Deprivation Isn't Healthy

Not only that, dieting may be one of the surest ways to become obese. Crash dieting is something your body adapts to by hoarding every calorie that comes in. Your body's still operating on the level where you're hunting and gathering -- and having fat deposits to get through lean times when there's nothing to gather is adaptive.

You may have run into this idea before: the way to take off weight and keep it off is to develop healthy habits, eat less and exercise more. Bring your calorie intake down to where it maintains your activity level and have enough activity to burn off the calories in a healthy diet.

I've had this proven to me by moving in with my daughter, who's a good cook and serious nutrition expert. Once she had kids, a casual interest in nutrition became serious. She's been doing Stealth Nutrition all along, everything from putting the potato skins into the mashed potatoes and ground zucchini in muffins to working out that fat-soluble vitamins don't actually help unless you take a little fat in at the time you take the pill.

The best thing to eat with your daily multivitamin is buttered toast. Vitamins A, D, K and I think several others are fat soluble. The butter on the toast helps those get into your system fast. Ah. Carotene is one of them. Butter on the carrots makes them more effective for clearing up poor night vision.

I had poor night vision. Eating carrots with butter on them more often did clear that problem up over years.

I have mobility limits, being disabled. When I lived on my own I had to rely on packaged foods because that was the only thing I could prepare for myself. Microwavable everything and plenty of junk food beat starving, which happened if I got too weak. Vicious cycle given that gradual malnutrition weakened me.

But the vast majority of people who eat packaged foods are physically capable of getting up and cooking.

One of the most basic things about cooking is that if you make a serious hobby of it, you will be running around a lot. You'll be standing by the stove, running back and forth, testing this, tasting that and not eating actual meals because your stomach's full from all the taste-testing. I've seen this in my non-obese daughter. She'll go a day without eating -- because on the cook-off day instead of five small meals she had thirty or more micro-meals, a bite of this or that to tell if it's done.

She came up with a plan for people to lose weight. Part of it is to introduce healthy foods gradually. Start with a once a week small portion, then increase to a couple of times a week, then gradually over three weeks to a month get to where the new healthy food is part of what your body expects.

What happens to people who go from junk food to serious healthy nutrition and organic everything all at once is immediate and nasty. Serious digestive problems that are painful and embarrassing. All this feeds into the idea that Dieting is Deprivation, unpleasant, miserable and necessary if you want to be healthy and attractive. It also feeds into the idea that if you binge and go off the healthy diet, your digestion will clear up.

It won't, binge and you get the digestion problems in the other direction after keeping it up for a while. So instead of trying to grow a resolution to suddenly change your diet, start gradually decreasing portions and frequency on rich foods while adding healthy foods into your diet.

One thing that happens when you stop having candy every day is that it starts to be more of a treat. It starts to be special again. Same with pies, other dessert items. A lot of the obesity problem comes from foods that are treats becoming part of every meal avery day all the time. Combined with sedentary work that can be ruinous.

Then when having the treats, don't bother with cheap chocolate. Get the fancy kind, the Holland special dark one with the extra cocoa butter -- chocolate has some real health benefits. In fact, you could have a small piece of that good stuff daily and it'll help your heart. The main thing is to use moderation on quantity when it comes to rich foods, not cut them out.

One habits change I made on my own in 1990 was to understand comfort eating. I used to have a problem with that. Grew up with parents who were both morbidly obese (over 100 pounds overweight) both of whom ate enormous portions of high calorie everything, whether that was mayonnaise or ice cream.

So I grew up with the idea of consoling myself for loneliness and social pain by eating comfort foods. That's a way to start a vicious cycle of becoming too heavy and sick to keep up with your social circles, losing confidence every time you look at yourself and digging in deeper.

The long term solution is to get more active and social. Find things you want to do, find people you enjoy being with, meet your social needs head-on as social needs. Maybe meet them on the Internet on topics you like and then start organizing local get togethers.

But in between and when life hands anyone, even socially successful people, those moments of stress that are usually handled by triple chocolate something with whipped cream... find an alternative comfort that doesn't involve eating the food. For me it was actually buying the food. Not depriving myself at the store. I just chose stuff that took some preparation like cake mixes and boxed pudding over things that I could eat right out of the bag, like candy.

Also, keep in mind the exercise involved in say, making homemade caramels versus buying a bag. If you treat yourself to comfort foods that are homemade and take significant preparation, the more work the more you can indulge for emotional reasons. You've spent the calories, so don't feel bad about eating the pie.

I don't mean buy a premade pie crust and a can of filling. I mean make a pie by standing at the kitchen island making pie dough from scratch and cutting up the apples to go in it. You can then make the luxury of your pie go to greater heights than anything you can get from the store by doing it to taste. You might want a dash of nutmeg in it. You might like apple pie that has raisins in it, or even something odd like chopped dates. Do it your way.

If you're enjoying a luxury, then make sure you get the most enjoyment out of it that you can. Treat it as a treat, not an everyday thing. Work it into your habits -- not everyday, but once or twice a month so that it is something a bit special. Use it to celebrate little personal triumphs more than to comfort yourself on bad days.

All sorts of non food rewards can be used to train yourself into facing the sadness or anger of a bad night. You can buy books in your favorite genre, if budget's an issue start looking for used books. Or download favorite movies or television.

That's the third big habits change that can help. Turn off the TV as such. Use something like Tivo or download your programs instead of just watching commercial television.

People eat on social cues. Restaurant commercials and food treat commercials interrupt something else you're doing (following the story) with a suggestion to eat something. It's not real. It's just continuous as a background element -- and that's what gets to couch potatoes. It's why the chips and stuff wind up vanishing in large quantity.

Few people immediately run out to the steak and lobster restaurant every time they see the commercial. But start tracking when you snack and compare it to when the food commercials come on. That's social pressure. Carefully crafted social pressure intended really to get you thinking about going for fast food or for steak and lobster, the specific product.

It adds up to a lot of reminders to eat at times you may not actually be hungry. If you already ate, there's no reason to snark in terms of hunger -- but eating is social and the fictional people in commercials affect people viscerally. It's also a big lie because most of them are thin and healthy looking, so it shuts down any observation that hey, you're trying to lose some weight, maybe going out for steak and lobster is not a good idea every night.

Food cravings can come up for emotional reasons, social reasons and physical reasons. Getting enough good nutrition with proteins, vitamins and other essential foods eliminates the cravings for trace minerals and vitamins that may lead to eating large quantities of less nutritious foods. Dealing with vitamin deficiencies can help eliminate the nutrient based cravings.

Facing emotional needs as what they are and finding nonfood rewards is a way of handling those more effectively. Give yourself some time. Indulge in a favorite activity. Hobby supplies or using them, craft materials, just time to write in a personal journal -- these are rewards that don't put on the pounds. Activity itself can be a reward, going out to play a favorite game or hike to a pretty spot instead of staying home bored can work.

That works best if you genuinely enjoy the activity. Gardening is good for it. Cooking is. So is plein air (outdoor) painting. So is competing in marathons walking or running, that's how some people manage to stay fit and keep it off -- they're meeting social and emotional needs with exercise rather than food treats.

The good feeling of walking for cancer or any good cause is something that gives added pleasure to the "walk for reward" thing. Those become very popular because in addition to healthy exercise, you're doing something for people, being heroic, helping save lives.

But if your emotional need is to be selfish and self indulgent, then go for something else. Go for something that's deeply personal, an interest not shared by other people in your life. Buy that weird old movie no one else likes and take the time on that bad night to watch it and be with yourself for a while comforting yourself.

You don't have to be trendy about non-food rewards. They're almost more effective if you're not, depending on your emotional needs. Trendy like pilates or yoga or whatever is good if it's loneliness and social needs that you eat to fulfill with comfort food. Non-trendy quirky personal non-food treats are better if you're exhausted from too much social pressure and need time to regenerate the self.

It's very common for active people not to have enough time to take care of their own feelings. This is when to actually read the magazine about cats or fly fishing or the history of the state, some interest not shared by everyone on television. This is when to indulge in reading trivia on Babylon-5 or film noir stuff and actually watch the things that got left out of pop culture, or get into music that isn't mainstream.

A lot of "self esteem problems" come up through conformity. Through giving up too many real personal interests and desires in order to fit in with the alleged norm -- the common ground of pop culture as is, the television world. If you're into opera or old folk music or jazz instead, that's a great non-food reward.

It's a real human need to touch base with your personal identity, to know who you are as an individual. Privacy, solitude and introspection are rarely encouraged in this society. So you may need comfort from denying yourself these other interests in order to fit in and get along with the mainstream. Any personal interest or taste that's ever been mocked on a situation comedy may well come into this category of unnecessary self denial.

It's okay to be yourself. That's really a lot of this in a nutshell. People eating for comfort often go through life feeling socially rejected anytime someone at work is standing around laughing about those idiots who read, or those jazz nuts, or those antique collector weirdos... you catch my drift? It's a subtle, real form of humiliation that most people go through all the time about completely innocent pleasures in life.

If you understand all of the reasons you overeat and meet the nonfood needs with nonfood rewards, then cutting portions stops being deprivation. So give some thought to living a healthier life and break the cycle. You might not just get healthier and thinner, but happier too.