Diet Survivors™ newsletter August 2007
The newsletter for normal eaters
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About this issue
This issue of Diet Survivors™ is targeted especially to our male subscribers, but if you're a woman, don't despair! There's information in here for everyone, and it just may help you to help a man in your life.
Eat like a man again—but not like a fat man
So you've tried some diets, and even stuck to the rules about "good foods" and "bad foods" for a while, using that old dubious friend, willpower. Perhaps you dutifully followed the low-fat diet and chowed down on manly mounds of macaroni-hold-the-meat sauce, or maybe you tried to go low-carb, and dove into robust ribeyes-and-broccoli-hold-the-potatoes.
And you probably bought into the message that if you stick with these diets, you "get to eat more food," as if a manly appetite means an enormous appetite. But after a while, you hated your unbalanced meals, desperately missing foods you once loved. You re-doubled your efforts for a while, having tasted success in the form of a lower number on the scale, and maybe the use of a once-unused hole on your belt.
But your subconscious began a mantra of "I can't live this way." You began daydreaming of off-limits cuisine at the most inopportune times such as at church or while you're out on a date.
The diet, once your friend, has now become your enemy, and you lose your resolve, returning once more to normal eating, but with some uncontrollable bingeing thrown in for good measure. The weight comes back with a vengeance. Now you are allowing all foods, but with a bigger appetite than ever, and the uphill battle has just become steeper.
Is there another way to approach weight loss?
Yes there is, says Karen R. Koenig, LICSW, MEd., and author of The Rules of "Normal" Eating: For Overeaters, Undereaters, Emotional Eaters, Chronic Dieters, and Everyone in Between! According to Koenig, learning to find one's own hunger and fullness signals is critical to weight control. And this is just as important for men as it is for women.
Says Koenig, "Like women, men are often tuned into externals—muscles, clothes, appearance—rather than feeling truly connected to their bodies. Thinking about hunger, food preferences, fullness, and satisfaction levels may be foreign concepts. They may feel they don't know how to tune into their appetite or that they don't have the time, and therefore they just grab whatever is available foodwise."
According to Koenig, adjusting to smaller portions is the answer. And it's not as hard as you might think. You won't have to deprive yourself of any food choices, and neither will you have to launch into feelings therapy or uncover childhood issues. Rather, it's a simple matter of becoming aware of when you're hungry and full.
In short, you will learn to interrogate yourself.
What's at the bottom of all the weight gain anyway?
A study was conducted from 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2000 by the North American Association for the Study of Obesity to find out trends in obesity. Interestingly, the largest increases in the prevalence of high risk waist circumference occurred among men and women 20 to 39 years old.
This is a telling statistic. Had the at-risk age bracket been senior citizens, we might more easily explain it away. But the fact that such young adults are the ones struggling the most with weight gain is difficult to attribute to aging, heredity, or even to wrong food choices alone.
What's going on here? Are portion sizes to blame? Curiously, as our growing middle class has become more sedentary in our jobs, we have also shifted toward larger portion sizes. Of course, this trend is irrational when you consider that the middle class worker burns far fewer calories per day than, say, the garbage hauler, the bridge builder, or the farmer.
Our nation's demand for large amounts of food is reflected in the increased portion sizes offered both by restaurants and supermarkets, but is less obvious at home, where we can snack freely between meals.
Our demand is also a central theme of "low-fat" dieting, as in, "I'm on a low-fat diet so that I can eat more food." (But why do we want to eat more food? Is this a worthy goal?) The low-fat dieter unwittingly increases his visual appetite for larger mounds of food, thus altering his expectations of how much he is permitted, even entitled, to eat in a day.
Trying to eat like a man the low-carb way
Likewise, the low-carb diet, so popular among men because it bolsters men's view of manly eating both in food content and in allowable portions, encourages the same mentality of entitlement to large portions. The low-carb dieter starts out enthusiastically eliminating all carbohydrates.
As promised by the diet, his body goes into "ketosis," burning most or all the calories consumed as fuel instead of storing it away as fat. He's allowed to eat all the steak, salad, and dressing he wants, and is even encouraged to continue eating until he is quite full. He eats a lot. This happy burger-binger begins to lose weight, but over time, he also starts to miss his fries.
So he cheats a little, and adds a potato chip or two. He's even told this is okay after he has kick-started the weight loss with a carb-free beginning. But now his appetite is larger than when he started. And the weight loss stalls, now that he's including carbohydrates again.
Sadly, for many men, this is often when the scale begins to deliver bad news. This is the time when men either give up or redouble their efforts to again eliminate carbs completely, and subsequently develop an eating disorder in which they find themselves bingeing on carbs when nobody's looking.
Redefining manly eating
The duality of fewer calories burned paired with larger portion sizes has had a devastating effect on men. Sedentary men today are being told to satisfy their large appetites, and if they get too fat, just "go on a diet."
Manliness has long been equated with certain food choices, leaning in the direction of the steak and potato, burger and fries class. Some of our older readers might remember the book, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, the title of which made its way into our homes and conversations a few decades ago.
This attitude about what men do and do not eat is probably pretty harmless—while questionable as to its accuracy, such a definition of manly eating is about food preferences rather than portion sizes.
The greater harm is to be found in the belief that manly portions are large portions. While historically, this attitude may have once made sense, recalling that men's work once consisted largely of manual labor, it makes no sense at all in today's information-based economy, where more men than ever sit at desks. They just aren't burning the thousands of calories per day that they are still insisting on consuming in the name of manliness.
The result is obesity. But is there really anything masculine about obesity? Most folks don't think so. See the above cartoon if you're not sure. It's time to alter our definition of a manly appetite.
To eat like a man today, and be healthy, strong, and slim, you can still hang onto the traditional food choices if you want to. But it appeals to logic that manly portions today must be smaller than they used to be.
For some men, this adjustment in their beliefs is all that's needed. But what about the guilt and self-condemnation you've systematically learned from your dieting years? Isn't it still helpful to think in terms of good foods and bad foods?
Absolutely not. As we've explored, the experts can't even agree as to which are the good and bad foods. It's time to throw the good-food-bad-food guilt away. And while you're at it, ditch the entire diet as well.
How to measure your success
Now that you've tossed the diet and the guilt, there's a better way to measure your daily success.
It's time to realize that the only criteria you need, in order to know whether you're being "good," are:
- Did I wait until I was hungry before eating?
- Did I do my best to stop when I thought I might be eighty percent full?
- Am I eating reasonably balanced meals? (Your own wisdom is the best guideline)
- Am I sticking with only delicious, satisfying foods?
That's it. If you can answer "yes" to these questions, that's all you need to know. So simple. If you like to be mathematical, you could even score yourself a zero or one for each question, with a goal of four for each meal.
For example, if you answered "yes" to the first three questions, but "no" to the fourth because you ate that salad with diet dressing even though it didn't taste good, your total score is three. Not bad, but you can do better. Incredibly, if you ditch the diet and strive for a "four" at each meal, you will eventually reach your ideal weight.
Of course, the purpose of scoring is only to change your habits. Experts tell us that it takes about seven weeks to establish a new habit. Eventually, you can swtitch to auto-pilot and become more like a normal eater than you've dreamed possible.
For more information about this hunger and fullness method, read "What do Diet Survivors™ do about their eating problems?"
Did you know?
That many cases of erectile dysfunction today are associated with overweight? If that doesn't put a nail into the coffin of large manly portions, nothing ever will. The good news is that the problem is reversible.
Here are some links for your further study:
- Overweight men risk impotence Article from BBC Health News
- Obesity and erectile dysfunction PubMed
- Effect of Lifestyle Changes on Erectile Dysfunction in Obese Men Journal of the American Medical Association
(Disclaimer: While our editors concur with the integrity of the above-cited studies, we do not necessarily agree with their recommended remedies for obesity. We maintain that the "hunger and fullness" method alone is the best approach to permanent weight loss.)
Learn more about the new book, How to Survive Your Diet, available now!
What is normal eating?
Visit our Diet Survivors™ group on
Yahoo!
Subscribe to this monthly newsletter
Eat like a man again |
What's the cause of the weight gain? |
Trying to eat like a man |
Redefining manly eating |
Measuring your success |
Erectile dysfunction and obesity
Copyright © 2005, Linda E. Moran. All rights reserved.
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