Key Five: High-Response Cost, High-Yield Nutrition

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Key Five: High-Response Cost, High-Yield Nutrition

Unlock the Door to Food Control

I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.

--MAE WEST

KEY #5: HIGH-RESPONSE COST, HIGH-YIELD NUTRITION.

Be aware that certain foods lead to a considerable amount of mindless, uncontrollable overeating. If you eliminate or cut back on these foods, you will control your weight automatically, and live in peace with food.

If you are eating without any degree of control, stuffing your face with everything that doesn't move, then you need more than anything else what I call a behavioral approach to food and nutrition. This is a way to eat that tames your hunger, stops destructive patterns of eating, and enables you to regain control over food and how much you eat. It is designed to build on what you already know about food and good nutrition, so that you do not have to start from scratch. I call it my High-Response Cost, High-Yield Food Plan, which means that it focuses on choosing foods that produce and reinforce lasting weight loss and control. As we go through this chapter together, you will see why this plan works so powerfully to help you lose weight, effectively and permanently, without turning your life upside down or driving you nuts.

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This approach runs absolutely counter to what most "diets" push, which is a metabolic approach to weight loss, usually employing puritanical restrictions of certain food groups or special combinations of food that promise miraculous fat burning. These approaches may work for a short time, but as soon as you return to your old ways of eating, your weight returns, with interest. This key--high-response cost, high-yield nutrition--unlocks the door to food control so that you are no longer a prisoner of binges, cravings, and fixations on food. You will discover some truths about food that I'm sure no one has ever told you before, and you will rely on important food realities to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, instead of resorting to another bizarre fad diet or gimmicky program that will keep you from ever attaining permanent weight loss.

SUE ANN'S STORY

Since I believe it's always helpful to have a model or example to illustrate key concepts, allow me to share with you a brief story of a former patient of mine, Sue Ann, who was enrolled in my program for chronically overweight patients. She was twenty-four and a single mother of a young son when she entered the program, and had already eaten her way up to 250 pounds. Her eating was way out of control, characterized by one binge after another. She lived to eat, and hated herself every minute for it.

Sue Ann's husband had abandoned his family several years before. Jobless most of the time, he had been unable to support them, and so Sue Ann was forced to do the juggling act of mother and breadwinner. She was holding down not one but two jobs, working for a maid service by day and as a cashier by night. Her means barely covered the minimum. The ferocious demands on her time, coupled with the mind-numbing fatigue of her long days, wedged her into a habitual pattern of buying and bingeing on fast foods, or any food that was convenient and required little or no preparation. Sue Ann never took the time to do any cooking or food preparation, simply because she was too busy and too tired after working all day to worry about eating right. It was easier to grab and go, picking up fast food, carryout, and other unhealthy junk food. This had been her routine for years, and now she was living the consequences. Food had be-

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come not only her time-saver, but also her companion and consoler. Many times, she would buy a whole chocolate cake for herself when she felt tired and sorry for herself, and cry as she consumed it piece by piece.

By the time she entered my program, Sue Ann's health had begun to deteriorate, while her weight continued to climb. She had high blood pressure, dangerously high cholesterol, and had been diagnosed as a borderline diabetic. Clearly, we had challenges ahead of us.

For Sue Ann to get well, to stop her self-sabotage, and to ultimately stabilize her weight at a healthy level, we had to first work on a new life strategy for her. Her lifestyle was chaotic, out of control, and it was clearly supporting and sustaining what she had become. The scales of her life were tipped too much in favor of selfdefeating behavior, and as a result, she was living a distinctly unbalanced lifestyle, and this was contributing in a big way to her weight problem.

Sue Ann had to dump that lifestyle, with all the wrong things that had been working to the disadvantage of her weight and health, and start living anew. This required on her part a commitment to quit one of her jobs, move in with a relative until she could get on her feet financially, and basically reevaluate her priorities and options. In short, she had to recreate her own experience.

Once Sue Ann had begun to deconstruct her world and put it back together again--with fewer time constraints and pressures--she was ready to work on her weight, food choices, and behavior.

Her work focused on the foods she was eating. The fast food, the easy-to-fix foods, and all the grab-and-go stuff she was choosing were doing nothing more than promoting rapid, uncontrollable, mindless eating, and the result of this behavior was an ever-increasing weight gain. Sue Ann's problem with food was mostly behavioral, and it had to be solved behaviorally.

What we settled upon was the following: Sue Ann agreed to eat foods from a list that I would give her. It wasn't a diet, just a list of foods. What's more, I told her that if she still wanted junk food and fast food after eating foods from the list, she could do so. That was it. That was the extent of the plan.

When Sue Ann came to see me following a week of eating from

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the list, I asked her, "How did it go? Were you able to eat from the list?"

Her face lit up. She told me in amazement, "I did it. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I just ate from the list. As for junk food, usually I felt fine going without it. I lost eight pounds, and I feel different."

So each week thereafter, Sue Ann renewed our agreement to eat from my food list, and while not every week was perfect, she began to feel in better control of food and more confident that she could change her eating behavior. After a few months, she was buying smaller clothes, zipping up jeans that hadn't fit in years, and feeling so much better about herself that she wanted to keep going.

The upshot of this story is that it took Sue Ann ten months to get to her goal weight of 120 pounds. A huge factor in her transformation was, of course, rebalancing her life so that she could take care of her health, and spend more quality time pursuing things that would be life-enriching and not revolve so much around food.

As her life began to change, she began to feel more energized, physically and emotionally. Her desire to binge on emotion lost its grip on her life. She gradually took up a walking program, and that made losing weight so much easier. Sometimes easy-to-eat foods like fast food and pizza were her weak points. But she didn't eliminate them from her life altogether. She just limited them to occasional indulgences.

In losing all that weight, she had lost one half of herself, and in the process gained so much more. Sue Ann learned what it meant to make choices for the health of her body, reversing the health complications of obesity through good nutrition, so that she could regain the strength and energy she needed to get on with her life.

Maybe you can relate to Sue Ann's experience. Maybe this is where you are right now. If so, you need a new approach to food, something doable but not drastic that you can do, starting today, to regain control over food. This is exactly what we will do in this key.

Let's begin by taking a nutritional assessment to examine more closely your food choices, and whether they are working for you or against you.

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NUTRITIONAL ASSESSMENT

Most people misjudge how poorly they really eat or how often they consume various foods, and as a result, have no idea of how their food choices are driving weight-gaining behavior. By completing this assessment, you'll take a big step toward understanding where you are nutritionally, and where you could be. You'll confront the ways in which you're harming your health and stonewalling your weightcontrol efforts. Keep these questions--and your answers--in mind as you continue to work through the rest of this key.

This is a multiple-choice assessment organized into seven separate sections. For each section, answer the questions honestly, then total up your score at the end of the section. The points you receive for each answer appear at the right. After completing the assessment, you'll have a total of seven different scores. How to interpret those scores is discussed at the end of the assessment.

Section 1: MEAL & SNACKS

1. How many meals do you eat each day?

a. 3 meals and 2 snacks

3

b. 3 meals and 1 snack

2

c. 2 meals

1

d. 1 meal

0

2. How often do you eat breakfast?

a. Every day

3

b. 4 to 6 days a week

2

c. 1 to 3 days a week

1

d. Never

0

3. Breakfast usually includes:

a. An egg, whole-wheat toast or cereal, and fruit or 3

fruit juice

b. A bowl of sugary cereal with milk, or pancakes with 2

syrup

c. A doughnut

1

d. Nothing

0

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