Christmas stuffing

Now is a good time to weigh ourselves and witness the damage. Very few of us will have put on less than 2 pounds. Unless we take action, this weight will still be there next Christmas.

Weigh yourself now and decide to be cautious over New Year so that the extra weight doesn't grow further.

Over Christmas we are unusually inactive and unusualy well-fed. When we get back to our normal way of life, we can take a little action to get that excess weight off. For now, while we are still in the holiday mood, the most we can hope for is to not put any more on!


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The urge to gorge

Here we are in the Christmas season. Even before Christianity came to Europe, there were pagan winter feastings. In those days, food was hard to come by, and winter was a time of hunger, so a special festival like this was a major treat.

Nowadays, food is plentiful, accessible and relatively cheap. For the vast majority of us, food shortage is just not an issue. But getting fat is something that concerns an increasing number of us.

Somehow at Christmas, we permit ourselves to gorge hugely, stuffing ourselves before, during and after a meal, with calorie-stuffed fun food. So what to do?

I was in the supermarket the other day with a friend who has a problem with alcohol. He wanted to buy a bottle of each kind of spirit - vodka, whisky, gin, brandy - for the friends who would be dropping by. He did this last year, and personally consumed all the bottles by New Years Day.

So here is the tip. Don't kid yourself that all these boxes of chocolates, tins of biscuits, sacks of crisps, bags of nuts, cakes etc etc etc are for your friends and visitors. Letting rip like this will only make you feel miserable, after you have eaten the evidence.

Enjoy lots of wonderful meals with your family. Have a happy Christmas. But when you are in the supermarket, make a Christmas wish to avoid all the fun food. It will be no fun at all in the New Year, when you struggle to lose the 3 pounds that you are at risk of putting on, and keeping on.

And when I say you, of course I mean Us!

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Social factors make it harder for women to manage their weight

Apart from greater social pressure in the Western world to be thin, there are social pressures which reduce women's opportunity to control their weight. These pressures are changing, though, as women become more economically resilient.

Leisure or recreational activity levels are lower for women than men, with a marked decline during adolescence. While boys continue to play football or ride their bikes, womens' physical activity declines.

When they are older, opportunities for physical activity for women are limited by greater caregiving responsibilities. They have less time for themselves. And indeed, their partners and family members often view any time spent at the gym or a dance class as "stolen" since they take the woman away from family responsibilities. I remember this well. My husband went every week to play squash straight after work. This of course meant that I had to be home to look after the children. I never felt permitted to take the same sort of time off.

And then there are safety concerns that affect times and places available for physical activity.

Socially acceptable forms of physical activity may be fewer for women than men, particularly in some ethnic groups. This includes swimming for some groups, dancing for others.

In addition to this, occupational activity levels are also often lower for women.

There is often a lot of family negotiating to do when it comes to fitting in some exercise, and women's plans are often confounded by another family member's needs - so that the woman has to stay at home.

So if you are having trouble committing to physical activity, you are not alone. Don't beat yourself up about it. A hypnotherapist will help steel your resolve, and suggest ways to empower you.



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Stepping onto the scales!

How often do you weigh yourself? People who are worried about their weight (whether or not they are trying to control their eating) weigh themselves lots. They get on the scales in the morning at home, at work, when they get back home and again before they go to bed. Each weigh-in is another opportunity to feel bad and get a dose of anxiety.

Getting on the scales won't make you thin but it could make you depressed. If you are a scale-junkie, then you will know that your weight varies throughout the day not just over a month.

Use the scales to check for trends. To do this, a weekly weigh-in is enough. Are you remaining the same weight, putting weight on or losing it. Then take action. Taking your waist measurement helps you to check on the loss of fat stores. Do that once a week too.

To get a lower number on the scales, try a few of my tips to change your eating behaviours.


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It's the environment making us fat

There is a new term, which came along in the 1990s. It's the obsogenic environment, which means that our whole environment is geared up to getting us overweight. Just knowing this can help us manage our weight better.

It is hardly surprising that we get fat. We have been designing our environments to expend as little energy as possible. All the shops are gathered together by the car park, so we don't walk to the shops. We don't even get up to turn the channels over on the telly.

And we are given food messages all the time. The TV channels are stuffed with them, not just adverts, but whole programmes. Magazines, even slimming magazines, are stuffed with food messages. And the presentation of food in the shops, as well as the kind of food they sell, gets us thinking about eating.

There are more subtle environmental cues. Food packages have got larger and suggest that larger portions are fine - we didn't ask for it. But we have got used to it. When we go out, it is more often to a restaurant or bar than to play bowls, dance or do a communal activity.

One way to control your eating is to control your own environment. We tend to want to eat when we see food. Research by Brian Wansink has shown that if food is in opaque packets we eat less than if it is in clear packets. And if we have to make an effort to get at the food (even a walk of just a few yards) we eat less. So, here are some good tips to modify your own environment:

• Watch less telly - get another pleasurable activity into your daily routine
• Avoid magazines with loads of food ads
• Shop with a list and get out quick
• Don't buy and store in the house foods that you know you can't resist
• Keep biscuits and other stuff in tins or opaque boxes

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British find depression linked to processed foods

A great piece of research from University College London (UCL) is the Whitehall II study which examines behaviour, work and lifestyle of 3,486 civil servants in the UK. Earlier this month, the researchers published their findings linking processed food to depression.

The researchers identified two groups of people, those who mostly eat natural and fresh food, cooking from scratch, and those who eat mostly highly processed foods such as fried foods, processed meats, sweetened desserts and high-fat dairy products etc. We can all relate to that. Increasing numbers of people no longer cook, relying on the scientifically-ensured-delicious prepared foods we can now get so easily.

In analysising their data, the researchers took account in a statistical way of age, gender, activity levels and any thing else so that they could just measure the effect of these different eating types.

The people in the processed food group had a 58% higher risk of future depression than the natural food group. Those who ate the most whole foods had a 26% lower risk of future depression than those who at the least whole foods.

Depression thrives on chips, hamburgers, lots of bread, fatty meats, regular fry-ups, suet pastries, cakes, éclairs, sugary pies, toffees, sweet drinks and chocolate bars. It also loves snacks throughout the day. It will become the devoted companion of anyone regularly eating junk food and drinking too much alcohol. Read more about that here.

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Unwiring our urge to eat

We are hard-wired to eat, since if we didn't eat, we would die.

My cat is a stray and I found her when she was scavenging in my friend’s kitchen. She was skinny and scared. After coming to stay with me she became as fat as fat because food, all of a sudden, was freely available. These are the rules my cat was following, to deal with the serious risk of lack of food and starvation:

• Always eat when food is available
• Always eat as fast as possible
• Always eat as much as possible
• Always eat anything put in front of you

We are animals too, and are wired to protect ourselves from starvation, so we can end up following these rules too, even though food is easy, accessible and cheap. Do you? I know I do!

Hypnotherapy can help you by embedding suggestions in your mind, to help you overcome these hard-wired behaviours.

You can do-it-yourself of course. Here are some weight-control tips. By introducing some of the behaviours suggested below, one or two at a time, you will find that they become increasingly automatic.

1. Eat half the plate offered you, screw up your napkin and place it on top of the remaining food and push the plate away. If you are in a public place, it will be very hard for you to grab the plate back, remove the napkin and start eating again! It is using your sense of embarrassment in your own defence.

2. Before you eat anything, consult your hunger quotient. How hungry are you at the moment on a scale of 0-10? If it is less than 5, you don’t need to eat. There is always food available later. This just adds a little bit of delay to the decision to eat. You know that if you eat when you are already satisfied, then more food just makes you feel sick.

3. Eat slowly. I eat very slowly and in restaurants, my plate gets whizzed away when everyone else has finished. I feel a tinge of disappointment, but gratitude too. Research has shown that if you train yourself to eat slowly, and indeed, to decelerate your eating rate, you will eat less.

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Why am I eating?

Part of what I am trying to encourage is to eat mindfully, being fully aware whenever you are eating and enjoying it. .When you become very aware of what you are eating, you get a clearer idea of why you might be putting on weight.

My approach encourages you first of all to work on giving up the food that you are eating for no particular reason. Simplify your life by just taking note of the eating you do between meals. This eating is the easiest to give up. You don't have to do it all at once. Take it week by week or month by month. Don't be too hard on yourself. Make these changes for the long-term and do it bit by bit.

So first of all, leaving aside your regular meals, what are you eating and when? Make a note of it, maybe put it on a post-it note on the fridge. Becoming aware of these unnecessary eating behaviours helps you stop them. And hypnotherapy can help you too.

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Why should I exercise?

Exercise makes you feel better. For some, thrashing away at a gym for 2 hours is just the ticket. For others, gardening or walking to the shops suits, and others still enjoy dancing. Whatever you choose, it should be something that you enjoy doing and can fit it into your day without a great struggle. The natural response of your body to exercise is a desire to eat, so it is good to do it before a regular meal.

As I mentioned in my blog of.29 November 2009 exercise won't make you thin, unless you are really going at it, like an Olympic athlete. However, it will protect your health. Start with a bit of exercise, and then see if you can do more. Don't set yourself such high targets that you give up early.

Here are a list of benefits!

• Lovely supple joints for your old age
• Less stress
• Less risk of dementia in your old age
• A smaller waistline and thus less risk of metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease (Coronary heart disease mortality is higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. The premature death rate for men living in Scotland is 50% higher than in the South West of England, and around 90% higher for women.)
• Less risk of insulin resistance and overproduction, which lead to diabetes or obesity with high cholesterol and heart disease)
• Less osteoporosis - weight bearing exercise such as running, dancing, skipping, rather than swimming
  

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