Annie’s Healthy Weight & Eating Blog

Here it is. The holiday season. Party time, candy and cookie time, rich food time. Estimates for how much Americans gain during this season range from 5 to 15 pounds, depending on who’s doing the reporting. I suspect that the weight gain phenomenon is more prevalent in New England and the northern climes, but I’d love to hear stories and strategies from those in warmer places as to their strategies for maintaining a healthy weight (and healthy habits) through this time.
Here are few survival tips:

Accept the fact that you won’t be losing weight this month. Regardless if you are a party momma or a stay-at-homer, there is just more high-calorie food around. Just maintaining is a feat this time of year.

Keep on moving. Practice stress management. Tie them together. Keep physical activity top-of-mind this month, and squeeze in extra workouts, try some of the TV workouts on cable (if you have comcast on demand, check out the fitness TV - there are yoga, Pilate’s, walking and many other workouts - that’s what’s kept me moving through the last month or two when the weather has been less reliable here on Nantucket). Physical activity is great stress management, so if you didn’t get your packages in the mail on time, didn’t get to cards this year, or whatever, move a little to release the emotion that sits in your body as a result of not being perfect.

Focus on the peeps, not the table. Food traditions this time of year carry deep resonance and a strong pull. For me, it’s my mom’s cookies, and anything resembling eggnog. It’s not always easy to remember that the reason for the season is really love, hope and connectedness. I know that many family relationships can be challenging, and that can drive us to seek comfort from seasonal goodies in unhealthy quantities. There’s a Buddhist practice that may be helpful in working with relationships this season. The Dali Lama describes a practice of bowing down to the difficult people in your life, and thanking them for the opportunity they have provided to help you to experience spiritual growth. Love and honor them! For me, this practice a) cracks me up a little, and b) opens me up to another way to seeing things beyond the way my conditioned judgemental mind does. Somehow, it makes it easier for me to step back and see the people who challenge me differently, and to forgive them for the pain they cause me.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely or difficult your life is, the world opens itself to you this season. My wish for you is to feel that magic. My wish for you is that someone does the Buddhist practice of loving you when you cause them pain. And I wish you peace.

Namaste
Annie

The New York Times has been covering the social stigmatization of weight recently. Gina Kolata reported in an October Week in Review (their weekly OpEd section), that there is an ever- louder beat of the drum from researchers (and of course amplified by the media), blaming obese individuals for everything from higher gas prices to global warming. There was another piece more recently on the growth of fat-discrimination as a college study topic.

In essence, Kolata’s piece notes that social stigmatization of overweight is at an all-time high. But, while the great tide of disapproval helped stem other unhealthy behaviors like smoking or drinking, unfortunately it doesn’t work that way with our most ubiquitous coping mechanisms: comfort food and inactivity. All that self-loathing and fear of weight just makes us gain more.

Evidence mounts that it’s the healthy behaviors (being physically active and following a healthy diet) that determine health to a greater extent than the number on the scale. Remember that CDC report that noted that people slightly overweight lived longer? So, a thin person who under eats or overexercises is less healthy than an overweight individual following a healthy lifestyle.

But does that help us to exhale around accepting our body size? No! Why?

I think that food and fashion industries have just been wildly successful at sending messages to shape the culture and ensure our insecurity. An unhappy person is a great consumer, after all. Want to see what I mean? take a look at some of the ads on www.about-face.org. To learn more about this topic and connect with others around it, check out the International Association of Size Acceptance. The have lots of downloads, reviews of the science around size acceptance, pod casts and links. Just tons of great information.

I think the way out of the hatred and stigmatization of weight is simple education. Kids now really need media literacy in order to become conscious of what they can do to live healthy lives today. And for adults, I think there is more support to renounce the unhealthy aspects of our culture - look at the popularity of yoga! Yoga, of course, is a wonderful way of doing the mental work around releasing some of the underlying issues that cause all the suffering around poor body image, and waking up to the truth that each and everyone of us is perfect, and is divine.