Harder the Second Time Around?

We all get older every day.  Sadly, with aging, all systems deteriorate.  Some slower, some faster, but all get a little older and a little less functional every day.  If you achieve success on a low-carb diet and find yourself 70 pounds lighter, you’ll also find your self five or six months older.  If you regain that lost weight, then decide to start another low-carb diet to re-lose it, you will probably be a couple of years older than you were when you tried your first low-carb diet.  Just as it’s a little more difficult to pick up tennis at age 46 than it is at age 44, it’s a little more difficult to get everything moving with a low-carb diet when you’re a couple of years older.

Built-in survival mechanisms

Although most dietary recommendations are fairly simplistic, our bodies are unimaginably complex.  Not only do we have a complicated metabolism centered around and directed by the liver, we have multiple neurological and endocrinological feedback pathways between the liver-directed metabolic system and the central nervous system.  And we have gut hormones that get into the act sending signals of fullness or lack thereof.  It is an intricate system designed to allow us to survive on all kinds of food and to keep us alive as long as possible in the face of famine.  I like to think of this entire interconnected system as having its own memory.  It will allow you to fool it once or maybe twice, but then it gets wise.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/why-is-low-carb-harder-the-second-time-around/

I feel lucky when I read this.  It took me from 1996 until 2007 or so to figure this game out in a way that satisfied me.  In all that time, I must have nuked my body with huge sugar bombs at LEAST weekly, probably much more often than that. But right now, I can more or less effortlessly keep my body fat in the healthy range by eating the foods I like, and the foods I used to think I couldn't live without, I just don't like them as much.  

The takeaway?  There's probably a limit.  There's no bad time to stop nuking yourself with carbs, but there may be a limit for being able to regenerate and be as lean and well as you could have been had you stopped poisoning yourself with sugar ten years ago.

"Hey, Who's In Charge Here?"

"This rogue elephant scenario is what Dr. Haidt thinks happens to us from time to time.  Our rider (the conscious part of us) wants us to do something, but the elephant part of us doesn’t want to, and so the rider just hangs on for the ride while the elephant goes wherever it wants to go.  We can put this in dieting terms.  Our rider decides that the elephant needs to go on a diet.  As long as the elephant is up for it, the diet hums along.  But if the elephant has other ideas, the rider becomes an ornament.  If things are going well, the rider has the appearance of control; if things aren’t going well, i.e., we had to put Mom in the hospital, then the elephant takes over.  And the rider accepts it.  He says, hey, I couldn’t control this beast because we had to put Mom in the hospital, and you know how he gets when we have to put Mom in the hospital.  He wants to eat, and I, the rider, have to go along with him.

"Yale psychologist Paul Bloom presents another way of looking at this situation in an enlightening article in the November 2008 issue of The Atlantic.  He puts forward the idea that we all have multiple selves that we’re constantly dealing with, arguing with and trying to fool.

"Let’s say that we’ve dined large late at night and are headed for bed.  As we crawl into the sack with belly distended from a carb overindulgence and lie flat, we start getting the ol’ acid reflux feeling.  We sit up, burp, drink some water, rub our chest and grab for the Tums.  The self that is suffering says, ‘That’s it, I’m dieting tomorrow.  I can’t stand feeling like this, not for one more night.’  The next morning the self that wakes up is a different person who isn’t experiencing reflux, doesn’t have a distended belly and is hungry.  And, by God, hungry for some waffles, at that.  The feel-good morning self may not abide by the rules laid down by the refluxing self the night before."

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/lipid-hypothesis/why-is-low-carb-is-harder-the-second-time-around-part-ii/

This model of human behavior fits my experience of human behavior very closely.  The human animal is subject to much more unconscious control that we'd like to admit - why we don't like to admit that, I don't know.  Mike Eades does a nice job of delving into the topic and how it relates to changing one's eating patterns.  

As I have seen these patterns play out in more and more folks, I have been surprised to find that I keep seeing a few basic models from my college psychology courses:

1.  Approach avoidance conflict - you see something you want, you move towards it, as you get closer, some element of the encounter become fear producing (think of a squirrel taking a peanut from you hand).  You and/or the squirrel cycle back and forth through the zone between fear/attraction.  You want the cookie (beer, chips, whatever the high reward food is for you), you fear the obesity/sickness/death that you also associate to eating that food.  It may be at a party or the office, you resist mightily but have to keep struggling to stay away from the food, and it's tiring.  Eventually, approach wins out over avoidance, you eat the thing.  It doesn't even taste that good - you wonder why you put yourself through this stupid shit over a worthless piece of crap like a cookie/chip/beer - but over a lifetime, you've rewarded yourself with this food so many times, and the UCM's association to pleasure and that food is so strong, that it doesn't matter.  Like the folks pulling the arms of slot machines (no pleasure there, why do they keep doing it?), the pleasure experience of having won previously is great enough that you'll pull the damned arm 100 times with no reward, all the while driven by your unconscious mind's focus on getting the next dose of pleasure.  

2.  Learned helplessness - at some point, you have tried so many times to change that you think you cannot change; so why fight it?  

3.  The gambler's reward percentage - in this battle of your will (the rider) against the unconscious mind's associations (the elephant), there's a combination of rewards and pain.  IOW - the UCM's attraction to something, once it is strong, it isn't erased by one or even by ten negative experiences.  The gambling houses had it figured out long before the psychologists did.  There're a certain number of painful transactions you will go through (feeding quarters into a machine and pulling the arm only to not get anything), if the original pleasure reward was strong enough.  From memory, it seems like the ratio was around 40% of the time, if you get a reward, you'll keep pulling the slot machine arm.

In other words, the basic mechanism of the unconscious mind is to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Anyone who's had to do serious battle with their unconscious mind knows the difficulty of head to head battles; you can win, but only when it's the foremost thing in your mind.  Eventually, not eating the crappy food isn't that, and you revert to the old crap eating self.

The question for an adult who wants to take charge of their behavior then is - how do I train the "elephant"?  To have success you have to treat your unconscious mind like a dog or child and provide it with pleasure when you do the things you want to do more often, and no reward or pain as close in time as possible to the behaviors you don't want.  The former is much easier to do than the later.   

Everything you do or want or feel is a result of this internal pas de deux between your conscious and unconscious mind.  Getting your kids to do what you think is best for them is a "simple" matter of getting them to associate more pain to not doing it, and more pleasure to doing it - which is why we say "good job" when they pick up their clothes.  It's also why we interrupt them when they are doing something fun, and make them pick up their clothes, so they think "crap, wish I'd have just put this junk in the hamper in the first place."  Likewise, if you say "good dog" every time your dog sits and holds the posture with food in their face, the dog will associate the pleasure of "I'm about to eat!" with the sound "good dog".  Then, you can use "good dog" as a reward for anything the dog does that you like. 

If you can learn to train yourself in this way, you can get yourself to do anything, probably right up to the point of drowning yourself by sticking your head into a bucket and holding it there (not that I'm an advocate for that).  I'm not saying that learning how to train your elephant is easy or particularly fun, but like many things in life, it is a necessary pursuit, for which the rewards are high.  

I hope you have associated some pleasure to this idea.

Mike Eades, On Target

When I was a kid, I loved my maternal grandfather so much it hurt. He got sick once, and I started worrying that he might die. (He was in his mid sixties at the time, but he seemed old as a rock to me.) I stressed over the loss of him mightily. And must have looked really down in the mouth. Finally he asked me what was wrong. Why was I moping around? I told him that I was worried that he might die. He said to me, ‘Mike, don’t worry about that. I’m going to live until you’re way up in college.’ (He actually made it until I was 30.) I can’t tell you how much relief flooded over my young self on hearing those words. (It never occurred to me, of course, that he really couldn’t predict such a thing, but since I trusted him implicitly, I was assured of his long survival.)

I know my grandchildren feel the same about me. So, I don’t want to live a long time just so I’ll be around to watch them grow up – I want to live a long time so I’ll be there for them.

Thinking this way helps keep things in perspective, and it makes it a whole lot easier to avoid eating what I shouldn’t eat.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/meditating-in-the-garden-of-self-loathing/

Brilliant post by Dr. Eades, and thanks to him.  I recommend you read the entire post.  We are all swimming in this pool in one way or another. 

"Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today."

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that you will be able to enjoy the holiday with people that you love, with a minimum of travel hassle, and some fun activities.

My advice for how to enjoy Thanksgiving eating is - chow down, chow hard, go big or go home.  Notice all the ways this impacts you.  How will you feel tonight?  How will you sleep?  How will you feel tomorrow?  How will your clothes fit?  How does the gastric napalm of Thanksgiving affect your GI business for the next couple days, and your appetite?

Hopefully, the impact will be minimal.  If not, take note!  It will help you teach the UCM what you do and don't want.

If the idea of bathing your brain, nervous system and blood vessels in a hyper-sugar fest isn't appealing, after you feast take a long, enjoyable walk to help your system burn off that extra sugar it will be struggling to manage.  If you can train hard, that's fine too, but I never want to work all that hard I fill my gut with sweet, tasty crap ... which I will!

Anthony Colpo and others like to say the equivalent of "a calorie is a calorie, so fat gain/loss is just a matter of not eating too much, and/or moving more."  They also like to say "I'm smart and you are dumb because you can't see the very clear science I see that proves this is true."

Well, I think days like today reveal how they have no clothes.  Why?  Because you can test for yourself the impact on blood sugar of eating the high sugar treats that characterize the Thanksgiving feast, and it won't be pretty.  If you test, you are likely to see hours of elevated blood sugar.  I don't think there are too many folks who would say that's not an issue for health if it becomes a long term pattern.  If you chose to, you could also test the alternative:  eat an equivalent amount of calories as moderate protein and high quality fat to see the impact on blood sugar.  I'm betting it'll be far better than in the sugar case.

In other words, the "calorie is a calorie" argument is not important for most of the folks that need to change how they eat.  What they must do is stabilize blood sugars - regain the body's natural glycemic control.  You can most easily do that via carb restriction.

There are too many blessings in my life to dig into here, but one is the chance to explore learning, teaching and helping my readers - thanks!

Mental WOD

It seems I cannot repeat this type of thing enough.  What an athlete does to regain fitness/health and stay fit doesn't matter as much as that the athlete does something, with adequate consistency.  Anyone older than 12 knows that will power is over-rated.  Goal setting is cool, but over-rated.  Determination is great, essential even, but inadequate.  Fear of death or senility or feebleness also can be good but only goes so far.  What works to keep folks on track with health and fitness in a world of folks who consistently eat toxic foods is very simple, and very difficult.  What works is to enlist the assistance of the unconscious mind, as that element of our being is more powerful in our behavior than most of us are aware.

Like a dog, the UCM does not know cause and effect, and it does not see the same reality you see.  You could imagine the UCM being like one of the folks in Plato's cave - they see the shadow of the world, but don't realize that's not the world.  You would think that a person who drinks and gets a hangover would have a powerful unconscious association with pain and alcohol, but as we mostly know, that's not true - the events take place too far apart for the pain of the hangover to associate with the booze.  What the UCM associates with the booze is the pleasure of the buzz.  Thus the drinking pattern is easier to repeat than to stop for many.  The same is true with cigarettes and sugary foods.  There's a mountain of suffering that results from eating crap, but the UCM associates to the pleasure at ingestion and fights you when you try to "eat right".

The UCM is a full contact player and like a dog (or a kid) wants two things - it wants to avoid pain and enjoy pleasure.  Anything you do or can't get yourself to do, or won't do, it's likely because the UCM pain/pleasure formula tilts one way or the other.  If you want to do more of something, you have to get the UCM to associate pleasure to that behavior - and vice versa.

How come people do miserably painful workouts day in and day out?  The pleasure of the victory, or movement, or some pleasurable emotion exceeds the physical pain.  Plain and simple.

So, to get the UCM to help you win in your quest to live with vibrant health and abundant physical capacity, you have to train the UCM.  If you have ever had success training a dog or child, you know how this goes.  All bad behaviors have to become a source of annoyance and displeasure, and all good behaviors must be rewarded in ways the UCM finds palpable.  Negatives with undesired behavior and positives with desired behavior must be delivered as quickly as possible to the occurrence of the behavior.  Clear rational thought does not get through to dogs or the UCM - passion on the other hand, emotional intensity, is everything when paired with consistency.

How does this apply to changing lifelong patterns of eating?  You have to make it annoying to eat crap, like my friend who wanted to quit smoking so everywhere he liked to smoke, he couldn't smoke there.  So, he had to stop and get into the back seat to have a cigarette instead of smoking while driving.  How could you apply that principle to your favorite nasty food or drink?  Get creative, find a way that prevents you from going head to head with the UCM (losing formula in my experience to say "I'm never going to eat XYZ again").  You can eat anything you want as long as you are standing naked in the freezing cold dodging cars in the interstate?  Well, that might be taking it a bit too far, but not a bad nugget of an idea.

A really simple start is - get all the crap out of the house.  If you have to get into the car to drive to a place to get the crap, that's going to win many times when your will power will fail.

Another recommendation: find a way to celebrate every time you go to the track or finish a day or a four hour period of time of only eating the good stuff.

It doesn't matter how fast you used to be able to run - going to the track, or whatever, is a win so give yourself a celebration - the more intensity you can muster the better!

Any day that you notice any change - throw a freaking party!  A day without cravings?  Win!  A smaller waist?  Win!  A run faster than last week?  Win!  A week or a month of getting to the gym every time you planned to?  Win!  A day of eating good, nourishing food?  Win!

Can't get yourself to feel proud of what you accomplished today?  Pretend that you are, and act like you would act if you did feel that way.  Why?  Action creates emotion - correct actions can bring desired emotions, desired emotions are a reward for the UCM.

Call your friends, post on Facebook, say a prayer of thanks, give some money to a charity, give some money to yourself, call your parents, call your kids, do something with emotion to mark the success.  You are not a world class athlete using negative motivators to torture a tenth of a second off of your time in order to beat the best competition in the world.  You have a life, it is much too short for negative motivators.  Make success a process oriented game, and give yourself some credit for any success - dammit.  Self flagellation is for monks and the Shiites, you are here to enjoy your life and getting healthy is the best way to start doing that.  You are on a great quest, have fun, when you fall or fail, put it behind you and get back in the saddle.  Learn the lesson, leave the mistake behind with no regrets, unless you fail to focus on where you want to be.

The unconscious mind responds to emotion. If you give yourself an emotion you like after each workout or eating win, of sufficient intensity, the UCM will begin to think it wants you to workout, and it will help you get there. Success comes when the UCM and the CM are aligned.  Train yours with consistency, care and passion and it will serve you better than any dog.

I understand it is the British Special Air Service who say "Who Dares Wins"

PS - for further reading, consult Tony Robbins' work, or contact my performance coach, James Murphy via www.evolutionforsuccess.com

About Training - Exercise Is Normal, Programming Success is a Skill

Most people workout with a short-term goal in mind. I like looking at health in a different way…

• The goal is not to lose 40 pounds in the next 12 weeks. The goal is to regain your health for the rest of your life.
• The goal is not to bench press 300 pounds. The goal is to be the guy who never misses a workout.
• The goal is not to sacrifice everything to get your fastest time in next month’s race. The goal is to be faster next year than you are today. And faster two years from now than you will be next year.

Ignore the short-term results. If you commit to the long-term process, the results will come anyway.

Furthermore, stop acting like living a healthy life is a big deal. You can go to the gym every week. That can be “normal” for you. Not a sacrifice. Not an obligation. Normal.

What’s funny is that when you commit to being consistent over the long-term, you end up seeing remarkable results in the short-term. That’s the power of average speed.

Read more: http://jamesclear.com/best-exercises-basics#ixzz2hZgqf17G
http://www.businessinsider.com/6-hard-truths-about-exercising-2013-9

This is a great read.  I know of no one who would find themselves in the gym, or working out in some way, who would say after ten years "gee I wish I had not made time to be active."  Or, "wow, it sucks to still have strength, health and mobility."  The challenge is - what makes it possible for some but not for others to consistently train?  Some do the minimum necessary, some are putting hours into chasing their demons, and some can't get themselves to do either.  Why?

I think the work that best explains the difference is that of Tony Robbins.  A summary:  You do those things that your unconscious mind associates to either cessation of pain or experience of pleasure.  Your unconscious mind will owrk harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure.  Your unconscious mind will also ignore a lot of pain - think of fighters, marathoners, CrossFitters - to get pleasure if it has associated more pleasure to getting the workout done than it associates pain to the workout.

How can you use that information?  You can "work it" in two ways.  One, don't bite off too much when you start training.  If your first workout is over the top, it teaches the UCM "pain."  Two, give yourself a reward for doing something, anything, to get started.  The frustrated perfectionists fail here - nothing is enough for them to feel good about, thus everything is both pain and failure.  Three, ALWAYS give yourself credit for doing ANY workout, and give yourself more credit/reward for doing several in a week, or for going every other day, etc.

The reward can be a square of chocolate, a text of victory to your friend or coach, or it can be earning for yourself the right to do something you like doing.  Imagine the perception of working out you would have if every time to worked out you received $1000.  You may not have a $1000 to give yourself for doing a workout, but you can find something that would give an equivalent amount of pleasure.  If you are reading this and have an example, please post that in comments.  My example - what do pro and college athletes do after they make a play?  They have a ritual, an arm pump, a holstering the gun motion, a jump and point to the sky .... something that helps them anchor an attachment to the powerful, good feelings of success, something that becomes associated to the pleasure of success, and something that they can draw on when they have a set back (or set backs).

Is this just mind games? Yes, and no.  This is how successful people are successful.  They either have huge unconscious drivers that make lack of action very painful (not the ideal), or they learn to give themselves good feelings for taking the actions that lead to success.  What is maddening about this is how simple, easy, cheap and cool this is - and how difficult it is to learn and implement all day every day once you "see" how it works.  Like my coach, James Murphy told me years ago, "People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years."

Imagine - what could you accomplish in ten years of working out for an hour 5 days a week?  5 of 128 hours training.  2500 hours of training over ten years - how would that change the "you" of ten years from now?  How much better would you feel eat and every day after your first month of that kind of activity?  Is there anything else you could do for 3-5 hours a week that would guarantee that you would feel that much better?  If your answer is the same as mine, let that desire for good feelings guide you to a 5-10 minute workout tomorrow, and a 10-12 minute workout the next day.  Work you way way to a 10 minute warmup and skill session, followed by a 10 minute high intensity (for you) workout.  CELEBRATE every workout no matter how pathetic you think you are doing - the only thing that matters is that you do something.

If you do something, you will eventually be doing something you are very proud of, if you do nothing because nothing is "enough".

If you do nothing you will never earn that right to feel proud of what you did.

Something is always better than nothing.

"Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today."  CELEBRATE every win, no matter how small.

When Your Mother Says She's Fat

This is a good read, with several good lessons.
http://www.rolereboot.org/life/details/2013-06-when-your-mother-says-shes-fat

Part one - don't use your kids to vent about your own baggage.

Two - don't be like this lady and her mom who had all kinds of negative feelings about their bodies, but never realized they did not have to keep thinking and feeling that way.  We have habitual thoughts and feelings, sure.  It's not easy to become aware of them, and it's even harder to change them.  But these thoughts are neither necessary nor useful - so when you've had enough of them, freaking change them!

How?  I recommend Tony Robbins' work.  Where they come from is simple - anything that you do, you do because your unconscious mind associates either pleasure to the activity, or associates escape from pain to the activity.  IOW - if a thought delivers you from a more painful thought, or a feeling delivers you from a more painful feeling, that's a win as far as the unconscious mind is concerned.  Thinking can change these associations over time.  But what really wins over the UCM is emotion.  The more intense the emotion you associate to a behavior, thought or feeling, the more likely it is that you will repeat/stop the behavior, thought or feeling (you could say any thought or feeling is a behavior in this context).  Passion, hope, desperation, anger, inspiration, a mission, a vision - it matters not which, if it is strong and you can associate that emotion to the desired behavior, and do it again, and again, you will change.  Conscious goals with support from the unconscious mind are the most powerful human force.

In other words, you are not a victim of your thoughts or feelings - you created them to help you feel either more pleasure or less pain (usually bad feelings are a distraction from a worse feeling).  You can change them.  Self loathing will not change habits that don't serve you.  Your own sense of high standards leading to failure will not change habits that don't serve you.  Positive beats negative, but only positively motivating emotion.

It's hard, but it's liberating just to know you can take control and to start taking action, so you don't have to be stuck in some battle with your own unconscious mind that you think you can't win and therefore just give in to - when you could be winning, changing, and modeling how to do the same for your progeny.

Lastly, this is a good example of what we learned in Psych 101 is called learned helplessness.  If you try starving yourself enough time, you'll think it is not possible to lose fat.  If you try any diet that can't work for you often enough, you'll come to believe it is not possible for you to lose fat.  You may even associate your own failure baggage - I'm not strong enough, I'm not disciplined enough, I'm not tough enough, whatever - to the whole effort, and not even be willing to try any diets any longer.  Effort becomes more painful than simply accepting one's fate.  Then come the rationalizations ...

Don't give in, don't quit, don't accept the circumstances, never stop trying to find the lifestyle that will serve you and your goals and dreams and passions - as Churchill would say about the most important words in the English language:  "Never, never, never give up."

And if you hunger for a bit more of the writer turned politician's inspiration, I recommend:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2834066.Winston_Churchill

"We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97665/did-the-we-shall-fight-on-the-beaches-speech-mainly-use-words-from-old-english

PS: My dad used to finish that WC quote with something like this:  "And if they reach this island they will know, they have not fallen in with the lambs, but into the lion's den."  Brings a tear to my eye every time I think the thought.

"There is no try. Do or doughnut." Attributed to Yoda

A doughnut at the office - newsworthy?

The other day I had a doughnut in the office, the first I've had since my November experiment with blood sugar (2 D-nuts = blood sugar 212, ugh).  My co-workers snapped this photo.  However, when my kids visited my office and all laughed at the picture of me eating a doughnut, I realized it was a more significant photo than I had thought.  The secret to me not eating doughnuts all day every day wasn't that I have an iron discipline, that failed me for 30+ years.  What changed was I learned not to like doughnuts.  What enabled that was shifting from a sugar dependant metabolism to a flexible, fat burning and ketone making metabolism, and then noticing over a few years of running on fat, that doughnuts were just another pile of sugar, nothing special, nothing exotic, nothing magic.  

Freud said "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar."  He was trying to say "It has no sexual connotation when I smoke a stogie."  Well, to get control of sugar snacking behavior, you have to get to the point that a doughnut is just a doughnut.  When your metabolism is not sugar ingestion dependent, it doesn't make you feel much different when you eat a doughnut, or some other carb laden sugary treat.  When, on the other hand, you are dependent on carb ingestion to sustain blood sugar levels and mood, the doughnut is a lot more than just a doughnut.  To the unconscious mind, that doughnut was a life line, a way out of the darkness, a light at the end of a dark tunnel.  In that context, you'd be hard pressed to oppose the unconscious mind's association to goodness the next time you reach a close point of approach with a doughnut.  

Getting to the point of not eating sugar all the time so that I could become a fat burning machine was more a matter of organization and habit than will power.  The right organization and the best habits were discovered by years of trial and error.  Or as I like to tell the kids, "You have to fail to succeed."

Doughnuts Got A Holed On Me

Once upon a time I wouldn't walk past the doughnut box at work without grabbing a couple.  I didn't think that I could resist, so I wouldn't try that hard.  Since the free doughnuts and trips to DQ for the soft serve and the other sugar feasts were not every day, I survived them relatively unscathed.  But at some point I began to be "de-sugared."  I started to shake the bonds of a lifetime of being a "sugar dog."  As I ate less sugar, when I did eat it, it tasted far less compelling.  The physiological rewards of making my body a sugar dump had decreased so much that I felt less and less drawn to sugar junk.  

In other words, it began to seem like that life long "sweet tooth" had more to do with behavior patterns and physiological responses to habitual sugar intake than to some innate desire for sweet junk.  

These things make even more sense when viewed through the lens of a the Paleo model, which can help us see how chronic carb/sugar intake can set up an addiction cycle which would be as rewarding as smoking, drinking or some other addictive substance.  

I miss the certainty that I could eat a dessert of some kind - almost any kind - and deeply enjoy it.  But, I like how satisfied I feel every day eating regular food, without having to feel stuffed to feel satisfied.  I like the fact that I take one pain pill about every month, compared to 800mg 3x per day as I did in 1999 (and eating far more sugar, and had far more inflammation).  I like it when the doc says "You don't take any prescription medication?"  Or, "I don't know what you are doing, but keep doing it."

Takeaway?  You can interrupt this cycle with persistent effort over time.  In the mean time, every day, every week, every month in which you reduce your carb/sugar intake makes your body less damaged.  The only failure is the failure to get back on the horse in order to learn how to eat for the pleasure of feeling well, and for the natural pleasure real food provides when one is de-sugared - rather than the sugar pleasures of the moment which have to be balanced against the pain of being unwell, weak, and at risk for decrepitude and premature disability.

Keep trying until you find the version that works for you for the duration.

Emotional Pushups?

3 Ways to Keep Your Word And Push Past Negative Emotions
One of the things I talk to clients about, especially if they are going through periods of being discouraged about sustaining a dietary change, is "emotional pushups."  The idea is a way of thinking about the idea of "conditioning" your associations to an activity.

Tony Robbins tells the story of getting a piano tuned, and how it takes a re-tune after a week, and then a month, and then two months, and then six months, to get an old, out of tune piano back in tune and kept in tune.  In other words, it's not a one time deal, it's a process.

Likewise, getting ourselves to sustain a change takes "re-tuning" of our emotions.  Usually, we change when we're in so much pain that we're willing to expend great effort to move away from it.  Once the change starts, however, the pain decreases and with that decrease come a corresponding decrease in the reasons to sustain the change.

The lessons from James Murphy's site - link above - are good examples of "emotional pushups."  The idea is that you are not required to simply endure and live through your emotions.  You can change what you feel by how you think, as James describes.  It's work, you get better at it the more that you work with it, just like pushups.  By changing how you feel you change your limiting patterns.

What kind of emotional pushups do I recommend?  First, make sure you celebrate the goals you complete, both process and outcome goals.  After every workout, if all you think of is how hard it was and how much faster you used to be, that's negative emotional pushups.  If after every workout, you find something to celebrate in the workout, and you give that celebration some emotional energy, that's emotional pushups.  If you have a good food day, and share the satisfaction of that accomplishment with a friend, that's an emotional pushup.  If you reach an outcome goal, mark the occasion and share it with someone that you know will understand the significance!

If you can find a consequence of the change that holds an emotional charge - if I lose weight and sustain/regain health and feel better, I'll be a better father/wife or leader - and sustain contact with and draw emotional energy from that, you will be doing emotional pushups.

Emotional pushups help you tap into the emotional drivers that will help you fuel changes in behaviors, thoughts and feelings that betray your well being.  Once you tap into this skill, I think you will find it is a deep well of possibility in all kinds of arenas in your life.

Go to James' site and learn more!