Читать книгу The Social Network Diet - Michael Bertoldo - Страница 8

There’s no question that environmental factors play a part in inhibiting healthy eating and active living in this country. Our food supply produces cheap calories in great abundance—at steep cost to our waistlines and our health. Our jobs, our new technologies, our ways of commuting, even the design of our communities have “engineered” natural daily movement out of our lives, making it harder to stay fit.

Until we can create change in the larger environment, for the moment, it falls to individuals to make the personal change they need to transform their lives, just as Martha and Deanne did.

When Deanne made her life transition, she started small. To revise her “horrible” eating habits, she joined Weight Watchers, which helped her structure her eating and taught her not just what to eat but how to eat. “When people ask me how I did this,” she says, “I tell them that I started with small steps and was incredibly persistent. When I first decided I was ready to lose weight I was huge, 125 pounds overweight. I told myself, ‘Well, I have to start somewhere—I’ll just try to lose a little weight, any amount.’”

Deanne began by changing what she put into her personal environment. She examined the portion sizes she was eating. “They were so distorted,” she recalls. “They were based on what I had grown up with. Whatever was put in front of me, I ate.

“I started to measure out my food. I prepared portions ahead of time—e.g., chicken cut into 6-ounce portions. When I made meals, I pulled out only what I needed to eat for a single portion for a single meal, so there was no temptation to go back for seconds.

“That first week, I lost four pounds, and I realized I didn’t have to starve myself to death. I could do this. That small success really fueled itself. When I was drawn to food, I learned to ask myself, ‘Are you hungry?’ More often than not, the answer was, ‘No, just bored.’ So I would just turn away from the food instead of eating, waiting for the wave of ‘hunger’ to pass.” She began a regular program of walking on a treadmill, building up to a half-hour a day. She bought my first book, Strong Women Stay Young, and began lifting—at first with cans of beans and later with real weights. From February to November of 2000, she lost 60 pounds. Then she joined a gym and began jogging on the treadmill and exercising on an elliptical. She also found a new social circle. “I still maintain my old friendships,” she says, “but now I have a whole new group of friends; we train together and run races together.” Just five years later, by age 39, she had lost 120 pounds.

These days, Deanne weighs 145 pounds and wears a size 8. More important, each week she runs 25 miles and bikes 75 to 100 miles; she swims three times a week and can dead-lift more than 100 pounds. She races in triathalons and marathons. Still, even after all of these years, Deanne admits that she has to make conscious decisions every single day to eat well and go to the gym. “I just take it day by day,” she says. “I ask myself: Am I going to the gym today? Am I going to eat properly? Am I going to consume that doughnut or bagel sitting on the office counter, which I don’t need because I just ate a healthy breakfast a half hour ago? When I make a mistake, I never beat myself up. If I eat badly at one meal, I don’t batter myself and say, ‘Well, there goes the day.’ I try to get back on track as soon as I can.”

Deanne has maintained her weight for more than eleven years. She says that she has never been happier.

You see now that a complicated web of forces in your environment shapes what you eat and how you move. But what forces have shaped the environment? Before we can make the change we want to see in ourselves and in our world, we need to understand how our environment came to be what it is today.