So now you’ve got eight months.  And no excuses.  Alrighty then: there are a number of things we can do that will help us keep weight off.  For example, eating less.  Here are a few others:

1) Get Active: People go to great lengths to stay active – buying gym memberships and special outfits to exercise in, driving miles to get there, spending hours a day in the whole process – only to studiously avoid activity in the rest of their lives.  Does this describe you?  Do you circle the parking lot for 10 minutes, looking for a spot closer to the store?  Do you wait for the elevator instead of taking the stairs?  Do you hire someone to do your yard work?  

2) Get Muscle: Even sitting on the couch not exercising, muscle is burning calories.  Of course, if you’re putting on muscle, that might affect what you see at the scale.  After all, muscle is heavy!  But what you won’t see at the scale, you will see in the mirror.     

3) Get Some Sleep: If you don’t sleep enough (or go to sleep at regular times), it messes with your hormones, and you gain weight.  Okay, so that’s an oversimplification.  It’s also true.  This is a bigger deal than you think.

4) Get Happy:  I think we all intuitively understand that our moods can guide our food choices.  After all, when we’re feeling bad, those potato chips start looking awfully good.  But this is more than just common sense: some of the most impressive clinical research on weight loss has involved giving people antidepressants, and then watching them eat less.  (And by “antidepressants,” I also mean supplements, such as 5-HTP, which has been fairly well-researched in this context).

Of course pills aren’t the only way to feel happier – just the easiest to research.

5) Get Chewing: I asked around the store for people’s common-sense advice on weight loss.  Debra suggested seeking out food that’s harder to chew.  At first this seemed kind of silly to me, but when I thought about it, it started to make a whole lot of sense.  Food that slides down easy is easy to overeat.  300 calories of Wonder bread with mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce are scarfed down in a second; 300 calories of rustic whole grain bread with sharp cheddar and arugula, on the other hand, take a lot longer, long enough for your stomach to signal your brain that you’re satisfied.  You’ve spent enough time with the food to feel satisfied.  You eat less. 

6) Don’t Drink Anything Sweet: In many ways, this is simply an extension of the thing about chewing.  There’s been research where people were given 450 calories of sugar a day in the form of either a sugared drink, or jelly beans, and then told to eat as they wanted to the rest of the day.  Nutritionally, jelly beans and sugared drinks are nearly identical, so you’d expect both groups to have nearly identical results.  But after a few weeks, the people with the sugared drink gained a lot more weight than those with the jelly beans.  Why?  As it turned out, the people who got the jelly beans compensated by eating less the rest of the day; the people who got the sugared drink, did not.  The drink didn’t fill them up.  They kept eating.

7) Let Go of the Idea of What a Particular Meal Should Be: You don’t need to eat “breakfast food” for breakfast, or “lunch food” for lunch.   Lunch does not have to come between two pieces of bread.  Meals don’t have to be balanced, either, in that old-fashioned way where you always have a little bit of bread, a little bit of fruit, a little something to drink, a little side dish, and a tiny bit of dessert.

What every meal should have is some protein, some fiber, and at least a little bit of fat – and ideally a lot of non-starchy vegetables.  This morning for breakfast, the heirloom tomatoes at the store looked spectacular (I’m writing in early September).  So I bought a pound-and-a-half of them, chopped them up, tossed them with about a tablespoon of hempseed oil, some torn-up basil leaves, and a little bit of fresh mozzarella.  It was a pretty low-calorie breakfast, but there was so much food – and I wasn’t depriving my body of fat or protein – so I walked away feeling immensely satisfied.  

8) Get Up In Time to Eat Breakfast: Anyone can lose weight, but the people who keep the weight off, it seems, are the ones who eat breakfast.  While you’re at it, don’t skip lunch or dinner either.  If your body thinks it’s being starved, it will hold onto calories it’s got aggressively.

9) Keep Your Blood Sugar on an Even Keel: Back when I first wrote on this subject, the low-carb, Atkins-style diet was all the rage.  People have moved away from all that recently, finally questioning the logic of an all-bacon, all the time (perhaps embellished with un petit soupçon of mayonnaise?) weight loss plan.  That’s too bad, really.  Because the low-carb diet doesn’t have to be all-bacon, all the time.  The trick is just to avoid carbs – starches and sugars – which spike your blood sugar.

When blood sugar shoots up too quickly, the body responds by bringing it down too fast.  The resulting low blood sugar leaves us feeling tired and irritable – and craving more of the starchy, sugary foods which raise blood sugar so quickly.  And bear in mind, the body doesn’t lower blood sugar by simply getting rid of it.  Those calories have to go somewhere: namely the hips, belly, and thighs.   

Actually, that’s not entirely true: if we tax our ability to regulate blood sugar long enough, it becomes less and less efficient.  Awash in insulin, the hormone we secrete to bring blood sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells, our cells begin to ignore the insulin, little by little.  This is called insulin-resistance.  Insulin resistance is not something you can get rid of by dieting.  It leads to pre-diabetes and an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.  Insulin resistance also compromises our ability to send those excess calories to the hips and thighs, leaving the bulk to go straight to the belly.  We call it a “beer gut,” but we might as well call it a “starch and sugar” gut.      

So maybe you don’t do all bacon, all the time.  Think instead of a Chinese stir-fry, just protein and vegetables (minus the white rice, of course).  Think of traditional Irish breakfast: eggs, beans, fried tomatoes and mushrooms.  Think of crisp veggies dipped into humous, or a caprese salad (slices of fresh tomatoes alternating with buffalo mozzarella, drizzled with olive oil and dusted with basil), or lentil stew with sage, or whitefish crusted in macadamia nuts... this is all good food, and good for you.            

Part 2 will discuss my five favorite supplements for weight control.

..... Adam Stark