The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  I thought about Jen wanting me to put “Thank you” on the refrigerator, and I decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Driving home from my meeting with Dr. Liponis at Canyon Ranch, I’d stopped at the museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to the artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell. You don’t have to be a fan of nostalgic Americana (and I wasn’t) to admire his iconic picture Freedom from Want, showing a family gathered around a table, delighting at the Thanksgiving turkey. And in the very poignant painting Saying Grace, an older woman and her grandson, cramped in a raucous restaurant, bow their heads before a meal. The original sold for $43 million in 2013, so apparently I wasn’t the only one moved by its message of giving thanks, wherever you happened to be.

  I’d heard recently about organic eaters who updated the notion of saying grace by taking a moment before a meal to think about the farmers who had grown the crops and the cycles of nature that produced them. One vegan friend told me she always paused to picture the land where the food grew. I couldn’t see myself pondering rain falling gently on cornfields before I ate a taco, but I admired her ability to marvel.

  There are pragmatic as well as spiritual reasons for appreciating the bounty in front of us. Mireille Guiliano, the former CEO of the company that makes Veuve Clicquot champagne and author of French Women Don’t Get Fat, made the convincing argument that her fellow countrywomen stayed slim because they savored what they ate. Even rich foods like wine and cheese and pâté were fine when you had small portions that you took time to enjoy. It takes twenty minutes for our stomachs to tell our brains that we’re sated, and gulping food at the counter American-style didn’t allow that to happen.

  Joining Norman Rockwell to Mireille Guiliano—perhaps the unlikeliest dieting team ever created—I decided that learning to appreciate the food I ate had the potential to make me happier and thinner. Doing that seemed simple enough—and made more sense than most of the diets I knew. Our notion of what’s “healthy” changes—remember when bran muffins seemed the great panacea? Now it’s kale and quinoa, and while I happened to like both of them, I had the sense that it was my approach to what I ate that would make the difference.

  As usual, I went on a research binge (better than the ice cream equivalent), starting with the book Mindless Eating, by Cornell professor Brian Wansink, who heads the school’s Food and Brand Lab. He’s been on a quest to make people healthier by changing the external cues around food—apparently more effective than relying on our own desires and willpower. He quickly figured out that we judge how much to eat by the portion size we’re given. If you use a smaller plate at home, you’ll eat less. Take a tall narrow glass instead of a short fat one and you’ll drink less, too.

  Since we need some visual clue about when to stop eating, Dr. Wansink helped convince food companies to start selling snacks in hundred-calorie packs. (Enough people would pay more to get less that it turned out to be a good business plan, too.) In one memorable study, he gave moviegoers free popcorn, and those who received large buckets gulped down significantly more calories than those given medium ones. In a funny twist, the popcorn was stale and tasted like Styrofoam (one person asked for his money back, forgetting that it had been free), so nobody liked it. But they ate anyway—free popcorn!—and later claimed that the size of the bucket had no effect on how much they devoured. Dr. Wansink did variations on the experiment over and over, with M&M’S and Wheat Thins, trying different movies and theaters. But the results stayed consistent. Get more, eat more.

  Another time, he invited students to lunch and served them tomato soup—not revealing that some of them had an invisibly refilling bowl. (An unseen pipe connected beneath the table did the trick.) If they judged by their stomachs, they would have stopped when full, regardless of the soup level in the bowl. Instead, those with the magic bowl ate 73 percent more than those given just a normal serving.

  More recently, Dr. Wansink did several studies looking at whether our mood affects what we eat. He concluded—yup, it does. When you’re feeling happy and at one with the world, you’re probably not standing at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter from the jar. Feeling grumpy, grateful, or somewhere in between could make a big difference in your food choices. In fact, he found that being grateful could make you eat 77 percent healthier. That seemed like a whopping big number, so I gave him a call to talk about it.

  “A lot has to do with the time horizon,” he said, sounding like the kind of good-natured, cheerful guy who was (by his findings) more likely to eat broccoli than chocolate. “If you’re in a negative mood, you want something that will make you feel better right now. When you’re in a positive mood, you think more about how you’ll feel in the long term.”

  Changing the mood can change your diet. In one study, he had some people write a story before they ate about the happiest day in their life and some about the worst day. It had a big impact—with the “happiest day” people choosing healthier food afterward.

  Most of us aren’t going to write a life-changing essay before ordering a cheeseburger and fries, so Dr. Wansink wondered about smaller changes. “I’m always trying to find the intervention that a real person can do in real life,” he told me. He suspected that gratitude might be a simple way to move people from, as he put it, feeling “OK” to feeling “OK-plus.” In a lunchtime study, he asked people to tell him one thing that had happened so far that day that made them grateful. “It was only lunchtime, so nobody said they had won the lottery or that their kid just got named class valedictorian,” he said with a hearty laugh. “It might just be ‘I’m grateful I got to work on time this morning.’”

  Any grateful comment (however lame) had a big effect. The people who were prompted to be grateful ate about 10 percent fewer calories than others. Even more significantly, they switched what they ate—more salad, less dessert. “The ratio of fruit and vegetables to total calories accounted for that 77 percent healthier mark,” he explained.

  It wasn’t lost on Dr. Wansink that offering a grateful comment before a meal would fit well into Norman Rockwell’s world. It was the secular version of saying grace. “Making a grateful comment isn’t a spiritual statement. It works for everyone,” he promised. But you have to do it yourself and not rely on someone else. “When families say grace, it’s the person who says the prayer who gets the benefit, not the others,” he told me.

  For his premeal gratitude interventions, Dr. Wansink tried different approaches—he had people write down a reason to be grateful, say it to someone else, or whisper it to themselves. It turned out that the personal whisper was as effective as the others.

  “Could I just think a grateful thought?” I asked him, pushing the idea a little more.

  “Much better if you make it tangible. You don’t have to share your comment with anybody else, but at least say it out loud to yourself. The more muscles you move, the better.”

  A little whispering to myself before a meal might get me odd looks in a restaurant, but if it made me eat healthier, I wouldn’t mind.

  What about snacks? Could gratitude work its magic of cutting calories by 10 percent if I stopped to have a grateful moment on my way to eating a brownie?

  “Better stick to meals,” Dr. Wansink suggested.

  Then practically, he suggested wrapping the brownie in aluminum foil and putting it in the freezer, out of sight. Gratitude couldn’t do everything.

  Still, losing weight through gratitude seemed a lot easier to me than counting calories. So after we hung up, I pondered the various research findings and started to outline my own eating plan. I came up with four rules for my Gratitude Diet. They were simple and straightforward, and I had the feeling they would work. Since Dr. Wansink believed eating right was all about the environment and mind-set, I decided my diet needed an impressive name. So here it was:

  The Amazing Gratitude Diet!

  Take a minute to appreciate any meal before I started.

 
; Sit down to eat—no matter what.

  Fill up on gratitude rather than food.

  Eat only food that made me grateful (in quantities that made me feel good).

  It didn’t seem like it should be that hard. And there was plenty of evidence that these simple steps would help me eat healthier. I started working out the details.

  Rule #1: Take a Minute to Appreciate Any Meal Before I Started

  How often did I really look at what I planned to eat and then savor its pleasures? When I had breakfast at home, I usually checked e-mail or read the latest news feed, and in a restaurant, I’d be talking to friends and barely pause when the plates were put down. Now I wanted to pay more attention. I set a sixty-second rule: I would take a full minute to appreciate the rosy redness of a just-picked apple, the fragrance of fresh basil, the shiny, smooth surface of a piece of salmon. If I paused to appreciate the texture and aroma of anything I ate, I probably would decide against greasy muffins and sugary sweets.

  My friends who pulled out their iPhones in restaurants to snap photos of every course were actually on the right track. The maître d’ might find it annoying, but taking a photo to post on Instagram or Yelp or Facebook made you look at food as something special. I didn’t have to take a photo, but I would mentally register what I planned to eat and be grateful.

  Rule #2: Sit Down to Eat—No Matter What

  Norman Rockwell never made a painting of someone taking thirty seconds to scarf down a scone while she raced to pick up a kid at a soccer game. But I realized I consumed a lot of my calories while driving in the car or walking down the street. How could I be grateful for what I ate going forty-five miles per hour in an SUV? Since 20 percent of food in America is devoured in the car, a lot of real meals have been subverted for on-the-go consumption—like healthy yogurt becoming sugar-laden yogurt tubes, and cereal made more convenient (though how complicated was it to start?) with cereal bars. For me, food on the go was whatever I could grab with one hand. (Hello, energy bars!) If I made myself sit at a table for a snack, I’d be more likely to choose vegetables and salsa or pita bread with hummus—and appreciate it before it disappeared.

  Rule #3: Fill Up on Gratitude Rather than Food

  When I’d talked to Dr. Mark Liponis about losing weight, he’d pointed out that often we think we want food, but we’re really hungry for friendship, love, compassion, and gratitude. Food smoothed over bad moods or lonely feelings. People who say they are addicted to chocolate (and there are a lot of them) are looking to feel calmed, soothed, more satisfied. Rather than stopping to consider what would really fill our needs, we let ourselves crunch, chew, and munch.

  “Often the problems are loneliness and lack of fulfillment. If we had more connections and meaningful contacts, we wouldn’t be reaching for food,” he said. Women often told him that they lost weight without even trying when they started a relationship. “When the love is feeding you, then you don’t have the hunger. I sometimes think if I could just find someone a boyfriend, that would solve the weight issue!” (The old “reach for your mate instead of your plate” had something to say for it.)

  If I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, hunger pangs around noon probably deserved some food to sate them. But sitting at my desk an hour later and frustrated that I couldn’t get the sentence just right . . . well, maybe I needed to work on the sentence, not wander into the kitchen. Or if, as Dr. Liponis suggested, my hunger had a deeper cause, I could close my eyes and let myself think about all I had and fill up on my gratitude for the world. That would be longer lasting and lower calorie than a chocolate-chip cookie.

  Rule #4: Eat Only Food That Made Me Grateful

  Appreciating my body meant not filling it with versions of white flour and sugar that I ate simply because they were available—the boxed cookies left over from Christmas baskets and the Goldfish crackers long abandoned in the pantry. I didn’t particularly like them, anyway, and they never made me feel good afterward.

  Professor Wansink once watched people at a Chinese buffet restaurant, and he found that the slim ones scouted the buffet to see what they wanted before they started, while heavier people just grabbed a plate and began to fill it. “They didn’t skip to the foods they really liked. Instead, they served themselves a bit of everything they didn’t hate,” he explained.

  Only foods I really liked would make it into the Gratitude Diet. I appreciated the tart crunch of a Macoun apple when I got it just picked in early fall at the farm stand, but six months later, a grocery store variety that had lingered in cold storage tasted like a tennis ball. So “yes” to the apple, “no” to the tennis ball. Blueberries remained my favorite fruit, so starting my Gratitude Diet in the summer, when they were ripe and easily available, gave me a boost. Since they were healthy and low calorie, I decided I could eat as many as I wanted. My diet, my rules.

  And that was part of the point. I picked the foods that made me grateful to eat. The healthy ones were the easiest and anybody could make their own list of fresh favorites. I eliminated processed foods because nobody could feel grateful after reading those labels. But what about the double chocolate cookies that I bought freshly made at a little bakery near our country house? They made me happy. I appreciated every bite. Since I was counting gratitude, not calories, they made the list. A cookie that I really loved—one cookie—was just fine.

  And that was it. A Four-Step Gratitude Diet.

  I didn’t have to think about high protein or low fat, about Atkins or South Beach or Jenny Craig. Deciding simply to appreciate my food would change the choices I made. Instead of what I ate, I would focus on how I ate. And be grateful for every bite.

  —

  The next day, I came out of a meeting in Manhattan around lunchtime and stopped in a dive deli to grab a bagel and cheese. But then I remembered Rule #2—I needed to sit down, not eat on the run. I headed to a more civilized spot a few blocks away and lined up at the copious salad bar. I tried to pick only foods that would make me grateful (Rule #4), and then I squeezed into one of the small tables jammed together in the back. I picked up my fork to dig in—but then I remembered Rule #1, being grateful for my food before I took a bite.

  I put down the fork and gazed at the plate in front of me, appreciating the shiny glazed carrots, the black sesames on the tofu, and the many shades of green in the lettuce. I thought about how lucky I was to have such healthy variety available. I took the full sixty seconds to appreciate my plate. A minute lasts longer than you’d think, and the two men chowing down at the next table glanced at me nervously a couple of times.

  “You okay?” one of them asked when he caught my eye.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” I said. To avoid freaking him out further, I didn’t mention the delightful fragrance of my iced mint tea.

  I ate slowly and felt surprisingly content when I finished. My first lunch on the Gratitude Diet, and I didn’t even want a cupcake to top it off.

  According to Dr. Wansink, 75 percent of dieters quit within a month and 39 percent never make it past the first week. But there was nothing to quit on the Gratitude Diet. By sitting down, looking at my food, making sure I was hungry, and eating only what I really liked, I could make meals (and snacks) a joyous part of my life. There was no deprivation or denial. I’d probably lose weight slower than on more extreme diets, but I wouldn’t turn cranky either. Instead of being afraid of food because it might make me fat, every meal became a celebration. Dr. Wansink’s research was pretty convincing that mindless eating made us fat. The Gratitude Diet encouraged mindful eating—which I hoped would make me thin.

  —

  Now three seasons into my year of living gratefully, I reflected that my grateful approach to the summer had made me feel healthier and more alive. With gratitude bringing stress levels down, I had been blissfully headache-free, and following Jen’s ideas on positive body imagery, I still had that index card in my kitchen that said, “Thank you, I�
�m strong!” Instead of beating myself up about what my body couldn’t do, I felt proud of what it could.

  Sticking with the Gratitude Diet was making me feel surprisingly good, too. Being more appreciative of what I ate put me back in control—and I seemed to be consuming a lot less. I decided not to check the scale, because I wanted to focus on being grateful for my body and the food I put into it.

  But off the record, I thought the jeans that had gotten so tight were fitting just a little bit better. And in another week or so, I might try on that navy cotton knit dress again.

  PART FOUR

  AUTUMN

  COPING, CARING, AND CONNECTING

  Unless you are utterly exploded, there is always something to be grateful for.

  —Saul Bellow, Herzog

  On the off-chance that you won’t live forever, maybe you should try being happy now.

  —The Newsroom (HBO)

  CHAPTER 12

  Making Bad Times Better

  Glad to find that gratitude can bring comfort in even the worst of times

  Grateful to get a new view of losing a job

  Lucky that sad events can actually enhance our lives

  My wonderful friend Rose had given me tickets to Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first act had been sheer bliss, with breathtaking staging and sublime singing. Rose, an entertainment lawyer who counts the Met among her clients, had provided seats in the seventh row of the orchestra, and for the first time ever at an opera, I actually could see (my nearsighted eyes again) and follow the story. The other times I’d been to the Met, we sat so far away it could have been another galaxy. Being up close put me in heaven.