Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently by Arnold Caroline L

Author:Arnold, Caroline L. [Arnold, Caroline L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-01-15T23:00:00+00:00

Ready for Dinner

Robert generally didn’t snack in the afternoon at work and looked forward to the congenial meal he shared with his family each evening. Robert’s habit on arriving home was to get a cold beer from the refrigerator along with some salty pretzels to eat with it. The beer was filling in itself, and the addition of a couple of handfuls of pretzels often meant that by the time he sat down to dinner he had already consumed several hundred calories. Yet even without true appetite, he still ate a full meal with his family and often left the table feeling overfull.

In his quest to lose some weight, Robert reconsidered his predinner snack habit. He didn’t want to give up his beer ritual—it relaxed him after a long day of work—so he focused instead on reducing the impact that the salty snack had on his waistline and his dinner appetite. The beer was typically 160 calories and the pretzels around 200. Robert made a microresolution to limit my predinner snack to 50 calories. He made a list of salty treats he could eat for 50 calories: five small pretzels, five chips, six olives, three medium pickles. The pretzels and chips, Robert quickly found, left him wanting more, but the pickle kept him off the addictive carbs while delivering a salty wallop. Missing the crunch of the pretzels, he began eating celery sticks along with the pickles and beer. In reforming a single snack habit, Robert better aligned his appetite to dinner and saved himself 150 calories a day, enough to lose fifteen pounds over three years, according to the latest weight-loss models.*

If you make a microresolution aimed at increasing your hunger for real meals, be sure you know what hunger feels like. In our culture of plenty, we often use the word “hunger” to describe any idle urge to eat, confusing cravings with hunger. Hunger is a growling stomach, a cry that the body has exhausted its fuel, not suddenly feeling in the mood for Chips Ahoy. You can be full of food—the opposite of hungry—and still crave something to eat, very often something sweet. Craving carbohydrates in the absence of hunger is an energy distress signal from a tired brain and body; one strategy to relieve such cravings is to treat these urges chemically. Rather than letting the craving be a cue to toss back a handful of cookies or candy, make a microresolution to respond to carbohydrate cravings with simple sugars—a mint, a date, sweet tea or coffee. This will give your brain a direct sugar hit without the extra fat and calories that come with a carbohydrate-rich treat. One friend of mine who often indulged in afternoon confections made a microresolution to swallow a teaspoon of honey when craving sweets, a twenty-two-calorie hit of pure energy that saved her hundreds of calories each day. Making a no-excuses resolution requires that you be prepared when the craving hits, whether that’s having a jar of honey or a box of Altoids in your desk drawer.

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