The Life You Want Read online

  What you can change, however, is what gives you pleasure as well as your tolerance for discomfort.

  The majority of people who succeed at weight loss have the same built-in inclinations and susceptibilities as you; they’ve simply been able to overcome them or at least manage them. And not because they’re superhuman. Most of them have successfully changed what gives them pleasure and increased their tolerance for discomfort because they’ve changed the most important thing of all: their minds. They think differently now about what it takes to reach weight loss goals. If they once may have believed that success was all about transforming their bodies with diet and physical activity, they know now that it’s really much more about transforming their lives. To obtain a healthier weight, you must, of course, change your eating and exercise habits—that’s a given. But the newer and more effective approach to obtaining a healthier weight entails changing your attitudes and the way you live.

  Earlier I mentioned several of the things that can stand in the way of weight loss, such as unfulfilling jobs, family dramas, and emotional scars, to name just a few. These are issues far more serious than a weakness for desserts, so you can see that clearing the hurdles they present may take some major life renovations. Your relationship with your significant other, your work, financial issues, friendships, priorities—and especially the way you view and treat yourself—may have to change or at least be examined. It’s no exaggeration to say that successful losers undergo a true transformation, one that ranks up there with other biggies, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, from single person to spouse, from dependent student to independent breadwinner.

  Ann, Janis, and I have all observed this phenomenon time and time again, and we’re not alone. It’s also one of the findings of a landmark study called the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR). Some of the most interesting and valuable knowledge those of us in the health field have gained about weight loss comes from the NWCR, a project begun back in 1994 by two researchers, one from the University of Colorado and one from Brown University. Since then, those researchers and their colleagues have collected information on more than six thousand people who’ve met the enrollment criteria: a loss of at least thirty pounds maintained for one or more years. (The average weight loss among the participants is actually sixty-six pounds, maintained for an average of five and a half years; some of them have even kept their weight off for more than sixteen years!)

  There are many things that have helped the NWCR participants prevent weight regain. I will fill out the picture for you in a later chapter, but in the meantime, I think it’s important to know at the outset of your own journey that transformation played a critical role in their success. “Radical weight loss without a newly defined identity is impossible to maintain, as massive evidence has shown in countless research studies, including the NWCR,” says Inga Treitler, PhD, a cultural anthropologist who has spent intense one-on-one time documenting the lives of NWCR participants. “This new identity requires letting go of part of the old life and adopting new habits that fit with the transformed identity.”

  In my own observations, I’ve seen that sometimes the transformations are small: the guy who gives up a life in front of the TV to go out and play baseball with his son, the woman who skips enchiladas and margaritas with the gals to work out at the gym, the couple who replace their drinking buddies with walking buddies. And sometimes the transformations are radical. There’s the workaholic who switches (and downsizes) careers, the mom who confronts and ultimately spends less time with family members who are sabotaging her efforts to improve her health, and the people who even go so far as to end a relationship in order to better their lives.

  Years ago, I met a man at my gym—call him John—who was worried about his wife—let’s refer to her as Denise—a woman both overweight and unhappy. I was already overbooked at the time, but this man’s genuine concern for his wife made me decide to free up time for an initial consultation with Denise. She ended up becoming a regular client.

  Denise slowly started dropping weight, but she still seemed just as unhappy as when we’d started. The more I worked with her, the clearer it became why: Although she cared for John, he was holding her back in many ways, not the least of which was from pursuing her dream of acting. What’s more, while John had engaged me to help Denise, the closer she got to her goal weight, the more threatened he became by her newfound confidence and determination. Their marriage obviously wasn’t working for many reasons, these being just two of them. I knew that Denise would have to address the problems in her marriage if she ever wanted to reach her goal weight and live a happy life, and eventually she did. Denise and John divorced, and shortly thereafter, she landed the lead in a play—her lifelong dream. Through her work on the stage, she met the man of her dreams, also an actor, whom she later married.

  A cautionary tale? Yes and no. I’m not saying that divorce is the answer to all of life’s problems. In Denise’s case, her strained marriage was preventing her from Realizing her dreams and living a happy and fulfilled life. Is something preventing you from realizing your dreams and living a happy and fulfilled life? realizing what changes you need to make and actually acting on them can be hard, even painful. But the results—happiness, joy, confidence, a renewed sense of self, to name just a few—are more than worth it.

  HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

  While you’ll find practical advice about eating and exercise scattered throughout, this book is really about how to improve your psychological and emotional well-being. It’s all about exposing the barriers that not only seem to make it logistically impossible to eat well and exercise but also sap your motivation to do either. This is the book that’s going to help you get to the bottom of why you keep starting diet and fitness programs enthusiastically only to lose your incentive and stop (and then start and stop all over again). Or, if you’ve never gotten started in the first place, this is the book that’s going to help you understand why. Everything in these pages is designed to help you attend to what’s going on inside you (your mind, your way of thinking) so that you can get on with the business of improving what’s on your outside (your body weight). So how do you go about that?

  First, I believe it’s helpful to look at the big picture. There are many, many obstacles that stand in the way of weight loss, and we’ll run through them systematically throughout this book. However, there are also a few common and particularly significant barriers that trip people up. Those barriers range from feelings of unworthiness to sexual abuse. One or more—or perhaps none—of them may strike a chord with you, but whichever it is, reading about these obstacles will get the wheels turning in your head and help you to begin thinking about what in your life is holding you back from success.

  The chapters that follow get even more specific and cover six separate but interrelated topics: overcoming overeating, becoming a healthy eater, ending exercise aversion, improving your body image, learning how to maintain weight loss, and pursuing happiness. Whether it’s Ann, Janis, or me doing the talking, our goal is the same: to help you take a thorough and honest look at your attitude toward each aspect of achieving your best possible life. I find that most people operate on autopilot, rarely taking the time to be introspective about the reasons they do—or don’t do—things. Each chapter is designed to slow you down, help you become more self-reflective, and see yourself in a clearer light. Some of that will come from asking yourself questions. We’ll ask you to “interview” yourself to assess how motivated you are to change various aspects of your life. Some of it will also come from reading about different scenarios that prevent people from reaching their weight loss goals—scenarios that I think will sound familiar. When you can recognize yourself in a situation and say, “Hey, that’s me!” you’re moving toward finding the reason(s) that you haven’t been able to lose weight or maintain weight loss in the past.

  At points we’ll ask you to take stock of what you’re eating and how much you’re moving, even how many
hours of sleep you get, by keeping a detailed log. You may have kept food or exercise logs in the past; this time around we’ll guide you on how to best use this valuable information to make significant shifts in the way you act and even think. If you’re like most people, you probably dread the idea of logging—but I strongly suggest that you try it, at least for a few days or a week. Study after study proves it and I’ve seen firsthand with my clients: Logging is an important tool in achieving weight loss success.

  While recognizing your personal barriers is half the battle, you’ll also need to take practical steps to better your psychological and emotional life. If, for instance, you’re stressed at work and at home because you have a lack of boundaries—you take on every office responsibility and household task regardless of the fact that you’re overwhelmed—how do you go about creating limits and taking the pressure off yourself? Or, if you hate to exercise (and, in my experience, most inactive people put exercise in the same category as dental work), how do you learn to like it, or at least find a way to endure it? We’ll be giving you tangible solutions to these and many other dilemmas that stand in the way of weight loss success.

  Soul-searching, which this approach to weight loss requires a lot of, is never easy. But it’s almost always productive. It’s somewhat like looking at a road map: You need to know where you are before you can determine how to get to where you want to go. Moving forward, though, almost always requires making one or more tough decisions. I’ve never met someone who’s lost weight and kept it off long term who didn’t make the choice to change something significant (a job, a relationship, a cherished habit) in his or her life.

  There are essentially two ways you can look at the difficulties ahead of you. You can feel put upon and sorry for yourself, angry that life isn’t fair, or you can see the challenges that lay before you as an opportunity to alter something about yourself or your situation that you don’t like. Which attitude do you think is going to help you get and stay motivated? Embracing the challenges, of course! It’s what separates people who succeed from people who don’t. While the prevailing sentiment “woe is me” drains motivation, looking at the hurdles you face as a chance to take a new direction in life can give you meaning and purpose and be a powerful motivator. In some ways, you might even consider being overweight a blessing, as it is calling attention to something else that needs to be addressed. Anything that gives you the impetus to make profound changes in your life could be considered a good thing.

  Naturally, my goal isn’t just to get you to make changes; my goal is to get you to make changes that last. It’s wonderful if you lose weight, but only if you keep it off. In chapter 6, we’ll revisit the National Weight Control Registry. How have the participants in the registry managed to keep off the weight they lost? Once you make the transformation I hope this book inspires you to make, how do you keep from edging back to your old self? I think the lessons learned from successful people will provide some insight into both the practical matters of weight maintenance and what you might call matters of enthusiasm.

  Over the last decade, the number one question people ask me is, “How do you stay motivated?” It would be nice if I had one answer for everyone, but the truth is that the answer is different for each person. Finding what motivates you is a process that starts with identifying what’s important in your life, picturing your life as you want it to be, recognizing the barriers that keep you from having that life, then compiling a plan of action to remove the obstacles standing in your way. You need to know what life you want (as well as what life you don’t want), then you have to muster up the will and the drive to go after it. Make the tough choices, remove those barriers, and you’ll be on your way to living—really living the life you want.

  1

  * * *

  BARRIERS TO

  WEIGHT LOSS

  SUCCESS

  * * *

  By Bob Greene

  ON SOME DAYS, MOTIVATION comes easily. You just feel tired of your old life and ready to make a new one for yourself. Bring on the challenge, you say to yourself, I’m ready to go. Then the next day . . . you aren’t. That inspired feeling, that drive to do things differently, has slipped through your fingers like grains of sand. Where did it go? Why do you feel a strong incentive to change one day and so unmotivated the next?

  We all have barriers that can get in the way of our success. It’s part of the human condition, where nothing is simple and everything is interconnected. Messy thoughts and emotions, complex relationships, deeply imprinted habits, disquieting memories, the demands of a very complicated world—these things all conspire to set up roadblocks that make it difficult to achieve our goals. And when one of those goals is to achieve a healthier weight, our human physiological wiring also gets thrown into the mix, adding another obstacle to success. Once you get fired up about something and want to change, it should be easy to sustain that drive and enthusiasm. It should be easy, but there are many, many reasons why it’s not.

  Those reasons—barriers, as I call them—are at the heart of this book. The following chapters are going to discuss them in detail and, most important, give you direction on how to overcome them. First, though, I’d like to talk about eight of those barriers that I think are particularly significant. Professionals who work in the field of weight loss find that these eight barriers are especially prevalent among people who are on the diet and exercise roller coaster. When someone continually goes on and off weight loss programs, always gaining back the weight that was lost, it’s almost certain that one or more of these obstacles are standing in his or her way. And not only do these obstacles derail healthy eating and exercise, they also erode motivation. So even if you start out gung ho for change, it’s hard to stay motivated when you are constantly hitting the equivalent of a cement wall.

  While we’ll be dealing with these eight barriers in considerable depth throughout the book, I want to introduce you to them now to get you thinking about what might be the biggest challenges to your own success, and to prepare you to examine yourself on an even deeper level in the chapters to come. You may find that one or more of these eight barriers apply to you, while some of them do not. At the very least, though, reading through them may help you better grasp the concept of why losing weight isn’t just a matter of finding the right diet and exercise plan. A lot of people are quick to blame failure on the diets or exercise programs they’ve tried, believing that if they could only discover an absolutely spectacular plan, their motivation would never flag and they would achieve long-term weight loss. The truth is, that kind of thinking only distracts you from discovering what’s really preventing you from achieving a healthier weight, and it keeps you from doing the work you need to do to be successful. Taking an honest look at what you want in life and figuring out what you need to do to get there is a much better way to spend your time—and a much greater predictor of success.

  Are you aware of any of the barriers that might have prevented you from losing weight in the past? Some people can accurately name the barriers they face; however, many are completely unaware of their existence. Or they’re focusing on the wrong ones. This book is all about helping you find the right ones—the barriers that are affecting you personally. Sometimes you just need someone to hold up a mirror so that you can see yourself better, and that’s our aim here. Becoming aware of what’s standing in your way is the first step toward surmounting those hurdles.

  Almost everyone who has achieved something meaningful has overcome some kind of barrier. It’s a powerful experience that changes your life in profound ways. One of the critical differences between people who are successful and those who aren’t is that successful people view obstacles as a challenge. Think of basketball great Michael Jordan, who, if you can believe it, was actually cut from his high school basketball team. Albert Einstein was harshly criticized when he first presented some of his ideas, and one of America’s most beloved poets, Emily Dickinson, published little in her lifetime and was reviewed unfavo
rably by critics, but she kept writing nonetheless. There are countless examples of people who have not let setbacks stand in their way.

  When you take action to improve your situation and overcome whatever is preventing you from losing weight, you won’t end up with just a slimmer body. You will end up with a newfound confidence and drive, an ability to take control of your life and make the things that you want in all areas of your life happen. Losing weight, while important, is the least of it. Identifying and overcoming your barriers helps you become not just a physically healthier person but also a psychologically and emotionally healthier person. That’s when you’re going to be living a much richer and more fulfilling life.

  EIGHT SIGNIFICANT BARRIERS TO SUCCESS

  Barrier 1: An Aversion to Discomfort and Pain

  Like all creatures, we are programmed to move toward pleasure and to avoid pain. It’s part of our survival instincts. Let’s forget the pleasure half of the equation for a moment and talk about pain—or, really, its somewhat lesser cousin, discomfort. The most obvious things that cause discomfort and make it hard for people to change their eating and exercise habits are (1) the anxiety and dissatisfaction they feel when they are denied foods that their bodies crave with every inch of their being, and (2) the unpleasant (and slightly panicky) feeling that arises during exercise when their breathing accelerates and their muscles begin to throb. I want the instant gratification of my chocolate muffin. My stomach rumbles if I don’t have something to eat before bed. I don’t want to feel sweaty or my heart beating against my chest. Anyone who hates deprivation and physical exertion—and a large number of people do—is going to find it hard to stick to a plan that requires coping with both things regularly.