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By jamie, April 18, 2012 10:59 pm

My thighs are on fire right now, and the stairs at school this afternoon were a little bit tricky. Almost on a a whim, I lugged out my fitness DVD collection last night and attempted Bob Harper’s Cardio Conditioning DVD for the first time. I lasted fifteen minutes, but there was a lot of squatting in that fifteen minutes. I also drank more water yesterday and today. I know these are small steps, but at least they are moving me in the right direction.

In other words, Coach Yourself Thin is helping so far. A lot. I have read to chapter 11, and am reading about myself more than I expected to. This section consists of several short chapters which collectively discuss “seven undermining obstacles to weight loss.” Each of these “obstacle” chapters includes a quiz filled with yes/no questions for self assessment.

Lo and behold, one of them was “all-or-nothing thinking,” my nemesis. It was odd to read myself on the page, particularly after I recently wrote about this obstacle (of course, I have been thinking about it as a character flaw – if it’s just an obstacle, maybe I will finally be able to move past it). The authors compare new dieters to new-car owners. I remember the “no food or drink rule: I instituted not quite a year and a half ago when I got my new/used car. Now the back seat is full of crumbs and melted crayons, and we aren’t going to discuss the front/passenger side.

Here is a quote: “The more gung ho and extreme your initial effort, the greater the chance that you will swing to the other extreme as soon as you hit a rough patch. You go from eating wild salmon, quinoa, and kale to downing cheeseburgers, fries, and regular sodas, or from exercising like mad to being mad that you have to exercise.” I am so sad that this is me. My initial efforts are epic. And short-lived.

That’s why I did a monthly resolution this year – instead of just saying “My NYR is to lose weight,” I said “ten pounds a month until I’m happy with my shape.” Still, it is humiliating that I only lasted two months without jumping off the wagon (notice I didn’t say “falling”). But because my goals are monthly, I can still turn it around. Before reading this chapter, I was thinking I should try to lose 20 pounds this month (how many days are left in April?) in order to “catch up” on my goal. Now I am thinking I will start where I’m at. If I can catch up along the way, I will be pretty proud of myself, but I’m going to aim for 3-4 pounds lost by the end of this month, then start with a new goal of 10 in May. I don’t know what the authors of this book would say about this plan, but I think it’s a reasonable one.

Another obstacle is labeled “feelings of unworthiness.” When I began this chapter, I did not expect to identify with it. I do not feel unworthy. I am successful in other areas of my life. I work hard at my job, I feel fulfilled as a mother, wife, daughter, etc. (the house could be cleaner, but we all have our priorities). I take the time to read and blog because it makes me a better teacher, conversationalist, and person. I also take the time to paint my nails once or twice a week because it makes me happy and I love the compliments I get. That doesn’t sound like someone who feels unworthy, right?

I DO feel overwhelmed, though, at the enormity of my task, and I feel frustrated that it’s not easier. I am not saying I want to be easy, but I shouldn’t be my own worst enemy, you know? I AM self-critical, and I DO avoid certain situations because of my weight. There were so many quotes in this section that resonated with me that I copied several of them down and I keep thinking about the.m. Somehow, this feels like a breakthrough, but them I think about my “all-or-nothing new car feeling” and it seems more prudent to just be cautiously optimistic.

There is one more quote I want to share, and it’s from the obstacle titled “not listening to the signals from your body and mind.”

[T]uning out from what your body is telling you will lead to poor health decisions. Your body’s natural signals (like hunger, fatigue, and pain) get progressively more difficult to hear amid the buzz created by caffeine, alcohol, sugar, fat, and medications. Eventually those natural signals may disappear altogether; they might still be there beneath the surface, but because you’ve spent so much time ignoring or suppressing them, you’ve lost the ability to detect them. And underneath it all, health problems are brewing. As the health problems worsen, new signals—such as reflux, low blood sugar, or painful, swollen joints—emerge. These are symptoms of disease or injury, and they’ll be much harder to ignore.

Think about that a second. Re-read it. “Your body’s natural signals (like hunger, fatigue, and pain) get progressively more difficult to hear amid the buzz created by caffeine, alcohol, sugar, fat, and medications.” That’s pretty serious. I am afraid of a lot of substances, in part for this reason – I don’t like to take medicine unless I have no choice (I even opted against the epidural), I limit caffeine, and you can count on me to be your designated driver. I have never placed sugar or fat into this same category. And with all that I have read about processed foods (and some of you have read it right along with me), this should not have sounded so groundbreaking, but it did. (Maybe it’s that “all-or-nothing” thinking again.)

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By jamie, April 16, 2012 9:03 pm

My New Year’s Resolution this year was an ambitious one – I resolved to lose 10 pounds per month until I am happy with my shape. Coming off of a great success from 2011 (no McDonald’s – I still haven’t consumed so much as a french fry!), I felt that I could finally handle a biggie. January and February went according to plan, and then some; by March 1, I was down 25 pounds. Then came March, which was a terrible month, full of stress and sadness. I have no one but myself to blame for my five pound weight gain, which became eight pounds as of this morning. I can’t even say that I am consumed with guilt about the fact that I haven’t logged my food in weeks, nor have I exercised. I have been so busy with everything else I have to do that I haven’t even given it much thought (fleeting guilt, at the most).

Hence, this book. The premise is that, if you don’t have access to an actual coach, you can coach yourself towards weight lost, not by finding a quick-fix type diet, or by engaging in turbo-restrictions (did I ever tell you about the time I stopped eating carbohydrates? – I looked really cute and fit until my hair started falling out), but by changing your mindset. This shift will allow you to develop better habits, which will lead to real weight loss success.

I read through Chapter 4. I haven’t decided how to read/blog this book yet, because much of it includes activities, some of which take several days to accomplish (for example, the first one asks you to set a small non-scale-related goal, such as drink four glasses of water a day, commit to it, and see how you feel after a few days of practice). I may take it super slowly and do the exercises as I go, or I might just read it through, and then either review it right away or wait and review it after I have made some progress.

From the beginning chapters, the authors are pushing in the direction of positive change – no processed food, don’t just hang out on the couch without moving, etc. I’m feeling a bit twitchy because, of course, I know this stuff, but I’m counting on the part where they help me change my mindset. Oh, and “people who get 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep each night are thinner than those who get fewer than 7 hours.” This is not news to me – maybe hearing it a thousand times will finally convince me to try sleeping more consistently.

Here is a quote:

The Coach Approach is that negative thoughts don’t lead to change. Transformation is the result of positive feelings that build you up rather than tear you down, so improving your self-esteem and confidence actually precedes weight-loss success.

The Coach Approach is that you may need to lower the bar in order to jump over it. Keeping your weight-loss expectations realistic from the get-go will motivate you to move forward instead of frustrating you so much that you give up before you’ve even started. You can continue to increase your standards as you make progress and gain confidence in your abilities.

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By jamie, April 15, 2012 8:21 pm

I finished the book. It left me feeling a bit down, thinking about my overachieving friends when I was in high school and the years that I, too, tried to live on very little sleep to be the best. Sometimes I think the lack of sleep might have stunted my growth (I don’t quite clear 5’2″). Even now I give up sleep to get things done, and when I read that this is a likely factor in my struggle to lose weight, I feel angry and consider drastic measures like attempting to grade papers while riding an exercise bike or maybe spending eight hours a day on a treadmill (I can read while I’m on there, and I have plenty to read).

I have a bit of a problem in my head sometimes, thinking things have to be all or nothing. It’s very hard to walk the moderate path. I pour myself into teaching at the expense of a clean house (which I tend to completely ignore until someone wants to come over and visit); when I try to lose weight, I am either firmly and extremely committed, or I leap off the wagon after taking a running start. Blogging is one way I try to practice moderation, and I admit that I’m not very good at it yet – - ideally I would like to do at least a little bit every day (maybe take one day off a week), but more often I walk away from it for days or weeks at a time if I can’t fully commit to a self-designated weekly post minimum. Reading about the overachieving kids, who stress themselves out to be the best, I was perversely reminded of myself at various times in my life.

But enough about me. The book ends with updates on the students featured in the case studies. Robbins mentions that further updates are available on her website, but I could not find them. With few exceptions, these are “all” kids – pushing themselves in every aspect of their lies, even if it’s painful to do so. It sounds as though some of them will be able to relax a bit once they enter college (and the Harvard Freshman featured in the book sounds as though he is going to be just fine – I really wish I could have found updated information about him on Robbins’ website). She also gives suggestions to parents, students, and others involved in education.

We live in an extremely competitive society, and it’s only getting worse. I look at my smart, talented, beautiful little daughter and, with all my heart, I want the best for her. We work hard to encourage her without pressuring her, but I think she has already internalized some of the socially-driven expectation of perfection. Here is an example: lately, she will only write her name in capital letters. Her name is Noa, so there is only one real lowercase letter to write, and she won’t do it. She has been writing her name for a very long time, but she had been using upper- and lowercase letters until very recently. I asked her about it yesterday – dismissively, she said, “It’s okay. I don’t know how to make a lowercase ‘a’ so I don’t write my name like that anymore.” I let it drop so it doesn’t become a “thing,” but she’s right – she did struggle with that “a.” Hers looked like a “p” so her name would look like “Nop” whenever she wrote it. I would try to work with her, and presumably so would her teachers at school, and she was really improving – the tail on the backwards “a” was getting smaller and smaller. Then one day she “fixed” the problem by reverting to all-caps. This way, no one corrects her writing – her capital “A” is excellent. How can I help her fix this (the fear of imperfection, not the imperfect penmanship) without making it worse?

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By jamie,

This weekend our daughter had an Alice in Wonderland themed birthday “tea” party with a few of her friends (the tea was really lemonade). One of the girls finished her tea early and wanted to go play outside, but her mother told her she had to “keep [her] bottom in a chair” until the other girls had finished up. Kids are so smart – she waited until her mother wasn’t looking, then quickly moved into Little Mama’s “little red chair, ” a light-weight, child-sized chair that is easy to carry around. Careful to keep the chair firmly attached to her rear end, she then walked herself outside to play. No rules were broken (unless you count the second or two it took her to switch seat).

This section of the book is all about loopholes (I read through Chapter 14). There were plenty of exceptions to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, and people used these as loopholes to have alcohol if they wanted it.

Loophole One: each person was allowed a certain amount of homemade fermented fruit juice (it wasn’t technically assumed to be alcoholic, and was supposed to allow people who grew fruits to make use of some of their harvests). Grape growers got exceptionally rich by shipping mashed up grapes all over the country. Okrent says that, for a time, grape prices got so high that former wine makers were earning nearly exponentially more by just shipping grapes than they did making and selling wines (of course, some of them lamented that the quality of home-fermented wine was sub-standard, but they kept ion shipping the grapes. I vaguely remember making my high school science class making wine – as I recall, it wasn’t that hard to do (of course, no one was allowed to taste it, and it might not have been potable at all).

Loophole Two: Alcohol remained legal for religious purposes. In short, their motives were noble ones and, in the end, some priests and rabbis also managed to become very wealthy because of Prohibition. Also, a surprising number of people became Catholic or Jewish during this time. Here is a quote:

American Jews had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment with the near unanimity and absolute vehemence that seized American Catholics. For both groups, it wasn’t simply a matter of protecting the free practice of their respective religions. Like the Catholics, the Jews peered behind the Prohibition banner and saw the white-hooded hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and the foaming xenophobia of the nativist pastors who dominated the Methodist and Baptist churches. It was a view summarized by a speaker at the annual meeting of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1914: the effort to place Prohibition in the Constitution, the rabbi declared, could be attributed to “the ambition of ecclesiastic tyrants.”

Loophole Three: Alcohol remained legal for medicinal purposes. Evidently a lot of doctors and pharmacists prescribed straight whiskey or other spirits for various ailments, or used it in their various tonics. Some of them fancied up their prescriptions by calling it “Spiritus Frumenti” which means “spirit of the grain.” This reminds me of the current situation with marijuana – it is legal for medicinal purposes in California and other places, and I often hear people joking about how easy it is to get a prescription for it: Headache? Medical marijuana. Hangnail? Medical marijuana. Seems like the same thing was going on with whiskey back in those dark days of Prohibition.

They still put alcohol in some medicines, don’t they? When we were kids, they used to give us “Baby Percy Medicine” whenever we had stomach problems. That stuff contained quite a lot of alcohol, and it worked every time – as I recall, it made us fall contentedly to sleep, but you’ll have to check with my mom or grandma as to whether this was really the case. I Googled it and found an assortment of websites listing the alcohol content at 5% (don’t quote me on this – I made no attempt to verify this). Hm – doesn’t Nyquil have a fairly high amount of alcohol too?

Evidently, you can still buy it (you'll never guess where). The URL (and where this image was taken from) is printed as a footnote.

Here is my favorite quote from this section:

Charles Walgreen…had built his Chicago-based chain from nine locations in 1916 to twenty just four years later. In 1922 Walgreens introduced the malted milk shake, which family historians have credited with the chain’s next growth spurt. But it’s doubtful that milk shakes alone were responsible for Walgreens’ rocketing expansion from 20 stores to an astonishing 525 during the 1920s. The author sites, as evidence, a quote from one of the heirs, about having to call the fire department to the stores and hoping that they would leave quickly “because whenever they came in we’d always lose a case of liquor from the back.”

Not another loophole, but the book mentions that soft drinks did well during Prohibition, and not just because they gave the compliant something besides water to drink. Soft drinks were also used to mask the awful taste of home made spirits.

Footnote: The URL for the Percy Medicine is (wait for it): www.walgreens.com

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By jamie, April 10, 2012 3:49 am

When I attended community college, they used to give us a “welcome pack” every semester, containing a really cool planner, and several product samples like breath mints and deodorant. One time the sample pack contained “NoDoz.” I am not a coffee drinker, and, while I have had my share of chocolate, I have not been one to consume caffeine in doses high enough to brink about what I have heard people refer to as “caffeine headaches” whenever they are away from the stuff for too long. Anyway, I put the caffeine tablets in my purse and pretty much forgot about them until one day, after I had pulled an all-nighter and was feeling like I could barely hang on. I was trying to will my eyes to stay opened when I remembered – impulsively, I swallowed them down without any water, and hoped that I would be able to stay awake in my next class. I was awake alright – awake and jittery. At one point, I tried to speak, and my words came out all jumbled because my brain was running faster than my mouth could. It was horrible. Admittedly, I have attempted it since this – in tea form, but after about three cups my fingers don’t type properly and my whole body feels shaky and uncomfortable (I’m awake, but I’m not sure how efficiently I work in this condition). [I read through chapter 14.]

I guess my caffeine sensitivity is probably a blessing in disguise because it keeps me from being tempted by other things – admittedly, like so many others, I sometimes wish that there was some magic substance I could take that would enable me to skip the need for sleep [that was the most compelling part of The Twilight series for me - can you imagine how much you could accomplish if you didn't ever have to sleep, and you didn't ever feel sleepy?]. This part of the book talks about teenagers using much more than coffee to stay awake, including prescription drugs. Here is a quote – see how tempting it sounds (if you aren’t afraid of strange potential side effects, like I am)?

The pills are considered universal enhancers, meaning that even students without ADD could gain a longer and more focused attention span from the pills. “It won’t make you smarter, but if the material is hard, you’ll be able to stick with it longer, plow through it. You’re able to concentrate better,” said California pediatrician Lawrence Diller. “People with ADHD who are performing below average on mental aspects that require continued concentration and attention to detail, when you give them Adderall or Ritalin, their performance improves to normal levels. If you give [non-ADHD] people who are performing normally in these tasks low doses, their performance improves to supranormal levels.”

Some kids get a false ADD diagnosis in order to get the pills (by convincing a psychiatrist that they have it). Others make a fortune selling the pills to overachieving students who want an edge. None of my students admit to this, but they sometimes mention knowing someone who has, typically in high school. I am so afraid of taking unnecessary medication that it seems shocking that anyone would do this – then I remember the feeling of sleeping only a few hours a night for weeks on end. And I guess the drugs would be pretty easy to get in high school – I remember reading about ADHD drugs being over-prescribed to kids (are they the same drugs as for ADD?) and now I wonder what percentage of diagnoses for older kids are for those who really just want a “magic pill” to help them get more schoolwork done. Someone Robbins interviewed for the book actually refers to these drugs as “academic steroids.”

The other most interesting part of this section is about the SAT. I hadn’t realized that so many colleges no longer require this test (for many it is optional). The most disturbing quote: “Until 1994, “SAT” stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” But generally, students’ “aptitude” increased by thirty points for every $10,000 their parents earned in yearly income. A California study found that the level of parents’ education alone explained more than 50 percent of the difference in students’ SAT scores. The SAT has historically been accused of racial bias, with minorities regularly scoring below the national average for white students.” I knew about the racial bias, but combined with those other two statistics, it sounds as though the SAT is a form of “affirmative action” for upper middle class white people. Go figure. I am curious to see the actual results of these studies.