Coach Yourself Thin: Five Steps to Retrain Your Mind, Reclaim Your Power, and Lose the Weight for Good

by Greg Hottinger, Michael Scholtz

Overview

Today dieters are more frustrated than ever before: Neither restrictive dieting nor a moderate middle-of-the-road approach has curtailed the obesity epidemic. As professional weight loss coaches, Greg Hottinger and Michael Scholtz have developed a new weight loss paradigm that has produced impressive results for the Biggest Loser Club online members. Hottinger and Scholtz's unique strategy helps readers identify the obstacles that are sabotaging their weight loss and gives them Five Stepping-Stones to Change: a series of physical, emotional, and social guidelines to help them break through their barriers.

Coach Yourself Thin will help you lose weight by:
- giving you a sustainable, nutritionally balanced eating plan
- laying out the basics of fitness and helping you create personalized workout strategies that fit your lifestyle
- providing tools, techniques, and hands-on exercises for changing your habits

Packed with success stories and solid instruction and inspiration, Coach Yourself Thin is a guide to becoming self-aware, breaking the frustrating dieting cycle, and designing a personal plan for lasting weight loss success.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609613310
Publisher:	Harmony/Rodale
Publication date:	12/20/2011
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

GREG HOTTINGER, MPH, RD, AND MICHAEL SCHOLTZ , MA, met at Duke University Diet and Fitness Center and later formed NOVO Wellness, a health and wellness consulting firm. They have played a key role in the creation of Web sites such as The Biggest Loser Club and Flat Belly Diet! Online. NOVO Wellness is based in North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

If Everyone Is Dieting, Why Are We Getting Fatter?

Ask your oldest living relatives about their life growing up and you might hear how exhausting it was to wake up with the roosters, go milk the cows, and bale hay all day long. You might hear about kids walking a couple of miles to and from school, actually playing during recess, and staying outside to play after school. In those days, you only stopped moving when your parents called you in for dinner. Most people who grew up in early 20th-century America were eating food fresh from the farm and getting plenty of daily activity. It was arguably the healthiest generation our country has ever seen.

Though it happened gradually, major changes have come our way over the course of the last 60 years. For most Americans, farm jobs, manual labor, and daily activity were replaced by office jobs, desk work, and labor- saving devices such as cars and dishwashers. These factors, especially the invention of the automobile, caused a significant decline in the amount of physical activity the average American experienced on a daily basis. And as our culture becomes more and more convenience-oriented, grocery delivery services and online shopping are making it easy to never leave home at all! What's more convenient than ordering a pizza from your couch and eating it in front of the movie you rented online?

"One day, I overheard an overweight woman talking to her friend while walking up to the doors of their gym. 'Let's not do any more work than we have to,' she said as she pushed a button and stepped aside to make room for the automatic doors. I was struck by the irony of her comment—she was on her way to exercise but didn't want to exert the effort needed to open the doors."—Greg

MODERN DAY FOODS AND OUR VAST "WAIST LAND"

Equally detrimental to our health is the fact that while our energy expenditure has plummeted, the food processing industry has grown exponentially. During the late 20th century, the number of cheap, packaged products available in supermarkets exploded and the fast-food industry was born. Food became more accessible and plentiful than it had been at any other time in human history. And thanks to effective marketing on everything from billboards to radio to television, as well as the unrelenting use of the damaging food triple play—sugar, fat, and salt—we are now surrounded by products that are practically irresistible. Even if you are unusually strong-willed, it just takes one moment of weakness to find that you've inhaled a whopping 600 calories while driving or watching your favorite show.

Growing up in the '60s and '70s, we ate our share of sugary cereals, frozen TV dinners, canned soups, and other processed-food marvels. And like everyone else, we were so happy to have the convenience that we didn't question whether the ingredients in these foods might lead to serious health problems. It's remarkable that no one spoke up, when you consider that many of these foods were, and are still, made from refined flours, sugar, hydrogenated oils, and excessive amounts of salt, chemical fillers, and preservatives. The bottom line is that whether it snuck up on us or we simply chose to ignore this frightening trend, our families have been serving up meal after meal and snack after snack of these nutritionally empty foods for years.

Fake, Fattening Foods

There have been many health costs associated with America's widespread acceptance of processed foods. These include increased blood sugar and blood pressure levels, heart disease, and cancer.

But recent studies have revealed even bigger implications for the obesity epidemic. A person is much more likely to overeat when consuming a highly processed foods than when eating whole foods, especially if the fiber has been removed during the processing. This urge to overeat is not so much a conscious decision, but rather an autopilot physiological drive. Keeping a handful of potato chips from becoming the whole bag requires extraordinary self-control, and it doesn't help that everything has been supersized. Soft drinks, candy bars, fast-food meals, and even household staples like boxes of breakfast cereal have become enormous. Buying bigger usually means you get a better value, but it also means that you are likely to eat more. According to recent research, it's human nature to gobble down more candy from a huge package than a "fun-size" one. You are hard-wired to overeat when the opportunity is in front of you, and in our world, opportunity knocks often!

In a nutshell, processed foods are nearly impossible to eat in moderation, they're literally everywhere, and you can supersize them any time you like. Yikes! It's no wonder that society is fatter now than at any other time in history and that this change happened so quickly.

The implications of larger serving sizes, combined with our biological drive to overeat, are disastrous for a culture that faces large, extra- large, and jumbo-size portions throughout the day. Consider this: If you eat an extra 200 calories per day beyond what your body needs, at the end of a year you will have gained 20 £ds of fat. Many serving sizes have more than doubled in the last few decades. For example, in the 1970s, the standard fast-food order of a hamburger, fries, and a drink contained 650 calories, or about the same as today's regular hamburger, small fries, and small drink. However, if you supersize your order, your meal exceeds 1,400 calories!

But Wait, There's More

It's not hard to see how these changes translated into more people being overweight. It's all quite clear when you consider the "calories in versus calories out" equation: If you consume more calories than you expend, you gain weight. But the obesity epidemic is far more complex than simple math; in fact, it's shortsighted to include only food- and activity-related issues as the major contributors to the obesity problem. There is much more behind the obesity "perfect storm."

For example, increased stress and lack of sleep are both major players. And they are directly connected to one another: It's hard to sleep well when you are stressed-out, and you feel even more stressed when you're sleep deprived. It seems that everyone is battling intense job pressures in this ever-changing global economy, and some people are still struggling to make ends meet despite working more hours than ever. The human body is wired to go on full alert and kick into survival mode; this is commonly referred to as the fight-or-flight response. One hundred years ago, most jobs were physically demanding and provided a healthy outlet for stress, but today there are few natural outlets. If you're not making it to the gym regularly, the stress simply builds up, and chronic elevation of stress hormones has been implicated as a major factor in weight gain. High levels of stress lead to stress eating, a type of emotional eating that can wreak havoc with your food choices and your ability to discern real physical hunger from psychological hunger.

And on top of all that, chronic stress carries over into the night, interfering with both the quantity and quality of your sleep. This is bad news because studies have shown that people who get 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep each night are thinner than those who get fewer than 7 hours.

All of these factors have turned the health of modern day America into a vast "Waist Land." And while many questions remain about how to change the larger cultural picture, one thing appears certain: Simply going along with the ultraconvenient, supersedentary way of life is the fastest way to "supersize" yourself.