Biggest Losers Face Home Reality Without Keys to Success

Rudy, Danny, Liz and Amada are the final four contestants, and their last challenge was going home for 60 days and preparing to run a 26 mile marathon. One of them will be voted off this coming week.

What they realized in going home was how much they had changed – and not just physically. At home they came face to face with some of the issues that led to their obesity in the first place. While at the ranch, they focused on physical changes and discovering how much they had let themselves go. Back home, they were seeing that it isn’t just the physical that has to change in order to really succeed. They have to address the underlying subconscious mental and emotional issues that drove their unhealthy behaviors and overeating in the first place.

While this episode was going on, a former Biggest Loser winner, Ryan Benson, failed to return to the reunion show held last week. He had regained most of his weight back and admitted to extreme fasting and dehydration during the show in order to win. And just a couple of weeks earlier, Daniel Wright, who has done the show twice, went home. Daniel now admits he struggles with binge eating and kept that hidden during the show. Most likely it was even worse when he got home, having been severely deprived for the past 10 weeks. Overeating or bingeing after extreme dieting and deprivation is normal, and no doubt many other contestants have found themselves over-indulging once back home. This may explain why half of the Biggest Loser contestants have regained most or all of their weight loss.

Programs, like the Biggest Loser, are failing to address the underlying drivers of obesity that each of their contestants will deal with after the program ends. This is a disservice to those who put their trust in the trainers and dieticians, as well as to those watching the programs. It simply isn’t a matter of extreme diet, exercise and weight loss to be a success and maintain weight loss. If it were, obesity would have been solved long ago.

What drives our behavior are subconscious thoughts, beliefs and feelings, and when it comes to food and exercise these are complicated and unique to each person. Binge eating, for example, can be driven by a subconscious rebellion against food restrictions, an unmet need that is soothed by food, a means of keeping unresolved emotions repressed, or a reaction to not getting enough food and being compelled to make up for that deprivation. The triggers for dysfunctional eating can come from nearly anything, and without understanding how to be aware of them, how to resolve them and strategies to limit them, they will continue.

Rudy, Danny, Liz and Amanda all hope to go home the next Biggest Loser winner, yet they also share a concern about their ability to maintain their weight loss when the show ends. They have every reason to be concerned, because they haven’t been given the tools and experiences they really need to change their relationship with food and fitness from the inside out.

Judgment of Those with Obesity Doesn’t Solve Weight Problem

This morning I had breakfast with a friend at a local diner, and she couldn't help but notice a group of people who were overweight and eating huge piles of pancakes and waffles dripping in butter, syrup and whipped cream. She wondered what was wrong with them and criticized them for their choices.

It is so easy to judge people who are obese for not taking responsibility for their weight problem, but until you’ve walked in their shoes you have no idea what the real problem is. It might appear obvious if you see them eating huge portions of food or eating things that aren’t healthy, but these behaviors are a symptom of a greater problem that is not well understood or obvious.

The problem starts with dieting, and most likely everyone who is obese has dieted at least once if not repeatedly. Restrictive diets all have two things in common: they are short term and they limit what you can eat. Once the diet ends, whether as planned or because it was too hard to stick with, there is an insatiable desire to eat what wasn’t allowed and to overeat. This reaction is both physical, because the body has been in starvation mode and works to restore its fuel supply, and it is psychological. When you’ve been deprived, you have an emotional need to make up for that deprivation.

These aren’t conscious, even if you know you just can’t stop eating foods you know you shouldn’t have. They are subconscious drivers of behavior that lead to food obsessions, cravings and bingeing. In 35% of the cases, they become eating disorders.

In addition, most people are stressed out, working long hours, juggling many responsibilities and putting themselves last. This isn’t an excuse, but a reality.

Instead of judging people for their poor eating choices and lack of activity or unhealthy lifestyle, the answer starts with empathy for their situation.

The next step is to help them take a look at these choices and come to understand what is driving them from an objective perspective. It is nearly impossible to take a closer look when they are self-critical and self-loathing. In fact, that is what leads to denial, because it is often too painful to deal with those feelings. Instead, by being curious of their behaviors without judgment, then they can see what is sabotaging their choices and can start to address their subconscious thoughts and emotions. In doing so, they can regain control, be in touch with how they feel, and discover an easier way to create and maintain healthier decisions for the long term.

Kicking Food Cravings, Binges and Addictions with Intuitive Eating

Many people believe they are addicted to sugar, simple carbohydrates or other specific foods, because they crave them all the time and then seem to go crazy on a binge when they gain access to them. There is a good argument to support this belief in Dr. David Kessler’s latest book The End of Overeating, which puts the blame on the food industry for developing foods specifically to create this uncontrollable preoccupation and compulsive eating.

Yet, having worked with many people who struggle with cravings, binges and a belief they are addicted to certain foods, I know the issue is just as much driven by subconscious factors as bio-chemical ones. I also know you don’t have to give up these foods to be in control of them, as he strongly recommends.

Dr. Kessler’s research findings conclude the reason people crave specific foods is the combination of fat, sugar and salt often used in those foods to stimulate dopamine in the brain, which feels really good. Once you’ve had a food with this combination that stimulates arousal, you’ll want it again and again. This is certainly an important breakthrough in understanding why people are irresistibly drawn to food that isn’t healthy and struggle to stop eating even when they are full. No doubt, the food industry has taken full advantage of this potent combination, putting them in processed and fast foods where you’d least expect to find them, to keep people coming back for more and boosting their profits.

One approach to dealing with this is to simply stop eating all types of desserts, packaged and processed foods, fast foods, and most restaurant meals, and replace them with healthy whole foods with no sugar, fat, salt or emotional triggers. And that will indeed eliminate the cravings, for a while.

But like dieting, very few people can stick with eliminating foods they enjoy long term without feeling deprived. While Kessler acknowledges this problem by suggesting you rewire your circuitry by creating unappealing images of the food, this doesn’t address the real issue of deprivation backlash and the need for food satisfaction.

A better way to address foods that are designed to trigger cravings is to incorporate them into a healthy diet, so they are balanced with other foods to create satisfaction. Satisfaction is an important element of eating, and you are just as likely to overeat in an attempt to reach satisfaction as you are when you are over-stimulated by too much satisfaction.

6 ways to control cravings and binges without giving up favorite foods

1. Pay attention to how hungry, satisfied and full you feel. If you don’t know when you are satisfied physically or when you are full, you won’t realize you are overeating or appreciate how unpleasant it feels to get full.

2. Identify the food for what it is instead of calling it a bad food. Most highly stimulating foods, like cookies, are primarily a simple carbohydrate with saturated fat. It is harder to tell if it has much salt.

3. Balance this food with other foods that have complex carbohydrates, unsaturated fats and lean protein. If you want a cookie, then the trade off is to not have simple carbs or saturated fat in the rest of your meal or snack. When most of what you are eating is really healthy, having a little less healthy food doesn’t throw off the balance or make it unhealthy.

4. Give yourself permission to have this food in moderation when ever you balance it with healthier foods. When you eat food you think you shouldn’t, it creates a feeling of guilt and reinforces the belief that you should be deprived of it. This fuels emotional and rebellious eating, giving the food power over you. To take back your power, you have to stop seeing the food as a guilty pleasure or a forbidden food.

5. Really taste this food to see how much you enjoy it. When you aren’t over-stimulated or concerned about being deprived, you can more easily focus on tasting the food you crave. Most people find it isn’t as good as they thought and that healthier foods actually taste better.

6. Focus on creating satisfying meals with healthier foods. The more you remove the charge of highly-stimulating foods by allowing them in balanced moderation, the more likely you’ll gravitate to choosing healthier ways of being satisfied without feeling forced or deprived.

This approach, which is the basis of Intuitive Eating, addresses the emotional and bio-chemical cravings for foods designed to get us hooked. The less we eat of these foods, the less the food industry profits from them.

Is Your Wallet Making You Overeat?

Does it make you uncomfortable to throw out food these days, compelling you to eat it instead? Did you grow up hearing that kids are starving in Africa, to always clean your plate or that throwing out food is no different than wasting money? Many of us did and it hits home during an economic recession, but that doesn’t mean those beliefs warrant eating food that you don’t need or don’t want. Instead it may be time to reconsider the benefits of wasting food rather than eating it.

If you stop and think about it, whether you finish eating something or you don’t, will not save you money and having a clean plate as an adult is really a habit and doesn’t serve any real purpose. To address these beliefs requires a change in thinking and some techniques to change your habits.

While wasting food is not ideal, it is better to look at your options than to carry a black and white belief about waste. The next time you find yourself with more food than you need or want, consider what your beliefs are, if you think they make sense, and what would be better. You have the power to challenge and change your beliefs around food if you stop and look at them. This week take the opportunity to see what your beliefs about wasting food are costing you.
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Giving Yourself Satisfaction

Have you ever noticed that when you aren’t satisfied by the food you are eating, you eat even more in an attempt to get satisfaction?

Maybe you are settling for food you think you should have, instead of what you really want. Or maybe you think you want a food because it is supposed to be good or once was, so you eat it expecting a certain experience. I see this happen a lot with my clients who overeat out of a desire to feel good only to end up feeling disappointed, full and wishing they hadn’t eaten so much. They don’t even recognize this pattern because it is subconscious and they aren’t paying enough attention to how they feel physically or emotionally.

Satisfaction is a genuine need that a part of you (often your inner child) craves and will do anything to get. Instead of resisting this desire to enjoy certain foods, give yourself permission to have the food and fully appreciate it without any guilt. If you are afraid of overdoing it, which is a valid concern at first, be strategic as to how much of your favorite food you can access at one time. If what you really want is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, see if you can get just one Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bar in your favorite flavor. If you love a certain type of cookie or candy, find a way to get or create packages of just a couple at a time.

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Breaking the Deprivation Cycle

You know you shouldn’t have that piece of cake, the Girl Scout cookies or the candy that is calling your name, but you just can’t help yourself. You just have to have some. The next thing you know, you’ve eaten more than you wanted and now you are feeling a bit full and guilty. Once again you just couldn’t seem to stay in control around food. Has this happened to you recently – like over the holidays?

Feeling out of control around food can happen to the best of us, and right now it is happening to a great many people who have tried so hard to stick to their New Year’s resolutions and are giving in to their forbidden foods. Succumbing to what isn’t on a diet is inevitable. The more you try to force yourself to resist something you want and believe you shouldn’t have, the more you rebel against that restriction. Have you ever noticed that when you are deprived of something, you want it all the more?

It is when you are depriving yourself that you are emotionally compelled to make up for being deprived. This is true whether you think you should be deprived of ever having the food again, will surely be deprived because of an upcoming diet, have just been deprived having stopped a diet, or were deprived in your past. Many people are overeating foods they were once unable to have, even as far back as fifty years ago. An older man in one of my audiences wanted to know what he could do about overeating desserts every night. It turns out he grew up in the depression when sugar was rationed and he seldom got desserts. He is still compelled to make up for having been deprived of the desserts he wanted as a kid.

This week pay attention to the foods you are trying to restrict and notice how this affects your behavior. Then try giving yourself permission to have that food in moderation and see if you really want all that much of it.

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Dealing with the Realities of Fat Camp

Right now, thousands of overweight children are away at fat camp. They are expecting to lose weight, have fun and gain self-esteem; and that is just what the camps promote. Some kids went by choice and others were told to go, and right now many of them probably wish it was over. You would too if you knew what was really going on at many of these camps, or perhaps you do know if you watched MTV’s Real World Fat Camp episodes this past winter. What I watched made me cringe and worry about the impact the experience was going to have on these young people long-term.

They had to be publicly weighed and measured, and many were clearly upset by the experience. It would seem to me the last thing you would do is set the stage for more shame in a kid who is overweight, since self-criticism and self-hatred are drivers of emotional eating, low self-confidence and exercise ambivalence.

All the girsl and boys, even those at four hundred pounds, were required to perform high exertion exercises while out in the heat and sun. No personal trainer I know would do that with unconditioned adults, much less those who are obese. Not only is this risky, many of the children were clearly miserable and struggling with what was being asked of them. Again I had to wonder what the mental and emotional impact of doing extreme boot camp-style exercising would be on these girls and boys.

As I continued to watch the show the children dealt with another challenge. To eat, they had to climb a steep hill where the food hall was located. The kids hated this hill and many of them opted not to eat to avoid climbing it. No surprise, all they talked about was food and how hungry they felt. They were obsessed with finding ways to get food they couldn’t have. The emotional impact of being deprived and feeling guilty when eating forbidden food is a primary cause of overeating and bingeing that can last a lifetime. It seemed to me this camp was setting the stage for long-term dysfunctional eating and not a healthy relationship with food or good nutritional habits.

The reality of most fat camps is they are doing more damage than good, yet the MTV reality show was such a hit that Camp Pocono Trails is having one its best summers ever.

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In Control of Your Appetite

Do you ever wonder why you can’t seem to stop eating or what it will take to get control over your appetite? If you’ve tried appetite suppressants, you already know that isn’t the answer.

There is an answer that does work. It is doing the opposite of suppressing your appetite. I know that may not be the answer you were expecting, but it is true. The more you try to suppress your desire and need for food, the more you will overeat or feel out of control around food. Right now, as summer approaches, there are lots of advertisements for products to help you avoid feeling hungry so you can eat less and slim down. Nice idea, but that only leads to pigging out when you finally do eat. What ever calories you thought you were saving earlier in the day are fully spent later on.

You are much better off eating when you get hungry and then stopping when you are satisfied, just before you get full. I call it conscious eating. Others call it mindful eating, and this week Melinda Beck of the Wall Street Journal wrote about it in her Health Journal column and on line forum. She was amazed that by being more aware of her hunger and the experience of eating she was more easily satisfied with less food.

It sounds simple to eat when you are hungry, but if you’ve been ignoring your hunger for a period of time it can be tougher than it sounds. What can be challenging is to recognize when you do get hungry. It can also be hard to know when you get full if you haven’t been paying attention to that either.

Stop and consider how hungry or full you are right now. Do you know? Just what does it feel like when you get hungry? Do you know when you overeat and get full?

This week pay attention to your hunger levels and let them guide you to eat just the right amount of food your body needs. If you eat when you are hungry and stop before getting full, you won’t need to count calories or points. You will be eating in alignment with your metabolic requirements and feeling in control of your appetite.

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Overcome Emotional Eating - Open Tele-Program

I’m offering a one hour open call on How to Overcome Emotional Eating.
Join me Wednesday, May 21st at 8pm ET.

Do you think you may be eating comfort foods to feel better or turning to food when you aren’t hungry? Are you ready to overcome emotional eating and feel better about the way you eat?

I’m going to talk about:
- What is emotional eating
- How to identify emotional eating in yourself
- What drives you to overeat
- What you might really want
- How to stop emotional eating
- What tools work to manage it
I am also going to leave enough time to answer your questions.

Click here to register
Get the help you need to feel back in control around food?

If you missed this event, get the recording afterwards here

Avoiding Thanksgiving Day Stuffed

Are you already starting to worry about overeating during the Thanksgiving holiday? It is such a tradition to eat until you are as stuffed as the bird that you may not even realize how full you get. Few escape the need to unbutton their pants or loosen their belts by the end of Thanksgiving Day. Why is that? Let me share three possible explanations you may not have thought of.

First is because we only get this meal once a year. Thanksgiving dinner includes fresh cut turkey, stuffing, pies and all the family recipes that get pulled out for this special occasion. When we finally sit down to dinner we know that this is a one-time thing, not to be repeated for another year. That is a long time, and we feel we have to get it now while we can, because we won’t get it again any time soon. So we sit down to dinner having been deprived of it for the past year and knowing we will be deprived of it again for the upcoming year. This sets the stage for overeating, often to the point of feeling sick. Did this happen to you last year?

Second, the meal takes hours of preparation and we gather ahead of time to socialize, nibble and wait for the big event. During this time we are impatiently waiting and at the same time often bored, doing preparation chores or talking with family members with whom we may not be that fond or we may not have much to say to. So we eat mindlessly to keep our feelings of frustration, boredom or annoyance at bay or to give us a reason for a diversion.

The third explanation is you may be feeling alone and wish you were with family or you are with family and wishing you were somewhere else. This can create emotions that are difficult to address and food is an easy way to push the feelings away. Food is a comfort and a coping mechanism for emotions. Do you anticipate some emotion during the Thanksgiving holiday?

This Thanksgiving be conscious of your hunger levels, find ways not to feel deprived, plan your day so you don’t get to the table filled up on hors d’oeuvres, and recognize if you are having some emotions so you can address them without turning to food. Then enjoy all your favorite things about the holiday meal.

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Handling Halloween Candy Differently

There is always concern about how much candy kids are eating at Halloween, but what about parents who consume nearly half of what the kids are bringing home? Candy is a comfort food for many of us, and when lying around in bowls and bags, it becomes a temptress greater than most adults can resist. Do you find yourself unable to stop when it comes to Halloween candy?

Instead of gearing up for a binge fest and worrying about how you are going to handle having all that candy around the house, consider what is driving you to overeat and crave it and then put some strategies in place to help yourself eat much less of it.

Some of the most common reasons people can’t seem to stop at a few pieces of Halloween candy start with feelings of deprivation.

What does this have to do with deprivation? Everything. When you believe that you shouldn’t have something, you want it all the more. And the more you try to control the urges and deprive yourself, the more you obsess and overdo it when given the chance. This is human nature, and it is easy to see in children. We tend to forget that as adults we aren’t any different. Like kids we rebel against harsh rules and restrictions that are depriving.

Here is a way to have your candy without feeling out of control.

• Pick 2-3 pieces of the candy you like most for greatest satisfaction
• Eat the candy along with one of your meals to minimize high blood sugar levels
• Pay attention to when you start to feel full and stop
• Remind yourself that you can have more at your next meal
• After a few days when your favorites are gone, figure out the best way to get rid of the rest of it.
• You won't miss it because you've let yourself enjoy it
• And you can always get more at the store if you really want more

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