You Can't Go Home Again

When you go on the Optifast diet, if you follow it and do not cheat, it is like being in a nice secure bubble. You are insulated from all the bad things that you were doing that turned you into a Thanksgiving Day float. But eventually, you have to leave the bubble. The rest of the world doesn't live in there. That's when your time comes and it's "fly little bird, fly!!" It's time to do the hard work. It's time to look at the real world and address all the things that contributed to the XXL or XXXL person who walked through that door on day one.

At week 12, I hit 219 lbs. I had now shed about 60 plus lbs of ugly fat. 12 weeks is an incredibly fast time to lose that amount of weight. It is weird in that you just seem to be hitting stride and now it is time to think about managing your life OFF the diet. My original goal as set by the doctor was 215. My personal goal was 205. I was basically where the doctor thought I should be. Next week, we would talk about adding another meal to the daily plan. As I have said, I was on three shakes per day plus one carefully measured dinner meal. I now had to consider a diet that was 100% real food. The Miriam Hospital program, in my opinion, excelled at showing you how to manage your eating like a normal person. Strike that. Our country is now comprised of a population where over 50% are considered overweight, obese and morbidly obese. This condition is becoming the 'norm.' So this program was teaching us how to eat within the boundaries of a normal human body, not at the levels we have become accustomed to as a society.

To do this, the education program in broken into behavior and dietary management. I have said this over and over, but the diet management was the most valuable to me. I am going to cover some of the topics in the next few blog entries.

A man of 210 lbs burns about 2000 calories per day. If you want to lose weight over a long term, you should restrict your intake to about 1600-1800 calories per day. Exercise plays an important role. First, you need to have enough energy to exercise. Second, you can burn a large amount of calories depending on how much exercise you are doing. On my diet I was taking in 900 calories per day. I was burning about 2000 normal calories and about 400 exercise calories. The exercise calories came about from my speed walking which I did daily. On weekends, in addition to the walking, I would mow the lawn etc. I was running a daily 1500 calorie deficit. The weight, at this tempo, comes off at a speed that has been reflected in my progress.

Start to think about your sex, height and weight. Look at a chart that will show you your normal calorie burn. That is what you work with daily. The most important thing you need to know now, coming off of Optifast, is how many calories you are burning on average daily and how much you are taking in. We could go into the detail about the type of calories but let's keep this real simple. My 'off-diet' calorie intake should be about 1800 calories daily. I could manage this because I had decided that I would exercise 3-4 days per week and figured I was burning around 2400 calories per day. That number gave me some leeway for any small indiscretions. We aren't perfect and we aren't robots either. So that's my number 1,800.

One of the most astonishing things I learned in the education classes was how many calories I had been ingesting. I had absolutely convinced myself that, before this diet, I didn't consume that many calories. The day it really came home to roost was the day our class covered the "Dining Out Guide." This is a compiled list of meals and their calorie content from some of the most known restaurants in the United States. If you are serious about losing weight, you should go out and buy "The CalorieKing Calorie, Fat & Carbohydrate Counter 2009" by Allan Borushek. If you eat out even one night a week, you should just take this little baby with you. It lists the calories in most foods but it also has a section like our class "Dining Out Guide," only even more extensive. It tells you just how much you are stuffing into that chubby little frame when you eat out in restaurants. You won't believe it. I didn't .

Here are a few examples. As an appetizer (the meal hasn't even arrived yet!!), an order of fried Calamari (3 cups)....1,037 calories. That was more than my diet allowed ALL DAY! Here are some more appetizers. Ruby Tuesday's low carb Spicy Buffalo Chicken Wings with dressing...1,090 cals. That's right football aficionado's, don't even try to tell me that you limit it to one serving either. Especially during the playoffs and on Super Bowl Sunday. Don't rationalize this one...the restaurant doesn't matter! Check out TGI Friday's Buffalo Wings...1,010 cals. Whew!! But you may actually be making a relatively HEALTHY choice! Check out these! Stuffed Potato Skins with sour cream...1,260 cals. The Bloomin' Onion with dipping sauce (because it tastes awful when it's plain)...2,130 cals. Here is the all time show stopper appetizer, Cheese Fries with ranch dressing...3,010 cals. Make sure you have the diet-cola!!

Here is something you figure out pretty fast using these guides, and take it as a tip. The appetizers listed above had more calories than the entrees. They also have more calories than dessert! The golden rule, SKIP THE APPETIZERS and SKIP THE DESSERT. If you are going to eat the meal, an appetizer could multiply your calorie intake by (depending on choice) a factor of 4!! Add a dessert and multiply that intake by 6!

I could cover this forever. Go and buy the book. It will be the best education and investment you can make. Go and find a chart of calories you burn daily, print the number in BIG BOLD CHARACTERS on a sticky label, and put that label on the cover of the guide. If you are serious about weight loss, you may never have another appetizer OR dessert.

Other major thing to consider in restaurants:

(1) Watch the alcohol. It is a source of empty calories and makes resisting the dessert and appetizers hard. You will thank me when you get the bill and see the difference between the cost of two Brown Ale's and two Ice Water's with Lime.
(2) Watch how the meal is cooked. If it says "fried" or "baked", ignore it. Go for grilled or steamed. Watch the sauces. Go light. Pick "marinated in juice" over "marinated in butter."
(3) No pasta and no starch. Go double veggies always with your protein.
(4) If all else fails, go with the Grilled Chicken or Fish Salad.

My pre-Optifast life was one of excess. Absolutely. No exercise. Much food. Much drink. I was King of my castle. My castle of fat.

The walls are down and it's time to live like a person who hopes to see the finish line. It IS possible. But...you can't go home again. You don't want to anyway.

Next: Stay with the new life plan, don't listen to them!!

Motivation (Part 3): What Motivates Kirstie Alley?

So what motivates Kirstie Alley (or any of us for that matter)? Will we ever be able to answer this?

Let's try to apply the theory that we have exposed in Parts 1 and 2. I have to make some assumptions based on what I know about her life. Most people of even a moderate degree of success fulfill their Level One needs. Let's presuppose that she has done this. The Level Two need of Safety and Soundness is probably being filled as well. I do not know of other medical issues she may have but I am assuming, since she is still large, that her weight issues are not tied to them. With this in mind, Diet and Physical Fitness (DPF) are probably not on Level Two for her. So let's also presuppose Level Two is fulfilled at this point in her life. The question becomes, 'where does Kirstie put DPF in her hierarchy?' Some people put their DPF in the Social Needs bucket...particularly those in the Media. Their social circles place a high value on how they look. Additionally, affinity needs get fulfilled with intimate relationships and, unfortunately, many intimate relationships start and are maintained based on appearance. So, in that case, DPF becomes critical. Friends and Family also typically play a role in Level Three.

So, it is quite apparent that Ms. Alley is not taking care of DPF. It is either a Level Three need that she is not fulfilling OR she has put it on Level Four and only thinks of it when it becomes an Esteem Need issue. If she has a lot of support and affinity in spite of being very large, she may have put the DPF priority at the top of her pyramid and is simply not addressing it. She then would be in the position of only addressing her DPF when it becomes something that she feels is inhibiting her career. If it is sitting at Level Four, it is in a place where many things can derail it as a priority, in particular, Level Three things.

There is one other possible answer to this though. She went through a divorce in 1997 to her ex-husband Parker Stevenson. That may have triggered her weight loss issues culminating in the 2005 appearance on Oprah. For many who simply let their weight and personal appearance get out of hand, when they lose affinity/love and feel like they need to find love again, they move DPF from a Level Four to a Level Three, but only TEMPORARILY. When they get their DPF under control and regain some affinity ties, they move DPF back to Level Four. I believe, based on Kirstie's pattern, that this is what she did. In all fairness to Kirstie, I am using her (somewhat unfairly since I do not even know her) as an example and my evaluation is based on much supposition.

I think that the majority of yo-yo dieting happens this way. Instead of putting DPF somewhere in our personal needs hierarchy and making its placement permanent, we move it around to suit our temporary wishes and then it gets bumped by other things.

What is my recommendation to Kirstie about her weight? It is the same advice I would give, and will give, to any of you that want to go on the Optifast (or any other) diet.

Start with a personal assessment of what the diet actually means to you. Where does this diet fit on your personal hierarchy needs chart? The lower (lower meaning a most basic need and a high priority) it is on your chart, the higher probability of success you will have with it. What in your life will trump your dieting efforts? Will it be trumped by work?...by family?...by social life? Is it going to take a permanent place on your needs chart or is it temporary because it is serving a temporary purpose?

If you need to lose a serious amount of weight, you need to assess its value to you. Losing the weight is difficult. There will be a lot of obstacles to derail that goal. There is something even more difficult after you complete the diet and that is KEEPING THE WEIGHT OFF. That is the real battle. That is where the Personal Needs Hierarchy Pyramid for you becomes critical. You need to put your DPF in a permanent place. You need to assess this in your life because extreme dieting and yo-yo rebounding can actually be more unhealthy than never losing the weight in the first place.

Is there a value you can tie to your weight loss that makes you permanently move it to a lower and more important base level of your needs? If physical safety is not one of those things, how about the monetary cost of being fat?

I recently took a look at our family's financial situation and decided I needed to upgrade my life insurance. Without getting into my personal finances in a public forum, let me say one thing. A life insurance policy with the same payback and term provisions for me as a fat, high cholesterol person would have been $150 more PER MONTH than the same policy for me under my current 205 lb frame with low cholesterol. Additionally, because I have not had the weight off for at least a year, they ADDED HALF THE WEIGHT BACK when calculating my new policy. If I had lost the weight 2 years ago, my policy right now would be $50 per month less. So in real terms, being fat, per just my life insurance policy alone, would cost me an additional $200 per month. That is $2400 more per year and $48,000 over a twenty year policy. That is a tangible cost that you can use to put the value of DPF into the low level, high priority area's of your Personal Needs Hierarchy Pyramid.

Doing these things will separate for you whether or not the diet is a goal for your life, or whether it is a "wish to be thin."

This kind of look takes a lot of hard work and commitment.

My thanks to Kirstie Alley for involuntarily providing the inspiration for these past 3 blog posts! Not everyone needs to show perfect success in order to be inspiring. I have poked fun at her (honestly, I make fun of myself a lot too) but truly wish the best for her.

Next: Sticking With IT!!

Motivation (Part 2): What Motivates Kirstie Alley?

Let's see if we can answer the question by examining my personal theory and how I have applied it to my diet at this juncture of my life.

Motivation, as defined in Wikipedia (God, I hope someone didn't edit it to say something stupid), is "the set of reasons that determines one to engage in a particular behavior." That understood, the question becomes "what forms the basis for the 'reasons?" To understand the 'reasons' we must go back to something that, at some point in time, we have all been exposed to...whether it was in High School Biology, Psych 101, or some type of workplace training...and that is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Ugggghhhhh!! I can just hear the collective groan.

Maslow's theory, which we have all come to widely respect, is that we humans fill and fulfill our most basic needs in a specific order. That order is based on the pyramid above. We fill the pyramid from the bottom up. We start with our Basic Physiological Needs (survival). We fill those needs first. Once we feel that those needs are met, we move on. Safety Needs, Social Needs, Esteem Needs and then we can focus on Self-Actualization. For most of us, we live our lives filling the levels in the middle of the pyramid. Some people are rare and get to the top two levels. There is a very tiny group that actually make it all the way to the top. The theory (and one I happen to agree with) is that if one of us has a deficiency in a lower level, it must be filled before we can further advance. The theory also says that if you have three levels filled and are working on something that fills a level four need, but then have something happen to you that upsets the lower level needs, you will stop the level four work to go back and back fill the lower level need and then have to return to level four. This theory of Maslow's is ageless and valuable.

As I read the many professional interpretations of Maslow, I continued to run into the same conflict. That conflict was that the writers in each case interpreted Maslow's levels with their own definition of what makes up each level. In the most basic example, 'Career Success' is most often placed at the Esteem Level by the social scientists who study Maslow. It is commonly held by them that a person's need for that success usually satiates the Esteem Level in that it typically brings with it the fulfillment of the Respect and Achievement need. The question I had was, "what if, for whatever reason (upbringing, dire social situations, etc.) a person puts Career Success at a different level?" If a person places Career Success at the Safety Need level, or they classify it as a 'must have' for their definition of personal Safety, they will approach fulfilling that need differently.

The uniqueness of every human being and the diversity of upbringing and experiences means that we build our pyramids differently. The items in my life that constitute my Esteem level are different from the next person's. If we try to interpret someone's motive and behavior using OUR OWN pyramid, we invariably end up in confusion and it can often result in conflict. The key, therefore, to understanding anyone and their motives, is to understand the person's personal pyramid of needs. Once you know that, their behavior makes sense and forms a pattern. Try to evaluate their behavior using YOUR pyramid, and their behavior looks erratic and confusing to you...because it is! It violates your own pattern of needs.

So I began to look at this as it relates to Dieting and Physical Fitness (DPF). Why can some people do this well and yet others be so poor at it? Also, why have I had success in my weight loss but not in keeping it off? The answer lies in where we place this DPF part of our lives on our personal hierarchy of needs pyramid.

I will tell you that for the longest time, I put DPF in the category of Esteem Needs. Why? Let's cover the lower levels first. I had all my Level One needs met without needing my DPF to be perfect. My Level Two needs of Safety and Security were not viewed by me as being jeopardized by being fat or thin. All those needs were met also. My Level Three Social Needs were also being met. I am happily married with a great family. No one socially, that I know of, was accepting me or rejecting me because I was a very big person. Everyone told me that I wasn't really THAT big and people accepted me for who I was. I also had the ability to laugh about my size and didn't take offense if people said I was big, fat, heavy...whatever. My Social Needs were filled without the need for my DPF to be perfect. I had, at that point in my life, decided to put my DPF issues on Level Four, the Esteem Level.

My personal reasons for putting DPF on Level Four were based on some observations that I had in my personal life. I noticed that many times in my life, I had tried to obtain jobs and move to a higher level of career status. The ONLY times I had ever been hired and obtained the next level successfully, was when I was thin. When I was large, I never got the job. Not once. Based on this, I had coupled my DPF with Career Success. Let me state for the record that in the last 3 to 4 years, I have been relatively happy with my current job. That said, I think I am ready to try some new things in my life. The fact that I am pretty happy and feel somewhat secure had me toying with the idea of improving my DPF and getting thin. But I wasn't that serious. Also, with DPF at Level Four in the chart, anything that could disrupt the first three levels became a priority and would derail the DPF goal. It just wasn't as important as other things.

Then something happened. My physical security was threatened. I was experiencing physical ailments that I hadn't before and needed to take drugs to counteract them. There was an inability to enjoy certain activities with my kids and family without feeling like I was hurting myself or holding them back. Without knowing it at the time (or thinking about it quite this way), I made the decision to move my DPF to a Level Two Personal Safety concern. Once I did that, things in my life pertinent to dieting changed to what they are today. I now view them as a safety and soundness issue in my life. My DPF today comes before a lot of other things in my life.

My theory is this: How you achieve the things in your life is determined by where you as a person put them on your own individual hierarchy of needs. You have to take a real personal assessment of the things in your life and then look close at where you put them. Some things make sense. Some things do not. There may be conflicts that cause life events to be at issue for you. Also, and very important to my theory, is that you can move things in your life from one location on the pyramid to another. It is not easy to just "do". It takes a strong degree of self-realization and self-awareness. It also may require something very serious to affect your life and force this change. But it IS possible.

As an illustration of this, let's explore a subject that people have differing values about in terms of their placement in the personal hierarchy of needs. There are many people in this world that put their Career Aspirations in the Safety and Soundness box on Level Two. For them, something in their lives convinced them it deserved this position. Something in their upbringing or personal experience has supported this placement. As a result, the Social Need things (the Level where most people put 'family and friends') take a back seat to work. This causes conflict not because this person has put Career in the "wrong place" but because their placement of it is so at odds with the majority of society. In many societies, take Japan and China for example, it is expected that the Male personal hierarchy chart look just this way! The Female hierarchy chart in these societies, however, puts Career at the Fourth Level if even giving it a position at all. So the Female hierarchy chart has Family as a priority before Career. In that way, these societies have determined that you may be able to optimize both Career and Family within a family unit. It is highly dependent on a family structure (husband and wife) being stable and that that structure is acceptable to both husband and wife. I am sure there are conflicts that arise because of this societal norm.

So, based on all this theory, what motivates Kirstie Alley (or any of us)?

What Motivates Kirstie Alley - Part Three

Motivation (Part 1): What Motivates Kirstie Alley?

Kirstie Alley is fat again. I know, I was really upset too. Distraught is actually a better word. She was real thin in the early 80's when she was in Star Trek 'Wrath of Khan.' She had her first televised weight issues when she was on 'Cheers.' She started out thin and then became bigger in front of our eyes while hanging out with Sam Malone and Norm and Cliff. Then, for some reason, she lost the extra weight and went back to her svelt self. Now, why did she do that? Did she worry about losing her job? Did the public criticism get to her? Was she afraid Sam would love Diane Chambers instead? Was it just the cameras? We all know they add ten lbs. Why did she lose it? These stars we watch regularly are always so concerned with appearance that when they lose weight, no one questions it...unless of course it becomes extreme like Nicole Richie or Tori Spelling. We have come to expect our stars to be thin and in shape. So in 2005, Kirstie lost 75 lbs and became a part of the Jenny Craig diet movement. Sans her weight, she went on Oprah in a bikini. Personally, I thought the 75 lbs was admirable. I also thought she should have dropped another 50 before she jammed herself into the XXL Victoria's Secret. It really seemed a bit premature to be sporting those thighs on stage.

Of course, to show herself off, she picked The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah is the biggest 'enabler' on television. She will applaud any cause...especially if it has to do with weight. Kirstie (and I refer to her by first name because, through the tabloids, I feel as though we are personal friends) went on Oprah in 2005 when she lost the weight and, last week, she went back on Oprah to say the weight had come back. This poor woman. By all evidence known to man, it was a sneak attack.

There she was, going into her refrigerator for the apple and celery sticks. She innocently opened the freezer looking for some ice cubes. As she reached for the tray, the Haagen Daaz Cherry Vanilla morphed into a big hand and pulled her into the Half Gallon container...where she built a home...for the next 18 months.

The diet that I used to lose my 80 lbs was the Optifast diet. Oprah made that diet famous by using it to lose a remarkable amount of weight...just like many of the serious dieters who go on that diet. But Oprah, as we all know, put that weight back on. Again, this rebound is similar to those on Optifast or ANY diet for that matter. The rebound syndrome is something that we all have to face. Point of fact, "the rebound syndrome" is the REAL battle not "losing the weight." For those of us who have lost weight and put it back on, this is crystal clear. We have been successful losing weight, but not in keeping it off. Doesn't it make sense then that our goal should be to "stay thin", not "lose weight?"

So there Kirstie was last week with Oprah. She wants to lose the weight again. My last blog entry (before the Celtics) addressed the things that drive us to lose weight. I read and re-read my own writings again and again. I was missing something. So I did some research on the subject of motivation. There are surprisingly few books and research studies on the subject. There are many books on how to motivate yourself to do something. There are many on why we don't do things the things we should. There are many on the things we do to sabotage ourselves. But there are very few that explain what motivates us to do the things we do.

I was not looking for motives for dieting...I was looking for that THING in all of us that drives us to do anything at all. What drives us to get out of bed in the morning? What drives us to eat X for breakfast instead of Y? What makes you work longer hours at work to be successful? What got Michael Jordan to go outside and shoot a basketball for so long that he became the best player the game has ever seen? There has to be an answer...and I was looking for it. The real trick to dieting successfully and having your physical condition be a driving force in your life centers around the answer to this question. Why are some people successfully staying vibrant and thin and others successful at being obese? Why are others losing and gaining so much?

What motivates the Kirstie Alley's of the world?

What Motivates Kirstie Alley - Part Two