The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss (32 page)

By now, you probably have noticed people wearing bands around their wrists that don’t quite look like watches, but don’t quite look like bracelets either. These fitness trackers are great for letting you keep track of how much you move per day (obviously with the goal being to burn more calories), but you don’t need a fancy fitness tracker to get an idea of whether you’re getting up and around enough.

Today, using a stopwatch or the stopwatch function on your watch or a step counter app on your phone, track how much time during your day you spend walking around, climbing stairs, just getting from place to place. I’m not talking about working out; just your regular daily movement.

What I like about logging your progress is that it turns into a little competition with yourself. Can you do more than the day before? Can your weekly tally beat the previous week? Trust me, charting your movements is going to make you want to move more. It also gives you clues for how to improve on what works for you. Add it to your daily routine.

You can also make it into a little competition with your mate, friends, or co-workers. Bet them that your weekly combined movement will be more than theirs, and report your totals to them every day.

The workplace is the worst place for people who want to lose weight. There’s always some guy who thinks he’s being generous by bringing in doughnuts every Monday morning. Then there are the group lunches ordered from fast-food places; meetings with frothy, fattening drinks; and the big bowl of candy sitting on a well-meaning (but clueless) co-worker’s desk. Today, you’re going to fight back by arming yourself with the right stuff. Bring an apple or other healthy snack to a meeting. Everyone else will be envious of your willpower and forethought, and the snap of the apple as you bite into it will get everyone’s mouth watering. (Bring an extra one and give it to the person who comments first.) Brown bag it even if you know the boss is springing for pizza in the conference room. Stock your desk drawer or locker with nutritious foods you can turn to when the office vending machine beckons. The message here: Be prepared!

There’s also a kind of built-in bonus to showing such discipline at work. It will show your boss that you are in control of your life, which can be a good career move. Being in control is powerful, and powerful people usually get paid more!

Say you unwrap a candy bar, break it in half and set it out where you can see it oozing caramel and peanuts (or whatever your candy bar of your choice features). If you had cameras on you, it would keep you honest. Nobody wants his or her weakness to be public knowledge. But if you’re in a one-bedroom apartment and that candy bar is sitting on the coffee table where you typically put all of your take-out food, the voice in your head telling you to grab and eat it is going to get very loud. (By the way, even skinny people hear that voice; they just don’t put themselves in a position to have to fight it.)

Now take a photograph of that oozing candy bar and post it on Facebook with a sentence about how, in a test of willpower, you’re not going to eat it for 24 hours. Then report in. “Four hours down.” “Fifteen more hours to go.” You’ll get comments like, “Oh my god, I could never do it!” and “You go, girl.”

This small exercise is going to make you feel empowered. And how great will it be when, at the 24-hour mark, you post a picture of yourself tossing that candy bar in the garbage? (Let me just add that, as a precaution, pour soap over that candy bar. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve dug food out of the garbage.) You might even take a video of yourself running over the candy bar with your car. Post the video; people will love it! I would definitely give it a “like” if I saw it.

When you feel yourself wavering in the face of temptation today—or maybe you already made a mistake—call someone, preferably someone who’s been through it themselves, and talk about it. What do alcoholics do when they are on the verge of screwing up? They call their sponsors. That’s because a sponsor is not going to judge you; a sponsor has been there. Their job is to help you and make you feel good, not shame you so that you spiral into a binge. This is the same thing.

Talking about it will keep shame from creeping in. Shame is worse than the cupcake. Giving your feelings a voice by sharing them with others turns the volume of shame down. This is an effective tool to keep yourself on task. When your shame volume starts to creep up, stop eating and start talking!

Even if you don’t have a friend or family member who has struggled with weight to call, choose someone who can be honest with you. You don’t want your go-to to be someone who’s going to pat you on the back and say you did a great job when you didn’t. It has to be someone who will say something like, “Okay, you made that mistake, now move on,” or, “Okay, you’re feeling temptation, everyone does, but you made a promise to yourself.” A big part of your assignment in this weight-loss journey was to enlist support—now use it!

In my household, we eat our dinner on salad plates. I’m no saint: If I had a regular-size dinner plate, I’d fill it up just like everyone else. Nobody wants to see a little circle of rice surrounded by blank space; it makes you feel like you’re being punished! It’s human nature to want to fill up the plate. I used to do it all the time, and the upshot was that I’d end up eating a giant bowl of pasta and other outsized meals. But then we decided to change our serving routine. We started using the salad plates. And guess what happened? Our portions came down to a healthier size. But, and this is a big “but,” we didn’t feel deprived. We felt satisfied even though we were eating less, because our plates were empty when we were finished. Just another mind trick!

Maybe you’ve heard this change-your-plates tip before, but believe me, it really works. That’s because we’re not really hungry for everything on our plate, but we eat it anyway because it’s there. It’s Mount Everest. It’s there, we climb (eat) it. If you’re using smaller plates and bowls, you’ll still eat what’s there, but it will be less—though your brain won’t register that. It’s all about perception. We think we’re so smart, but we’re easily fooled! Today, give it a try. Even if you do go back for seconds, you’re going to end up eating fewer calories.

Today we’re going to work on keeping the vows you make to yourself. How many things have you been promising yourself that you’re going to do, only to back out again and again? Today (and the day after that and the day after that) is going to be different. And just to be clear, when I talk about keeping your promises to yourself, I don’t mean
kind of
keeping them. Go the whole way. If you say you’re going to eat a healthy lunch, don’t order a turkey sandwich with mustard, then grab a bag of potato chips at the register. Get in the habit of keeping your promises to the letter.

As with everything, go for reasonable, not radical. Don’t promise to do an hour of cardio if you haven’t exercised in a year; unless you’re walking, that’s overreaching. So to begin, make a list of your promises for the day. Things like, “I promise to do 30 minutes on the treadmill.” Again, that does not mean you get off at 25 minutes or even 29 minutes, no matter how much you want to. If you write down 30 minutes, do 30 minutes! Believe me, your body will send powerful signals telling you to get off early, but if you stay with it, eventually your body will get accustomed to the challenge and reward you for finishing.

Also, don’t underestimate what you are capable of. If you start with 30 minutes of walking, add 5 minutes a day after that. Remind yourself it is only a number. That number cannot beat you, only
you
can beat you. Plenty of people I work with on my shows say “I could never run at a 5.5 pace on the treadmill.” To prove them wrong, I put a towel over the readout, slowly move the pace up to a 7, and they don’t even notice! So don’t let a number put a glass ceiling on your progress.

On Day 3, I had you revise your shopping list, reducing the number of highly processed packaged goods you throw into your grocery cart. Let’s build on that. A lot of the packaged foods people eat don’t come from their kitchens; they come from vending machines, the well (but toxically) stocked break room kitchen at their work, a quick duck into the mini-mart when they stop for gas, and so on. This goes for restaurant meals, too, since who knows what’s really in them? It’s not in your control.

The easiest way to gain control of what you put in your mouth is to decrease those packaged/restaurant meals. I’m not suggesting you never eat out. But I am suggesting that you reduce eating out as much as you can. If you always buy lunch at the corner deli, try brown-bagging it, and I bet you’ll lose five pounds—if not more. It can make a real difference—you’ll see.

How many packages do you open in a day? Just like you did on Day 2, do a count, then incrementally reduce the number. You eat ten a day, next week eat eight. Keep going from there.

Today is all about getting active, really active. At the top of every hour, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., I want you to do either five push-ups or run up one flight of stairs. Think about it. Five push-ups might take you 15 seconds, but if you do it at the top of every hour, you will have done 40 push-ups for the day! And running up a flight of stairs takes less than 10 seconds, but at day’s end, you will have done about 8 flights. That’s pretty amazing.

Do this every day for 7 days, then add a push-up or flight of stairs for the next 7 days. Keep adding until you’re ultimately doing 8 push-ups or 4 flights eight times a day (a total of 64 push-ups or 32 flights daily). I guarantee you will feel the benefits big time. Chances are, you’ll draw others in as well. I did the push-ups challenge at my office and by the week’s end, there were nine of us doing it. At the top of every hour, we’d all run out of our offices, meet in the hallway and get our push-ups on. It was incredibly fun and gave us all a much-needed energy boost. The shared camaraderie of a stunt like this can really bring people together, too.

Nutrition rules keep changing all the time. First fat’s bad for you, then it’s good for you. Don’t eat eggs. No, eggs are okay. Carbs are the way to go. Oops, we mean protein. It gets confusing. Still, I think if you just use common sense, you’ll know that no good is going to come of living on bacon and pork ribs. I think it’s pretty clear now, too, that a diet made up almost wholly of foods collectively know as “white foods”—pasta, white bread, white rice, crackers, and most cereals—will make you fat and damage your health. For instance, it’s known that refined foods are stripped of fiber, one of the elements of food that helps you feel full. Refined foods also raise blood sugar, triggering the release of insulin. Both things can make you feel hungry and crave more calories Plus, white foods are mostly empty calories—you get very few nutrients from these foods—and many of them contain high fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to obesity and diabetes.

Today, take all of the white foods I named out of your diet. Nothing white except cauliflower. I think you’re going to actually find that you feel good. Try it again for another day, and another. See where you can go with it, how long you can last. You’ll be on a streak! “I haven’t eaten white foods for two weeks.” Not wanting to break the streak may actually lead you to a healthier diet.

Do what you
have to
do, before you do what you
want to
do. I say this to my kids every day. “Dad, let’s play basketball!”

“Did you do your homework?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay, do your homework, then we’ll play ball.”

Doing what you have to do before you do what you want to do is a philosophy of life that can help you head in the right direction. Working out, eating right, getting your life in order are the priorities to put at the top of your list. Then do things that you want to do like watching TV, going online, sleeping in. It may seem unrelated to weight loss, but it’s all a part of reorganizing your life for the better. Today, as you go about your day, keep that adage in mind, and catch yourself when you fall off the path. Ask yourself:
Did I do what I had to do before I started to do what I want to do?
Then make sure the answer is yes.

How much TV do you watch? Don’t even answer that because whatever it is, it’s too much! Odd words coming from a television producer, I know, but even I know that TV can be a time suck that prevents you from doing healthier things. And, most likely, consciously or unconsciously, you associate watching TV with eating. Super Bowl Sunday and cheesy nachos, binge-watching
The Walking Dead
and binge-eating mint chip ice cream—they go together like salt and pepper. And what else is the Food Network for if not to inspire you to eat? Likewise, commercials can propel you right into the kitchen either out of avoidance or because the bacon cheeseburger being advertised has you salivating.

So let’s begin there. Today, when you watch TV, do not watch a
single
commercial. Instead, get up and move. Every one-hour show has 18 minutes of commercials; if you watch two hours of TV without moving, that’s 36 minutes of exercise that you’re losing out on! Make it heart-pumping and nonstop for the whole break—jumping jacks and squats are always good. The next time there’s a commercial break, change it up, maybe do some push-ups and sit-ups. The time after that, do burpees (the exercise where you squat down, place your palms flat on the floor, kick you legs back, then pull them back to the squatting position; repeat) or run up the stairs. The choices are endless. Keep it interesting!