Ok – I know there aren’t any readers out there that still consider this to be a happening blog.  I’ve let it sit for over a month.  But, just to let those few readers out there know, I haven’t been personally sitting for that same month.  I’ve joined a full contact minor league football team here in the Phoenix valley.  The Peoria Patriots are a member of the Copper Football League (CSFL).

I’m number #65 and at 32 years old, having been out of the game for about 15 years, I’m second string.  I do not mind though, because I play with some of the best linemen in this league, and I would rather string behind the best than be a starter on a team so bad they would have me as a starter!

Anyway, I’d love to see you in the stands cheering the Patriots and me, #65 holding down the bench.  The games are at Moon Valley High School on the corner of Cactus and 35th ave.

I’m guessing you are already starting to think about what you will resolve to accomplish next year in 2010.  I have the added pleasure of being able to read through several past years thoughts… I’m not sure what my new New Year’s Resolutions will be, but most of them will be the same old New Years Resolutions.  You could almost take those old posts and just change the year… I still need to lose weight, I’m still working on that degree, I’m still paying off debt, I’m still trying to find a savings plan that works for me, I’m still trying to read more books… yada yada yada…

I’ll have a clever post soon for 2010 – maybe “10 goals for 2010″ or “20/10 – 20lbs in 10 weeks”… I like that one…

2007 – New Years Resolutions

2008 – New Years Resolutions

2009 – The Biggest Mistake You Are Going to Make in 2009

I was reading through some of my old posts – reflecting on 2009 and looking ahead to 2010 when I came across this post from a year ago and I found it to be as on point as ever and thought I would share it again:

Top 5 Things skinny people should never do at a holiday Dinner with Fat People

Excerpt:

Its hard enough being 50, 60, or 100lbs overweight – but having to listen to someone who has never been 20lbs overweight, talking about losing that ‘last 5 pounds’ is unbearable.  It often triggers an eating binge for overeaters.  Lets be honest here – you may really need to lose those 5lbs – and maybe that piece of pie wasn’t the best idea for you – but saying out loud infront of a food addict is kinda like saying to a crackhead – “I really shouldn’t, but I just gotta try this new crack”… Read More

A Few other great posts:

Everyone is fat including you

My 500 Calorie Run with Nike Plus

Top Five Reasons To Stay Fat

You’re Too FAT to Eat Here!

Sorry I was late, but I’m FAT

Ok – I’m set up for failure here, Albert Tubbs!  Lets review the rules:

1. Eat WHATEVER you want
2. ONLY eat when you are hungry
3. STOP eating when you feel full
4. ENJOY every bit

2 OUT OF 4 ain’t bad, right???  I mean, if this were baseball I’d be batting .500… which is pretty amazing… right?

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Have you ever been hiking?  As a kid, I used to run around in the wooded area behind our house.  There was this ravine that ran through the woods were I played, and I often ran through it, playing all sorts of games with my brother.

I remember once while we were playing after a rainy week, I stepped on the edge of the ravine and my foot slipped.  It wasn’t like tripping over something and finding yourself on the ground wondering what just happened.  It was slow and obvious.

First my left foot slipped just a few inches.  Then when I tried to firmly plant my right foot on to higher ground, away from the edge, I felt it sink into the mud and then slide back toward me.  My left foot was still slipping toward the edge.

I grabbed for near by branch, but it slipped away from me and I found myself now doubled over, hands on the side of the ravine, an inch into the mud.  Things started happening more quickly.  I was falling into the ravine and the more I did to correct it, the faster I found myself falling.  In the end, I was covered in mud and at the bottom of the ravine about ten feet below, luckily unharmed.

The last two days, I have noticed that I have started eating a little bit faster.  I have the next bite of food on the fork before I’ve finished the bite in my mouth.  And when I feel the beginnings of ‘full’, I’ve shoveled a few last bites in, knowing that I was putting myself past full and into the stuffed range, because I didn’t want to stop eating.

In other words, my foot as landed in the mud and I feel myself starting to slide.  Unlike when I was a child, I am not going to panic.  Rather than grabbing blindly around me and stepping more and more into the mud, I’m going to stop, evaluate the situation, and make my actions from here deliberate.

Something about the “I can make you thin” program has clicked with me like no other program I have done.  I’ve never understood before that my addiction was not to food, but to the act of eating.  I never understood exactly what emotional eating was before either.  Now armed with this new information, I have very successfully resisted the temptation to eat at night before bed or between meals when I wasn’t hungry.

I’ve pushed back the plate when I was still on the first portion instead of the third and I’ve left food on every plate since I started the program December 1st.  I have never before dealt with the opportunity cost of eating one food OR another since I’ve always just eaten both.  Now instead of saving the ‘best’ bites for last, I eat them first since my first bites might actually be the last bites of that meal.

I have started many programs out there, but this is the first time where I feel I can answer the toughest question anyone starting a new weight loss program can ask – “What makes this time different”.  I can’t tell you what it is about “I can make you thin” that clicked with me, but I can see it clicked.  My understanding of myself and my addiction is different.  And I think that might just make all the difference in the world.

Enjoy every bite of food. Focus while you eat and eliminate distractions. Including but not limited to no eating food while watching television. These are ideas that McKenna has laid out in his book.

The first few days I followed this to the letter. Then slowly began watching TV while eating, think “no problem”.

Sadly, I have noticed that I can’t stop eating when I am full and be in front of the TV. Furthermore, I have a strong distain for that fact that I have discovered I enjoy the act of eating.

It has become excruciatingly clear that I must divorce these two activities from each other if I am to be successful at following the principles laid in “I can make you thin”.

The strange thing that has happened is that I am experiencing the five stages of grief after this discovery and I’m not quite at acceptance yet. Seriously, this revelation has not been one of enlightenment but of grief, sorry and depression.

I now know for the first time in my life when I am really full – good. That food and TV can’t be united in matrimony – good.

I’M NOT HAPPY ABOUT KNOWING THIS!

I feel like a child whose parents are saying “we only want what’s best for the kids” but are still making live in a broken home, deserted.

I’m so offended, that now I’ve fallen of the wagon and ran away for the last few days.

Oh crap! I thought I was near stage five but it seems I have digressed back to anger, which of course is only stage three.

I was recently listening to a Duke University research podcast that talked about emotions and emotional memory.  Follow me, this is diet related…

Associate professor Stacy Wood mentioned her study on our ability to remember how we felt regarding various events in life.  She mentions three states she observed regarding how we feel:

1. How we expect to feel about an event should it occur
2. How we actually feel when an event occurs
3. How we think we felt during the event after it has occured

What she found was interesting (at least to me).  We have expectations on how an event will feel that may not (and often do not) match the way we actually feel when the event happens.  That’s not too interesting until you found out that the way we ‘think’ we felt during an event tends to match the way we ‘expected’ to feel rather than the way we ‘actually’ felt.

Did I lose you?  Let me use an example – I love to eat.  I love to over eat.  I expect that eating a second and third dessert will feel great.  Then I actually eat the second (or third) slice of pie and feel miserable.  But if you ask me next week how it felt to eat three desserts today, I’m going to tell you how good it was.

How can this information help me?  I’m not sure yet, exactly.  But I think that if I can somehow remind myself how miserable it feels to overeat before I actually overeat, I might be able to avoid overeating.

I want to correctly remember how overeating feels.  I want to expect that this miserable feeling is how overeating will feel.  If I can change my ‘expectation’ regarding how eating, when I’m not hungry, will feel, then maybe I can change my actions when I’m faced with a table full of awesome looking treats at a company holiday party…

I’m serious – the worst part of this diet is that I’m always full. If you have been following the blog this month then you know how much I am addicted to eating. The key to this diet is listening to your body when it tells you its full. I am learning to know what that means, and so far, I don’t like what I’m seeing.

Today I was eating with Stephanie using the techniques taught in this book; eating slow, chewing each bite, enjoying the food completely before taking the next bite. Stephanie actually made the comment that she has never seen me eat so slowly. Less than 10 bites in, I was full. Completely full.

For someone that loves to eat as much as I do, this is bad news. I know that most diets tell you that you have to have portion control and moderation, but this one doesn’t do that. Paul McKenna simple asks you to stop eating when you are full. Soon after learning how to recognize what being full means, I realized that I am always full on this diet. Have I really been overeating every single meal for the last 30 years?

I used an example earlier equating the activity of eating to playing with a puppy; this doesn’t seem to resonate with most of my readers. What if I told you that you can drink alcohol but only if you are actually thirsty and you have to stop as soon as you are no longer thirsty? I now see why ‘less filling’ would be a selling point.

Or think of when the Catholic Church told its congregates that they can have sex, but only to procreate. Do skinny people ever eat just because they like the taste of something?

Its too early to say, but I think this might be a life changing moment for me. I used to think my issue was an addiction to food but now I know its an addiction to eating. I don’t have to give up eating any particular food but I may have to give up the activity of what I’m going to call recreational eating.

Sayings like “nothing tastes as good as thin feels” never worked for me. Maybe because I don’t care what the food tastes like, I am addicted to the act of eating, regardless. I think “Eating isn’t as fun as being thin” might work better for me..

I had a good day today. My biggest problem was fighting the urge to weigh myself.

One of the suggestions from Mckenna is not your weigh yourself any more than once a month (every two weeks tops). The thought is that weighing yourself often doesn’t help you listen to your body but to the scale.

I get it and it’s true. If I weighed myself while trying to lose weight and it was a bad number, I may eat less. I understand my eating less was really starving myself off and on all the time.

Being in tune with what your body is goal and I think that is beginning to happen for me.

Still, I want to know how much I weigh.

PS: I would enjoy hearing others who have read or are reading “I can make you thin”.

One of the key concepts of the “I can make you thin” book is that you should eat on purpose.  The author suggests that you remove distractions like television while eating a meal.  I enjoy eating while watching TV – but I don’t enjoy being FAT.

Today I made a point of eating each bit of food like it was the only bite I had.  I savored it.  I chewed it slowly over and over while noticing every favor.  I didn’t put the next bite of food in my mouth until I had completely finished the first.

This forced me to slow down, giving my body more time to signal that its full – but had the added benefit of allowing me to enjoy food.  I know it sounds a bit crazy, but the truth is, to enjoy eating is not the same thing as enjoying food.

Have you ever watched “The Biggest Loser” when they show clips of FAT people shoveling food into the face at a ridiculous pace?  Eating produces endorphins, similar to the affect you could get from working out (hmm… interesting).  Eating at such break neck speeds shows an addiction to eating, not to food.

Eating on purpose like this allows me to enjoy food.  That’s cool – not a lot of diets out there have a real claim to that one.  It reminds me of a quote from Ratatouille:

Linguini: And you’re thin for someone who likes food. [crowd gasps]
Anton Ego: I don’t LIKE food. I LOVE it. If I don’t love it, I don’t SWALLOW.