New Ways of Thinking - 4. Conditioned Eating

Our class discussion for week 4 was about automatic eating behaviors, or conditioned eating.  The session was about learning to identify your personal eating habits that are based on environmental or time-related cues rather than on physical hunger.  The concept is that if you can identify habit-based eating, then you can develop a plan to eliminate or reduce the counterproductive eating behavior.  More on that next time.

Identifying Conditioned Eating (or 'Needing' vs 'Wanting')






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New Ways of Thinking - 3. Motivation

So back to the classroom materials.  I've been taking my time to summarize and organize the classroom materials and the Optifast binder.  It's taking quite a bit of time to work my way through all the pages.

The third classroom session was called 'Values and Goal Setting'.  It was really about making sure that our specific fitness goals are aligned with more global values.  This makes sure that we will have better motivation in working towards the specific goals.  Because the theme was 'motivation', I've included some of the relevant sections from the Optifast binder and a quote from a great book that I was reading at the time.

Motivation



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Christmas Holidays # 1 Under My Belt !

Boy, Christmas holidays are a really big challenge to healthy habits ! 

Looking back at the holidays, I did Ok - I didn't gain any weight.  I make specific plans on how to deal with the high risk eating times; some worked, some not so well.  I've got some ideas on how to make the next holidays a little more health friendly, so I'm practicing the 'forgive and move on' part.

Lessons learned:

1. High risk meals need a WRITTEN plan.  One of our family traditions is to have a buffet of festive finger foods on Christmas Eve after our Christmas Church service.  Everything was healthy - nothing fried, not lots of sweets, meatballs with lean turkey, some veggie options.  I had planned to limit myself to a small plate with no refills, and have a balanced snack beforehand to reduce physical hunger.  Good.  Well when the time came, there was so large a variety of fun foods that it wouldn't fit on just one plate.  Since I had helped select the menu, I really wanted to have some of everything, so I though 'Ok, so it's Christmas, two small plates won't hurt (permission thinking), just no refills'.  The plan was also not specific enough - I had not thought through the composition of the plate.  I ended up having way too much volume of high-density stuff like meat balls, cheese balls, crackers, etc.  Another thing I hadn't planned for was the high-calorie beverage, hot spiced apple cider, yum.  I ended up having several mugs, when I should have probably had one followed by a switch to water or tea.
2. Weight loss has not 'fixed' my migraines.  I had thought that my weight loss had taken migraines out of my life - nope!  I spent the next three days suffering from a migraine episode - mostly abdominal migraine, but not fun.  It seems to have been triggered by the high volume (relatively) of high density food.  Certainly gives me some motivation to not repeat the heavy eating episode any time soon.
3. Dealing with nuts and candy dishes is hard.  Sue talked with me about the candy and nut bowls ahead of time.  We decided that we would limit these bowls to Christmas Eve/ Day and the times we actually had guests.  This worked reasonably well.  Next time, I should have a better plan on how to include these as 'treat events', in terms of how many/ how often, etc.
4. I CAN avoid Frozen cookies.  Cookies are hard for me - because I eat them so rarely, they are a highly prized treat, and of course, inherently addictive.  We were able to limit the period of time the cookies were on display, and I did plan on incorporating 2 - 3 into my 'treat events'.  All good.  Several weeks after New Year's day I happened to open the downstairs freezer.  I discovered that there were two containers of Christmas cookies.  Oh my - that was a tough evening.  I managed to stay away - but I ended up having a near binge of healthy fruit in my efforts to steer clear.  A couple of days later I mentioned to Sue that I'd have to bury these containers under other stuff in the freezer, and Sue mercifully got rid of it all.  So yes, I can avoid frozen cookies, but it's better to have an avoidance plan, like bury them or seal the containers, or something.  Better off to keep them out of the house.

So starting of 2016 with flying colors - here we come.....