thinking way of categorizing food as either “good” or “bad.” In addition, we judge our eating mode as “being good” or “being bad” as well.

  For instance, when we are “being good,” we are eating the food that our weight loss plan, whatever it is, deems as good, and so we see ourselves as being good as well. Nothing is wrong about eating healthfully, but our distorted black-and-white, perfectionistic attitude about food sets us up for failure. That’s because anything outside of the strict confines of “good” is “bad.”

  Once we fall from grace by eating a bad food, we tend to shift into eating “whatever” we want. After all, if we are going to be bad, we might as well be really bad, right?

  Can you see how this good-or-bad attitude has been causing you to spin around in the Weight Struggle Cycle and has tarnished your relationship with food? This fat thinking mindset focuses your attention on an external structure (the diet, the detox, the plan) that when you are “good” about following it, you will lose weight. Your attention is focused outside of you on something that doesn’t belong to you. There is no ownership in faithfully following a diet. You ultimately “fall off” not because you are a bad person or lack discipline but because you are focusing externally on “doing” something, rather than focused internally on “becoming” something—that is, being masterful with your own personal relationship with food.

  Thin Thinking And Food

  One of the first relationships that all humans and animals establish is with food. I remember when the doctor put my newborn son on my belly. He nudged his way up to my breast to eat. How beautiful and amazing is the pure need to sustain ourselves in this world. As we grow up and are exposed to a world of food, both healthy and unhealthy, that relationship may become stained with pain, suffering, and limiting beliefs. We learn to fear food, hate it, and wish we didn’t have to eat at all. We have distorted views of ourselves and our relationship to food.

  My dear apprentice, this is going to be the longest skill chapter because our relationship with food is so layered and complex. Stick with me and know you will have a lot of time to master your relationship with food during our 30-Day Thin Thinking Practice. With your lab coat on and your Inner Coach by your side, you’re ready to begin wiring a new, positive relationship with food from the inside out.

  Is a Calorie a Calorie?

  You have already created your Daily Calorie Budget for Weight Release and know that when you stay within that daily parameter you can release weight at a rate you decide. Now let’s begin to look at the calories themselves.

  Are there good calories and bad calories when it comes to weight release? If your Calorie Budget for Weight Release is 1,200 calories a day and you eat 1,200 calories worth of French fries and ice cream, would you release the same pound of weight at the same rate as eating 1,200 calories of chicken and broccoli?

  Well, luckily for us, Mark Haub, professor of nutrition at Kansas
State University did a study on himself. For ten weeks, he ate a diet of mostly Twinkies and powdered doughnuts. Even though he was eating a junk food diet, he was also eating 1,000 calories less than his Daily Body Burn. Over the course of the 10-week study, he released nearly 27 pounds!

  The truth is that a calorie is a calorie. When your calorie intake is less than your Daily Body Burn—no matter what you eat—you will release weight as per the laws of physics—just like Professor Haub. So if you eat a brownie, is it “bad?” Will it make you “fat” as you’re often told? Will eating a brownie banish you from the heaven of good dieters and send you into the hell of brownie-eating sinners? The answer is no. The brownie itself is not fattening per se; our fat thinking around the brownie is. Generally, after eating the brownie, this thought comes to mind: “I blew it, I ate a brownie, and that was bad. Well, since I blew it, I may as well eat three more and start over tomorrow.” The truth is: “Gee, I ate a brownie. It was probably about 300 calories, and I have about 500 calories left in my Calorie Budget for Weight Release for today. Let me move on, eat a healthy dinner, and get my body back in balance after the sugar and flour from the brownie and continue with my healthy lifestyle for the rest of the day.”

  The Food Struggle Zone

  With the revelation that calories are calories, why aren’t most long-term Weight Masters eating a diet of French fries and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream?

  There are a few very important reasons:

  Refined foods are densely packed with calories. A small amount (1 ¾ cups of ice cream, which is 875 calories and a medium serving of French fries, which is 340 calories) is all you can eat in a day to stay within a 1,200 calorie per day range. And, no doubt, you would need to eat more than your Daily Calorie Budget to feel satisfied.

  Sugary and starchy refined foods eaten on an empty stomach spike your blood sugar and cause an insulin imbalance. If you kept eating this way over time, you would become resistant to insulin and the satiety hormone leptin. This would lead you to suffer from what I call a constant feeling of fake hunger—feeling hungry even though you have just eaten.

  Also, the sugar, fat, and salt in refined food stimulates the dopamine neurotransmitters in your brain creating cravings for more refined food.

  In short, by eating a majority of the calories within your Calorie Budget for Weight Release in refined foods—especially those “white foods” containing sugar and flour—you awaken what I call the Carb Zombie, a deprived feeling and a food-obsessed, always hungry, and nonstop thinking about food state. In that mode, your mind is hijacked by the excessive priming of your neuropathways with refined carbohydrates. The Carb Zombie makes you:

  Think obsessively about food.

  Feel hungry even though you may have recently eaten.

  More prone to overeat, binge eat, and have the impulse to eat any refined food that crosses your path.

  This Carb Zombie ultimately pulls you into what I call your Food Struggle Zone by reigniting your old fat thinking wiring—the eating habits and food cravings that caused you to struggle with weight in the first place. So even though a calorie is a calorie and there are no “good” or “bad” calories, when you are consistently overeating certain foods, your body and mind revert into a state of imbalance and instability that leads you back to struggling.

  The Food Mastery Zone

  So, my dear apprentice, instead of relying on some outside structure: a diet book, a meal plan, or a ketogenic app to tell you when you are being good or bad, I am proposing a revolutionary inner structure that has nothing to do with outside rules, regulations, or dogma. Rather this is a structure you create, and you will take back all the power you have given away over the years. You are going to shift the focus and learn to use food to create internal states of:

  Stability. The state of satiety, a feeling of being fed, comforted, and even-keeled in body and mind.

  Nourishment. The state of vibrancy that comes from eating foods with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other nutrients the body needs for optimal health. Also a state of mental nourishment that comes from self-care and seeking pleasure in things other than food.

  Balance. The state of confidence that comes from being able to find pleasure in healthy whole foods and use them as the foundation of our Calorie Budget for Weight Release, while allowing for a small Buffer Zone of calories that allow for treats, desserts, and other foods that were once seen as “bad.” This allows that wonderful feeling of being able to live in the real world and yet stay out of fake hunger and cravings and the grasp of the Carb Zombie.

  These internal states form what I call the Food Mastery Zone. Learning to live in this zone allows you to develop a way of eating that honors you, your lifestyle, and your Calorie Budget for Weight Release and then Maintenance.

  In this chapter, I am going to guide you and your Inner Coach through:

  The 85-15 Percent Food Mastery Zone Eating Strategy

  Living in Your Food Mastery Zone: Guidelines for Success

  The 85-15 Percent Food Mastery Zone Eating Strategy

  When I started mastering my relationship with food, I realized that instead of focusing on what I couldn’t have and feeling deprived, I could figure out how to spend my Calorie Budget for Weight Release wisely and create a wonderful way of eating that I enjoyed.

  I learned that with my Calorie Budget for Weight Release, like my money budget, I could spend a certain percentage on food that allowed me to feel healthy and nourished and keep my blood sugar on an even keel. These foods took up most of my daily calories. I might call them my living expenses. The more I ate lean proteins, vegetables and fruits, and healthy fats, the more I liked them, even craved them. If I spent my budget well with these healthy wholesome foods, I would have some extra calories for foods that were maybe not so healthy, like a small dessert, a glass of wine, or some dark chocolate. (Think of these foods as nonessential luxury items.) The calories remaining after I created a stable foundation with healthy, whole foods allowed me a Buffer Zone of calories that let me live in the real world and not in a rigid “good food, bad food” diet prison.

  I learned what many Weight Masters learn along the way to mastery—that is, to eat mostly healthy, nourishing foods and allow some wiggle room for small servings of snacks, desserts, or treats. It’s the 85-15 Percent Food Mastery Zone Eating Strategy. Each day your focus is on eating approximately:

  85 percent (to 100 percent, depending on the day) of calories from foods that allow you to achieve a nourished, stabilized, and balanced state in both your body and mind. These calories include protein, healthy fats, vegetables, fruits, some complex carbohydrates, and water.

  15 percent (from 0 percent to 15 percent, depending on the day) of calories from less nutritious foods that offer value in other ways—sociability, flexibility, and pleasure. Desserts, bread, chocolate, and alcohol are examples.

  “It was funny, once I started working those old ’prohibited’ foods into my diet and they were no longer “off limits,” they suddenly lost their appeal. When the guilt and thrill of eating “bad” foods was removed, and I actually began tasting them, I realized I didn’t even like many of them! I also learned that I was perfectly capable of being moderate with pleasure foods. I like my healthy, grown-up relationship with food.” Susan J. (Released 5 pounds in 30 days, maintaining a 20-pound release for 10 years)

  85 Percent Nourishing and Stabilizing Foods

  Below are groups of foods that, when you eat them consistently, will allow you to feel nourished and stabilized—free of fake hunger and Carb Zombie-driven cravings. These nourishing and stabilizing foods aren’t “good” per se; they simply provide a positive value for your body. You want to strive, therefore, to make them the largest portion of your Calorie Budget for Weight Release. Feeling nourished and stabilized is a great way to love and care for yourself. It also feels amazing!


  Please don’t look at the following section as a lesson in nutrition. The information listed is primarily to aid you to begin tuning into your mind and body and experience for yourself how different food groups offer value to your body and mind. If you need additional resources with more nutritional specifics, please visit the Online Resource Center at www.FromFatToThinThinking.com.

  Protein

  It’s satisfying in any form. The body is made up of more than 50,000 different proteins. Nothing hits your system and immediately stabilizes you the way protein does. This food source delivers and stays by your side, keeping you satisfied for long periods of time. Protein nourishes and stabilizes you by:

  Stabilizing your blood sugar.

  Satisfying you with the fewest calories of any of the food groups.

  Allowing you to stay satisfied longer than any of the other food groups.

  Helping you maintain lean muscle mass, which burns more calories than fat.

  How much protein do you need?

  Most adults should shoot for 72 to 80 grams of protein per day (That’s about four 3-ounce servings or three 4-ounce servings.) while you are reducing calories and if your Calorie Budget for Weight Release is 1,600 calories or less. If your Daily Calorie Budget is above 1,600, you can follow this formula: Multiply your current weight in pounds by 0.5 to get the minimum grams of protein to eat per day. (Make sure to disperse protein throughout the day.)

  When you eat too little protein and too many refined carbohydrates, the brain develops an amino acid deficiency, resulting in emotional imbalances that lead you to crave sugary and starchy carbohydrates.

  NOTE: Keep fatty cuts and processed meats to a minimum. Overconsumption of these foods is linked to heart disease and cancer. Choose lean, lower-fat cuts of meat, poultry, fish, and low-fat dairy products. They’re also lower in calories!

  SOURCES OF PROTEIN