Resetting Normal: The End of Yo-Yobesity

Resetting Normal: The End of Yo-yobesity

by Tessa Wizon

Published by New Perspectives Press

Seattle, WA

www.ResettingNormal.com

© 2018 Tessa Wizon

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced

in any form without permission from the publisher, except as

permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:

[email protected]

Cover art and book design by Kim Carney.

Illustrations by David Miller.

millercarneymiller.com

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7321563-1-9

For

Faye, John, Vanessa and Stephanie

Acknowledgements

Writing this book was a personal commitment that took far longer than I ever imagined. The ideas are from my personal experience, and the first draft was entirely a solo activity. However, transforming the manuscript from my first draft into final publication quality required expertise I didn’t have. And I am grateful to the friends, professionals, and family members who helped me with that difficult task.

I’d like to thank my longtime friend Loretta Rippee, a hypnotherapist who works with clients wanting to lose weight, for reading two early versions of my manuscript and giving me detailed feedback that helped me improve the organization and make it more relevant for readers. I also thank her for her constant support and her patience in listening to some of my unorthodox ideas, judgement-free.

I’m grateful to Bonnie Goren, another longtime colleague and friend, for our enlightening discussions on the how and why of my approach to solving the weight problem. Challenging many of my convictions, she provided me with lots of practice explaining and defending them. She also read an early version of the book and gave me helpful feedback and support. And I’m extremely thankful she volunteered to test all my recipes, as I know from experience that she has in-depth culinary expertise.

Another very important person who helped me is Sandra Kersten Chalk. She was my first professional editor and she had quite a challenge guiding me in cutting my 560-page manuscript down to a readable length. I resisted every step of the way, but she persisted with patience and I am grateful for that. I also call her my Encourager in Chief. She believed in my message and at times when I wondered if my concept was worth publishing, she gave me hope that I did indeed have valuable information that could help other people.

I am immensely grateful to designer Kim Carney for the cover art that encapsulates the Yo-Yobesity concept and for the overall book design. And for illustrator David Miller for his fun graphics. I had a number of ideas for small graphics at various places in the text and Kim and David were able to take my vague descriptions and translate them into amusing images that help get my points across.

I would also like to acknowledge The Editorial Department (TED), a company that provides excellent manuscript editing services. Peter Gelfen advised me on content organization and Julie Miller did a thorough job copyediting my manuscript. I learned a lot about presenting ideas with clarity and about the mechanics of grammar – the book would not have been very professional without their help.

Regarding the endless, tedious tasks involved in actually getting a book published, I must thank Beth Jusino, a writer, developmental editor and publishing consultant who helped me navigate the confusing path to self-publishing. It isn’t as easy as it looks, and her guidance was essential to my success.

Finally, I can’t end without giving credit to my husband Phil, my kids Faye, John, and Vanessa, and my granddaughter Stephanie, as well as my brother Jerry and his wife Irene, who have listened to me talk about this project for more than a dozen years. They might not realize it, but their little suggestions dropped here and there along the way helped shape the final message. And Stephanie invented one of my favorite terms in the book, snacktivity, which perfectly expresses the Western normal’s habit of continuous snacking – I suspect (and hope) one day she’ll become a writer. Thank you all.

Contents

Part 1: Introduction

Who should read this book?

Why listen to me?

How to get the most out of this book

Part 2: The Experiment

My Story

Translating experience into a plan

Resetting Normal—Overview

Part 3: The Plan

The Battle of the Mind

The Battle of Activity

The Battle of Quality

The Battle of Quantity

The Final Frontier

Tips for Keeping your Normal Forever

Part 4: Special Cases

How to improve quality on a limited budget

Resetting Normal for Kids

Part 5: Wrapping it up

Appendix A: Whole-Food alternatives

Appendix B: Action tools

Appendix C: Additives and preservatives

Appendix D: additional reading

endnotes

Index

Part 1: Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Who should read this book?

ASK YOURSELF: How many diets you have tried? If the answer is more than one, then you might be a yo-yo dieter—someone who cycles between denial/weight loss and indulgence/weight gain. Yo-yo dieting is the curse of the modern health quest. If one diet doesn’t work we just blame ourselves for the failure and try another, eternally hopeful that we’ll find one that does work. But the end result is gradual weight gain because with each cycle we invariably gain more than we lose. Welcome to yo-yobesity!

We endure a continual barrage of obesity warnings from all corners of the health industry. Experts want us to lose weight to get healthy, but they all advocate one primary solution—dieting. There’s just one tiny problem: the success rate of this method has been dismal. People have been trying to lose weight by dieting for a century, at least. Yet the population at large is—well—just getting larger.

Today, you can assume almost every person in the country has been on a diet, is on one now, is trying to adhere to one, or thinks they should. Diet regimens have become billion-dollar businesses, and people have been dieting either by themselves or in some expensive diet program for well over fifty years.

But ask yourself the following questions:

• If so many people have been dieting in so many ways for so

long, why is the obesity problem getting worse?

• If dieting were the answer, wouldn’t it have solved the problem long ago?

Wouldn’t we all be svelte and fit and leaping around like deer

in the forest?

Why don’t diets work? It’s because none of the experts can answer the following question: Even if you manage to lose weight on a diet (any diet), how do you maintain that for the rest of your life? Most diet programs profess to train you for maintenance, but all of them rely on self-control, willpower, and some level of denial. Who can tolerate that for a lifetime? Who even wants to?

What if I told you there’s another way that’s not a diet? A way that's not a diet but a transformation—a transformation that solves the problem so completely, you never need to think about dieting again. How would you feel if you never felt compelled to step on the scale again? If you never needed to track calories, fat grams, or carbs? If you never needed to count every step you take every day? If you never gained weight on vacations or holidays? And what if I told you that once you complete this transformation, you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want to?

Would you believe me? Probably not. And I would understand because I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t gone through the transformation myself.

To get a glimpse into this future that awaits you, try to imagine a state in which you don’t have to obsess about what and how much to eat, don’t have to choose between guilt and deprivation, and don’t have to start a diet every Monday or a whole new diet and exercise program every January 2nd. A state where you can channel all the energy formerly wasted on those efforts into what you really want to do with your life.

If you’re a confirmed yo-yo dieter like I used to be, you probably can’t. But that state is where I am now. And it could be where you are in the future. Resetting Normal will prove to you first that it’s possible to achieve such a state, and second, how to do it yourself.

Resetting Normal is a permanent solution because anything normal is easy to maintain: you don’t have to think about it, you just do it, without undue stress. For example, if it’s normal for you to start your day with coffee, you just get up and make it or you pick it up on your way to work. You don’t go through an agonizing decision every morning about whether to do it or not.

Consider: for most people, our current Western lifestyle is the norm. Unfortunately, this normal simply does not support good health or an optimally healthy weight for you. To improve your health, lose weight, and keep it off forever, what you need to do is change to a better normal. While that may sound impossible, you have the power to do it—Resetting Normal will show you how.

All it takes is winning four battles. Now, it might seem like fighting battles is an intimidating, negative approach to the problem. Who wants to fight? And why should you? But what is dieting? Dieting is a continual battle against yourself: what you want to eat vs. what you think you should eat. Weakness vs. willpower. Enjoyment vs. misery. How many win that battle? On the other hand, the battles to reset normal are winnable. You wage them not against yourself but against the outside influences that keep you trapped in a weight-gain cycle. You stop fighting yourself, you learn to leverage your own personal metabolism.

When you win these battles, you will reset your body to a new, healthier normal. Then you’re done for life. You’ll experience a sense of relief and freedom you never had before. No more dieting. Ever. You will win the prize: a totally natural, healthy, guilt-free relationship with food and activity that produces a normalized body weight.

Resetting Normal is for every one of you…

• Who doesn’t feel you are as healthy as you could be

• Who hasn’t had long-term success with any of the current diet plans

• Who’s sick and tired of so-called experts telling you what,

when, and how much to eat … and then changing that

recommendation every couple of weeks

• Who’s sick and tired of those same experts telling you how much and

when to exercise … and then changing that recommendation every

couple of weeks

• Who’s sick and tired of being accused subtly and not so subtly of

gluttony, stupidity, ignorance, and weak willpower

• Who has other goals in life besides trying to stick to a diet

Join me in Resetting Normal—put an end to yo-yobesity. Take the pledge:

No mo’ yo-yo!

CHAPTER 2

Why listen to me?

Resetting Normal is based on my personal experience—years of it. I’ve recently passed the seventy-year mark, and I was on the wrong end of the diet stick for forty-three years. I’ve been through all the societal diet cycles—low-calorie, low-carb, low-fat, high-carb—and back again. Some of them worked in the short-term. Some didn’t work at all. None worked in the long-term.

My experience also includes lots of different roles, which gives me a unique perspective. I understand firsthand the demands and frustrations of everyday life that drive overeating. I’ve studied it from the inside (one of the people with the problem), as well as from the outside (studying the problem as a detached observer).

I’ve been an overweight child, pre-teen, teen, and adult. I’ve experienced the peer pressure in elementary school, junior high school, high school, and college. I’ve been an overweight spouse, an overweight parent, a parent with overweight children, a parent returned to school, and a grandparent. I’ve been a stay-at-home parent, a working single parent, self-employed, and an employee of various companies. I’ve been pre-menopausal, menopausal and post-menopausal. And in between being fat I’ve also been reasonably thin—not very often, but at least enough to know that it feels good.

I’m not an expert by scientific standards but that turns out to be an asset: after all, it was the experts who led me astray for all those overweight years. Once I stopped listening to them I was free to experiment, and I found a solution that changed my life more profoundly than I ever expected. A solution that gives me peace of mind knowing I’ll be as healthy as I can possibly be and I’ll never have a weight problem again. Ever.

In the coming chapters I frequently chastise these experts, so I want to be clear who I’m referring to. I’ve taken the liberty of adopting the definition set out by author David H. Freedman in the introduction to his book, WRONG: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them¹:

… when I say expert, I’m mostly thinking of someone whom the mass media might quote as a credible authority on some topic—the sorts of people we’re usually referring to when we say things like, According to the experts … These are what I would call mass or public experts, people in a position to render opinions or findings that a large number of us might hear about and choose to take into account in making decisions that could affect our lives.

There are many professionals in the field of nutrition and health who truly are experts and make significant contributions every day. The problem is that they do so quietly. Unfortunately, it’s the loud voices that hijack media attention and influence health policies and medical advice—even if they’re wrong.

I’m certainly not qualified to give anyone medical advice. But my life experience qualifies me to understand the problems overweight people deal with, and my success in conquering my own weight problems qualifies me to describe to you how I did it. I will never say, If I can do it, anyone can. But I will say, If I can do it, it’s possible.

CHAPTER 3

How to get the most out of this book

Resetting Normal contains everything you need to succeed in defeating yo-yobesity: the background on how we got into this situation in the first place, how and why Resetting Normal works, the battle plans and the specific Actions for making it work for you. However, each person who has tried to lose weight and failed is an individual with a unique set of dietary experiences, likes and dislikes, and levels of dysfunction around eating, so I have also provided a corresponding workbook on the website resettingnormal.com where you can customize your experience.

The online workbook lists only the Actions, along with some extra detail and spaces for personal notes. You can download the workbook and either make your notes digitally on your favorite device or – if you prefer pen and paper – print out sections as needed and make your notes manually. That strategy allows you to choose which Actions are appropriate for you. Not everyone who wants to reset normal needs to complete all the Actions, as each of us comes from different lifestyle backgrounds. If you already practice some of the habits I recommend, you’ll get through the program faster. But don’t feel bad if you need to work on all the Actions—I certainly did.

I suggest you read all the way through the book first. Then go to the website and use the workbook to tackle the Actions you think you need to take. Some of those Actions are quick, mental exercises that only take a few minutes. Others will need to be repeated until you’ve absorbed them into your new normal.

Part 2: The Experiment

Chapter 4

My Story

A history of dieting

If you have any kind of eating disorder (underweight, overweight, emotional eating or any other problem eating behavior), I understand you. I was one of you. Even if your problem is greater or lesser than mine, we share the same underlying problems and possibly the same solution. I suspect you will identify with most of the situations and feelings I describe below.

If you want the short list, here are a few of my stats:

• I was always chubby as a child.

• I came from a family where overeating was the norm.

• I started dieting at age twelve.

• I lived in a cycle of diet-on/diet-off.

• My adult height is five feet two.

• My weight at its highest point—excepting pregnancy—was 170 pounds.

• My weight when I quit dieting was 155 pounds.

• I am currently in my seventies.

• My current weight stays between 125 and 130 pounds

(which I’ve maintained for more than ten years).

Today I count myself as one of those lucky people who sense when it’s time to stop eating, but for most of my life that wasn’t the case. I used to think it was genetic. Now I know it wasn’t: I just developed some very bad eating habits as I grew up, and I carried them through most of my adult life.

Growing up with TMF (Too Much Food)

I grew up in an era where the prevailing belief was that being pleasantly plump was healthy. My family always served a lot of good food—homemade and delicious, but it was a lot of food. And there was a subtle, underlying pressure to eat a lot.

It was also the clean-your-plate era. I don’t criticize the intent of this principle—I certainly don’t like to see people pile food on their plate and throw it away—and the immediate result was that I did always clean my plate. However, the unintended consequence of this policy was that instead of putting less on my plate so I could eat it all without getting stuffed, I just got used to eating more than I needed. In other words, the amount I put on my plate didn’t shrink to fit my natural appetite; my appetite grew to accommodate the amount I put on my plate. And feeling stuffed became a normal feeling.

So it’s no surprise I was an overweight child. I felt the effects by the time I was eight or nine years old. Just as it is today, those who weren’t thin were excluded from the cool set, so my weight limited my social circle and lowered my self-esteem. It didn’t help that some of kids nicknamed me Tessie the dinosaur. By the time I was twelve—that age when the social scene becomes especially important—the weight thing really set in, and that’s when I started dieting. After all, I’d need to be thin to attract the boys. And the quest to be a part of that thin group led to my series of diets.

You may recognize the cycle I went through for years.

.

Teen diets

Cottage cheese and peaches

My very first diet: eat cottage cheese and peaches three times a day for four days and lose five pounds. At age twelve I tried it and it worked. Of course, I gained it back in another couple of weeks, and for the next twenty years I didn’t even want to think about cottage cheese and peaches.

Standard 1960s diet: low starch, low sugar, lean meat

In the 1960s the common belief was that too much starch, sugar, and fat was what made people fat, so going on a diet meant eating lean meats and limiting starches like potatoes, pasta, and desserts. For example, most family restaurants carried the a same typical diet plate: a lean hamburger patty (no bun), cottage cheese, lettuce and tomato, and a small cup of fruit. I tried this method for four months and it worked, too, but with the same long-term result—I gained it all back. Which didn’t deter me from trying to do it over and over. Unfortunately, it got harder and harder until I finally gave up, destined to spend the rest of my teen years in the overweight category with a few close friends but no social life to speak of. I had entered early-stage yo-yobesity.

Early-adult diets

Post-college, during one of my low-weight periods, I did manage to socialize enough to develop a relationship and get married. But the ensuing motherhood generated additional pounds and the question of how to get rid of them again. Hope springs eternal, and just like most other people who diet, I blamed my previous failures to lose weight on myself while continuing to search for a diet that would work.

The Drinking Man’s Diet: low-carbohydrate

My father had always fought a weight problem, too. He’d had success with a diet called The Drinking Man’s Diet, created by Robert Cameron². This diet took the approach that dieters could drink any amount of alcohol they wanted as long as it had no sugar in it. For example, bourbon with club soda was ok; wine and drinks made with sweet mixes were not. The diet allowed about fifty grams of carbohydrates per day, and dieters could eat as much protein and fat as they wanted. It wasn’t nearly as severe in carbohydrate restriction as the Atkins Diet is, but it still didn’t allow very much.

I tried it. I weighed about 160 pounds when I started. It took a lot of determination—life is full of carbs—but I stuck with the plan for six months and got my weight down to 115 pounds. I felt great! But once again, I couldn’t stay there. After a few months, I was sick of protein overload, and cravings for the foods I hadn’t let myself eat during the diet got the better of me. I gradually started gaining the weight back.

I went through this low-carb diet two more times over the following fifteen years. I could never hold onto the weight loss for more than six months and after a while I just got used to being a citizen of the Land of the Fat and Ugly: mid-stage yo-yobesity.

Maintaining a state of hunger + walking

At the ripe old age of thirty-nine—after fifteen years as a stay-at-home mom raising three kids, and three years into my second round of college—I didn’t want to reenter the workforce in a year as a fat person. Determined to get the weight off no matter what, I cut back on everything. I ate what everyone else ate, just not very much of it. I was so busy with the kids, school, and working part-time it was easy to distract myself from food. As part of that distraction I also began my habit of walking—the one habit I gained during those years that has continued to benefit my health. I just started walking a little every morning, gradually working up to three miles.

I went hungry a lot of the time, regarding hunger as a signal that I was losing weight. And I did. I succeeded in losing about forty pounds, once more getting down to 115. But by now you know the story: I gradually gained most of the weight back.

Dieting becomes an obsession

Still, I was determined not to give up. I got serious with educating myself about nutrition and I began doing a lot of reading, investigating other kinds of diets. During the next decade I tried many of them—some with more success than others, but none that stabilized my weight. The most disturbing trend during this time was my growing obsession with food: what it consisted of, how I prepared it, and when and how much I was allowed to eat. On some of these diets I made everything from scratch myself, calculating the calories and fat in each serving, and I kept a diary of everything I ate every day, even adding up the total calories and fat at the end of each day and each week.

But there was an unintended consequence: I micro-managed my eating so much during the work week that when the weekend arrived I went crazy. Then the more I ate over the weekend, the more penitent I was on Monday, and the more restrictive I was Monday through Friday to try to compensate for the weekend binging ... which resulted in even more binging the following Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I ate anything I could find until I was so full I couldn’t eat any more—stuffed to the max. In one of those days I could consume more than 5000 calories. I know that number because in an effort to curb my binges (by shocking myself), I made myself write down everything I ate and add it up. It didn’t work. It only succeeded in making me depressed and more determined to make up for it the following week. I had entered the advanced stage of yo-yobesity.

Just for the record, here are a few of the diets I tried during my advanced period.

The body-type diet

This diet assigned a body type to people based on their shape and metabolism, then laid out kinds of foods and eating schedules for each type. My particular type dictated that I eat very little for breakfast—only a little fruit. Then for lunch and dinner I could eat eggs, cheese, and rice, as well as unlimited amounts of some vegetables. I did lose some weight. But I couldn’t handle the morning without any substantial food. By 11:00 a.m. I was counting the minutes until I could eat lunch. I felt like I was entering starvation mode—which I probably was. Eventually I fell back into the familiar pattern of restriction on weekdays and binging on the weekends, and after three months, gave it up altogether.

The very low-fat diet

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the low-fat, high-carb diet became a national trend. Susan Powter’s book Stop the Insanity! ³ declared that dieting was insane. Her solution to fight dieting hunger was to consume lots of low-fat foods. Her theory: dieters who cut out the fat could up the quantity of everything else, feel full and still lose weight. In addition, she recommended a lot of exercise: she herself became a fitness instructor and claimed she could consume thousands of calories every day with her food and exercise regimen.

I gave it a try, sometimes getting my daily fat down below 10 percent. I made everything myself and kept track of all calorie and fat intake. But two things happened that made me quit. For one, after three months and no weight loss I realized I was never able to keep the calorie count low enough because the lack of fat kept me continually hungry and snacking on low-fat foods. Second, I began to have problems focusing my mind on anything—not a good thing when I was writing computer code—a symptom I later learned can be caused by too little fat in the diet. Since it wasn’t working anyway, I abandoned it.

The Atkins Diet

Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution ⁴ was relatively new at the time, similar to The Drinking Man’s Diet but much more restrictive.