I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR WEIGHT LOSS: 7 STEPS TO GET IT! (Issue 14)

by Diane Gold

In the past weeks, I have been hearing over and over again how people don’t have the time in their busy lives to work on their weight. I am going to talk about weight loss, but the same applies to weight gain of any kind. It also applies to many of life’s weights such as feeling sad, angry, bullied, alone or misunderstood.

Two weeks ago, I had a plumbing issue in my house. I became defocused because of it. I was fairly consumed about the hygiene of my house and whether the issue could be affordably resolved. Of course, I had to move rugs and furniture, clean floors multiple times and make multiple arrangements with plumbers. What I didn’t have to do was to choose to allow this issue to live in my head when I was not moving rugs, cleaning floors and talking to plumbers.

Part of what snapped me out of the plumbing crisis was the fact that my daughter, who lives near her vet medicine school, came down with the food-transmitted, week-long version of salmonella (intestinal bacteria) which included hospitalization. Thankfully, she is OK, and the plumbing pipes are fixed but too old to last long.

My systematic approach to time and creation management is in place most of the time. As we say in the martial world, we show our true selves in adversity, how balanced and prepared we are or are not.

I realized how fortunate I am that I follow my own program most of the 365 days a year for most years. It has brought me to want to share these seven steps that give us time for weight loss.

1)    GRATITUDE. The most important part of the day occurs as it begins. We get a chance to rejoice, to jump up and down with glee, to fill our hearts with warm happiness. Why? Because we awoke and have another shot at growing, creating something great, helping someone out and getting help ourselves.

This might sound like hype, but the alternative would be that we didn’t get the chance to get up and go. So, yeah, be happy about it. When we are happy, our focus is better and so is the way we use our time. This should take 5 seconds.
2)    SELF-RECOGNITION. Now that we have awakened, we can take 10 seconds to stretch and recognize how lucky everyone else is that we have arrived in the conscious world and are here to do something brilliant and creative, help someone or call on someone. It is our job to be productive, so we might as well recognize ourselves for it. When we root ourselves through self-recognition, our actions become streamlined and time economical.

3)    POWER WAKE UP (aka meditation or chi wake up). Once we stand up (or sit up in our wheel chair or sit up in bed if that’s how it is), let’s feel the power of our body. Let’s take 30 seconds just to stand (or sit or lie) and feel our blood supply coursing through our veins. This action will wake us, allow us to pump up without anything more. We get emotional power from physical power. Powering up daily will increase and sustain our power. When we feel powerful, we act at peak performance. When we are at our peak, we treat time as the preciously valuable dimension that it is.

4)    CHEERLEADING. As we are doing our morning routine, we should take 15 seconds to pick out our goal for the day. It could be to wash two loads of laundry, take the first step to doing our taxes, make 50 phone calls to tell people about our business, call the girl we talked to from last year’s gym class that we promised to call. Whatever it is, those 15 seconds will bring us to laser focused attention. We will commit ourselves to one task (this exercise is in addition to longer term goals, if we have them). This cheering ourselves on will methodically lead us down our path. We can use the cheering behavior for the rest of the day until we have reached our target.

Imagine we are on a treasure hunt, and we know we are close to finding the treasure. The time that we spend in looking for it is so energetic, proficient and precise because we are highly motivated to find the treasure. We are internally cheerleading. This enables decisive time economy and allows us to find more time for weight issues.

5)    REACH OUT TO ONE. No matter what kind of day we are having, no matter how busy we think we are, no matter where in life’s journey we are; we should take one minute out to reach out to someone and say hello. This could be on the bus to work or school, while putting the trash can outside, while going to the mini mart on the way to play volleyball. If we don’t know anyone we can call, if we work or school from home or if we can’t go out and don’t have anyone who lives with us; we can say hello to our neighbor or to the first person we see riding a bicycle near our front door. If no one rides by, we can call the phone company and ask about our bill. If we have an internet connection, we can reach out globally to half the world.

What does this have to do with time management? When we communicate with another person, our perspective modifies itself, often in a positive way. We realize we are an integral part of the world as we know it and that people have something to offer us and vice versa. With this realization, we can become more productive and motivated and can use our time more efficiently.  Then there is more time for weight loss.

6)    TOP OF THE AGENDA. When we want to do something, we usually schedule it in, right? Think about what happens when we feel like eating a particular food. Funny how we have no problem scheduling that in. Yet, when we want to remove some pounds from our stomach by doing some tai chi or fitness activity that would take less time than it would take to go get the food we craved, we don’t have (make) the time.
Looking from a different angle, when we see that our daughters are having weight issues, we bake a cake. Or we encourage them to make sure to have a big appetite when visiting grandma and grandpa. Or we think we are being generous when we decide to buy our daughters’ clothing when they are four sizes larger than they want to be. What are we thinking? Where’s our agenda then?
By keeping the weight loss goal (or weight gain goal or emotional weight goal) on our calendars, we keep it fresh in our minds. If it’s scheduled in, we have already made the time.  15 seconds.

7)    WRAP UP MEETING. When it is time for bed, let’s have a small 30-second meeting with ourselves. No matter what else is on the agenda, let’s review how we managed with the other six items in this plan. The program takes two minutes, 45 seconds a day. It should bring us one extra minute for each of these seven steps because we get stimulated after we eat good food, see good friends, succeed at creating something great, lose a pound. That totals seven minutes. Subtract two minutes, 45 seconds from seven and get four minutes, 15 seconds.
This meeting gives us more time because it keeps us accountable to ourselves for weight loss. It shows us how easy it is to make time through scheduling, focus and the positive effects of infrastructure. We begin to save time in other areas of our day, which we can add on to weight loss time.

CONCLUSION

When we carry extra weight, it consumes us. We wake up knowing it; we go to school and work knowing it; we go to sleep knowing it. Spending time on the idea of extra weight uses up our time in a way that doesn’t benefit us. When we take an organized approach to our objectives, whatever they are, we have less time to live in our negative, overweight thoughts. We might even have time for an exercise or two from the WarriorsOfWeight.com inbox magazine.

When our lives have so many things pulling at them that we think we are about to break AND we carry extra weight, it is almost too much. Tension from other weight issues often drives us to eat. It also tends to create a funnel-like image in our minds, not unlike a tornado, in which all the problems that ever were and ever will be are floating around above our heads clouding our thoughts.

Extra weight makes us feel bad; not like our looks; shorten our life span and the time we could be with our grandchildren. We choose to have time for ourselves. We choose to have time for our favorite people and food. We don’t find time for people we don’t like just as we think we are in control if we walk away from food we don’t like.

We can start now by picking one of the seven steps to do for a week. Once we complete one of the steps for seven straight days, we should continue to do it for another seven days and, at the same time, add another step.

Every two weeks, we should add another step until, in 13 weeks, we will have time for weight loss and we will have adjusted our minds to lose it.

FEEDBACK

Please leave your comments in the comment section below. Your experience and feedback can be very helpful to others in the community.
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DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music and  stress expert and a dedicated mom. She believes that we are the masters of our fate as long as we get the chance to wake up successfully. She says, “If we put half the effort into advocating for ourselves as we do in caring for others, we’d spend lots of time on ourselves.”

Copyright © [2012] by [WarriorsOfWeight.com] – All Rights Reserved.
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HOW TO CHANGE OUR LIVES THROUGH THE POWER OF WORDS (Issue 13)

by Suzanne Kovi

How many of us have ever been faced with a situation where we felt as though our personal power were compromised? It may have been a fight with a loved one, a confrontation at work [or school], a loss of a job [or responsibility] that left us feeling helpless, or perhaps it was a situation that blind-sided us and now we are forced into a transition we weren’t prepared for. It can feel as though we are naked and vulnerable while trying to remain strong.

Many people live their lives in this state of hurt yet keep it buried deep inside not realizing that it affects their world and all the relationships around them. What does it take for a person to be able to brush herself off and stand strong when life’s circumstances seem too difficult to bear? It takes Courageous Communication to transform our lives from a place of fear and uncertainty to a place of bold courage and action.

Courageous Communication is simply this: saying what needs to be said, to whom it needs to be said and in such a way that creates win/win results. Simple, right? Not all the time.

One of the dangers of communication in a moment of turmoil is that we forget how to respond, and we choose to react. Becoming reactionary only adds fuel to the fire without providing solutions. Communicating by reacting is not a powerful way to heal, nurture and grow our relationships, it destroys them. I’m sure we all want the same thing: to be happy. So how do we develop our Courageous Communication in such a way that it empowers us and helps all our relationships progress forward?

We work on ourselves by trying to understand how and why we choose the words we choose and what fuels our responses. This takes courage.

To start healing our relationships, we need to heal our internal dialogue first. Each of us has a little voice that has this unique ability to hold us captive whenever we strive to create a change in our lives.

Although this little voice in our head may seem harmless, we need to become aware of the words we choose because over time they can damage our personal beliefs and keep us stuck in life. We can recognize these as words that diminish our self worth and disempower us. They may sound like,”What if…Not yet…I’m afraid…I’m not ready…My life will never change…I can’t” and so many more. These words are more to blame for our lack of courage than our past experiences are to blame. But through our experiences we create stories and a belief system about who we are. If these stories don’t support who we want to be, then the little voice in our head has us trapped. If we change our stories, we can change our personal belief system which will directly affect how we communicate. A powerful mindset will create the environment for healthy internal dialogue. We will see an improvement in our communication with others as we build our belief structure.

Sometimes we blame other people or a situation in our life for “making” us feel powerless, but here is an important point – no one can make us feel anything. We choose the feelings and the responses we have in life and we choose the internal dialogue that fuels our choices. To be a Courageous Communicator we need to begin with the little voice inside our head and reprogram it so we can progress forward.

But how do we begin to transform that little voice into one that will positively affect our relationships? The first thing we must do is to address the relationship we have with ourselves. This has to be strong. Our sense of personal love and self-respect has to come first. It is imperative, yet it can be the most difficult choice for many people to make.

Without personal love and respect, we risk being taken advantage of, walked all over, disrespected or worse. Do we know why? Because other people have not been told how we wish to be treated. If we don’t tell people how to treat us, they are left to their own imagination of what works…and it usually works for them. By communicating to others how we wish to be treated, we set up the relationship for success. We harness the responsibility for our own happiness and by setting the standard of powerful communication, we create the environment to nurture and heal the most important relationships in our life.

Maintaining healthy relationships is a team effort, one where each participant has to be at their personal best and they share the same goals – to reach a win/win solution. To become a Courageous Communicator we must begin with nurturing our personal relationship with ourselves. As we learn to honor and respect our views, opinions, dreams and ambitions, our communication style will be transformed. We cannot change another person’s ability to communicate well, but we can be the example of how another human being deserves to be treated and with that we can transform lives.
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CONCLUSION BY DIANE GOLD
Communication through words can help everything. What’s the worst that could happen if we opened our mouths and said our piece? Someone could get angry or not like us. But, on the other hand, we could make someone very happy, could feel relieved and we could make a friend for life. At the very least, we will get practice in self-expression if we take a chance and talk. AND, we will do a better job the next time, no matter what. It couldn’t feel any worse than holding in what we wanted to say. Right?

This week’s action step is to go and communicate with kindness, purpose and without self-judgment. Expression is not about perfection. It’s about saying what we want to say.

As Suzanne says, we must use Courageous Communication. If it doesn’t come easily, we can take it one step at a time. When we do, even if we are acting at the beginning, we will be one step closer to the courage that we seek and one step closer to becoming close to ourselves.

FEEDBACK
Please leave your comments following the full article in the Issues tab of this site.
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SUZANNE KOVI, AUTHOR
Suzanne Kovi has over 20 years in the entertainment industry. She is a successful business woman, personal trainer and wife. Her greatest roles are that of mother and community leader. She is inspired by people and passionate about helping women and kids stake their unique claim in life. She challenges her readers to “get busy living” and is the author of Ignite Your Life Choices. You can learn more about Suzanne at www.igniteyourlifechoices.com.

SCHOOL BULLYING: 9 SOLUTIONS FOR STUDENTS (Issue 12)

by Diane Gold

How many of us remember some friend (if we can call her that) or kid at school who was a dictator or a bossy boss? For no apparent reason, that’s how she was. I had a fairly bully free childhood, But, I remember having a girlfriend for a while who thrived on being bossy and not sharing the decision making process when choosing the things we did. I had to have been around 14 because my dad had just passed.

My self-esteem was shaky, I now surmise, because I allowed this friend to make decisions for us. I liked the activities we did, I liked her friends and status (not a good reason to hang with someone) and I wanted friends, thinking I needed her as one of them. I didn’t realize until we stopped hanging out together that our relationship put a strain on me and, when it was over, I was relieved.

This incident was relatively short. Most kids have it worse times 10. There are bullies in school who outright ruin kids’ lives. Now that I think about it, I had a kindergarten teacher who would make me drink milk at rest period. She actually made me drink it after I said many times it made me sick, and I didn’t want it. It felt like torture, having been brought up in a household where personal choice was normal. I never did understand why the teacher was a milk dictator. We had to put our heads down on our desks for rest period. Then, when milk was delivered, she made us drink it. I pretended to be asleep so I wouldn’t have to drink it, but she always woke me. I even for a note from home saying I didn’t have to drink the milk. Luckily, my dad’s job changed, and so did my school.

Even that is massively mild, comparatively, and I didn’t have to experience a kid lurking around the corner in school waiting to pounce on me, as many do. There are kids who wait for recess so they can torture other kids. They physically abuse them, take their lunch money, humiliate them in front of their gang of followers who are afraid not to be part of the gang lest they get tortured themselves. And worse. We, as humans, are sometimes brutal when we are young, on our way to finding our who we are. Many of us grow out of it; some of us were the victims.

So what’s a girl to do so she’s not perceived as a tattletale? Below are 9 solutions. Each of us is different, so we need different solutions. Each situation is very complicated, and no one is suggesting it will be solved by simply reaching out, but we need support. The people I suggest we reach out to may not be sensitive enough, skilled enough, interested enough, patient enough to deal with what we ask. So, we mustn’t give up if we ask one person and that first choice does not work out. The next one probably will. Or the next.

1. Tell the teacher, unless it’s the teacher who is torturing us like my situation with the milk in kindergarten. teachers became teachers so they could help kids. We might find one teacher who is attentive, even though we probably have no proof to show and name calling alone hurts but is not against the law.

2. Tell the security guard so s/he can help. This act will build an ally in the security guard, who enjoys being a symbol of protection. This communication could work, although, if the security guard were a bully as a youth, we might not get anywhere and have to try elsewhere.

3. Start befriending the bully by not falling apart when we are bullied. Talk to the bully with an even tempered face. This could lead to communication and becoming a friend to her pack of followers. We would stop being a victim as we communicate with the bully and realize the bully is fragile herself and trying to cover it up through bullying. We must be very alert and brave for this one.

Hint: Never call the bully a bully. It would go against the information in solution 9 below. Instead of saying, “You called me a name,” say, “So, did you hear about the event this Saturday?”

4. Ask the school guidance counselor or psychologist to help us express anger through role playing or some type of screaming. It feels good to role play, and it feels good to scream. What? They don’t do that? If we ask, they might create the program for us. Think of how many people we would be helping by having the counselor offer that service on a regular basis. We might think we are the only ones in the world who have it so bad, but, we are not alone, even though it feels as if we are.

For role playing, tell the counselor that we need to practice being forceful. For our anger, ask the counselor the best way to get it out, and go with that. Ask if screaming is OK. If the answer is yes and we decide to do it, make sure to protect the throat from getting soar.

5. Ask the physical education coach to help by teaching us to hit the punching bag or body bag. This would not be for the purpose of punching our opponent out. It would be:

a. To release the anger we felt toward the bully and ourselves for being in that situation in a healthy, athletic way.
b. To become stronger by the very nature of punching the bag.
c. To earn the respect of the coach and our peers for taking personal action.
d. To learn a skill that helps us focus and be independent.

6. See if there is a community group for school bullying with other kids who feel the discomfort of other kids who are mean. I am sure it will be massively difficult to go to a group like this because we don’t like to admit we need help. If we do go, it will totally help our lives in a big way. Wealth, color, intelligence do not matter. There are others who will welcome us.

7. Enlist the help of our parents and guardians.This might be the hardest of all, since we do not like to admit we need help, and we might be at a stage with our care takers where we don’t want to confide in them. Look at it this way, parents and guardians were kids once, too. Each may have a story to reveal that would help us see we are not alone.

8. Begin kung fu lessons. These lessons would not be to learn to pound our bully and become just like her. No. They would be to:

a. Reveal our true self-esteem that might be covered and needs development.
b. Change the strength of our muscles and bones through the kung fu exercises.
c. Develop personal pr, that is, a positive personal image.
d. Increase confidence.
A side effect would be that we would balance our weight through stretching, moving, exercising and proper calorie use.
A second effect would be our increase in flexibility, which would make it easier for us to walk well, with proper posture and ease. These physical changes would translate to a look of confidence, definitely something bullies shy away from. When facing strong confident people, bullies move on.
A third side effect would be that we would develop an understanding of our personal space and learn to move in ways that would protect it.

9. Take Tai Chi lessons. As with kung fu, these lessons would not be learned to assault the bully. They would be to learn to be patient, forgiving and stress free while we became confident, fluid in movement and skilled at understanding give and take.

We all know the yin/yang symbol. It is the symbol of balance, represented by opposite sides of a circle. It is the symbol and the way of tai chi. And tai chi teaches us to be balanced of mind and body, ready to change with the wind, if anything, like a bully, should come into our path.

We all know that when we feed fuel to a fire, it gets bigger. Think of adding sticks to a fire or coal to the barbecue pit. The fire grows. If we have no more sticks or coal, the fire gets smaller and goes out.

In this same way, think of what happens when person A yells at person B. If B yells back, then A yells again and B yells again. What if B didn’t yell in the first place but talked to gain understanding of A?; A’s fire would die down from lack of fuel and the yelling would be over. In the same way, when a bully comes over to us huffing and puffing with insults or torture or telling us we are bursting out of our seams because we gained weight, our crying acts as fuel, and the bully bullies more. If we keep our wits about us and smile, no matter what the bully does or says (knowing in our hearts that the bully is hurting and shows it by bullying), the bully’s fire will go out because there is nothing to excite her bully fire.

CONCLUSION

No matter which of the 9 solutions presented here sound good to us, we will begin to understand that all bullies have some type of pain that makes them bully. The next time we encounter a bully, we can keep that in mind. We can realize that a bully is just crying out and expressing her problem through being abusive or mean. We just happened to be in the bully’s path.

I thought it quite karmic that while researching for this article, I was reading Clive Cussler (master author of ship wreck/salvage team adventures) and his Devil’s Gate. One character said to another,

“Like a child with bad self-esteem, you resort to your bullying in hopes of proving your strength.”

This quote reminded me of the well-known universal truth that bullies are covering up the fact that their self-esteem is broken. If we were saints, we would forgive them. We are human, so we must prepare ourselves.

The other book I was reading, John Maxwell’s Failing Forward, had a relevant quote,

“To keep the right perspective, take responsibility for your actions, but don’t take it personally.”

If we could put our emotions aside to see clearly and claim our glory, we would see that being bullied does not reflect our shortcomings. It may seem to, since we might want to scold ourselves because we were chosen to be bullied or because we didn’t have the silver tongue or master technique to stop the bullying. But school bullying, most often, is a random act of cruelty that we may not avoid but can definitely learn to understand and manage.

FEEDBACK

Please leave your comments there or email us at 1 [at] warriorsofweight [dot] com.
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DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music and stress expert and a dedicated mom. She believes that giving our minds a daily rest leads to creative, ongoing world solutions. You can read more about kung fu and tai chi at http://dianegold.com/tai_chi.html.

The Avocado Story And Fat Can Be Good (Issue 11)

by Anahad O’Connor and Dave Lieberman

(Anahad) Most of us have been programmed for years to think that cutting back on fat in every shape and form is the shortest path to better health. But the science could not be any clearer. Focus on the right kind of fat, and you’re likely to lose weight, protect your ticker, and lower your risk of all sorts of diseases. Scientists have known this is the case since at least the 1940s, when out of the devastation of World War II came one of the most crucial nutritional discoveries of the last century.

The setting was post-war Europe, southern Greece. In 1947, the Rockefeller Foundation sent researchers and humanitarian aid workers to the palm-dappled island of Crete, a land steeped in ancient history. Previously a paradise, the island had been left in near ruins after a brutal invasion and occupation by German and Italian forces. When the Rockefeller researchers arrived, they were sure they’d find rampant malnutrition. Compared to Americans, the Cretans ate like peasants. Wartime dinner tables were bereft of dairy, and protein was scarce. Instead the locals ate mostly bread, nuts, legumes, some fruits and vegetables and ample amounts of fat, some from fish and animals and a lot of it from olive oil.

But the diseases that the researchers were sure they’d find among the Cretans were nonexistent. Cardiovascular disease, cancer and other ills were almost unheard of, and life expectancy was high.

That was in stark contrast to what scientists found when they examined six other countries, especially one much further north, Finland. Physically, the Finns could not have been more different from the people of Crete. They were loggers and farmers, standing tall, strong, and rugged. Malnutrition was not a concern. Like the Cretans, the Finns ate plenty of fat, most of it from meat, milk, and their national condiment, butter. They also had cholesterol levels that were similar to what was seen in Crete. But unlike the Cretans, the Finns had extraordinary rates of heart disease, the highest in the world. Sharp chest pains were as much a part of reaching midlife in Finland as a fiftieth birthday, except that the chest pains came first. Many Finnish children knew their grandparents only from pictures.

Some researchers thought the difference was genetics, or perhaps Crete’s balmy climate. But that theory was quickly disputed. Cretans who migrated to other countries, including tropical ones like Brazil, suffered the same rates of heart disease and cancer as their new countrymen. Speculation soon turned to tobacco. The Finns were known to like their cigarettes. But later studies showed that even in rural areas of Crete where the locals smoked frequently, drank heavily, and had other coronary risk factors, cardiovascular disease was low. Like a Doberman standing sentry over its turf, something in the Cretan diet was fiercely cardio-protective.

We know from more recent studies that the Finns were torturing themselves with the principal fat in their diet, saturated fat, while their Cretan counterparts were reaping huge rewards from the type of fat they were eating, monounsaturated fat.

The benefits of monounsaturated fat cannot be overstated. The medical literature on what it can do for you is enormous. It lowers bad cholesterol, raises the good kind, reduces inflammation, and prevents heart disease. Compared with the artery-gumming effects of saturated fat, it acts like arterial drain cleaner, keeping blood vessels clear and reducing harmful deposits. That’s the kind of fat anyone could love.

Balance may be a good thing, but experts say that when it comes to your fat intake, you definitely want the scales to tip heavily in favor of monounsaturated fat. Ask most people where they can find them, however, and beyond a mention of olive or canola oil, you’re almost guaranteed a blank stare. So consider yourself a Rockefeller scientist, on the verge of another great discovery. One of nature’s most abundant and perhaps surprising sources of monounsaturated gold is a food that plays almost no role in the average person’s diet: avocados. If the only time you eat them is in guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday, you’re making a huge mistake, like limiting green veggies to St. Paddy’s Day.

It’s time to make some room in your culinary repertoire.

Ounce for ounce, avocados have more fat than virtually any other fruit, which is why most people typically avoid them, busting them out in the kitchen only a couple times a year for football or Cinco de Mayo.

Avocados collect dust on supermarket shelves the rest of the year, making only brief appearances in California rolls and burritos, as we fill our plates with foods that are nutritionally inferior.
Avocados may be high in fat, but the bulk of it is monounsaturated; and, like all plant foods, they contain no cholesterol. In fact, with their extremely high levels of fiber, about 30 percent of the recommended daily amount in a single cup (the most of any fruit); they actually work to lower your cholesterol.

But it gets better. Half an avocado has only 150 calories. That’s less than a small tier of [fast food] fries (230 calories), and amazingly, it’s even less than a single serving of most [creamy] salad dressings (170 to 190 calories), which also come loaded with sodium and both trans and saturated fats. Why dump that on a perfectly healthy salad when you can top it off instead with the best fat possible in the form of a few slices of avocado?

If every American made that decision, our health and nutritional landscape would look a lot different. According to a joint report by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, as many as a hundred thousand cardiac deaths in the United States could be prevented every year if people replaced the bad fats in their diet, particularly trans fats, with monounsaturated fat and its similarly healthy sidekick, non-hydrogenated polyunsaturated fat.

Then there’s potassium, the blood-pressure-reducing mineral that bananas are famous for. Bananas are a wonderful food, but avocados contain about 60 % more potassium. Like carrots in a candy store, avocados rarely get their due.

Consider avocados something of a culinary triple threat: tasty, versatile, and an excellent stand-in for other fats. As a health reporter who’s been through the studies and examined the science, I was sold a long time ago. But for all my good intentions, every time I experimented with avocados I would find myself right back in the same place: looking for … chips.

I just couldn’t seem to break out of the guacamole rut.

So I turned to Dave, who had dabbled only occasionally with avocados but quickly came around when he discovered their nutritional profile. In fact, he said, he had wanted to put them to good use all along.

(Dave) When I lived in Los Angeles, I thought I had entered an avocado Nirvana, because I had a big, beautiful avocado tree growing right on my deck. It was heavy with fat, green avocados. But I wasn’t the only one who had designs on them. Like clockwork, every time the avocados were ready to pick, I’d walk out onto the deck to find that every last one of them was gone, save for a few sad casualties left on the porch that were riddled with little tooth marks. That’s when I discovered I had squirrels. So much for my avocado heaven! That is, until now. Anahad finally gave me another good reason to dream up a bunch of ways to use avocado.

I’ve always loved avocados, but it wasn’t until I finally got around to experimenting with them that I realized just how truly versatile they are. Like most Americans, I’ve been pretty narrow in my avocado repertoire, sticking to salads, sandwiches, and dips. But …there’s a wide range of uses for avocado, from serving it hot in stews and soups to making it the starting point for delicious smoothies and desserts.

Preparing avocado in a sweet way was the most eye-opening part of this exploration for me. But in many parts of the world, particularly in South America and South Asia, enjoying avocado as a dessert with nothing more than some sugar …is de rigueur.

Treating avocado as a luscious dessert makes sense, considering its velvety richness. This heart-healthy fat content and mild flavor is exactly what makes avocado such a versatile ingredient. …With endless uses, avocado has everything you need to make it a staple at lunch, dinner and dessert.

Publisher’s Note:
It always seemed to me that avocados tasted so rich so that we would eat them and get full of good, healthy fat so that we could curb our appetites from the fullness we felt.

FEEDBACK
Please leave your comments below so others can share what you think.
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ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Anahad has been writing for the Science Section at the New York Times. He is passionate about investigative science and fitness reporting. He is one of our panelists whose full bio you will find in the Experts section. Check our Resources Tab to purchase The 10 Things You Need To Eat.

DAVE LIEBERMAN

Through watching his father cook, Dave started his relationship with food. He went from hosting a campus cooking show at Yale to hosting shows for the Food Network and authoring several books. He works as a personal chef in New York, NY.

Copyright © [2012] by [WarriorsOfWeight.com] – All Rights Reserved.
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Acupressure And Tapping: How They Can Help Your Weight (Issue 10)

by Hillary Talbott

There are many different [acupressure] points as well as many different patterns of disharmony that can lead to weight gain. It’s important to understand what your pattern of disharmony is that’s leading to the weight gain, if regular diet and exercise are not working.

In order to do this, locate your local acupuncture physician at AcuFinder.com.

Two common points that we’re going to discuss today, are Stomach-36 and Liver-3.

Now, Stomach-36 is a common point for regulating digestion. It has an auto regulating effect on the digestion, meaning that it can be used for things like diarrhea and constipation.

It tonifies digestion, whose deficiency can lead to weight gain. So, to find Stomach-36, we start by locating the two dimples under the knee, sometimes referred to as Calf’s Nose.

[Tonify means to increase energy, blood, chi in the area.]

It is approximately, one hand breadth below the lateral dimple. And it is also found by running your finger up the crest of the Tibia [lower leg bone in front] until it begins to curve out. Your finger will actually fall into a natural depression there.

So, applying firm pressure to Stomach-36 will help to tonify the digestive system, hopefully, leading to weight loss.

Another technique, known as tapping, is also effective here. You just want to tap on the point for about 30 seconds, at a time. Now, like all points, this point is found bilaterally on the body. So, you can find it on both legs. [Do it on both legs.]

Another point combination that is helpful for weight loss is Liver-3 and Kidney-1. These points are located on the foot. They’re particularly helpful when you find yourself eating out of frustration or stress. Which most of us happen to do, in this day and age.

So, to locate Liver-3, it is in the hollow, between the first and second metatarsal bones. And again, your finger will kind of fall into a dip here, just before the bones begin to close. Now, Kidney-1 is on the bottom of the foot, almost directly below Liver-3.

And pushing these two together, is very helpful for coursing Chi throughout the body, calming the mind and tonifying digestion. So, a gentle pressing technique is useful here. [Chi is vital life energy.]

And the tapping technique is very useful for calming a mind that just won’t quit  so that you can have better awareness and make good choices for yourself, as far as diet and exercise. I recommend doing this daily.

CONCLUSION BY DIANE GOLD

Hillary has given us some wonderful techniques to use for weight loss. They also stimulate our body’s energy, in general. Born from her successful experience with her own patients, the fact that she has shared them with us is a rare gift. We would ordinarily have to go to school or get acupuncture treatment to get this knowledge.

Such a small action as pressing or tapping can bring such a huge result. And these techniques  feel so good.

Caution:
When pressing or tapping, go about these actions gently. Take it easy until you know your strength. If you have any questions or you have any specific medical issues, please consult your medical professional first.

HILLARY TALBOTT, AUTHOR

Hillary Talbott, DOM, is an acupuncture physician and clinical herbalist in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her education in exercise physiology and health science education from University of Florida, led her to pharmaceutical hematology/oncology distribution work, a change of heart to Eastern Medicine and now, an emphasis on Women’s Health, through her professional degree in Oriental Medicine. See her full bio and contact info in our experts section on the main site here.

FEEDBACK

Feel free to comment below so that we can let Hillary know our results from pressing and tapping.  Comments are always welcomed and appreciated.

[youtube color1="00FFFF" color2="A9A9A9" autoplay="0"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo6K0cYQTZ0[/youtube]

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Video Version Of This Material

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS THAT WORK: WEIGHT LOSS, 2012 (Issue 9)

by Diane Gold

New Year’s Resolutions? When the calendar changes from December of one year to January of another year, we reflect. We take note of our accomplishments, our failures, our destiny, our direction. Whether we are more successful than at any other time in our lives, whether we are making slow progress towards our objectives or whether we are in a funk and working on nothing; we reflect. We use this time to help us set priorities, persevere, motivate, initiate, produce and thrive.

Why is this so universal?

Every day, we, who have freedom of choice and just enough to eat, make decisions about our day, every day. Each time we do our school work or our professional work; we choose a path toward our greatest current priority. Whether we want to stay in our family’s good graces so we have a roof over our head or whether it’s to make enough money to pay for our home or kids; our actions, for the most part, are a conscious effort to proceed toward and, hopefully, succeed at our goal.

Let’s talk about some of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions that pertain to weight loss.

1)    I will lose 100 pounds this year.
2)    I will lose 10 pounds a month for 6 months in a row.
3)    I will stop eating sugar.
4)    I will skip breakfast.
5)    I will skip lunch.
6)    I will eat one meal a day for 3 months.
7)    I will stop eating carbohydrates.

What all these resolutions have in common is that they are extreme, not gradual. They cause a biological roller coaster that puts the body into a tailspin. The biological effect of skipping a meal or eating less or changing foods can be big. The idea of eliminating a food or a meal may be disastrous. The psychological effect for anyone with an “urge to eat” issue is huge. The combination of mental and physical effects can cause anything from depression to reduction in kidney function.

The tricky thing about severe diets is that the diet can seem to work as pounds drop off. The body feels better because of the psychological elation from weighing less. There is also a chance that the diet may tax the organ systems, which could cause medical problems. If the body does well, what commonly occurs after the initial period of losing weight is that it is difficult to maintain the weight that has been lost.

We all know that practice, practice, practice gets us to our goal in whatever discipline we are. In music, we always asked, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall,” with that same answer. Practice works in weight loss, too.

Learning a new way to eat requires a regulated and consistent period of time. It cannot be cultivated by removing a main component of an eating plan in a speedy fashion. The dietary change in extreme diets is so intensely different from the old plan that the body doesn’t get the time to adjust to it.

Similar to the idea that we need to eat slowly so that we take the 20 minutes the body needs to realize it is being fed, we need time to acquire the will power to maintain each new step of our new diet. We need to stabilize the new additions or subtractions we make to our diet for several weeks to a month (this would change depending upon the individual) before we go to the next step in any diet. This way, once we have taken the step, we could, potentially, maintain it without returning to the old patterns of eating that brought us to need to lose weight in the first place.

I’d like to emphasize here that some people can handle extreme diets. This is a given. But, on average, for people who have difficulty with weight loss plans, the “slow and steady wins the race” diet usually prevails because the preparation for maintenance in speed diets is usually missing.

So what’s a good New Year’s Resolution for weight loss, and how do I know how far to go?

We all have to look at our own situations. What are our own personal controls? Do we have any medical issues that we need to factor in? What are our motivation and our final desire? Once we answer these questions, we can choose what we want to do. Since the choice, ultimately, is ours alone.

Some interesting ideas might be:

1)    To reduce the sugar in my coffee by half.
2)    To drink water before every meal.
3)    To eat a large green salad with one meal a day.
4)    To add one serving of vegetable juice to one meal a day. (Remember that tomatoes are fruits.)
5)    To drink one ounce of wheatgrass juice once a week.
6)    To use chopsticks, at least, once a day, to see whether they slow down the speed at which we eat.
7)    To do one exercise before each meal (personal choice on how long the exercise will be).
8)    To reduce our intake of whatever we believe helps us gain weight by one serving per week.
9)    To chew our food 20X per mouthful, at least, one meal per week.
10)  To eat our last daily food of any kind (meal, snack or dessert) one hour earlier, at least, one day per week.

These kinds of resolutions start to shape a different way to eating. Each one of them, alone, does not traumatize the way someone eats. The slight adjustment that each causes is hardly noticeable. Yet, each starts to become a new habit, if continued, each of them a good habit. And, even, if we decided to do all of them, at once, they would not disrupt the way we are.

CONCLUSION

The most successful New Year’s Resolutions are those that can be executed in small steps. Their commencement can result in big changes, but they don’t rattle an entire lifestyle. The way used to form who we are is the same method used to form who we become. Each time we learn something new, we incorporate it into our lives. When we learn about adding layers to our lives, we know about maintaining what we have achieved.

We have a better chance of growing with a solid foundation than we do by building on a roadway of sand.

FEEDBACK

Please leave your comments below or through our Contact Us form.

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DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music pro and stress expert and a dedicated mom. She believes that we can will ourselves to accomplish tremendous things. She says, “We each deserve our own priority. When we know what it is, we can walk toward it.”

LET’S MOVE: EVEN WHEN IT’S REALLY HARD (Issue 8)

by Diane Gold

When it’s hard to move because you weigh too much, so many enjoyable activities become dark, cumbersome burdens that have bad feelings attached to them. And we usually carry these feelings alone because other people might not feel the same way.

I remember when I was at NYU. There was a time that I was 30 pounds heavier than I am now. It was probably the ricotta cheese in my lacto-vegetarian diet or the melted cheese on the pasta and sitting and practicing piano and then eating, definitely.

I know that’s not a serious amount of weight compared to other people, but that was my burden and a lot of trouble for me. Every morning, I would sit up on my piece of foam (no bed in those days) and hold my gut to see how my weight was doing. Since that was the first place weight settled on me, I wanted to know how much excess I had immediately upon awakening. I would be able to calculate right away where I was, and, maybe, tiptoe over to the scale in my studio apartment and weigh in. I always knew that the day had a gray cloud over it when I woke up and had that gut, but I went about my day of getting my music therapy training, just the same.

It’s important to remember, as moms of overweight girls or as anyone who knows anyone in this situation, regular activities are not so regular to everyone. The simplest thing in our lives might be a monumental chore in another’s.

Picture our height as five foot six inches, we weight 120 pounds and are in decent overall health. We go to run across the street because we see a friend, we get into a car, jump rope, go dancing. None of these activities trouble us; each is part of a very average day.

Now, let’s picture we are that same five foot six inches, but our 230 pounds changes the way we move, the way we think, the way we feel physically and the way we look at our day. We aren’t going to be as happy to move around because there’s more of us to move, because people may look at us in judgment, because our balance is off. So, not only do we favor activities that don’t require moving, but we don’t have the same energetic will to be out and about and we don’t expend enough energy to balance what we eat. And we’d rather have a companion snack while we are sitting at the computer than go running.

Some of us really don’t like exercise. We’d rather read or write a book, play a game online or watch entertainment. Fond memories of Ma, who would rather have gone to a Broadway play or a ballet than go dancing, come to mind. She would always take a book over a sport, and she did. She did go for walks when she married my stepfather because walks were romantic.

She did one thing every morning that added value to her life. She always did her bed exercises: situps and a few stretches, every morning, from I’m not sure when to her last year of 83. This movement, though done in bed, made a huge difference in her quality of life and her health. She was never sick one day in her life until her last year, which was a mostly peaceful passing. (Shout out to Gertrude!)

Let’s get back to how easy it is to sit in one place and “go to school.” During high school, we may be (or will soon be) in “blended education,” where part of our public schooling is done in a face-to-face classroom, another part online, another part done through mobile events.

In all three settings, some students are very much connected with fellow students through electronic messaging, electronic tracking of friends’ physical whereabouts through standard phone apps that identify of their friends; others of us try to be invisible in school, hibernate in our homes, only showing our head when we have study groups or meetings by webcam, even while getting college degrees or running full time careers.

The blessing to the new learning is we don’t have to bother getting dressed to learn or to talk to people. We don’t have to travel, and we save time, money and energy by staying home. The down side, obviously, is two-fold. Our social skills do not have to develop. More than this and the all-time favorite for people who are uncomfortable in their own skin is they don’t have to MOVE.

The same is true with running a career from the home. Our interactions are very different from the face-to-face method, and we could lead our lives from home, never learning the nuances of actual social interaction.

When we are home, whether we are studying, working, creating, hiding or vegging out; we don’t get the natural exercise we get if we go out to school or work. We don’t pass the mailbox; we probably don’t pull our own weeds. We don’t hunt for our food – well, most of us don’t, in modern society. We don’t have to run for a bus or even get in our car. Our bodies literally stagnate.

We don’t have to move to shop. We push a button, for the most part, and go shopping from our chair or bed. We click a remote and get a video streamed to us. We can opt for a job where we do the work online, never see our co-workers or are a solopreneur, stay invisible and cut the need to move. Except that, to be in good health, we have to move.

So whether we don’t like exercise or it doesn’t like us, there are tons of ways we can slowly but surely, almost secretly from ourselves, without our knowing it, start to move when we do our daily life, even if we go from bed to shower to chair to video screening couch to chair and back to bed.

Even if we go from bed to the bathroom to the couch, if we add one little itsy, bitsy thing; we will happier, we will feel endorphins filling our body with life, we will be more vigorous, we will be more vital, our muscles will get toned, our blood will circulate more, our bones and tendons will become more pliable, our brain function will increase and we will move toward balancing our weight.

Here’s what to do:

1) Before you sit up in bed for the first time of the day, wiggle your toes 9X. If you like, do one foot at a time so that you can concentrate on the action. This will stimulate the brain and tell it to wake up and have a good day.

2) As you sit up in bed to get up, we sometimes stretch. So, lift the arms high over your head. Keep them up. Tip over to the L like a teapot. Then tip over to the R like a teapot, a few seconds on each side. This will wake up your digestive tract so you can eat.

3) When you are in the bathroom sitting on the throne (toilet seat), put your feet flat on the floor. Put your palms on your lower stomach and rock forward with the feet on the floor 9 X, without moving from the hips down. This will relax your lower intestine, good for the throne. It will also tighten your abs a teensy bit. Be careful not to break your toilet seat. If it is too fragile, you can do this one in the chair.

4) Every time you walk from the bathroom to the kitchen (or from the bathroom or kitchen to anywhere, if you like it), put your hands on your hips as if you are a model walking down a fashion runway. Straight back, regal walk, relaxed chin. This will make you feel good, will strengthen your back and solidify good posture.

5) When  you get to the kitchen; bend, cut, stir, mix, serve and eat with the same “runway” posture. This will remind you that you are regal. It also helps with digestion.

6) Sitting in your chair, with hands on your desk, computer keys or (if you are typing on your phone or not at all) hands on upper thighs, elbows against body, without moving hips or below; rotate L shoulder to the rear, then R shoulder to the rear, 9X, alternating (that’s L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R, L, R).  Good for moving your organs around and your sides.

That’s it.

Should you do these movements when you go out? Whichever of these help you and feel good to you are what you should do wherever you are. If you like the chair exercise and you’re at the mall, take a seat and do the exercise. It will take about 6 seconds. No one is watching you.

Or, if someone is looking, waving is always good. Then, get up and continue along your way. As a reminder, put a tiny sign on the wall near your feet in the bedroom, across from wherever you look in the bathroom, by the bathroom exit, in the kitchen, at your chair and, definitely, on your phone.

“TOE WIGGLES 10X”
“TEAPOT STRETCHES”
___
“ROCK THE BACK 9X”
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“WALK THE RUNWAY”
___
“PREPARE & EAT WITH STRAIGHT BACK”
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“SHOULDER TWISTS 9X”

CONCLUSION

There is so much media about the benefit of cumulative work, the story of how Aesop’s tortoise beat the hare through persistent work, how Aesop’s lion was saved by a wee mouse. In the same way, when we move a little on a consistent basis; we do so much to save our heart, our mind, our body and our social life. Do not worry, if you are not interested in trying one or all of these moves. Keep them in the back of your mind for a rainy day. The time will come.

Let me know if these exercises are enlivening should you try them. They may seem too small to bother with. However, after over thirty years of working in recreation, education and martial arts; I have seen how just taking one step gets you ready for the next.

FEEDBACK

Please leave your comments below. Email us at 1 [at] warriorsofweight [dot] com.
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DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music pro and stress expert and a dedicated mom. She has dedicated her life to helping people reach out for their goals and realize their own vision. She says, “It takes only one step to change your entire life.”
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HOW TO BREAK A FOOD TRANCE (Issue 7)

by Sharon Livingston and Glenn Livingston

G: Hey, Sharico.

S: Hi, Sweetheart.

G: How are you, today?

S: I’m good. I was looking at the letters that we get. And we get like tons of letters every day. And I try to peruse them quickly to see what the themes are where people are just commenting. They’re not asking for response. They’re just talking about what’s going on with them. And a very typical theme is I’M OUT OF CONTROL. I can’t stop myself. I don’t know why I do it. I just put the stuff in my mouth.

Sometimes, they’re very cruel to themselves the way they describe it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and trying to think about how to help people with it. And what I’ve come to recognize is that that kind of eating is like being in a bad trance.

G: In a negative trance.

S: It’s a negative trance. Do you know what I mean by that?

G: I do.

S: So, talk about it from the way you experience it.

G: I have bought myself a pizza. And thought that I’m gonna have four slices. And I taste the first couple of bites. And then I go into a kind of an automaton routine. And then I look down, and almost all four of them are gone. And I don’t remember having slice number two, slice number three, or even the bites in between there. I don’t remember the experience. I’m very angry at myself for doing that. And because I wasn’t really there, I’m still hungry. And, so it keeps going.

S: You’re still wanting.

G: Right, not physically hungry, but still…

S: Feeling like you missed something.

G: Exactly. Like the aliens came and took Glenn away and just put on this food machine.

S: Yeah, we were talking about it as though it only happens with food that’s not so great for you. But, it could happen with a salad, too. Right?

G: Ya.

S: Like, I put the salad down, and I got involved in doing something like working on the computer or watching something on TV or getting in a conversation with someone. I felt like I needed another bite, and I looked down at my plate. It’s all gone. Like, where did it go?

And that’s one of the elements of trance. From the way were taught about hypnosis in school. There’s a sense of timelessness. Like time had stopped, and we don’t know how much time went by. Did you eat it in 5 minutes, did you eat it in 10 minutes. Did you eat it in 1 minute? I bet you couldn’t tell. And that’s one of the signs of being in a trance. There’s no sense of time.

G: Absolutely, true.

S: And also, because you were in this trance, instead of being there, you didn’t taste it. You didn’t feel the texture; you didn’t smell it; you didn’t experience yourself swallowing it. All of that has disappeared. It was as if you hadn’t eaten it. And you still are wanting.

G: It’s a horrendous thing because I’m still wanting, but I know that I shouldn’t have, and I’m feeling somewhat bloated. And feeling like I shouldn’t be wanting. And you just don’t know what to do. And, because that’s a painful realization, the easiest thing is to go right back into the trance.

S: Exactly. And, so then, more ends up on your plate, and it all disappears, and you repeat the process, trying to get the experience and never really having it.

G: So, what’s the solution?

S: Well, it’s a very simple one, actually. It’s to, at least, for when you are starting that particular food experience, is to be totally present.

I see you do it a lot, actually, where you’ll say,

“Honey, do you want to come and sit at the table while we have this food?”

Because  I’m very often quite willing to go and eat at the computer or eat in front of the TV. I know we both do that, but if I really want to savor my food and experience it, I’ll have a much better experience of satisfaction of having eaten it if I sit at the table, and I take a bite, I smell it, I kind of roll it around in my mouth a little bit, so I can savor the flavor.  I can get the texture, and maybe even just pause for a second with it in my mouth before I start to chew it so I can get the full experience of the food.

G: What do you think this has to do with our early table experiences? Eating at the table in my house was not very comfortable. It’s something that I learned that it’s really helpful to do as an adult and, actually, not all that long ago.

As a kid, there was a lot of competition at the table.  I didn’t always get along so well with my dad and my mom and my sister. The food wasn’t always so good. So I tended to have more peace all by myself. Yet, even if I am all by myself, my eating is much healthier when I take the time and sit at the table.

S: What happens is people aren’t paying attention to the food. They’re paying attention to everything else but the food.

I want to go over the anti-trance, mindful kind of eating experience…

G: Uh-huh.

S: Where you’re really paying attention to it. Recently, we hear a lot about mindful eating, and you’ll hear people talking about that. It’s something that’s been around for a very, very long time. And I remember going to a workshop when I was an older teenager where we were taught how to eat an orange. And really savor it. And it was the best orange I ever ate in my whole life. And so I’m gonna talk about that more in a moment. I’m also wanting to come back to what you’re saying ‘cause it’s a different thing about early eating experiences, and, you know, I’m one of five kids, and my grandmother lived with us, and we had a lot of people around me at the dinner table.

G:  So, you took the time to pay attention to your food, it would have been gone from your plate ‘cause someone else would have taken it, in my house.

S: Right. Your dad would have eaten it. I had to compete with my brothers. To this day, I’m a fast eater. Right?

G: Very fast. Ya.

S: It’s easier to have digestive problems if you’re gulping down your food.

G: Right.

S: If you take your time, which I rarely do, I have to really, really, really talk myself into doing that,  if I take my time, I’m more likely to digest it properly and have less of a chance of putting bubbles in my tummy or making myself uncomfortable.

G: How do you do that? Do you have a specific set of instructions to help us to do that?

S: Yeah. Going back to that orange exercise, I think everybody should do this. Do it with an orange. Do it with an apple.

G: Something that you have no ambivalence whatsoever about eating. You know it’s healthy for you and it’s totally on your plan.

S: An orange is a particularly wonderful thing to do or like a tangerine. Something that’s easy to peel. The first thing to do is to take a look at it. You want to experience this food with all your five senses. You’re going to take some time, maybe 20 minutes, to fully experience this orange, or an apple, whatever it is.

What you’re doing here is tuning your brain to pay attention to what you’re doing. So, when you have that orange and the first thing you do is you start to peel it. Isn’t this the most incredible thing anyway?  Like, whenever I’m in the kitchen and you decide you’re gonna to have an orange, and you start to peel the orange. Like, I want some. It just smells so good. So the very first thing is when you start to peel it. You know, you feel the little bit of spray that pops out from the peel. You feel it on your fingers. You bring it to your face. You’ll smell it very intensely, and that starts you appreciating the orange or the tangerine or whatever.

And then taking your time to peel it and take a wedge of it, and smell it, take a little bite, and just experience it in your mouth, fully, what’s the temperature of it, what’s the texture of it, what’s the taste of it, even before you start to bite and chew and then take your time chewing a section before you swallow it to make sure that you’ve gotten it to the right texture – what that feels like, and then fully feel the swallowing before you start with the next bite.

So take your time to go through as much of this orange or tangerine as you want to eat. Smell it, feel the texture, experience the sensation of it, how it is to chew it, how it is to swallow it, with every bite, the sweetness, the tartness. It’s gonna be a totally different orange than you’re used to eating because most of us take a couple of bites and just kind of swallow it without having chewed it very much. And then, you’ve inhaled this orange only having experienced a tiny bit of it.

G: That’s why I would imagine that if you do this a few times, that that experience starts to translate to what you are eating throughout the day without consciously doing that exercise.

S: But you can consciously do that exercise with every single thing you’re eating. And I don’t mean that you’re gonna spend 20 minutes with every thing. But, if you could slow yourself down enough to truly experience and taste the first bite, that kind of sets the tone for being mindful about eating it. I mean, you’re not gonna take the full 20 minutes for every food on your plate, but, you will be slowing yourself down, and you will be appreciating or not appreciating – you might find there are certain things you like more than others, and why am I even bothering eating this. Unless there is some real major reason why you have to, you really don’t have to.

The other thing is to pay attention to where you are when you are eating it.

And, if you’re forced into a situation where you have to be at your desk and eat, to take 10 minutes, that’s just 10 minutes, for whatever food you have in front of you. That’s the hardest thing to do is to slow ourselves down enough to pay attention to what we’re doing.

I know that even though most weight loss, and dietitian and nutritionist experts, would say the best thing is to eat at a table, totally dedicated. For you, that was a painful experience. Having dinner in front of the TV is very soothing sometimes because the TV is keeping you company.

Important is, still, to taste your food. It’s important to take one bite at a time. There are times when I’ve stuck things into my mouth because I want to get it down ‘cause I think I have to do something. That’s one of those times when the food really has disappeared. Like I’m trying to get it out of my hand so I can do something with that hand. And then I go to have another bite of it, and it’s gone.

I hate that. There are some other things you can do to slow yourself down. You always ask me, “Why do you get the chopsticks,” in the Chinese restaurant? ‘Cause it slows me down. That’s why I do that.

G: Interesting.

S: Another thing some people do is they eat with your non-dominant hand. So, if you’re right-handed, eat with your left hand. That will naturally slow you down.

G: That’s interesting.

S: If possible, try to avoid doing other things. Or, even if you’re in a conversation with other people, make sure that, in between talking with them, you’re actually looking at your food and bringing it to your mouth in a mindful kind of way like knowing that you’re doing it. I know that when I eat standing up, I’ve inhaled it. I have a better chance of slowing myself down if I’m sitting down.

So those are a few things. The other thing about that, and we all know this, if you eat something in under 20 minutes, your body doesn’t know that you ate it. It takes 20 minutes for you to register that you actually had the food. So, if you can take your time, and slow yourself down, put your fork down in between bites. Now if you’re eating an ice cream cone or handfuls of food, like snacks, you don’t have a fork to put down. But to make some space and pause between bites.

Anything that can serve as a pause breaks the trance.

G: Gotcha. Did you want to say anything else about the early table memories and how that influences people’s ability to eat mindfully and avoid going into the food trance?

S: I wasn’t thinking about it so much as a trance. It was an important consideration about what we learn when we are kids.

G: As you do this, you’ll probably have memories about what your table experience was.

S: Like we just did now.

G: Which is very interesting for you to look into.

S: Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it, that, wow, I better get that food down quickly or there won’t be any to have. To have three big brothers who were much bigger and, you know, much hungrier and all that testosterone and they were like a pack of moose who constantly had to eat, feed themselves. And there wasn’t much room for a little girl.  And then, of course, there was my grandmother who was just like this human eating machine. If it was on your plate and she thought you weren’t gonna eat it, it disappeared. So you had to eat it quickly; otherwise, it was gonna disappear.

G: Well, OK, sweetheart. The summary here is what?

S: Break the trance.
The other thing is that when you come out of that trance and you realize all that stuff is gone, like maybe the whole bag of potato chips is gone, or the whole bowl of popcorn is gone, or the whole bowl of cookies is gone. People coming out of a negative trance feel horrible. You know, when you’ve had a good hypnosis experience, you come out of it feeling refreshed and vibrant and awake.

G: But if you wake up from a one-night-stand, you feel like you don’t really respect yourself for what you did.

S: Exactly. And that’s how it feels when you’ve had a bad eating experience that you …

G: That you’ve compromised your value. When that happens, what you should do is …

S: Dedicate yourself to paying attention. All it is is a matter of paying attention. It doesn’t matter what you’re eating. Pay attention to it, and slow yourself down.

G: So you can always use the present moment to be healthy, and the way to do that is just pay attention. No matter what you had before. No matter how full you feel. No matter how long the trance was.

Thank you, Sweetheart.

S: That was great.

G: Yeah.

S: Thanks for listening. Now, to gain more confidence in your ability to enjoy guilt-free, stress-free eating with delicious food, please visit http://emotionaleatingrelief.com. Got it? That’s http://emotionaleatingrelief.com. Thanks.

AUDIO VERSION

How-To-Break-A-Food-Trance.mp3

SHARON LIVINGSTON, PHD

Sharon (S, in the transcript, above) holds a PhD in humanistic psychology from Kennedy Western University. She has interviewed over 5,000 people about emotional eating. In addition to her private coaching, she has done psychological research for companies like Weight Watchers, Atkins, Kraft and more and has published articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is available, as above, at http://emotionaleatingrelief.com.

GLENN LIVINGSTON, PHD

Glenn (G, in the transcript, above) holds his PhD in clinical psychology from Yeshiva University. He has previously practiced as a marital and family counselor, seeing approximately 1,000 patients in nine years. He also consulted for many major corporations in emotional eating pertaining to advertising. You can reach Glenn through the same link as above.

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MEDITATION FOR WEIGHT LOSS (Issue 6)

by Diane Gold

Meditation for weight loss is a huge topic. You might be saying,

“It seems impossible that if I meditate, I will lose weight.”

“How can meditation help weight loss?”

“After all this time, all I have to do is meditate, and I will lose weight?”

The statement is quite powerful, as it is sincerely meaningful. Meditation is the act of focusing on “no thing” through a study of focusing attention on one thing. This article will look at meditation as a solution for many where “other” systems have had minimal success.

The obvious secret weapon that meditation offers is that it doesn’t require working out or body motion, often dreaded when we want or need to lose weight because we feel too uncomfortable to move or we’re dismal.  There’s no big effort to get it started. The only thing moving is internal, it only takes a minute and it makes you feel good.

So what is this meditation for weight loss? We have to recognize that, for every system of our body, there is some type of release valve, like on a pressure-cooker, radiator or properly operating oil rig. We, humans, have our own pressurized systems resulting in nerve pressure, blood pressure, intestinal pressure, bladder pressure, eye pressure, brain pressure and so on. The body has a specific way of relieving excess pressure, or we start to break.

The mind is a human system of conscious experience and intelligent thought. It, too, feels pressure and needs a relief valve or else. It is very hard work to spend a full 24-hour period without giving the mind a break, especially if the day includes worry, anxiety, poor self-esteem, frustration, stress. We all experience all of these emotions from time to time. However, weight losers who are having trouble doing it have these emotions while they also have the pressures of a day-job (corporate or independent), going to school or mothering. The exhaustion and stress caused by the weight issues is enough to make you want to do what?

Specific to our topic, I will say the word: “eat.” There, I said it. To let off steam as our release valve, we eat. For people with weight gain issues, the opposite is true, too. The strongest minds with “bad feeling overload” may end up with no appetite and become unhealthy because of it.

Here’s what we know about the mind, that fragile piece of real estate that we know so little about:

1)    we function more successfully without pressure
2)    we can train ourselves to focus to remove pressure
3)    we can choose to live in ways that can minimize pressure
4)    we can train ourselves to recognize the signs of pressure before it is there
5)    we can awaken deeper levels in ourselves

With that in mind, is it clear how meditation is connected to weight loss? When we meditate,

1)    we give ourselves a personal place of stillness
2)    we learn to stand still
3)    we learn to have a focus
4)    we allot time out
5)    we evolve

Imagine if every time we felt stress of some sort, we could do half a minute of meditation, and the stress would go away. Our emotional eating would reduce once we learned that a tiny taste of the meditative mind could give us a different perspective which could help reduce food cravings.

As we said before, meditation is focus. The more we practice, the more adept we become at having our mind follow the path we design for it, rather than having our mind follow its own, undirected whims. It is not simple to rein in the mind, but some ways are simpler than others.

When I was 21 years old, living in Washington Square Village, I followed a philosophy that included two-and-a-half hours of meditation a day. For 5 years, I sat in two prescribed positions on a daily basis. Did I meditate? The answer to this question requires understanding that meditation is not a physical action. The mind has to cooperate through being trained to do it.

My answer is that I almost never “meditated,” even though I spent 2.5 hours in meditation position. The method prescribed concentrated on more than one thing at a time, and my mind was easily distracted. To this day, as a positive result of that training, I teach a simple method where focusing on one thing is not impossible. No mantras, no looking at clouds, no techniques that can split the mind. We are scattered enough.

The trick to weight loss meditation is to change your reaction to the urge to eat or the urge to eat what you have decided you would prefer not to eat at the time. Where your reaction used to be to get instant gratification, be sad, be mad, be hasty; you can change your behavior by standing in meditation position for 30 seconds. This act may give you an opportunity to grab your mind away from that urge when you want to eat and it is not time to eat, or when you want your mind to lead you well, rather than comply without choice.

Here are steps to follow once a day for a month at the time of hunger, when you would like to postpone your eating, eat less, lower your urge level or simply change your perspective. This certainly will slow you down and give you a moment to be your own boss.

By the way, if this is not an impactful experience the first time, do it again. At least for two weeks. It might grow on you. You might start to be able to see another aspect of yourself. How much fun would that be!

1)    Stand with feet shoulder width apart.
2)    Bend the knees.
3)    Tuck the butt.
4)    Straighten the back.
5)    Lean forward 2 inches from the waist.
6)    Make sure arms are relaxed with palms at side of thigh, hanging.
7)    Take the left hand and semi-point the index finger from the relaxed position.
8)    Slowly, meditatively, draw a counterclockwise circle from the right side of the body to the left, 3X, 3/4 of an arms-length in front of you.
9)    Place arm back at the side, dropped arm position, no tension.
10)  Relax a second or two.
11)  Take the left hand and semi-pointing the index finger from the relaxed position
12)    Slowly, meditatively, draw a clockwise circle from the left side of the body to the right, 3X, 3/4 of an arms-length in front of you.
13)    Place arm back at the side, dropped arm position, no tension.
14)    Relax.

This meditation affects weight loss through the body’s working to pump the blood through the legs in the standing position. Most of the result comes from taking your focus away from other distractions, including food. You are undoing stress in yourself, so you will be better equipped to proceed and succeed at weight loss.

CONCLUSION

There are many ways to meditate, and there are a myriad of programs on weight loss. This particular combination of meditation for weight loss uses 30 plus years’ experience at stripping down to basics the act of meditation and the act of changing an urge. As with any meditation, it is very personal. There is no wrong. There is also no comparison chart for you to use. This is for you.

Your questions and comments are always welcome. Particularly for this article, if you would like to ask a personal question about your experience, please do.

YOUR FEEDBACK

Always feel free to share your stories by commenting below and by email at: 1 [at] warriorsofweight [dot] com.

DIANE GOLD, AUTHOR

Diane Gold, Founder of Warriors of Weight, Moms For Healthy Daughters, is a mentor in tai chi, kung fu and meditation, a music pro and stress expert and a dedicated mom. She says, “Any action changes our perspective. The simpler we make things in preparation, the easier they will be. The more we repeat the same action, the more we will understand it.”

A WINNING COMBINATION: GRADES IN SCHOOL AND SELF-ESTEEM (Issue 5)

by Florence Bernard

It’s the fact that the better the grades are at school, the higher the self-esteem is in the student. This goes for good students, failing students, big-sized, medium and small students.

So there is really one