Are Your Relationships Fat?  
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

Change is hard for everyone.  It's human nature to want to stay where you are, to protect yourself and to preserve the status quo.  In making deep and permanent lifestyle changes that affect your weight, you'll encounter lots of "voices."

First, there are the little voices in your head that say change isn't necessary.  Coaches call these voices "gremlins" and some of the things they might say are "I should be loved just as I am," "Why should my weight matter?" or "I'm not as fat (or out-of-shape) as so-n-so."

In addition to these little gremlin voices, there may also be some big voices!  These are the people around you who also want to preserve the status quo. 

Maybe your husband or wife doesn't want to see you lose weight and then regain it again, like you've done in the past.  Perhaps they hate to see the disappointment and sadness you feel when that happens.  And they just might like to have chocolate cake in the house at all times too.

Your best friend might love having a binge-buddy or just someone who likes to eat as much as she does and she fears losing that companionship.  I was waiting to be seated at a restaurant recently and there were two women standing in front of me.  As the hostess approached, one of them turned to the other and said, "Let's decide right now, are we dieting today or not?"  Obviously, whatever they decided, they were more comfortable taking the same approach to lunch rather than following their own needs.

Perhaps your sister likes to control others.  She gets her jollies by watching other people pig out.  This is a dynamic I've witnessed in a lot of relationships when one person is thin but addicted to dieting and the other person is overweight.  One of the ways the thin person stays motivated is to push food on others and (negatively) feel good because she's NOT eating.  This is the person who brings elaborate and high caloric dishes to the potluck and then sits in the corner with a few veggies on a plate and can't take her eyes off people eating too much food! 

No matter what the relationship might be, if you are trying to change your eating habits, your fitness lifestyle, or simply cut back on certain foods for health reasons, odds are you will encounter some relationship difficulties along with way.

Here are some things to watch out for:

1.  Do you throw your efforts away when they aren't met with excitement from friends or family?

I can't tell you how many times I've heard things like "I was doing fine until Susi showed up with donuts."  Remember, Susi doesn't control the pathway from your hand to your mouth.  YOU are in charge of that.

2.  Are you attuned to subtle sabotage?

Subtle sabotage often appears just when your weight loss starts to show, usually around the 10-pound mark.  You go shopping with a friend and she suddenly wants to visit the cookie shack.  You're at a family dinner and your mother keeps passing dishes of food to you every two minutes.  Your wife backs out of a commitment to go to the gym, citing something vague like "I just don't feel like it."  Chances are your weight loss is showing.

Be aware.  These people may have some personal investment in your being overweight!  It's like the potluck diva who never eats, they may negatively feel better about themselves if you are heavier than they are.  Or they may be unhappy about their weight and feel powerless to change.  Misery loves company but you don't want to be miserable any more!

3.  Are you strong enough to eat differently in group situations? 

You're having dinner with a group of friends.  Everyone is ordering burgers and cheese fries.  Are you focused enough to order grilled chicken and veggies?  Do you feel too out-of-place?

Group situations will appear at work as well as with family and friends.  Be prepared to deal with them.  You might start by not following the crowd with a more sympathetic (or higher esteem!) group.  Look for subtle saboteurs here too.  There may be a coworker who'll chide you "Are you dieting again?" but there's also the friend who doesn't say a word but eyes your plate with a nasty expression on her face.

The bottom line for all relationship issues that surround food and eating is that you are going to encounter them.  And you're going to have to deal with them.

As a coach, I help my clients deal with these kinds of issues on a daily basis.  I'm often asked, "Will my friendships change?"  To this, I say, "Yes, they will ALL change.  The good ones will change for the better, the not-so-good ones will go away and you will build new ones that are healthier and more positive."

Think about it.  If all you have in common with a friend is that you socialize around eating, do you really have that much in common?  Shopaholics encounter this too.  If they have a change in income level and can't shop for a while, their shopping buddies disappear!  Well, there wasn't a whole of deep connection or support happening anyway.

You may not have a whole lot of control over other people's reaction to your personal change.  But you can support yourself fully.  Be open and honest about what you're trying to do.  Stay motivated no matter what.  Never take on negative vibes from anyone else.  Keep your goals in mind at all times.  In short, be strong!

The longer you work on changing negative habits, the more successful you will be.  It's a persistence game.  And, as you stay true to your goals over a substantial period of time, others will see that you are serious and either support you or.... go away!

In the long run, what you gain from greater health and fitness far outweighs the benefit of relationships that aren't serving your positive needs and goals in life.

Eating Like the French
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

For years, I've taught a class on choice in my weight management course.  This class reminds students that choice is always available when it's time to eat.  So many people watching their weight feel they don't have the power of choice because they (1) feel compelled to eat certain foods ("cravings") or (2) they think they must stay on highly restricted "diets."

In remembering that we have choice, I explain how the French, the culture with the most densely caloric, highest-fat and richest cuisine in the world are also the thinnest people living in any industrialized country in the world. 

By the way, the French started dieting at about the same time we did (1920s) but quickly abandoned it as destructive and unproductive.  Interesting.

I was reminded of this when a friend of mine, Lygia, a French native, and I recently discussed restaurants.  Imagine a heavy, alluring French accent as she said, "Oooooouh!  I cannot go to many American restaurants.  If I ate that much food, I would be huuuuuge!  Pat, why do they give you so much food?"

It was a serious question!  I did my best to explain the complicated nature of American eating styles:  in our heads, more = better.  It doesn't matter if the food is completely wasted (made into fat on our hips) as long as we think we "got a good deal" on our meal.  Restaurants that are more successful in our country feature large amounts of food to make you think you're getting your money's worth – even if most of the food they overfeed you (rice, potatoes, chips, french fries) costs almost nothing!

I asked Lygia to share her eating style with us:

1.  Never drink soda.  She drinks approximately 3 liters of water a day and coffee.  If she feels a lull in energy in the afternoon, she'll have a little coffee.  Her theory:  if you eat to stay awake, pretty soon you're eating all the time.

2.  Never eat while doing something else.  This means never.  I've never seen her eat popcorn at a movie, eat her lunch while working at her desk, etc.  In other words, she pays attention to her food.

3.  Eat only whole grain cereals, breads and, occasionally, a whole grain cracker.

4.  Limit highly glycemic carbs like potatoes or rice to 1/2 serving at a time.

5.  Never snack.  Occasionally, if she delays dinner (late dinners are OK, by the way), she will have a snack of fruit.  She considers fruit the only acceptable snack.

6.  Have a fruit or a vegetable at every meal.

7.  Eat desert!  Yes!  But only in small portions.  As with any rich, calorie-dense food, the French believe in respecting calories and they fully enjoy their sweets -- but in very small portions.

8.  Eat only fresh food, never processed.  In fact, she doesn't believe in food that comes out of a package.  This means everything she eats has lots of vitamins and minerals intact.  And she never eats things like chips, prepared snacks or sweets.  Her comment:  "You can just taste the chemicals in that stuff!"

This brings up a good point.  Many scientists believe it is the chemicals in our over-processed fast food that causes Americans' weight problems.  In fact, most additives that give good "shelf life" are starches, filler and carbohydrates.  Think of the "junk" you may be ingesting every day! 

Another chemical issue:  Today, in the U.S., we use lots of hormones and chemicals to fatten up cows, chickens and other animals raised for food.  What are those same chemicals doing to your body when you eat them?

What do you think of those 8 simple rules my French friend honors in her relationship to food?  Do you think you could teach yourself to eat like this?  It sounds a lot more enjoyable than the latest fad diet.  In fact, it sounds easy, sensible and adaptable for the rest of your life.  And isn't that the point?

My suggestion is that you adopt these rules slowly, focusing on one at a time so you don't feel overwhelmed.  Identify your change and integrate it into your life fully before you move on to the next one.

You might start with making sure every meal has a fruit or vegetable involved.

Or drop soda from your life.  If you're drinking the diet variety, the aspartame is probably thwarting your efforts to lose weight anyway.

Bon appetit!  Remember, enjoying what you eat will lead to more satisfaction.  However, eating is not entertainment!

The Sweet Life
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

After twenty-three years on the market and millions of dollars profit, the manufacturers of foods containing aspartame have finally been brought to court in lawsuits filed in California.  The companies include:  Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Bayer Corp., the Dannon Company, William Wrigley Jr. Company, ConAgra Foods, Wyeth, Inc., The NutraSweet Company and Altria Corp. (parent company of Kraft Foods and Philip Morris). 

The really sad part?  Among the products are Flintstones vitamins and children's aspirin.  Given the lower blood-brain barrier in young children, this is frightening.  Please, even if you don't value your own health enough to eliminate toxic substances like aspartame from your diet, never give them to your children!

As the negative effects of aspartame become known, an interesting connection to low serotonin levels is discussed with increasing frequency.  Have we become a nation of anti-depressant poppers (Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft) in part because of the prevalence of this chemical additive in our food?

For years now, my clients have reported tremendous changes in their moods and mental attitudes as they quit using aspartame.  Among the statements I've heard are  "It was like low-grade depression that I never realized existed lifted." and  "I was in a bad mood a lot and had headaches 3 or 4 times a week.  Now, I feel so different!"  Of course, they lost weight when they stopped using aspartame too!

Aspartame wasn't approved for public use for 16 years after first being brought to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval.  Then, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  The CEO of Searle, the company who invented aspartame, vowed he would reverse the disapproval by the FDA and get it on the market.  He was part of Reagan's transition team and was involved in getting a new FDA chief appointed, Arthur Hull Hayes.  Aspartame was approved for public consumption the following year, in 1981. 

       Who was that CEO?

    Donald Rumsfeld

The bottom line is this.  The FDA is a political arm of the government.  Their approval does not mean that a food or food product is safe for you or your family. 

The American public can be consuming a food additive for 20 years before the long-terms studies are complete!

You only have to look back one year to see the danger of this with the ephedra fiasco.

I have just read all the recent studies on every artificial sweetener and NONE of them look safe to me.

I don't want to wait 20 years to find something is unsafe and is being taken off the market after the manufacturers have made millions off the product.  (By the way, the manufacturers of these artificial sweeteners are pharmaceutical companies that will also make money off the cancer, diabetes, stroke, depression and heart disease drugs the American public has to take as a result of poor diet.)

There is an alternative solution!

Instead of substitution madness, take a positive approach.  Why not change your attitude towards sugar and sweet food?

Sweets and sugars should comprise at the very most 10% of your diet.  This means, if you eat approximately 2000 calories a day, less than 200 should be sweet.

At one time these food items, being highly refined and processed, were rare, hard to get and very expensive.  They were part of our great grandparents lives only at holidays.  By our grandparents' day, they became a staple at dessert on Sundays only.  Today, we've got a high sugar, high fat or chemical substitute for every meal, snack and eating excuse on earth!  As a result, we have increased our intake of sugar from 15 pounds per person in 1816 to around 200 pounds per person a year today!

Food manufacturers spend millions developing more elaborate and highly caloric foods and millions more selling it to the American public in ads.  The public palate has become used to richer and richer foods, desserts and other sweet concoctions.  Once, a brownie was a brownie.  Now it has layers of icings and cream fillings plus toppings.  Once, a sundae could stand alone.  Now it needs cake, cookies or brownies with it and more layers of syrups and toppings on top.

What the food manufacturers don't  
advertise are the effects on your  
insulin levels.  The more sugar and  
sweet food you eat, the more insulin  
your body puts into your bloodstream.  
Insulin signals your body to store fat.  
It's that simple.

So, what are some positive changes you can make to permanently alter the sugar blues in your life?

Rule #1 - Think like an Italian grandmother:  "What you drink should never be sweet!"

Think about it.  You learned to tolerate sweet drinks.  It's not a natural thing.  A friend's Italian grandmother, who always refused to even taste Coca-Cola, once told her unbelieving grandchildren.  "It's disgusting to even think you drink such a thing!  What you drink should never be sweet.  It's not a dessert!  Water you should drink, maybe a little coffee or tea or wine, but mostly water!"

This is doubly important given the recent studies which have shown the correlation between corn syrup sweeteners (the primary ingredient in non-diet soft drinks) and the dramatic increase in diabetes in countries that consume those drinks.

Rule #2 - Make sweet count.

When you respect the power and calories in sweet foods, you savor them and use them sparingly.  This allows you to really enjoy them.  When your food intake is proliferated by donuts, sweet rolls, soft drinks, ice cream, and snack foods such as granola bars, it's no surprise that control around desserts like cakes, pies and brownies disappears.  When the majority of what you eat is sweet, you lose all sense of proportion.  Even our breakfast cereals are high in sugar! 

I allow my son to bring home cereal from the supermarket only if it has 10 grams of sugar per serving or less.  He usually searches the cereal aisle, reading box labels, for roughly 20 minutes before he finds an acceptable one. 

Rule #3 - It doesn't matter how a food is made sweet.

Sugar substitutes are not the answer.

In fact, if you eat sweet things that are artificially sweetened, your sense of sweet is impaired even more.  This is because the artificial chemical sweeteners are thousands of times sweeter than sugar.  The truth is that, the more you ingest artificial sweeteners, the less impact the taste of sweet has on your taste buds.  You may be convinced you are avoiding calories, but it's actually taking much more food, sweetened with sugar or artificially, to satisfy the natural need for sweet in your diet.

The proliferation of non-sugar sweeteners in the U.S. hasn't cut the consumption of sugar at all!  Sugar use has risen dramatically, in direct proportion to the use of artificial sweeteners.  Translation:  People who use artificial sweeteners use MORE sugar than they did before adding artificial chemicals to their diet.  The impact of Americans eating 200 pounds of sugar a year means the average person consumes an 40 teaspoons of sugar a day!  The effect on our youth is extreme:  teenage boys get an average of 34 teaspoons of sugar a day and yet only 11% of them get the daily recommended amount of fruit and only 29% get the recommended daily amount of calcium rich dairy foods.

Don't rely on labels to tell you the full story either.  Manufacturers avoid listing sugar as the first ingredient by dividing it up into different categories under different names.  In other words, they put smaller amounts of 3 or 4 types of sugar in a product so they can list them later in the ingredient list.  You might see ingredients like dextrose, corn syrup solids, high-fructose corn syrup, malt powder, sucrose, barley malt, fructose as well as some of the artificial sweeteners like xanitol, sorbitol, sucralose and acesulfame listed.

Here's the big question.  How do you begin to transition away from the over-sweet diet?

Slowly!

1.  Eliminate one item at a time.  You might start with making sure your breakfast has no sugar in it, then extend that to eliminating sweet items from your entire morning.  You might start with dumping the item you like the least and then isolate another target for extinction.  You might start with what you drink.

2.  Expect repercussions.  You may have headaches, confusion, lethargy, minor depression or other effects.  Be prepared.  This is another reason to eliminate slowly.  Be persistent, however.  The first few days are the hardest.  From there, it gets easier.

3.  Have a plan.  Make up a twelve-week chart and enter one item per week.  Note your progress and give yourself credit for your efforts.  Non-food rewards can add incentive!

The interesting thing about eliminating sweet things from your diet is that your taste will change over time.  You'll no longer crave these foods.  Like an ex-smoker, you'll find healthy food tastes better than it did before.  You'll begin to notice the wide range of available food.  You'll regain your power of choice – and that's the ultimate sweet life!

Let Them Eat Cake!
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

We’re going to have some fun this month.  Here are some food myths it’s time to destroy:  

NO!!  NO!!  NO!! 

I went from customer to customer, asking “Do you think sugar is a FOOD?  Do you think it’s LOW FAT?”  Unless you’re planning on sipping from the bag itself, you’ve got to mix sugar with something to make it edible – and that’s usually white flour and lots of fat.  It’s deadly!  Especially if it forms the bulk of your diet in the form of muffins, scones, breads, cakes, pies, cookies, brownies, etc.  Once and for all, let’s nix the low fat scenario that never worked to take off the pounds (but made a lot of money for food manufacturers).

5. Most meal replacement shakes might as well be cake!  This is the comparison fitness experts make when they read the ingredients in a commercial protein shake – a cake mix with a little protein added.  You can make your own protein shake with pure protein powder (choose soy or whey protein), milk, a multivitamin, fruit or natural flavoring.
   

7. Alcohol is sugar!  Make no mistake about it.  Doesn’t make any difference if it’s one of these new low-carb beers (which aren’t new at all, just more expensive now).

Here the point of my ranting: 

What can you change in your current
eating regimen right now that would  
have a positive effect on the amount  
of nutrients you get every day? 

After all, the more food you eat which doesn’t give you nutrients, the more you’ll stay hungry for more.  In fact you’ll stay hungry until your body gets the vitamins and nutrients it needs.  That’s your body’s unique genius for survival at work.

Here’s an example of a positive change:  Chili’s recently revamped their kids menu so that kids can get a side dish of broccoli or corn instead of fries.  All right!  Let’s hear a big round of applause for Chili’s.  Now, this is a big shift and I realize it may take a while to catch on – in fact, the wait staff isn’t quite accustomed to it yet.  My son ordered cheese pizza, broccoli and milk for dinner last week and the server nearly fainted.  She was even more amazed when he ate it all!  “You actually drank all your milk?  WOW!” she said.  (He’s 11 and thought she was flirting with him so her response had some positive impact!)

When I look back at my 70-pound weight loss, there were two changes I made that had a huge impact on my success.  I gave up french fries and pizza.  Just two foods made an enormous difference!  But I knew they were problem foods for me because, once I started eating them, I felt a loss of control around them.  (If you have a problem giving up a particular food, email me and we'll set up a coaching session for you – I have great exercises to help you break negative habits!)

So, here's my challenge:  Are you willing to have broccoli and milk with your pizza?  Or substitute a salad or vegetable for fries?  It's the small changes that get you started and lead to you even more positive changes down the road. 

Be proactive this week.  Make some simple changes like adding more veggies, fruit and calcium products or deleting sodas, fries and chips – it’ll make a difference you’ll see and feel!

Starting a Fitness Plan
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

Research tells us that exercise is actually more important in a weight loss plan than what you eat.  Exercise has many additional benefits other than lowering that number on the scale:  it relieves stress, promotes better sleep and relaxation, improves confidence and attitude, gives you strength and, even more important, it gives your body the message that you are caring for it.

Starting an Exercise Program

Here are some tips for starting an exercise program.  If you already exercise on a regular basis, check these ideas to see if you've got them in your program.

1.  Start out slowly.  I'd be a rich woman if I had a dime for every person who told me "I exercised today and I'm going to do it every day!"  If you aren't exercising on a regular basis, it makes no sense to attempt an every day routine in the beginning.  Three times a week is the general recommendation from fitness professionals but I recommend an every other day routine.  That allows you to never go two days without exercise but it also gives your body time to adjust and recover from exercise.

2.  Start out simply.  If you don't exercise at all and you are out of shape, start walking for just 10 minutes a day, every other day.  If you are in decent shape and want to run, try adding 2 minutes of running to every 8 minutes of walking and increase the running segments slowly.  Don't plan a marathon right away either!  Increasing running by more than 10% a week usually leads to injury.

3.  Match exercise type with your personality.

     a.  Do you like to exercise with people?  Exercise with a buddy or try an exercise class.

     b.  Do you like to exercise alone?  Swimming, biking, running and walking are great solitary activities.

     c.  Do you prefer indoors or outdoors?  This may be determined by the climate where you live.  Do you like changing scenery and fresh air or do you prefer to avoid the elements (especially if you live in Seattle or places with high humidity).

     d.  Do you prefer to do what YOU want to do or to follow a leader?  An exercise class with a qualified instructor takes all the guesswork out of what to do and how long to do it.  Classes are especially beneficial to busy people who have too much on their minds already.  Let the teacher lead you through a safe exercise routine.  Don't think you have to go to the big megagym for classes either.  Look for a smaller exercise, yoga or dance studio.  They are generally less intimidating and much more fun.  And just because it says "yoga" or "dance", don't assume they don't have a variety of classes in other exercise forms.  Investigate!

     e.  Are you a team player?  Prefer sports?  Maybe you'd be happier playing tennis, racquetball or volleyball.  Rowing teams are also popular if you live near water.  Look for established recreational outlets in your community.

     f.  Do you prefer the convenience of exercising at home or the atmosphere of a gym?  Lots of people like the activity, adrenaline and energy level at their gym.  They report that, even if they don't feel like exercising, as soon as they arrive, they get a burst of energy to do their workouts.  Home exercise is an alternative ONLY if you can schedule your time and stick to your schedule, ignoring any distractions including the ringing phone and foot traffic (kids, pets, spouses, friends) in your home.

Use these parameters to help you decide the right exercise routine for you.  Don't be afraid to experiment.  Many gyms offer a free one-week trial period.  I was a shy and totally unconfident kid the first time I ventured into a gym.  I still don't know why I went in.  But I wound up in the weight room and followed a stranger as he went from one machine to the next.  I imitated his moves on each weight machine.  I didn't have any money but I promptly went to the front desk and asked how to join.  I took the application home and found a check in my mailbox, a deposit refund from college I'd forgotten I was going to receive.  I knew it was a sign!  I've never looked back.

4.  Suspend Judgment.  You may not be fast.  You may not have a lot of energy.  You may not feel great being active at first.  But say good things to yourself and be positive.  Most of all, (Nike had the right idea!) just do it!  After a while, you'll be stronger and faster, lighter and healthier.  Suspending judgment can help you get past the initial stages of frustration that often derail plans before they ever start to show results.  Once you start getting results and your body adjusts to a regular exercise routine, your attitude towards it will become even more positive.

You may not like exercise right away.  In fact, you may not ever say you "love" it.  But there's no denying these truths:  Your body needs it.  And you need your body. So, get moving!

Upgrading a Fitness Plan
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

Research tells us that exercise is actually more important in a weight loss plan than what you eat.  Exercise has many additional benefits other than lowering that number on the scale:  it relieves stress, promotes better sleep and relaxation, improves confidence and attitude, gives you strength and, even more important, it gives your body the message that you are caring for it.

So you already have a good exercise plan in place but you're bored or need different results.  Here are some tips on upgrading your regimen:

1.  Change the timing.  Do you walk after work but often feel too tired to go very far or achieve your goal for the day?  Mornings might be a better alternative.  Setting the alarm earlier may not sound like fun but, if you ease into it by setting it 10-15 minutes earlier each week until you are rising an hour earlier, your body will adjust.  And think of all the free time you'll have after work.  With any shift in exercise routine, give it a month or two for your body to get used to the new time.  I have exercised, due to schedule restraints, at 5 a.m., noon, 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.  They all have advantages.  Your strength, energy and flexibility will be different throughout the day and you'll have the advantage of at least one of them at every point of the day.

2.  Change intensity.  If, as an example, you've gotten good results at walking every day for 20 minutes and you don't have more time available, change the intensity.  Time your regular route and take 15 seconds off your time each day until you reach a speed that gives you a challenging, intense workout.  Get a little out of breath!  Sweat!  Or change your route to one that has lots of hills and inclines.  Other examples:  Turn walking into running or jogging.  Change biking into a spinning class.  Change a water aerobics class into lap swimming.

3.  Change length of exercise period.  Are you walking 30 minutes and don't want to run?  Increase by 5 minutes each week until you are at 45 or 50 minutes.  Or put in an additional 10 minutes at lunchtime.  Every session doesn't have to be the same either.  If your schedule is generally more open on weekends, make those sessions longer.  If you have lots of social activities and pressures on the weekends, make Tuesdays or Thursdays your "long" day.

4.  Change focus.  Do you exercise while watching TV or reading?  It's hard to focus on your body and it's hard to work intensely when your focus is some place else.  The minute your eyes and brain are engaged in deciphering dialog or printed material, you lose focus.  Try some pumping music with a good beat so that your eyes don't have to be engaged.  Or take it a step further.  When I first started running I ran with a walkman and I never thought I'd be able to run without music.  But try exercising without the onslaught of music.  This allows you to clue into your environment.  You can hear birds and kids playing.   It's also safer.  You can hear your body and traffic better as well.

5.  Change your attitude.  Do you usually run thinking "when will this be over?" or "why do I have to do this?"  Those thoughts are not only negative, they'll get in the way of your fitness.  Learn to focus your self-talk, that constant voice in your head, to positive and energizing dialogue.  Remember the quote by Lou Holtz:  "Ability is what you're capable of doing.  Motivation determines what you do.  Attitude determines how well you do it.”

6.  Change what you do.  If walking was your first step towards fitness and you've grown bored, do something new.  Try a kickboxing, yoga or pilates class, upgrade to running, or buy a bike.  If you've been lifting weights for over a year and have trouble coming up with new exercise routines, try a class or hire a personal trainer to spark your jump to a new level of fitness.

Finally, just like changing eating patterns, make JUST ONE of these changes at a time.  Suddenly increasing intensity and length of time exercising at the same time can lead to overstress on the muscles and injury.  Give your body the time to adequately adjust to new routines and programs.

Be good to your body.  Give it the fuel (oxygen!) it needs through consistent exercise and it will reward you with better performance in every aspect of your life.

Packaging Size Does Matter
By Pat Barone, CPCC, PCC
"America's Weight Loss Catalyst"

Think you're saving money by buying large-sized products at your local supermarket or bulk/bargain store? 

Recent studies actually indicate the positive effect of a few pennies saved might be offset by your larger waist measurement.

How are the two related?  Listen to the results of new studies conducted at the University of Illinois:

Study #1 – Package Size.  Participants were given 600 M&Ms to eat while they watched a movie.  Half of them were given the candy in a large bag.  Half of the group had the same number of candies but they were broken into smaller bags.  The act of stopping and opening a new bag had a profound effect on how much each person ate.  Those using the large bags ate 35% more.

When this experiment was repeated with chips, participants ate 30% more from the large bag.

Study 2:  Serving Dish Size.  At an ice cream social, attendees were given medium and large sized bowls.  Those with large bowls served themselves 40% more ice cream.  When questioned later, they didn't believe they'd eaten more than an average serving.

Study 3:  Stockpiling Food.   At a Sam's Club, people were asked to participate in a study.  They were given lots of free food (i.e. 12 packs of cookies) as a thank you for completing a questionnaire.  Over the next week, they ate the food they had stored in large quantities twice as often as people given smaller amounts of the same food.  Clearly, simply being aware that food is handy and available influences the amounts eaten.

Study 4:  Proximity.  Hershey's kisses were placed in jars on secretaries' desks and six feet away from the desks.  Participants were told the jars were a prize for filling out a questionnaire and did not realize that they were being refilled each night.  Participants with jars on their desks ate an average of 9 kisses a day.  Those with jars located 6 feet away ate 4 kisses a day.  What does a difference of 5 kisses a day mean?  125 calories per day is one extra pound each month and 12 extra pounds a year.

Study 5:  Product Placement and Incentives.  Grocery stores also make considerable effort to make sure you take home more food than you need.  Pricing items 3 for $3, even if it's not a sale price, results in customers buying 30% more.

At a convenience store near a high school, signs saying "buy 12 for your backpack" resulted in students buying 3 times their usual purchase amount.

Products placed at the end of the aisles sell 40% more because of the increased visibility, even if the price is the same as usual.

Here are some tips to help you combat the urge to buy more:

1.  Focus your shopping trips.  Know exactly what you intend to buy and where it is located in the store.  Zigzagging through aisles leads to impulsive purchases.  Wandering aimlessly while you are trying to figure out what to make for dinner is brutal on the waistline.

2.  Spend as little time as possible shopping.   Allocate a specific amount of time to each trip to the store.  You are on a seek-and-buy mission for specific items. 

3.  Avoid promotions.  Promotional marketing devices like pricing (3 for $3), contests ("win a free trip to Disney") and special product placement in prominent locations aren't giving you any value.  They are just luring you to spend more money and eat more.

4.  Buy smaller.  Choose food divided into smaller one-serving packages or smaller packages in general.

5.  Plan ahead.  Make menus ahead of time and buy only what's needed for those meals. Avoid extras, convenience snacks, and the bakery aisle. 

6.  Shop the perimeter.  Shopping the perimeter of the grocery store ensures you'll buy fresher, more nutrient-rich foods.  The inner sections are filled with processed food, snacks and sugar-laden cereals.

7.  Never supersize.  A large package of chips isn't a bargain if the excess winds up on your hips.

Following these tips will not only have positive affect on your weight but your budget too!