Week 50 is here, which means it's been almost a year since I started my eating plan (a little more than a year since I started this blog). I haven't lost nearly as much weight as I'd hoped to (not even a pound a week), but I've made great progress on learning the behaviors I will need to stay thin for the rest of my life. And for the first time, I'm below 160 pounds, which means I've reached another milestone.
This past week I was challenged by lunch out with my coworkers at a restaurant that featured large quantities of high-calorie foods. I would have liked to have met the challenge more successfully, but I did learn some things. The first challenge was the cost of the meal: it was much higher than I'm willing to pay normally. This by itself was not bad. The problem was that with a meal that expensive I wanted to get my money's worth, but to do that meant eating more than I should. So I had to decide whether I would be happier eating less than my money's worth, or eating more than I should. Was there a way to compromise? I tried to find one by eating from the salad bar first so that I might be too full to eat much of the meats that were offered in quantities limited only by the diner's appetite. Since the idea of going to a Brazilian steak house is to eat the meat, I felt I was at least going to get an experience for my money by choosing both the salad bar and the meat.
Well, the first part worked pretty well. I ate from the salad bar some nice veggies (asparagus was one), but also ate some of the creamy soup and bacon chunks (they were much bigger than bits) and a little pasta roll. The second part was also moderately successful. When the meat started to arrive, I ate small slices, but it was so fatty that even a small slice was probably high in calories. It was tasty though, and I tried to eat slowly and enjoy it. I ended up not eating everything I was served, but I was still pretty full when I pushed the plate away. When the dessert cart came around, I said no along with my fellows.
Interestingly enough, when I saw the dessert cart, the first thing I asked myself was, "Is it included?" Of course, that should make no difference. The proper question should be, "Do I want any dessert?" Once again the old "waste not, want not" subterfuge (in one of its variations: "I have to get my money's worth") came into play, tempting me to ignore the fact that I'd already had more than enough to eat. Even then, I might have gone for it if someone else at the table had offered to share a dessert (no one did). The cakes and puddings looked very rich and were probably delicious, but again, that was not the issue.
But this is the kind of eating behavior problem that persists in showing up to try to take me down just as I'm getting close to my goal. And they're not going to go away without some extra effort. In her book, Learn to Be Thin, Shirley Simon offers what she calls "Extra Help Techniques" to deal with the more stubborn eating problems that prevent people from succeeding. I've already outlined the first technique that was introduced in Step 9: The Clue-Finding Technique. Step 10 describes the "Zeroing-In Technique" (160).
In the Zeroing-In Technique, we choose the eating problems we want to work on and then find and employ the best way to solve them. In this step she also introduces coping levels 1 through 7. The coping levels outline how well you deal with temptation when faced with it. For instance, if one of your eating problems is that you can't stop eating ice cream once you start, you might not be able to cope with ice cream at level one, the highest level, where you are face-to-face with your nemesis without any help--that is, the take-it-or-leave-it level. The lowest coping level, seven, is where you can't even stand to have it around and so to avoid temptation, you have to keep the problem food out of your life entirely. In between are coping levels 2-6, where you can have it around, but have to do something to avoid eating it, whether it's facing it under controlled conditions, or keeping your hands or mouth busy without eating it, eating something innocuous instead, or making it difficult to get to it. In psychology terms, the process of moving through such coping levels is called successive approximation.
For each problem eating behavior, you choose which coping level you are at currently, then gradually try to move up to level one: face-to-face without any help. So take my problem of not eating responsibly at a restaurant, for instance. To change that behavior, I need to work on getting to level one, where no matter the occasion or the restaurant, I will eat only those things that are appropriate to eat and refuse those that aren't. Before I do that, though, I need to decide what level I'm at now. I'm not sure about it, but I'm going to do some research and find out.
So that's what I'm going to do this week coming up. I'll report on my results next week!
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