So . . . happy new year! I'm back. Long break, I know, but now I'm back in the swing of things and should be posting more regularly again. It's one of my new year's resolutions, and if you think I believe in making new year's resolutions, then you haven't been really getting what I've been writing in this blog. But I do enjoy writing these posts and am looking forward to getting back into it. Of course, that isn't what this post is about - today I'm writing about my ever-expanding gut. More on my girth after the jump.
At this time of the year we see lots of ads for gyms and weight-loss plans, and it's no great mystery why: people make resolutions to lose weight (I'm guessing it's the most popular resolution out there, right before "watch less crap like My Secret Addiction on TV" and "finally clean out under the porch, because I think there's a family of possums living there"). Like most people in this part of the world (other than Nicole Richie and the Situation) I could stand to lose a pound or twenty. I know that I want to lose the weight, and I sometimes engage in pro-weight-loss behaviour, but it just seems to continue piling on. Here are a few reasons why we have trouble dropping the poundage.
Short-term vs. long-term goals: Weight loss is a long term goal, unless you're doing lipo. Burger and poutine for lunch is a short-term goal. Short-term goals tend to win out over long-term goals. I know that if I cut out burgers, pizza and ice cream from my diet I will lose weight, but that won't happen for a while (once I lost a bunch of weight in just by removing potato chips from my diet, which speaks to both the fattening effects of potato chips and how many I was eating). If I eat the burger and poutine, I will enjoy it now. Besides, I can always start my diet tomorrow. Net result? Constant fulfillment of the short-term goals, long-term goal sacrificed. Sort of like the Toronto Maple Leafs' player management.
Memory and recall: Quick! Write down everything you ate yesterday - not just meals, but everything you ingested. It's difficult to do, right? Unless you're keeping track as you go, you easily forget the small snacks and noshes you had throughout the day, and therefore feel like you can afford to have the giant waffle-brownie-fudge-marshmallow sundae that you want. I know that if I have a craving for pizza, I can conveniently forget that I had a veal parm sandwich at California Sandwiches (go if you've never been) two days earlier.
Food hedonism: I like to eat. I enjoy the act of eating, the taste of food. It's almost like a hobby. Eating is not just a survival thing for me. And so I do it more than I need to (well, really most of us do - when you look at what some people subsist on around the world, the amount we eat is appalling . . . and delicious), more often than I need to, and in greater quantities than I need to. When it comes down to it, there are diminishing returns when it comes to food; eating three lindor truffles doesn't give me that much more satisfaction than eating two, especially when each one goes down in about four seconds (and by the seventh, you just feel gluttonous).
An accept-no-substitutes mindset: I don't like frozen yogurt - I like ice cream. If ice cream is not on offer, I will have nothing. So offering "diet" or "lite" options often doesn't work for me, especially when it comes to dessert.
Too many options available: not overabundance of choice in terms of products, but rather in terms of what is close at hand. If I put a jar of jellybeans in my office, they will get eaten. If I don't put them there in the first place, I won't miss them. I can control this to some extent by limiting what I bring into the house and what I bring to work (lately a lot of fruits and vegetables) but there are so many damn Tim Horton's around that a donut is never far from my grasp.
Overcompensation: I biked fifteen kilometers, so that Chocolate Xtreme blizzard is my reward (isn't "extreme" bad enough without it being misspelled as well?). I had my fruits and vegetables today, so I can have a stick of butter for dessert. We tend to congratulate ourselves a little too vigorously for "good" behaviour, cancelling out any positive effects.
Habit: This one is really tough. If you eat more, you feel the need to eat more. If I eat dessert every day, I crave it every day. I know this, and I know that if I just forgo the cookies for two or three days I won't crave them anymore, but it's hard to do. And even worse, I know that if I've kicked my dessert habit and I have dessert a couple days in a row, the addiction will return, and yet I do it anyway. For all of the reasons listed above.
So what does this all come to? Well, for one I can at least be aware of these proclivities and recognize that without some (painful) changes in my behaviour that I won't drop any weight. And I can explicitly make the choice between maintaining my pants size and Tucker's Marketplace buffet, rather than letting the choice happen because of the biases and tendencies described above. And I can avoid gimmicky solutions that I always see on daytime talk shows at this time of year, such as chewing your food thirty times before swallowing (you fill up on less food, and it has the added bonus of killing any potential conversation at the dinner table).
And if all else fails, there's always lipo.
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