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Surviving the holidays after weight loss surgery
- 1. Surviving the Holidays After Weight Loss Surgery (Without going completely off track or murdering anybody!)
- 2. The Will Power Myth
- 3. Six Time Tested Strategies for Staying on Track Through The Holidays (…WITHOUT MURDERING ANYONE)
- 5. Strategy #1 STOP FOCUSING ON CAN’T AND FOCUS ON CAN
- 6. • You CAN start new and healthier holiday traditions • You CAN make lots of memories with the people you love • Believe it or not, you CAN eat whatever you want to during the holidays Things you are totally can do
- 8. Do I or do I not WANT it? Ask yourself 3 questions: • Can I stop at just a few bites? • If I eat this, how will I feel physically? • Is eating this going to make me feel guilt or any other strong, negative emotion that may sabotage me or make me feel defeated?
- 9. You control how you feel during the holidays. Focus on what you CAN do instead of what you can’t do and you’re more likely to feel filled with joy and gratitude than deprivation and longing. Focusing on can instead of can’t BOTTOM LINE
- 10. Strategy #2 OWN YOUR PROCESS, MANAGER YOUR NEEDS
- 11. Stop that.
- 12. Mantra #1 “I alone am responsible for my health. If my health is truly a priority, I have the power to choose good health.”
- 13. • Hosting the party? Don’t try to be “Super-Host.” • Make or bring food you can eat. • Consider special requests carefully. • Manager your appetite and your energy. So how do you own your process… AND MANAGE YOUR NEEDS?
- 14. Mantra #2 “I had surgery, they did not. They are under no obligation to change their behavior because I chose to change mine.”
- 15. Strategy #3 TREAT YOUR HEALTH LIKE IT’S A JOB
- 17. Veg-Out Time
- 19. Put it on your calendar TONIGHT. #YesIAmBossy
- 20. Strategy #4 DEAL WITH PEOPLE WITH TACT & RESPECT
- 21. “Are you supposed to be eating that?” • DO: Let folks know that you’re capable of making your own food decisions. And thank them for their concern. • DO NOT: Get defensive. That not only escalates the situation, it only tends to make YOU feel worse in the end.
- 22. “You’re getting too thin! Stop losing!” • DO recognize that this may be coming from a place of genuine concern. Acknowledge that. • DO NOT go into a diatribe about goal weights and your journey. They might not understand it and that will frustrate you.
- 23. “Don’t go gaining that weight back!” • Do let them know you are not concerned. You might even tell them you’re taking it one step, one day at a time. • DO NOT elaborate or feed into them by explaining anything about your actions or habits. No matter who says it, this comment is NOT constructive. A person who would say that to you isn’t a person you should spend your time trying to educate. Move on!
- 24. Strategy #5 SET A HOLIDAY GOAL
- 25. Strategy #6 USE THE MOST POWERFUL TOOL YOU GOT!
- 26. When Accountability Works Best THREE SITUATIONS 1. When you have an actual someone/something to which you are accountable. 2. When you know what your goal is and it’s specific enough to track. 3. When you hold yourself accountable to someone who holds themselves accountable to you.
- 27. So what does this look like? 1. Choose a goal to pursue. 2. Actively decide to use accountability as a part of your plan. 3. Decide to whom or what you will be accountable. 4. DO IT!!!
- 28. • The Bariatric Foodie Holiday Survival Guide (www.bariatricfoodie.com/holidays) • Even more recipes to be added to the blog • Holiday mini-challenges with prizes! • Holiday food “check-ins” & discussions • …and a few more surprises on social media Bariatric Foodie Help for the Holidays HERE’S WHAT I HAVE TO OFFER TO HELP YOU THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS
- 29. Bariatric Foodie Holiday Survival Groups A TRIPLE LAYER OF EXTRA SUPPORT • Six people, just like you – trying to stay on track through the holidays • Hour-long weekly support call with ME! • An accountability partner for day-to-day support • A secret Facebook group to talk about your struggles • Fun challenges and discussions along the way
- 30. • A free copy of The Bariatric Foodie Holiday Survival Guide • A one-on-one session with me to make over your favorite holiday recipe. • You get in on a group at a special price. The full price will be $227. You’ll get in for $197, a $30 savings! Bonuses IF YOU JOIN A HOLIDAY SURVIVAL GROUP TODAY… Claim your spot NOW at: http://www.bariatricfoodie.com/holidaysurvival
- 31. LET’S STAY IN TOUCH
Notes de l'éditeur
- So in preparing for this session, I really wanted to capture some of the awkward situations I know happen to post-ops. I know they happen because I’m listening to you. Or, more accurately, I’m reading. Every day on Facebook, Twitter, on Obesity Help, I ask questions and I actually read your answers and so I know that there are awkward situations that you all have experienced that have caused discomfort at best, downright embarrassment at worst. So I decided to ask you all…what awkward situations have you been in since surgery? Tell me about them so that I can share with others. And this is what I got…
- So I wanted to start off with why I think it’s very important to talk about holiday survival strategies for post-ops. I read a lot. I read stuff on the internet, and in magazines and when I read articles about staying on track during the holidays they all seem to have one main message above all else: if you have enough will power you’ll get through the holidays. And I guess you can say that’s true…but it’s sort of misleading. I was blessed to attend the Obesity Action Coalition Your Weight Matters Convention for the past three years and each time there was an expert researcher who spoke about will power. A few of the things he said struck me. He said: Willpower is not finite. That means we have a certain amount of it to use each day and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Willpower is like a muscle. It gets stronger and stronger when you exercise it. Willpower is also like a muscle because it can get fatigued. To me, this means that will power is an awesome tool to use to stay on track BUT during times like the holidays, when you’re likely to call upon it again and again each day, you can quite literally “wear your will power out.” So should we be scared about that? No way! But that does mean we need other tools and a plan.
- So that’s what I’d like to present to you today. My five time-tested strategies for staying on track through the holidays…without murdering anyone. Now you all may laugh but I put that in there for a reason. How many of you have had a meltdown on an innocent family member or friend? If you haven’t you’re all better than me! I’ve had plenty. I remember one of the first ones I had. I was just a few days post-op and staying with my mom and stepdad and I awakened to the smell of…bacon. Yeahhhh…bacon. Now you all know bacon smells delicious! But not when you’re three days post-op and mourning food. So I got out of the bed, grabbed my walker (which I had because I had a hernia repair as well as my gastric bypass so I truly did need it to walk) and hobbled to the top of the steps and yelled, “WHO THE HELL IS COOKING BACON?” Can I please tell you my stepdad is still to this day – nearly 8 years later – afraid to eat in front of me! So when I say without murdering anyone I truly do mean that these strategies are designed with your peace of mind at the forefront. Keep that in mind as I’m going through these points. My main goal is that in any challenging situation you face during the holidays, you are able to make a plan to behave in a way that leaves you feeling empowered, not defeated. Just remember that, like a mantra.
- So strategy #1 is to stop focusing on what you can’t do and focus on what you can do. This one may sound simple but it’s actually a tricky thing to embrace and you’ll see why in a minute. First let’s talk about the word “can.” Because it CAN mean a few different things. Some of us think of the word can and we think of being allowed to do something. When we say we can eat a protein bar, for example, we are saying it’s allowable. But can also can mean capable of. As in, “these are things I am capable of doing.” That’s the definition I’d like to focus on. Because here are just a few things you are totally capable of doing throughout the holidays.
- See…I told you the can-do mentality can be tricky. Usually when I say to folks that they can eat whatever they want during the holidays I get some form of the following reaction. “Are you crazy??? I will eat all the things!!!” But that’s not totally true. Let’s talk for a moment about what happens in your brain when you subscribe to a can/can’t, good/bad mentality. As soon as you tell yourself you can’t do something or have something what happens? That’s exactly the thing you want! That’s because you’ve made that thing taboo by saying you can’t have it. Conversely, if you remove that taboo by telling yourself you can have it, then a different set of questions become important. It instead becomes…
- Do I or do I not want it? Now to be fair, a lot of times the answer to that question is going to be yes. You do want it. And in that case you should then ask yourself the following three questions: -Can I stop at just a few bites? Or will I be compelled to eat the entire thing? -If I eat this, how will I feel physically? Because no matter what, no food is really worth dumping, is it? -Lastly, ask yourself will eating this food make me feel guilt or any other strong, negative emotion that may sabotage you or make you feel defeated? Again, my goal here is for you to come out of every situation feeling empowered, not defeated. So if you feel like you can’t practice control, like a food will make you feel ill, or that eating it will cause you to feel guilt or some other bad emotion, you CHOOSE not to eat it. That means you can eat it, but you choose not to because you choose your well-being over food. Now, if you decide you do want to try whatever the food is, don’t be surprised if one of the following two things happens: Either you don’t really want ALL the foods…but maybe just a bite or two. (And you know what that’s called? Portion control and moderation!) You take a bite and you realize it really wasn’t worth all the hype and move on. Either way, you haven’t binged, you haven’t gone overboard. You’ve done exactly what you were supposed to do, which was make a sensible choice that you can live with. But before you go out there giving yourself permission to do whatever wheneve
- I cannot tell you how mad it makes some post-ops when I tell them this. Many times we look to other own our processes and manage our needs. For example have you ever thought to yourself: “My family never cooks food I can eat!” “Everyone keeps asking me for stuff! I have no time for myself! Nobody cares about my process! They do x, y and z around me…”
- Stop it. Right now. Just stop…in the name of love. Right here, right now I want you to write down something. Or if you prefer type it somewhere on your computer for safe-keeping. Ready?
- Seriously. Just don’t. If you need help, ask for help. I know sometimes we feel like we “own” a holiday and we should carry out and execute it ourselves. But guess what? You’re human. And you’re learning a new lifestyle. So let others support you. I’m sure they are happy to do it if you ask! Even if you aren’t the host you can manage your needs by bringing food you can eat. Now many hosts will ask if they can make something special for you. If it seems like the easier thing to do, by all means let them do that nice thing for you! If it seems easier for you to bring something you can eat, then do that. But here are two other points to go with that. Say you make a healthy side dish for example. Many times we feel the need to “warn” people that it’s healthy. Stop that. Unless someone in your family may be allergic to the ingredients, there is absolutely no reason to warn people that you are serving them healthy food. Just put it on the table, take your portion, and walk away! The taste should speak for itself. And speaking of the taste…if you remember no other food advice I give during this webinar, remember this. TEST NEW RECIPES WELL BEFORE THANKSGIVING! Like…now if possible. When you make healthier variations sometimes you have to make tweaks to them before you and others like them. Do NOT fly blind on Thanksgiving. Test! So as I was saying before sometimes your dinner host will make a special dish for you. I am always sort of wary to ask for special requests though. With the amount I can eat, unless it’s something other people like, usually I just bring something myself to save the hostess the trouble. I just thought I’d put that out there. If you can’t eat much, just really think about whether it’s worth it to ask the host or hostess to make something special given their time requirements and such. Lastly, manager your appetite and your energy. There’s two parts to that. Managing your appetite means not starving yourself all day in hopes of being able to eat a little bit more at dinner (I did that…it didn’t end well). Even after weight loss surgery your stomach is still a stomach and it still behaves like a stomach. It shrinks up a little on you when you don’t eat a long time. So that strategy can actually backfire! Plus you arrive to dinner with lower than normal blood sugar and possibly cranky. Not a good look at all. Managing your energy basically means that you are probably going to be done eating before anyone else. From personal experience sitting at the table and staring at food leads me to do the “pick, pick, pick” game. Not good. Usually I will clear my plate and come sit for a bit at the table. But after a while I start doing stuff to get away from the food. I’ll clear dishes or sometimes just go for a walk. Many times there are folks who want to walk with me. Manager your energy so that you leave your Thanksgiving dinner feeling EMPOWERED not defeated. Now another thing to consider when you are thinking about family gatherings. I know lots of you get emotional when your families make foods you can’t eat and it seems like the whole world is against you. It can be hard not to be resentful. Because…really…you miss some of those foods. And that is ok! So here’s another thing I’d like you to embrace…
- Now is it a nice and considerate thing to do? Certainly. Is your family under any obligation to do it? Nope. And really, you can’t get mad about that. And you can’t be resentful. They chose their lifestyle. You chose yours. Now I didn’t really get this point myself until I met a phenomenal lady whose name happens to rhyme with mine. Her name is Vicky. She and I worked together for years. Now understand Vicky is what we might call naturally petite. She was less than five feet tall and probably 100 pounds dripping wet. So she never had any weight problems from what I could tell. And yet when we had staff meetings or lunches, she’d always quietly slip out and get her little container of lunch that usually contained grilled chicken, a salad and a yogurt. This perplexed me. I mean I could understand why I wasn’t eating the work lunches (many times they were high in fat and carbs or, worse, I didn’t know what was in them at all). But Vicky need not worry about those things. But after getting to know her I realized that healthy eating was just a part of her lifestyle. And she owned it. She didn’t expect accommodations to be made for her lifestyle choice but on the same token she also knows what is and is not acceptable within her lifestyle. That’s how I want you to look at situations during the holidays. You don’t have to “lower your standards” and you don’t have to be a diva about your needs. OWN them. And make sure that your needs get met!
- This is good general advice but especially during the holidays. Now…what the heck do I mean by it? What I mean is that you probably behave in a very specific way in relation to your job. For example: -You go to work at a certain time and try hard not to be late. (Or at least I hope you do.) -You don’t often skip work. -You commit to your job and try to do the very best work you can. You need to treat your health with that same level of seriousness. In fact, right after this webinar, I have a challenge for you. I want you to go to your calendar (in your computer, your phone, wherever) and schedule yourself some time for the following.
- L
- Ok, ok so maybe you can’t do it tonight but you should do it soon. Some important points on this one. -Schedule yourself FIRST. We tend to schedule everyone and everything else and then fit our self-care into the gaps. No. Schedule your time first and everything else works around you. -PROTECT THAT TIME! Don’t schedule things too closely before or after it so that you can truly take the time to do what you need to do. -Doing this will help you manage your stress. Managing your stress helps you manage your habits. Managing your habits will leave you feeling EMPOWERED and not DEFEATED!
- And I know what you’re thinking… I know that. I wasn’t raised in a barn! But yet, I hear from folks all the time that they have zapped OUT on somebody over something related to their weight loss journey. So let me start out by saying this. People will get on your ever-loving NERVES! They will. They do things and say things that sometimes are just not nice! If you’ve shared your surgery process with others, that seems to bring out even more jerkiness. You get folks questioning you and your process. Folks feel like they can start policing you all of a sudden (because of course you’re, like, five…right?) And here’s the deal. Technically you can respond to jerkiness with snarkiness. That is a choice you can make. But in my experience, nine times out of ten YOU are the one who ends up feeling badly about the situation. (Although there is that small segment of you who don’t or won’t). Remember, our goal is to feel EMPOWERED not DEFEATED. And you feel most empowered when you know you behaved at your personal best, not letting anyone drag you into behavior that you don’t believe in. So keep that in mind as I go over some tips for how to handle some of the most common things that folks say to us that makes us want to go upside their heads with a bag of nickels. The goal here is about YOU, not THEM.
- The best way to stay on track is to give yourself a big old shiny thing to focus on. You can do that by making a holiday goal. Now I want to caution you to think HARD before making that goal about weight loss for several reasons. -Firstly, because time is in short supply. Depending your process that could be problematic. For newer folks, you may lose weight no matter what you do. But for folks who are further out or in a stall it may require extra time and extra effort to get the scale to move. If you know you won’t have any more time than the time you DUTIFULLY scheduled (because I told you to so), then setting a goal related to losses may not be realistic. -Secondly, stress is high. Now we know that stress can lead us to behaviors like overeating but it can also cause biochemical reactions in the body that make it harder to lose weight. So if you are under a lot of stress during the holidays, I say you probably should be using exercise more as a stress reliever than a weight loss mechanism. And guess what? In doing so, you may just lose weight anyway! -Lastly temptations are everywhere. I point that out not to give you a free pass to eat whatever, whenever (as if I had that power anyway) but to say that when you have a goal to lose and especially to lose a lot, if you take a bite of anything you think you should not have (a cookie, pie, whatever) in your mind that one little bite because a million times bigger a deal. We tend to beat ourselves up a lot over those things when we are in “beast mode.” If you know that’s you, and you also know you want to try to practice moderation over the holidays, think long and hard about making a big weight loss goal. Now let me stop here and say one thing. I am not discouraging you from making a weight loss goal. Please let me stress that you can do anything you set your mind to. Anything at all! So the question in your mind should not be can I do it or can I not? The questions should be: what do I have to do to get to my goal and realistically, are those things I’m willing to do? And be honest with yourself. If the effort to meet a big goal of any sort is more than you want to take on in addition to the holidays, you have the power to “right-size” your goal so that it’s the right goal for you to feel EMPOWERED not DEFEATED through your holiday season. So if you don’t set a weight loss goal, what do you do? I know for me my goal is maintaining. But more than that I actually make goals that feed into maintaining. This year my goal is going to be to walk at least a mile every day throughout the holiday season. I may do that outside, on the treadmill, or wherever. Truth be told I’ll probably walk more than a mile because I like walking. But making a right sized goal means that I feel EMPOWERED not DEFEATED, which is a feeling that I can build upon.
- Ok pop quiz. If you’ve followed Bariatric Foodie for a while you may know the answer to this. Let’s see. If you were to ask me (Nik) what is THE most effective tool we all have that can help us achieve any goal, what do you think I would say? Type it in the chat window and I’ll tell you when someone has gotten it right… BINGO! I see it. Accountability. Now many of you already use some forms of accountability. For example, how many of you log your food in a food journal? And how many of you weigh yourself regularly?? Those are both things you do to stay accountable. Over the past year I’ve been studying accountability and I’ve learned quite a bit about how to maximize accountability so that it works at its absolute best for you. I want to share a few of the things I’ve learned.
- Many of us practice self accountability (like the example of food journaling or weighing yourself). And some of us do just fine with self accountability, but most of us do even better when we use accountability to its full potential. We’re going to talk about goals in just a moment but first I just want to say this. If you don’t have a goal, you don’t have anything to be accountable to. And if you don’t have anything to be accountable to you’re more likely to wander right off trace. This last one is important because lots of times accountability feels sort of like the principal’s office, which is why we don’t do it. We think we have to “confess” our sins to someone who will admonish us for it. And we have good reason to feel this way. Folks have been doing that to us practically our whole lives. That is NOT what accountability is about. Let’s talk about what it’s actually about. It’s true that accountability involves answering for the things you said you are going to do. But when you hold yourself accountable to something or someone, that doesn’t mean they get to beat you up if you didn’t do what you said you’d do. It simply means it’s their job to make you aware of it. A good accountability partner will be honest and let you know you are going off track. What you do with that information is up to you. So the great thing about holding yourself accountable to someone who is holding themselves accountable to you is that it removes that principal’s office dynamic. Nobody has more or less power than anybody else. You are simply two people working on a goal together and keeping each other in line to achieve it.
- 1. Goals – you all know about SMART goals right? If you do, type in the chat box what each letter of that acronym (SMART) means. Yep…you’ve got it! SMART goals are great because they act as their own compass. You can see how near or far you are from reaching your goals, but also others can see it too. That’s important because when you hold yourself accountable to someone or something you are agreeing to let them give you feedback on your progress. That’s much easier to do when you have a SMART goal. 2. What the heck does this mean? This means that you need to commit up front to using accountability. That means a few things. First you have to do #3. I’ll talk about that in a moment. But you also have to decide on the rules of engagement. How will you hold yourself accountable? When I say how I mean EXACTLY how? Are you going to email someone? Call them? Post something somewhere? Log something daily onto a website? You need to consider these things up front and prepare yourself to do them. I log my food every day and I have a reminder for each evening on my calendar that says, “Nikki? Did you log your food today?” I also use things like apps to stay accountable to my vitamin intake. So far as being accountable to people, I belong to an AWESOME Facebook accountability group where we’ve been very intentional about how we will practice accountability. There are rules. For instance, we don’t want our group to get too big so there’s a cap on membership. Also you have to actually participate to stay in the group. Every few months we check in on folks who aren’t participating to see if they’d still like to be in the group but the expectation is clear. If you’re in here, you want to be accountable and if you want to be accountable, that is an ACTIVE process. 3. Deciding to whom or what you will be accountable. This is important. You can be accountable to people or processes. Although to be fair usually when you are accountable to processes there are usually people behind them, you just don’t directly communicate with them all the time. Examples of being accountable to people: that group I just told you about on Facebook. Also you can have an accountability buddy. Examples of being accountable to things: training programs like couch to 5k that have options to log things, online weight management systems like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. 4. This last point relates back to actively deciding to use accountability. The previous items have all been about set up. The set up is important because if you make something ridiculously easy to do, you’re more likely to do it. But a few tips on actually DOING accountability. First, if you think you may back out, ask the person or thing you are holding yourself accountable to to not let you do that. Have them check in on you when you’re about to start so that you know someone is checking for you. Also, it might help to let others know what you’re doing even if you aren’t being directly accountable to them. Assemble yourself a cheerleading squad. Your loved ones can also help you protect the time you’ve set aside to take care of yourself. Most times all you have to do is ask them. So those are my six time tested strategies for staying on track during the holidays. I see you’ve all been giving Shannon a run for her money on social media, and I want to make sure I can answer some of your most pressing holiday questions, but before I do I want to tell you a little bit about the holiday support you have available to you from Bariatric Foodie.