Dealing with Weight-Loss Pitfalls: Conquering food cravings, Saying good-bye to the dreaded emotional-eating habit and Finding ways to move past weight-loss plateaus.

Dealing with Weight-Loss Pitfalls

In This Chapter

▶ Conquering food cravings

▶ Saying good-bye to the dreaded emotional-eating habit

▶ Finding ways to move past weight-loss plateaus

Weight loss is always more complicated than simply changing what you eat, which is why it can feel difficult to achieve and maintain. If losing weight were that easy, far fewer people would end up regaining weight after their dieting efforts. What makes losing weight so tough? Weight-loss pitfalls such as food cravings, emotional eating, changing habits, past conditioning, weight-loss plateaus, and faltering motivation. These pitfalls can even include some health conditions, such as insulin resistance and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), as well as a past history of having difficulty losing weight.

Awareness is often the first step to conquering weight-loss pitfalls. In this chapter, I explore some common pitfalls you may face in your efforts to adopt a low-glycemic lifestyle and go over strategies that have worked for many of my clients. The good news is your new low-glycemic lifestyle can become an important strategy for conquering some common weight-loss pitfalls.

Coping with Food Cravings

Food cravings can occur for a variety of reasons, both psychological and physiological. After you know why your food cravings are happening, you can take steps to deal with them more effectively. Some common reasons for food cravings (as well as how to combat them) are as follows:

✓ Unstable blood sugar: This is probably the biggest physiological food- craving trigger. The food you eat, specifically carbohydrates, increases the amount of blood sugar in your body. When you eat large amounts of carbohydrates, especially high-glycemic carbohydrates, your blood sugar spikes quickly and then comes crashing down. Following a low- glycemic diet can help keep your blood sugar stable by providing an energy source that digests slowly, producing gradual increases in blood sugar and insulin levels. (See Chapter 1 for further details on this topic.)

✓ Lack of sleep: Recent research shows that people who don’t get the appropriate amount of sleep at night produce more of their “hunger hormone” and less of their “full hormone,” leading them to feel hungrier during the day, overeat, and consequently gain weight. The study also found that these people had more cravings for salty and sweet foods throughout the day. To counteract this physiological trigger of food cravings, allow yourself seven to nine hours of sleep each night. If you have sleep problems, contact your doctor for professional help.

Can’t wind down at night? Try drinking a cup of chamomile tea, doing a few yoga stretches, reading, meditating, journaling, or any other activity capable of turning off your mental to-do list.

✓ Low serotonin levels: Some researchers feel that a hormone imbalance, specifically low serotonin levels, may be another physiological trigger for food cravings. Scientific evidence also suggests that carbohydrates may help replenish the body’s serotonin levels (serotonin is a feel-good brain chemical). Although there’s no conclusive evidence that eating carbohydrates has a calming effect, it may be enough for a quick feel- good moment. Keeping your blood sugar stable and eating high-quality carbohydrates such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables (rather than high-glycemic carbohydrates) can help. Exercise also increases serotonin levels and may help decrease food cravings. (For tips on adding exercise to your life, head to Chapter 21.)

✓ Conditioned responses from childhood: One of the biggest psychological reasons people crave food is because they’re conditioned to from childhood. Conditioned responses go hand in hand with emotional eating (I share tips for fighting emotional eating later in this chapter). Infants and young children learn through experience that certain foods make them feel better or even make them feel full or emotionally satisfied. Perhaps you always had dessert after dinner as a child, or maybe you got ice cream when you lost the soccer game. Some of these conditioning cues are okay because they’re once-in-a-while things, but some are tougher because they’re daily habits. For instance, if as a child

you were rewarded with sweets each day for doing your chores, you may continue this pattern as an adult, thinking “I worked hard today; I deserve this.”

To break away from your conditioned food responses, you may be tempted to cut out the food altogether, but doing so will only make your craving worse. Instead, eat something similar. If you’re craving ice cream

at night because that’s what you ate before bed when you were little, then have a small amount of frozen yogurt or a fruit smoothie. If you’re craving chocolate, have an ounce of dark chocolate.

✓ Restrictive dieting and restrained eating: Studies suggest that when people refrain from eating certain foods, they end up craving them more, giving into the craving, and overindulging. As a psychological response, they then feel guilty and decide to refrain from eating the foods, which only prolongs the food-craving cycle. Severe restrictive eating (found in very-low-calorie diets) can also result in a physiological trigger — low blood sugar from not eating! Instead of cutting yourself off from certain foods, eat small amounts of them. You can also try a lower- glycemic food that’s similar to what you’re craving.

Think about the last time you had a food craving. Can you point to your trigger? Becoming aware of why you crave certain foods can help you overcome and prevent these cravings in the future.

Keep in mind that the most common reason for food cravings in people trying to lose weight is low blood sugar. Unstable blood sugar can not only trigger food cravings but also make them worse. The following sections explain how a low-glycemic diet paired with timely eating are your secret weapons for fighting food cravings.

Low-glycemic foods to the rescue

Low-glycemic foods stimulate a slow increase in blood sugar; high-glycemic foods (as in the ones people tend to crave), on the other hand, trigger a fast spike in blood sugar. Excess intake of high-glycemic carbohydrates sets you up for a vicious cycle in which your blood sugar and, consequently, your insulin levels spike, leading to a blood sugar crash soon after a meal. Your body wants to get your blood sugar back up to optimal levels, so it may trigger you to feel hungry again even though you just ate recently. Eating low- glycemic foods throughout the day helps keep your blood sugar and insulin levels stable from morning to night.

If your food cravings are due to unstable blood sugar, then a low-glycemic diet can help reduce them drastically. If you have other physiological or psycho- logical reasons for food cravings, following a low-glycemic diet can still help because it stabilizes your blood sugar, thereby reducing the intensity and/or frequency of your food cravings. I can’t promise you won’t ever have a craving again, but you can certainly curb them by following a low-glycemic diet.

Timing is everything

Eating a low-glycemic diet is only half the battle when it comes to decreasing your food cravings. The other half involves eating your meals and snacks in a timely manner so you don’t wind up with low blood sugar.

Anytime your blood sugar gets too low, you end up hungry, and that hunger can trigger your urge to eat foods that may not be the healthiest choices. For instance, have you ever waited too long to eat and then went straight for the potato chips because they sounded good? Or perhaps you had a hectic day at work and were so hungry that you decided to stop at the nearest drug store for a candy bar instead of driving home and eating the healthy snack of yogurt and nuts that was waiting for you. If you’ve ever experienced these types of scenarios, you’re not alone. Choosing a healthy snack is always much harder when you’re famished.

Eating in a timely manner and enjoying a healthy, low-glycemic snack when you’re feeling comfortably hungry rather than starving helps stave off food cravings. Pay attention to your body’s hunger cues, eat when you feel hungry, and avoid getting to the point where you’re starving. (Trying to eat a meal or snack, preferably a low-glycemic one, every four to five hours is a good guideline.) Also, keep some healthy snacks in your car, purse, and/or office so you’re prepared when you start feeling hungry. (For a few yummy low-glycemic snack ideas, check out Chapter 19.)

Strategies for Defeating Emotional Eating

If you tend to eat more when you’re stressed or sad, you’re engaging in emotional eating, otherwise known as consuming food when you aren’t physically hungry in order to feel emotionally satisfied. These emotions or moods can be anything from stress, anxiety, and sadness to anger, frustration, loneliness, and even boredom.

Regularly eating to make yourself feel better without being hungry almost always results in weight gain because you’re eating excess calories that your body can’t use as energy. It also doesn’t do much to boost your mood long term because the foods people tend to munch on when they let their emotions dictate their appetites are sweets and other high-carbohydrate snacks that send their blood sugar (and mood) on a roller coaster ride. Following a low- glycemic diet not only balances your blood sugar but also helps you eat more mood-supporting foods.

Research shows that eating mood supporters can help boost your mental health by improving the chemical composition of your brain, resulting in increased alertness, relaxation, and a better memory. Mood-supporting foods include

✓ Water

✓ Vegetables

✓ Fruit

✓ Oil-rich fish such as salmon

On the other hand, some foods can actually have a negative effect on your mood and overall mental health. Specifically, these mood stressors can cause irritability, hostility, anxiety, and even depression; they include

✓ Sugar

✓ Caffeine

✓ Alcohol

Notice how fruits and vegetables fall on the mood-supporting side? These foods also happen to be low-glycemic, which is just one more reason why fol- lowing a low-glycemic diet can help with weight loss and overall well-being. Of course, embracing a low-glycemic diet is just one aspect of dealing with emotional eating. I cover some other steps you can take to begin tackling this issue in the next sections.

For some people, emotional eating may feel like a difficult challenge. If you’re having trouble defeating this behavior, reach out to a therapist in your local area who specializes in emotional eating. The extra support may be a good fit for you.

Discover your triggers

Overcoming emotional eating is much easier when you understand what trig- gers the behavior for you. Perhaps your trigger is a stressful day at work, or maybe eating is how you’ve traditionally unwound in the evening. The trigger is different for every person, and it’s not always clear what exactly it is.

To find out more about what drives your emotional eating, keep a detailed food record for at least one to two weeks. Include the following information in your entries:

✓ The date and time (including the day of the week)

✓ The food you ate

✓ How much you ate

✓ Your hunger level on a scale of 1 to 10 when you ate (1 being starving, 5 being neutral, 10 being stuffed)

✓ What was going on for you in that moment

You may find that when you’re bored in the evening you tend to go for some- thing sweet, or that you generally eat more when you’re happy or celebrating. Whatever you find, by discovering your responses you can create a new plan, breaking your old habits and forming new, healthy behaviors.

Find new healthy behaviors

Everyone has emotions and moods that they must deal with on a daily basis. Some are obvious, like a stressful day at work; others are subtle, like feeling disheartened because someone looked at you in a weird way and you’re sure it’s because of the outfit you chose. Everyone has different coping mechanisms for handling these feelings, and some, such as emotional eating, aren’t as healthy as others. The trick is to change your behavior to a healthier self- gratifying one. No matter what, you have to change the behavior so you have a new coping mechanism.

Your new healthy behavior must be something that’s truly self-gratifying so it can easily take the place of the old behavior (in this case, emotional eating).

Here’s an example of what I mean: A client of mine once discovered that she ate mindlessly in front of the television every night as a way of unwinding after work. She’d start with dinner and then continue eating sweets and other carbs into the late hours. After my client recognized that wanting to unwind from work was her emotional-eating trigger, she decided that instead of pigging out on sugary snacks, she’d portion out a low-glycemic treat such as popcorn or frozen yogurt and then write in her gratitude journal to help her remember all that was going well for her. This shift helped her to eat a reasonable, conscious treat and discover an alternate winding-down behavior so she didn’t have to depend on the food/television combination.

Swapping healthier behaviors for emotional eating isn’t a quick fix. First off, finding the right behavior to replace your emotional eating may take some trial and error. Second, you’ll likely still have a desire to go back to your old habits. It’ll take a great deal of practice until your new, healthier behavior feels like a comfortable old habit.

Here’s a list of healthy coping behaviors to give you some ideas of what might help you kick the emotional-eating habit:

✓ Journaling

✓ Walking

✓ Crafting

✓ Talking to friends

✓ Gardening

✓ Exercising

✓ Drawing

✓ Painting

✓ Taking a bath

✓ Playing with your kids

✓ Listening to music

✓ Sewing

✓ Knitting

✓ Reading

✓ Meditating

✓ Practicing yoga

Become a mindful eater

Emotional eating is usually unconscious eating, meaning you don’t really think about what you’re eating or why. You can score a major blow to your emotional-eating habit by being mindful of the foods you choose throughout the day. This awareness allows you to make choices instead of just going on auto-pilot and eating whatever’s around.

Following are some suggestions for becoming more mindful of what you eat each day:

✓ Keep a food journal. A food journal makes you more conscious of your choices in the moment. Many people find that they do less unconscious eating when they’re jotting down what they eat on a regular basis. For tips on starting a food journal, flip to Chapter 6.

✓ Pay close attention to your hunger and fullness cues. Believe it or not, your body has its own built-in weight-management system, which can be described as hunger and satiety (feeling full). Your body literally tells you when to eat and when to stop. So that you don’t miss the signals, your body even takes matters a step further by making you feel starved if you wait too long to eat and stuffed when you eat too much. Paying attention to these cues can help you manage your weight more effectively.

Ignoring your body’s hunger and fullness cues is all too easy to do when you’re eating for emotions, because it often takes more food to feel emotionally satisfied than physically full. Play the full game with yourself and pay close attention to when you feel comfortably full. When you do, it’s time to try your chosen healthy-yet-self-gratifying behavior (as explained in the preceding section).

✓ Slow down and be conscious of taste and texture. With all the rush, rush, rush in today’s society, people tend to scarf down their food quickly, which can make emotional eating that much worse. Why, you ask? Because the quicker you eat, the more food you need to feel emotionally satisfied. Remember: Eating isn’t a race! Slow down and really pay attention to the food you’re eating. Enjoy its taste and texture in a leisurely manner. When you do, you find that you discover emotional satisfaction faster and with less food. Try this approach out with a few M&M’s or an ounce of chocolate. Spend as long as you can letting the candy melt in your mouth instead of just chewing it, swallowing it, and grabbing some more. I bet you find that you “need” much less candy than you thought you did!

Taking care of your emotions in a healthy way

When you’re used to relying on food to cope with your emotions — be they happy or sad — you may have a tough time coming up with other ways of dealing with your feelings. The habitual act of eating when you’re stressed, bored, or excited happens so quickly that you may not have time to think about a different behavior to engage in.

So you can have some ideas ready to go, fill in the following chart with ways (other than eating) that you can take care of the listed emotions.

Emotion	Action You Plan to Take
Anger
Boredom
Comfort
Fear
Guilt
Loneliness
Love
Stress

Next, grab a sheet of paper and list any activities that you can do when you get the urge to overeat. Be sure to include self-gratifying behaviors that you know make you feel better, such as calling a friend or relaxing in a bubble bath.

Turn off the TV to lose weight

Studies have found a direct correlation between increased weight and increased TV viewing time. Why? Well, for many people, watching TV is a trigger to eat — and eat, and eat, and eat. Your metabolism actually slows down when you watch TV (in fact, it’s almost slower than when you’re sleeping!), so eating more and burning less spells serious trouble for weight loss. If you really want to watch TV to unwind, try moving to a different room — one that’s farther away from the food — and couple TV viewing with a hands-on activity, such as sewing or folding laundry.

Breaking Through Weight-Loss Plateaus

When your body can operate efficiently at a particular calorie level, you may find yourself at a weight-loss plateau, a point at which you’re no longer losing weight despite all of your best efforts. This situation occurs because previously you were eating fewer calories than you were burning through exercise, but now you’re using as many calories as you’re eating.

I promise that you can get past weight-loss plateaus. But first you need to forget about your feelings of frustration that you’re not losing weight and instead celebrate that your metabolism is working strongly and your body is becoming more efficient. Next, check out the following sections, which offer advice for how to make sure you’re on track and how to continue moving for- ward with weight loss.

Evaluating your weight-loss goals

So you’ve reached a weight-loss plateau, but you’re still 10 pounds from your goal weight. Before you start hitting the gym for an extra hour each day or lowering your daily calorie intake, make sure your weight-loss goal is realistic.

Setting desired weight-loss goals is easy, but the goals people come up with often aren’t appropriate for their age or build. Reaching an unrealistic goal weight requires much more exercise and a far lower calorie level than is healthy. To maintain such an impractical goal weight after you hit it, you need to keep up this rigorous pace. The result of setting unrealistic weight-loss goals is that you fall into a cycle of gaining and losing weight because the amount of work necessary to maintain a really low weight isn’t realistic for the long haul.

Here’s a quick calculation for determining your ideal body-weight range:

Just because you have an ideal body-weight range doesn’t mean you should aim for the lowest weight possible, which is what a lot of people try to do. Instead of striving to hit the smallest number on the scale, aim for a healthy weight range.

Consider the size of your body frame to determine what weight you should shoot for within your ideal range. If, for example, you’re a 5-foot-4-inch female with a large frame, you shouldn’t aim for a goal weight of 108 pounds. That’s far too low of a weight for you. Instead, you want to aim for the top of your range, which is 132 pounds.

You may know immediately whether you have a big frame or a small frame, but if not, you can approximate the size of your body frame by taking a tape mea- sure, measuring your wrist’s circumference, and then figuring out where your measurement fits in Table 13-1 if you’re a woman or Table 13-2 if you’re a man.

If you’re in your 50s or 60s, you may want to give yourself a weight cushion. Reach for a weight that’s within your range, but don’t try to hit the lowest number. Getting there can be difficult due to a decreased metabolism and (for many folks) a lower level of exercise intensity. Focus on pursuing health and wellness, not one particular number on the scale.

The number on the scale isn’t the whole picture. Hitting a specific number isn’t as important as making sure other health indicators such as cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar are good. How you feel about yourself is equally important. Being happy and healthy counts for a whole lot more than achieving any so-called perfect weight you may have in mind.

Apples and pears: Is your body shape leading you to a higher health risk?

There are two common body shapes based on bone structure and how the body deposits fat — apple and pear. People who gain weight in their abdomen and chest have an apple shape, whereas people who gain weight in their hips and thighs have a pear shape. Research has found that your health risk goes up as your waist size increases, which spells trouble for apple-shaped individuals. Specifically, abdominal weight gain increases weight around your internal organs and is associated with a greater incidence of Type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, heart disease, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea. This is especially true if your waist circumference measures more than 35 inches for women and more than 40 inches for men.

To determine your health risk based on body shape, stand and measure your waist right above the hip bone. If your abdomen is measuring high, then you should work on your low- glycemic diet and incorporate regular exercise to get your waist measurement below the danger zone.

Remember: No matter what the shape, all excess weight can be harmful by causing excess strain on joints and ligaments, a shortened life span, and increased risks for the aforementioned diseases.

Tracking consistency

Whether you’ve hit a plateau after losing some weight or you’ve had a hard time getting your weight to budge in the first place, take the time to track your food intake and physical activity. You may feel like you’re eating the right foods and exercising regularly, but until you track your food intake and physical activity for at least a week, it’s hard to tell. For pointers on starting a food journal, head to Chapter 6.

You’d be surprised how easy it is for excess calories, the wrong food choices, and exercise inconsistency to slip in without you knowing it. When keeping

a food journal, you may notice that you increased your starches to three servings at breakfast and lunch rather than two. That adds up to 160 calories right there. You may also find that you really only went on two walks this week rather than four or that you ate more high-glycemic foods than low ones for the week. These are the small, subtle differences that can really affect your results.

Take a look at this food journal in Figure 13-1 as an example.

If you just look at the food choices and balance, this food journal seems great. This person is using low-glycemic foods, eating every four to five hours, and balancing her intake of carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Her exercise looks good too. However, this person’s weight isn’t moving. When you take a closer look at the portion sizes, you realize that her calorie intake adds up to approximately 2,385 calories and that she has increased carbohydrate servings with a few meals, which can make her glycemic load higher than she may want.

This person has several options. Because nuts are high in calories despite being healthy and low-glycemic, she can decrease her almond servings to 1⁄4 cup. She can also decrease her toast in the morning to one slice and omit the whole-wheat roll with dinner. These moves would not only decrease her glycemic load for breakfast and dinner but they’d also lower her total calorie level to 1,885 calories, which may be enough to jump-start her weight loss again. By omitting one of the nut servings altogether, she can bring her total calorie level down to just 1,700.

When you review your own food journal for consistency, you want to look for the following:

✓ Food choices

✓ Balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat

✓ Portion sizes

✓ Exercise intensity and frequency

You don’t have to count calories like I did in this example. Just review the portion sizes presented in Chapter 9 to ensure you’re on the right track. Portion sizes that are a little too big are one of the subtle ways calories sneak in even when you’re eating all the right foods.

Switching up your exercise routine

When you hit a weight-loss plateau, you’re certain your goal weight is appropriate, and you’ve been tracking your food intake and physical activity, then there’s only one surefire way to break through the plateau without resorting to lowering your calorie level: Change your exercise program.

Doing a certain kind of physical activity regularly over a length of time conditions the muscles involved in that activity. After your muscles are conditioned, they become more efficient and burn fewer calories. Different exercise routines work out different muscle groups, and when you change your exercise routine to use new muscle groups, your muscles have to work harder, burning more calories in the process. So by changing your exercise routine every once in a while, you can break through weight-loss plateaus. For example, if you’ve been walking daily, you may want to change two of those days to riding a bike or swimming so as to use new muscle groups and improve your chances for weight loss.

If you really love your routine, then make it more challenging by increasing the intensity. For instance, if you’re a walker, try going farther, faster, or hitting some hills. All of these actions will help increase the intensity of your walk.