Life is Healthy

Create a plan to you success

We set goals and make resolutions. Some of us are more successful than others reaching our goals. Why is that? According to January 3, 2011, Associated Press article, New Year's Resolutions? Brain Can Sabotage Success, we're hardwired to seek immediate reward over a delayed one.

Bad habits become as much as part of our thinking as good ones—perhaps even more so. Whatever it is that gives us pleasure or comfort we will seek out before something that will get us to a long-term goal. When you look at changing long-time dietary habits this way, it's no surprise that great taste beats great nutrition almost every time. But that's no reason to give up. It just gives you more ammo to get to where you want to be. The more you understand where your craving is coming from, the more likely you will be able to overcome it, according to Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

In Volkow's experiments, she studied how the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine affects people, and how just a little bit of happiness turns into a habit. She says the right cue in the right environment will make the temptation too hard to resist virtually every time. In addition, she says that people believe they can handle more than they can. And it's these people who fall off the wagon more than people who have a more realistic view of what they can handle.

In one experiment, Loran Nordgren, an experimental psychologist and an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, measured whether heavy smokers could resist lighting up while watching a movie called "Coffee and Cigarettes." Participants were given the choice of watching the film while holding an unlit cigarette, leaving the pack on the table, or leaving the pack in another room. Those who thought they were in control and could hold the cigarette were more likely to lit up than those who left the cigarettes in another room. The temptation turned out to be more insidious depending on how close the cigarettes were.

So what does this tell us? I guess it's what Dr. Oz among others have been saying for a while:
1. If you want to lose weight, get the snacks out of the house,
2. Make your environment conducive to meeting your goals.
3. Use non-food rewards,
4. Repeat the new behavior over and over until it becomes a habit, and
5. Seek support that doesn't jeopardize your success.

Unfortunately, I have a hiatal hernia that I must have repaired—soon. But that doesn't mean I can't get my ass started. And stop paying for the other membership that I'm really not using anyway.

I want to be healthy as I enter my twilight years—I think I'm older than I am. But right now I feel older than I am.

A sidebar, and I know you'll be really interested in my health symptoms, my hernia causes me to retain large amounts of gas that identifies itself when I take a swig of diet Coke and follow it with something the magnitude of what might come out of a frat boy at a keg party. Nice, huh?

OK. That's the bad side of the hernia. What it has done for me, though, is made me think about every piece of food I put in my mouth. If I eat too much at a time, I'm in pain for hours afterward. So I'm eating very small portions. What I have come to realize is that I ate when I wasn't even thinking about it. I would look at some food and think, "this will be good," and then eat it—maybe later I don't even remember that I did it. Now, I stop before I put it in my mouth and think about the pain I'll be in if I give into the temptation. And I'm not even sure that temptation is the right word.

So that brings me back to using food to comfort myself. What does it do for me? Especially since it makes me feel so guilty after I do it. Why am I always on self destruct?

So that's what I'll be thinking about this week.