April 7, 2013
Day 12: An insidious trap
Starting weight: 139
Eat clean. I knew today would be weird. Tom asked me to be the “runner” at his EMT class’s practical exam, which meant we’d be tied up from 7:30 a.m. to 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
We brought our shakes with us to get the day started. One of the college’s staff, Kristen, had brought water and snacks for the students, proctors and volunteers. This was a health occupations class, so she had health on her mind – she brought apples and trail mix and granola bars … as well as muffins, cookies and chips. I thought I started out pretty well, choosing an oatmeal/raisin cookie and a bag of apple slices before degenerating to a white chocolate/macadamia cookie, another oatmeal cookie, a bag of trail mix and a quarter of a poppyseed muffin. This was over the period of 9 hours that we were there.
Of course, we were starving by the time the test ended, and I had cash money in my pocket as my payment for helping out, so naturally where did we go? Subway. (I made sure they had plenty of steak.) I finished off my foot-long sandwich about 5 p.m., and actually didn’t have anything else to eat during the evening except a few almonds.
By the end of the night, I came to a realization: This is foolishness. I’ve set a goal and stated it publicly – I want to get back to the weight I was before our Walt Disney World trip. But I have comfortably settled into the insidious trap in which millions of us are ensnared: There are countless, constant small decisions we have to make if we want to reach a long-term goal, and if we can’t see immediate progress, instant results, we lose interest. The momentum vanishes and it’s far easier to trade what we want most for what we want right now.
Is there a free cookie sitting right there available for you to pick up and eat? You have two options: 1) Eat it. 2) Don’t eat it. Option 1 is easy, because cookies are delicious and eating them is an enjoyable experience. Option 2 is hard, because all our instincts and our past experience and the pleasure centers in our brain are chanting, “eat the cookie … eat the cookie,” and there is no immediate adverse effect conditioning us NOT to eat it. We won’t suddenly plump out like the Nutty Professor after one bite.
This is where fitness and weight loss transcends the battle for calories and enters the arena of personal growth. If you can develop the self-discipline to say, “No, I would really like to eat that cookie and enjoy its deliciousness for 30 seconds, but I have a bigger, more meaningful goal of shedding some excess fat, and eating that cookie will delay my achieving that goal,” then you are teaching yourself that it’s possible to have control in other areas of your life, too.
One of the best all-time illustrations of the crucial skill of self-control is what’s known as The Marshmallow Experiment. This was a series of studies at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The researchers would offer a child a choice between one marshmallow provided immediately, or TWO marshmallows if the child waited until the experimenter returned (after leaving the room for about 15 minutes). In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the better rewards tended to have better life outcomes – higher SAT scores, more college degrees and better health. That’s because they were good at making those choices that might not have been very gratifying at the moment, but that compounded for long-term success.
What if you’re the kid who gobbled up the first marshmallow right away? The great thing is that we can train ourselves to get better at self-control. Can you imagine someone who’s lived their entire life on a junk food diet abruptly announcing, “I’m going to eat vegan from now on!” and suddenly tossing out all the instant and packaged foods in their kitchen, going down to the farmers market and loading up on kale and tofu, spending the time to nutritionally plan their meals and then actually cooking them, and relishing for the rest of their life meals that aren’t deep-fried or pumped full of salt and sugar? Do you think they would be able to flip a switch and stare down a package of Oreos without breaking down and snarfing several at a time? Yeah no. Our psyches just don’t work that way.
But give them a chance to make some small, gradual changes – ones they can successfully control – and over time, their decision-making process does become habit. I even have a tool I use for people in just this situation: Their diets are terrible and they know they need to improve their eating, but if they tried to overhaul everything at once, they’d just fail miserably and feel worse than they did before. It’s called the 8-week Transition Diet, and it has you change one small thing about your eating habits a week at a time. It even lets you have cheat days so you can eat some old favorite foods and stay sane.
So how am I going to empower myself again to make the right choices and lock back in to my goal? Pretty simple, really. I’m just deciding to DO IT. That’s all. Just do what needs to be done. Skip the cookies, eat another apple instead.
Drink water. I brought my 16-oz. cup to the EMT test and intended to keep it handy so I could hydrate. Did I do this? No, I left it in Tom’s office with my jacket and purse. I did grab a bottle of water about midway through the day. Tried to make up for it once we got home, but I’m sure I only drank maybe 30 ounces. Boo.
Burn calories. I thought there might be a slight chance we’d get home early enough to do a Turbo Fire workout … but more likely was the scenario that we’d be too fried to think about it. Ding ding ding. At least I got PLENTY of walking in! My job was to go around to each of the six testing stations, collect the evaluation forms and bring them back to the official in charge of administering the test. The stations were set up in classrooms throughout Columbia Hall at Clatsop Community College – not a HUGE place, but making the rounds for several hours like this I probably logged a good two miles of walking.
DAILY TOTALS:
Calories eaten (approximate): 1,750
How clean? (1=crap, 10=pure): 5
Water drank: 30 oz.
Calories burned (approximate): 2,592
Ending weight: 139
Want to join me on my quest to get back to 135? Post a comment!
thehealthymuse 