Shedding Pounds: One Approach (Physician Recommendations: 0)

           
(Gearing up for the holidays? Dreading the upcoming flood of food? Maybe the pointers below will help...or not.)

Six years ago, I returned from summer break to teaching classes again. On parents’ evening, several people wondered whether I was sick. When I finally asked one mom why she asked that question, she said, “You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
           
In those days, I stepped on scale two or three times a year at the YMCA. I had no bathroom scale in my home. What was the point? I knew I was overweight. I wasn’t exactly fat, but on the other hand I was well past what my mom used to call “pleasingly plump.” I had gained so many pounds over a period of twenty years that that my most difficult exercise at the Y was bending over to tie my shoes.

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The next day, I drove to the Y and weighed myself. Those women were right. My weight had plummeted twenty pounds in four months. Over the next year, I lost another 30 pounds until I reached the weight I have maintained for the last five years.
           
I was unaware of losing the first twenty pounds. To lose the rest of the weight, I never found it necessary to go on some sort of special diet. I merely made a change in some habits. Here in no particular order is the Minick “Knockin’ Off The Pounds” Weight-Loss Plan.

1. Give up alcohol. You’re guzzling empty calories. I quit wine and gin that year. It’s probably the main reason I lost weight so fast during that first summer. If you’re a moderate drinker, then abstinence should be easy. If you’re a heavy drinker, as I was and can be, then you need to knock off the booze anyway. You’ll feel better. You’ll wake in the morning without that loggy-headed feeling, you’ll remember where you were and what you were doing at 10 pm, and you won’t want a “snack” at midnight. Meanwhile, you’re cutting out anywhere from a thousand calories or more per day, depending on what and how much you drink.
2. Avoid processed foods. Quit eating your meals out of boxes and plastic bags. Stay away from most restaurants, especially fast food joints. Too many carbohydrates, mayonnaise, and butter. I gravitated to this approach not from a desire to lose weight, but because I enjoyed making my own meals. In addition, my youngest son, who was still living at home at the time, disliked going out to eat after my teaching duties were done. “Hey, how about a burger?” I’d say, to which he’d respond, “Home.”
3. Eat protein and vegetables. Cut the desserts, the bread, the potatoes, the rice, and the sugar. Cut the fruit, which is another source of sugar. Except as a child, I was never big on sweets, and though I once loved ice cream—vanilla slathered in peanut butter was a favorite—that dessert long ago disappeared from my freezer. Chicken, lean beef, lean pork, leafy greens, and all those other foods you find in most diets are exactly what you need.
4. Practice food discipline. Push yourself away from the table. Eat what you need, not all you want. Eat slowly, as your grandmother and mother used to tell you. Enjoy the food instead of gulping it down. Say no to seconds unless you’re hungry. Knock off the snacks.
5. Count calories in your head. No need to became a fanatic, no need to carry a little notebook and pen for writing every morsel onto a list. Just estimate the calories and have some sense every day of what you are putting in your mouth.
6. Satisfy your oral fixation with something besides food. This is a tricky one. I started smoking that year after a thirty-five year hiatus. Maybe I watched Casablanca too many times (nearly everyone in the movie is a chimney), maybe I was bored, or maybe I am poco loco in the coco. Certainly my doctor thought I was nuts. I don’t really recommend smoking cigarettes, although it is possibly one of the reasons why Parisian women stay thin. Whatever the case, if you need some sort of oral fix, other ideas include smoking cigars or pipes, vaping (I like the Mark 10 XL), chewing gum, eating celery, or sucking on sugarless lollipops.
7. Drink lots of calorie-free liquids: coffee, tea, certain vitamin drinks, and especially water. Treat yourself to some Pellegrino. Try replacing the wine with one of these beverages. For some drinkers, it is the act of drinking they lust after, not the beverage itself.  
8. Weigh yourself two or three times a week, not daily. Quit sweating every ounce that comes off your body. Relax.
9. Keep a sense of humor and perspective. In ages past, people worried about starvation. Today we’re worried about losing weight. Personally, I prefer dealing with the second alternative than the first.

 
That’s about it.
           
Good luck. And bon appetit.