Shannan’s Journey

 by Michael R. Eades

Despite the title of this post, it isn’t really about why low-carb is harder the second time around per se. It’s more about attitude toward dieting and why diets in general are difficult, sometimes even the first time.  What with it being a new year and all, I figured I would go ahead and get things stirred up early with my thoughts on the psychology of dieting.

I can’t begin to count the number of people whom I have seen in my office who have fallen off the wagon and who told me that they just couldn’t stick with their low-carb diet for any number of reasons.

A typical conversations goes something like this:
MRE: (In this drama, MRE is yours truly, the long suffering physician) So, Mrs. X, I see that you gained a little weight this week.  What happened?  Is there a problem we need to go over?
Mrs. X: Oh, no, not really.  I had to put my mother in the hospital this week, and I just couldn’t diet with all that going on.
Other answers could be: My kids all came home from summer camp, and I just couldn’t stick to it with all that going on.  Or my husband lost his job, and I couldn’t low-carb with that going on. Or I’m going through a divorce.  Or …  You get the picture.

These excuses bring to mind an absolutely wonderful book that I highly recommend, The Happiness Hypothesis.  It was written by Jonathon Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and is filled with interesting perspectives on happiness, what it takes to be happy and even the scientific basis of happiness.  The cover of the book has a sort of blurred photo taken from underwater of what appears to be an elephant with a rider on its back, which is central to Dr. Haidt’s thesis.

Dr. Haidt describes our minds and bodies (and by bodies he means not just our corporeal bodies but the working mechanisms of our bodies) as being akin to a rider on the back of an elephant.  Our conscious, thinking minds he casts in the role of the rider, and the rest of us as the elephant.  The rider can control the elephant as long as the elephant wants to be controlled.  And if the elephant is okay with being steered and directed, then to all appearances, the rider is in control.  But, if the elephant has other ideas, the rider basically just goes along for the ride.

Every time I think of this image, I’m taken back to our youngest kid’s dorm room in college where he played a bit of video he had taped from one of those Fox (I think it was Fox) shows from years ago called When Good Pets Go Bad.  It was a video of a woman who, along with her three young children,  went for a ride on the back of an elephant.  The elephant was a part of some sort of performance and had been placidly giving rides to all comers.  Once this particular family got aboard, the elephant decided it had put up with enough of this nonsense and went rogue.  It stormed out raising hell and tearing up everything in site with the poor mother and her kids hanging on for dear life. The family ended up unharmed after the rampage, but the elephant had to be destroyed.  Our kid loved the video showing all the people running in horror from this irate elephant and would play it in frame by frame mode so that he could see the looks of terror on all the faces of all those trying to flee.  MD and I, being the attentive parents that we are, must have watched this video a dozen times as he pointed out all the nuances that he loved so much, so it is firmly etched in my mind.

This rogue elephant scenario is what Dr. Haidt thinks happens to us from time to time.  Our rider (the conscious part of us) wants us to do something, but the elephant part of us doesn’t want to, and so the rider just hangs on for the ride while the elephant goes wherever it wants to go.  We can put this in dieting terms.  Our rider decides that the elephant needs to go on a diet.  As long as the elephant is up for it, the diet hums along.  But if the elephant has other ideas, the rider becomes an ornament.  If things are going well, the rider has the appearance of control; if things aren’t going well, i.e., we had to put Mom in the hospital, then the elephant takes over.  And the rider accepts it.  He says, hey, I couldn’t control this beast because we had to put Mom in the hospital, and you know how he gets when we have to put Mom in the hospital.  He wants to eat, and I, the rider, have to go along with him.

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom presents another way of looking at this situation in an enlightening article in the November 2008 issue of The Atlantic.  He puts forward the idea that we all have multiple selves that we’re constantly dealing with, arguing with and trying to fool.

Let’s say that we’ve dined large late at night and are headed for bed.  As we crawl into the sack with belly distended from a carb overindulgence and lie flat, we start getting the ol’ acid reflux feeling.  We sit up, burp, drink some water, rub our chest and grab for the Tums.  The self that is suffering says, ‘That’s it, I’m dieting tomorrow.  I can’t stand feeling like this, not for one more night.’  The next morning the self that wakes up is a different person who isn’t experiencing reflux, doesn’t have a distended belly and is hungry.  And, by God, hungry for some waffles, at that.  The feel-good morning self may not abide by the rules laid down by the refluxing self the night before.

Bloom relates a story told by the Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling about his own multiple selves:
As a boy I saw a movie about Admiral Byrd’s Antarctic expedition and was impressed that as a boy he had gone outdoors in shirtsleeves to toughen himself against the cold. I resolved to go to bed at night with one blanket too few. That decision to go to bed minus one blanket was made by a warm boy; another boy awoke cold in the night, too cold to retrieve the blanket … and resolving to restore it tomorrow. The next bedtime it was the warm boy again, dreaming of Antarctica, who got to make the decision, and he always did it again.

Then Dr. Bloom goes on to tell his story of his own dual selves:
Late at night, when deciding not to bother setting up the coffee machine for the next morning, I sometimes think of the man who will wake up as a different person, and wonder, What did he ever do for me? When I get up and there’s no coffee ready, I curse the lazy bastard who shirked his duties the night before.

We are all like this.  One of our selves makes a promise that another has to keep, or, more likely, try to weasel out of.  One of ourselves gets us in a fix that one of our other selves has to get us out of. ‘What on earth was I thinking? How did that happen?’ our responsible self says when our fun-loving self does something incredibly stupid.

My responsible self says ‘No golf unless you get this project finished first.’  As the day wears on and my golf-addict self realizes that there is still enough light to get in at least 9, and it says ‘Hey, I’m almost finished, I’ll do it when I get home.’  When I get home, my tired self who wants to grab a glass of Jameson and kick back says, “Geez, why didn’t I just finish this job instead of playing golf?  I’m a member of a country club, for God’s sake; I can play any time, so why today when I had all this hanging over my head?’

And that’s the problem with all these selves.  At least all my selves, and, I suspect, most people’s selves.  These selves can outwit one another, and if the selves aren’t careful or if there isn’t a father-figure, responsible self towering above the others, not much gets done.

These two authors astutely identify the ways we as humans tend to deal with life.  And since the part of life were talking about in this post is diet, these observations apply.

Our rider says diet, our elephant, in the throes of hunger, says screw that, I’m out of here.  And the rider goes along for the ride.

Or our one comfortably-fed self gets us into a diet that our other hungry or our stressed-out self wants no part of and so bolts.

If you believe these two psychologists, we are pretty much doomed to stay overweight, insulin resistant, diabetic, etc. because when it comes right down to it, we don’t really have any control.  What can we do as the rider of a runaway elephant?  What can we do if our good self makes the deal but the other self won’t keep it?

If you think these ways of looking at dieting are outlandish, just tell me how many times you’ve heard (or even said) these words about a specific food (high in carbs, usually):  I just couldn’t help it.  I couldn’t resist.  I gave in to the cravings. I couldn’t control myself.

Go back through the comments of the last couple of posts and read how many people wrote how they couldn’t deal with carb cravings.  Probably the most common excuse I heard for dietary indiscretion from my patients was that they just couldn’t control their diet when under some stressful situation.  The cravings got the better of them.

It sounds reasonable.  Psychologists write about elephants and riders and multiple selves fighting with one another because that’s how most people tend to react.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  We are not that helpless.

Back in the early 1980s a psychiatrist, William Glasser, M.D., wrote a book titled Take Effective Control of Your Life that I read at the time and thought to be one of the more insightful books I had ever read.  The paperback version of that same book appeared a couple of years later under the title Control Theory.  Both editions are now out of print but pre-owned copies can be had for pennies from Amazon.  This is a book well worth reading.  And not just for dietary help.

Dr. Glasser has gone on to bigger and better things and has become famous for an an entire school of psychiatric therapy.  I’ve read most of his books, and profited from them all, but the one mentioned above is a true gem.  I don’t understand why it still isn’t in print.

The insight that Dr. Glasser had and that I recognized in myself and in my patients as soon as I read his book was that people spend all their time worrying and stressing about things they can’t control and end up ceding control over the things that they can control completely.

Going back to our example at the start of this post, my patient who put her mother in the hospital didn’t have any real control over any part of what was happening.  She couldn’t control her mother’s disease, she couldn’t really control much of anything that went on in the hospital.  But she worried constantly about these things she couldn’t control and abandoned her diet, over which she had total, 100 percent control.

People do this all the time.  One of the very few things we have complete control over is what we put in our mouths.  Unless someone hogs us down, pries open our jaws and force feeds us, we have total and complete control of our eating.  Yet how many times have we heard people say (or have said ourselves), I just couldn’t do the diet with all this going on.  I lost all control.

Dr. Glasser understands about the rider and the elephant and the multiple warring selves, although he doesn’t call them such.  And he has a game plan for dealing with them, which puts the control squarely in our hands.

He explains that all behavior has four components.  (He doesn’t explain these in dietary terms, but I will).
1. the physiological component
2. the feeling component
3. the thinking component
4. the doing component

We have some control over the first two and only partial control over the third.  But we have total control over the fourth, the doing component.  Let’s look at how this all works with food…

Imagine you’re sitting in your office minding your own business when a co-worker comes in with a box of fresh, hot donuts, sticks the box in your face and says, ‘Have one.’  What happens?

First, your physiology kicks in.  Your pancreas says, uh oh, here comes some sugar.  Better get a little insulin cranked out to get ready for it.  You get a spurt of insulin and your blood sugar starts to fall.  Then, as your blood sugar falls, you start to feel hungry.  And your stomach starts to churn as it gets ready.  This is the feeling component.  And you have no control over this.  It all happens and it is totally beyond your control.

Then you think about how good a donut would taste.  And you imagine it.  And you say to yourself, hey, it’s only one. What could it hurt?  This is the thinking component, and you do have some control over it.  But with the physiology and feeling components hard at work, it’s difficult not to think about the donuts.  Difficult, but not impossible.
And all the above happens in just a few seconds.

Then you grab a donut and eat it.  The doing component.  You have complete control over this component.  You choose to eat the donut.  All the other components are ragging on you and you cave.  And you say you had no control, but you really did.  If someone had told you they were going to shoot you if you ate one of the donuts, you wouldn’t have eaten it.  All the other three components (at least the first two) would have been acting the same, but you wouldn’t touch the donuts.  You can control the doing component if you want to.  Problem is the other three components gang up on you, trying to disable your will.

But, this can all the dealt with.

Dr. Glasser realized that the physiology to feeling to thinking to doing progression could be reversed.  Since you have complete control over only the doing component, you’ve got to do something.  And once you do, you can foil the progression. Because if you take different action, you can drive the progression the other way.  If you get up from your desk and say, No thanks, then leave your office and go involve yourself with something else all the components start to fall in line.  Once you start doing something different, you start thinking about it, then your feelings of hunger go away and soon even your physiology falls into line.  Your liver produces glucose to make up for that the little spurt of insulin knocked down, and soon you’re back to normal.  And it doesn’t take all that long.

So, basically, we can be driven by a progression over which we have no control to abdicate the one thing we do have control over, our actual active doing.  Or we can use our ability to do something to reverse control all the components that we don’t have direct control over.

Realizing that I had this ability to control the seemingly uncontrollable made a huge difference in my life years ago and continues to do so today.  Knowing that I can control virtually any behavior, but especially my dietary behavior, by simply focusing my attention and effort onto a task or other activity has kept me on the straight and narrow multiple times when strong temptation fell in my path.

If the high-carb demon is goading you to go face down, telling you that you have uncontrollable cravings, just force yourself to go do something else.  Soon the cravings will be gone.  It takes a little practice, but it helps to repeat the mantra: I have 100 percent control of what goes in my mouth.  Take the advice of Dr. Glasser.  Start worrying less over those things you can’t control and accept that you have no control over them.  And take back control of the things you can.  If you do so, you will be a much happier person.  And a much thinner, leaner person.

Distinguish Wants From Needs

Time management often comes down to two basic fundamental concepts: what needs to be done versus what you want to get done. Learning how to structure your day between needs and wants can often help clear up time to get things done that you want to do. Make a list of daily activities that are required for you to do, like eating, going to work, and taking your kids to school (maybe even working-out if you are someone who doesn’t like it very much, it may have to be a requirement in your day). Then make a list of things you want to do, like meditating, listening to music, playing video games and knitting.

Prioritize Needs By Making a List

Making lists of your daily activities can be very helpful in keeping you on track and ensuring that you do everything that you need to get done. Studies have shown that individuals who create lists are more likely to feel satisfied at the end of the day because they have kept their goals firmly in sight. Consider keeping a master list in your house if you do not want to carry around a list, and mark items off the list to give you a feeling of completion.

Some Things Take Longer Than Expected

One of the biggest aspects of time management is knowing how long it will take to finish a certain task. Often individuals are unsure of how to judge the amount of time it will take to finish a project. They then find themselves behind on other things throughout the day because of that misstep. Bear in mind that unavoidable things will happen, so always give yourself a few extra minutes in any given activity in case unavoidable factors keep you in an activity longer than you might suspect.

4. Lose the Unnecessary Activities

Many things throughout our days end up eating time, and we sometimes can’t seem to figure out where the day went. Take note of activities that seem to lend themselves to wasting your time. Dragging your feet when getting ready in the morning or browsing for too long at the grocery store might leave other more enjoyable activities shortchanged later in the day. Notice when you are spending too much unnecessary time on an activity. Perhaps you should even set aside some time in your day to simply waste time if this is a tendency for you.

Help Yourself by Asking for Help

Whether at work or at home, people with time management skills often realize the importance of delegating tasks. Individuals who believe they have to do everything themselves and don’t feel comfortable releasing responsibility to others often feel more stress and have less free time to do things they want to do. Delegate your responsibilities to people you trust at work and home to get a firm grasp on the time spent in your day so you can have more time to relax and do enjoyable activities.

1. Salute the Troops

The immune system is like an army on the front lines against disease. Our immune system consists of proteins, special cells and tissues and protects us from germs that cause illness. Through a series of events called the immune response, these special cells and proteins react to microorganisms attacking the body, warding off infection. The immune system is constantly working to keep our bodies free from disease.

2. How Special Is That-

The special cells of the immune system, called leukocytes, come in two types: phagocytes and lymphocytes. The phagocytes eat microorganisms that invade the body and the lymphocytes help the body recognize and destroy bad germs and microorganisms they have fought off before. The lymphatic system carries the leukocytes between organs through lymph glands.

3. Start With the Freebies

Everyone is born with basic immunities that we receive from our genes called innate immunities. This is why we don’t share certain disease with animals like distemper. We also get protection from our skin and mucus membranes, like the ones in our nasal passages that attack germs before they get inside our bodies. Breast milk adds passive immunities that protect for a short amount of time. Passive immunities come from immunities found in mother’s milk.

4. What Doesn’t Kill You

Unless you’re born with an immune disorder, your immune system will improve itself over time- These immunities come from exposure to certain disease or immunizations. As children and adults get immunizations the leukocytes remember to kill off the harmful diseases by recognizing them when they attack. Certain vaccines only last a short amount of time and need repeating, like vaccines for influenza. Because there are such a variety of influenza viruses, the vaccine changes each year to meet the needs of the different strains. To build up immunities to diseases in children, vaccines come in a series over several years and often require a booster.

5. You’re Overreacting

There are several things that can potentially go wrong with a person’s immune system. An autoimmune disorder is when the immune system attacks the body’s own cells and tissues. This is an autoimmune disease. There can also be deficiencies in the immune system caused by infection or reaction to certain drugs. Allergies are a type of immune response and can result in severe allergic reactions when exposed to certain things. Cancer is also a threat to the immune system. Lymphoma and leukemia are both cancers of the lymphoid system.

1. Decide Whether the Drug-Free Option Is for You

Depression is a mood disorder that affects serotonin levels in the brain. Because of its physiological cause, many people believe that depression must be cured through chemical intervention. However, this is not the case for all. Many people find that a chemical-free depression treatment is just as effective as treating depression with drugs. The trick is to find the right combination of treatment that works for you and stick with it diligently.

2. Eat Right for Happiness

Diet plays a major role in the production of our brain’s chemicals. A healthy diet plays an important part in a healthy brain depression symptoms. Eating vitamin-rich foods balance out chemicals in the brain and provides a natural intervention for some who experience severe depression syndromes. Avoiding complex sugars and too many carbohydrates, which lead to mood swings, helps stabilize emotions. Consult a knowledgeable nutritionist or physician to help you determine what vitamin deficiencies you have and what foods will fill in the vitamin gaps.

3. Get Moving

Most health care professionals agree that one of the most important aspects of depression therapy is regular exercise. Depression is seen by some as the depression of energy in the body. Typically, very depressed patients cannot get out of bed, find that their bodies ache or that they sleep to much. The importance of exercise cannot go overlooked as an important aspect of drug-free depression treatment. Many people have cured many of their debilitating depression symptoms by finding a manageable exercise routine and sticking to it.

4. Talk About It

Therapy is indispensable for some in curing depression symptoms. The need for a therapeutic intervention can even be an issue of life or death. Talk therapy can help a person re-frame negative thinking patterns and find the emotional or psychological root of their problem. Cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy are also very effective.

5. Herbal Solutions

Drugless depression treatments vary from person to person. However, herbal supplements and intervention have helped some patients. St. Johns Wort has become a popular choice for some depression sufferers, as well as valerian root, ginseng, 5-HTP (a natural herbal compound), and a vitamin B complex. Consulting with a knowledgeable pharmacist or herbal treatment specialist can help you make the right choice for your specific treatment plan.

Numerous folks commented that they would like to know why it seems so much more difficult to successfully follow a low-carb diet the second or third time around. There are many reasons, some mentioned, some not…. Here are a few-

Over the years I’ve noticed this phenomenon in myself and in many others whom I have treated or advised, so it’s truly a subject worthy of exploration. I’m going to list the reasons experience has taught me below, starting with situations over which we have no control and ending with those over which we have total control.

Aging-

We all get older every day. Sadly, with aging, all systems deteriorate. Some slower, some faster, but all get a little older and a little less functional every day. If you achieve success on a low-carb diet and find yourself 70 pounds lighter, you’ll also find your self five or six months older. If you regain that lost weight, then decide to start another low-carb diet to re-lose it, you will probably be a couple of years older than you were when you tried your first low-carb diet. Just as it’s a little more difficult to pick up tennis at age 46 than it is at age 44, it’s a little more difficult to get everything moving with a low-carb diet when you’re a couple of years older.

Built-in survival mechanisms-

Although most dietary recommendations are fairly simplistic, our bodies are unimaginably complex. Not only do we have a complicated metabolism centered around and directed by the liver, we have multiple neurological and endocrinological feedback pathways between the liver-directed metabolic system and the central nervous system. And we have gut hormones that get into the act sending signals of fullness or lack thereof. It is an intricate system designed to allow us to survive on all kinds of food and to keep us alive as long as possible in the face of famine. I like to think of this entire interconnected system as having its own memory. It will allow you to fool it once or maybe twice, but then it gets wise.

Almost everyone who starts any kind of diet for the first time sees pretty rapid results. Pounds seem to fall off quickly and effortlessly. At a point down the way in the diet, it starts becoming progressively more difficult to lose more weight because the body starts catching on to what’s happening and starts fighting back. This phenomenon seems to occur less with a low-carb diet because if it is a good quality low-carb diet, the body is getting all the nutrition it needs, so it doesn’t rebel quite the same as it does with some other nutritionally inadequate diets. But it does rebel a little, nevertheless. And worse, it remembers. If you lose weight then regain it and restart a low-carb (or any other) diet, the body is not quite so willing to shed the first pounds as quickly as it did the first time. It remembers.

If you, like many people I’ve met do, give low-carb a serious, diligent go for about a week, then fall off because of a party, wedding, etc. that you attend, then try again for another week before falling off, you program your body to hang in there for at least a week before letting loose its fat. The body says, ‘Well, here we go again with another week of this nonsense. Let’s hold steady on and we’ll be back to our regular high-everything diet within a week. Let’s not go into starvation mode yet and starting getting rid of our fat.’

What you will find after a few turns of this cycle is that although the first time through with low-carb you may have lost six pounds the first week, the forth time through you will lose almost nothing the first week. Then the doubt creeps in. And you begin to wonder if the low-carb diet will really work for you. It will, but you’ve got to get past the body’s diet memory for it to.

Increased insulin and leptin resistance-

All the studies aren’t in yet on this issue for sure. But, those that are (both animal and human studies) indicate that we become progressively more insulin and leptin resistant as we age. This is especially true for people who have become overweight or obese and have maintained that state. Sadly, it is also true for those who became overweight or obese and lost the excess weight, which is most of us. The more insulin and leptin resistance we are, the more difficult it is to lose weight. So, the increase in this phenomenon just from the years passing between the first go round and the second on a low-carb diet makes it a little more difficult the next time.

Hormonal dysfunction-

Women who are wildly successful on a low-carb diet when they are in their 30s or 40s and premenopausal then try again when they are in their menopausal years often find it almost impossible to lose. It requires fiddling with hormone levels by replacing with natural hormones and getting the system back into balance before a lot of weight can be lost. It takes a while to do this. Even if the hormones do get back to where they need to be quickly, it takes some time for the body to respond. Often just getting the hormones balanced results in weight loss spontaneously without dieting. But dieting helps the process along more quickly. Now we get to the issues that we do have control over. I don’t want anyone to be offended by this list or think I’m pointing any fingers because I’m not. But I would guess that I’ve taken care of more overweight people on low-carb diets than anyone alive today. We’ve had thousands and thousands of patients in our clinics and we’ve dealt with many others second hand through books, lectures, etc. And we’ve had many friends, relatives, friends of friends, associates, etc. whose care we have monitored. In shepherding all these people (not to mention ourselves) on low-carb diets, we have learned a few things. What follows is a summary of what we’ve learned. Not about the biochemistry and physiology of low-carb dieting, but about the psychology of low-carb dieting.

Lack of commitment-

It has been my experience that people just don’t seem to commit as strongly the second, third, etc. time around. The first time, people make a major commitment. They lose weight. They feel better than they have in years. They are excited. Then they either stay continue on their low-carb diet and maintain or they don’t.  If they don’t, the weight comes back. Then a couple of years later when it’s time to start again, they just don’t have the commitment they did the first time around. And, due to the above reasons, it’s a little more difficult the second time around. They never really get into the swing of it like they did the first time, and then the notion that maybe it won’t work starts to gnaw. And then they start doing a ‘half-fast’ (if you get my drift) low-carb diet, which works okay for maintenance, but not for weight loss. Discouragement sets in, and they bolt from the diet. I’ve seen this cycle in action countless times. Don’t fall into it.

People learn how to cheat in their first low-carb go round and remember how when they start again-

The first time around on a low-carb diet is exciting.  You’re actually getting to eat all these forbidden foods - steak, eggs, real butter - that you’ve been taught make you fat and are losing weight like crazy. It’s unbelievable. But sooner or later, you get a little weary of steak, eggs and real butter, and you start looking to expand your food choices. If you stay on your carb restriction, you start to figure ways that you can keep carbs low, but eat facsimiles of the high-carb foods you enjoyed before you started your low-carb diet. You make the major discovery that low-carb brownies exist (or at least they call them low-carb brownies) so you give them a try. Then you find out about low-carb waffles, pancakes, bagels, etc. You discover that there is a whole low-carb world of what you’ve always thought of as high-carb foods. You are in heaven. You can have your cake and eat it, too, so to speak…

…But around about this time, the weight loss starts to really taper off and maybe even comes to a halt. A few years later, you’ve regained your lost weight plus some, remember how effortlessly you lost it on a low-carb diet, and decide to do it again. But this time, instead of starting with the steak, eggs and real butter all alone, you stock your low-carb larder with low-carb brownies, bagels, chips, and other junk as well. Strangely, the low-carb diet just doesn’t seem to work as well this next time around. If you want to be successful the next time around on a low-carb diet, you’ve got to follow a low-carb diet. And it takes commitment. You’ve got to realize it’s going to be a little more difficult than it was the first time, and you’ve got to go on an honest-to-God low-carb diet filled with quality low-carb real foods. And you’ve got to stick to it.

You want to hang in there until you get to what was called in the old medical literature the dynamic weight stage. The dynamic weight stage is when weight is changing rapidly in either an upward or downward direction. Anyone who has gained or lost a lot of weight has experienced this. You can gain rapidly once you get into this phase, but ultimately you stabilize and hit the static weight phase. It works the same going the other way. Once you get your weight loss momentum built up, you seem to lose effortlessly while in this dynamic phase. This is where you want to be…

…But you have to commit for a few solid weeks to get there. You can’t just diddle with it, go on a few days and off, fill up on calorie-dense, low-or-no-carb junk, say you’re doing a low-carb diet, and wonder why you aren’t losing. You’ve got to get up into the low-carb saddle and ride. In the next post in this series of two, I’ll present some tips that have helped me enormously and have helped others achieve the level of commitment needed to see us through years of low-carb dieting. In the above list of reasons I think the low-carb diet (or any diet) is more difficult the nth time around, I’ve probably forgotten something. Which is why I rely on you and your comments to fill in the missing info. If you have reasons I’ve not mentioned, send them in. Don’t be shy. Or if you disagree. Let me know. I’ll be eager to hear from you.  MD Eades

1. A Goal That Moves You

The definition of motivation is basically a state of being characterized by energy and direction. The first step to remaining motivated is finding your reason or goal. A goal fuels motivation and keeps it alive. Write the goal down on a piece of paper with some thoughts about why that goal is important to you. Rewrite and make the goal more specific over time. Write down examples of people or experiences that exemplify the goal. Finally, identify a mental vision of the accomplished goal and what it would look like.

2. Bringing out Your Best

Try not to judge your self motivation. Vanity, revenge, greed, arrogance and extreme competitiveness are all some of the unsavory motivations behind great achievements. Many times, the journey to achieving the goal is character building in and of itself and literally brings out the best in an individual. Getting started is the hardest part. What you learn about yourself and how you interact with the world as you accomplish your goal is as important as the goal itself.

3. Measuring the Milestones

Any marathon runner knows you can’t train in a week. Staying motivated will be easier if you break your time up into smaller accomplishments. If you’re trying to lose 30 pounds, for example, it is less overwhelming if you concentrate on what you’re trying to accomplish one week at a time. Have a reward ready or small celebration that is unique to mark the accomplishment that week.

4. Skinny Jeans Gimmicks

Dieting motivation drives a variety of money-making industries. Diet pills, hypnosis, acupuncture, diet support groups and crazy diets persuade us to try something new. In reality, we’re only distracting ourselves from our goal by grabbing onto a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with using some safe assistance to help us reach a weight loss goal, but it will ultimately fail if our basic diet and training program isn’t appropriate. Good nutrition and exercise is the only real way to lose weight. Anything beyond that should be complementary. Go back to your goal and write down an eating and training plan that is sensible to meet first, before you seek out any outrageous ideas.

5. Lighting the Fire Again

Every January, workout clubs and gyms get a lot of new members from weight-loss motivation. By the end of spring, most of those new members don’t show up any more. Plan for your motivation to wane and have an action plan ready. If you miss a week of exercise, get back into it immediately. If you have a cheat day, then let it pass and start back into eating healthfully. If you have an injury, cross train to work around it and resume your training schedule for your marathon as soon as you are healthy. This doesn’t mean you plan to fail, just that you acknowledge you aren’t going to be perfect.

Are you getting enough sleep? If not, it could be hurting your health.

Researchers don’t know why less sleep makes people more prone to colds, but believe it affects the immune system.

A new study suggests that people who lose just a bit of sleep, or those who have poor quality sleep, are more likely to get sick after being exposed to a cold virus than those who get more shut-eye.

“People who slept less than seven hours were about three times more likely to get a cold than people who slept eight hours or more a night,” said Sheldon Cohen, psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in a podcast. The study was published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Cohen and his colleagues interviewed 153 men and women ages 21 to 55 every day for two weeks. They asked how long they slept, how much they tossed and turned before dropping off, and whether they felt rested in the morning, in addition to other factors.

After that, the study subjects were quarantined for six days and given cold-virus-containing nose drops at a dose about 125 times the amount that it takes to infect cells in a laboratory.

The researchers measured everything from symptoms to the weight of nasal secretions (discarded tissues were weighed in a plastic bag, and the weight of the tissue and bag subtracted) to determine who became infected.

They found that 88 percent of people became infected with the virus (as measured by cold virus in their nose or antibodies in their blood), but not all of those people actually got sick. About 43 percent of the volunteers had signs of infection plus cold symptoms, such as a stuffy nose, cough, and sore throat.

“People whose sleep was disturbed were much more likely to develop colds than people who went to sleep, slept all night, and got up in the mornings,” said Cohen.

Study subjects who had less than seven hours of sleep were at greater risk than those who got eight hours of sleep a night. And those with lower sleep efficiency, the amount of time they spent in bed asleep, were at higher risk too. People with a sleep efficiency of less than 92 percent had a 5.5-times greater risk of developing a cold than those with a 98 percent or more sleep efficiency.

“If an eight-hour sleeper lost as little as 10 minutes of sleep a night, they could be three and a half times more likely to get colds; if they lost as much as 40 minutes of sleep on an average night, they were over five times as likely to get a cold,” said Cohen.

The researchers don’t know why less sleep is associated with a greater susceptibility to colds. They believe that sleep deprivation or sleep disturbances may affect the immune system’s ability to function at an optimal level.

Dr. David Rapoport, the director of the sleep medicine program at New York University School of Medicine, said the study adds to a large body of research on the interaction between sleep and the immune system.

“Many of the molecules and substances that circulate in body and also within cells overlap between immune function and sleep,” he said. “There are parallel paths here, so it’s not at all surprising that they affect each other.”

He noted that it’s a two-way street: When you’re sick, you often feel a greater need to sleep.

“Everybody knows that when you’re sick, you sleep. Likewise, when you don’t sleep, that seems to — according to grandma — make you more susceptible, and this study is along those lines. So it’s not totally out of left field to find these relationships,” he said.

However, relying on the volunteers to recall how much they slept tends to be a relatively inaccurate way to measure sleep time, so it’s hard to say if 10 minutes of lost sleep would really make a difference, he says.

And insomniacs shouldn’t add “catching a cold” to their list of things to worry about when they’re tossing and turning.

“Insomniacs worry a lot and the last thing you want to do is add to their worries,” Rapoport said. “You can’t quite jump from the conclusion that people who get less sleep who were selected from a relatively healthy population will have exactly the same effects as people who have a chronic condition that limits the amount of sleep they get.”

Posted in Training