Ah yes, the chocolate rebound. I know ye well.
Every person who has ever been overweight understands
exactly what Beyonce is talking about. The story goes something like this: You
deprive yourself of all the foods you love while you’re on a diet. You struggle
mightily, flexing your willpower muscles to the max, and when you finally reach
your goal weight after weeks/months/years of sacrifice, you reward yourself for
your accomplishment by doing what? Indulging in, even gorging on, all the foods
that made you heavy in the first place!
If this seems like a sad state of affairs, fear not! The
women’s mags are on it! From Woman’s Day to Woman’s World, the same advice
abounds for all those serial dieters out there: to keep the lost pounds lost
for good, find a reward other than food. Feeling tempted to stuff your pie hole
with, well, pie? No! Take a bubble bath instead! Now, I like bubble baths. They
can be quite soothing. But let’s be brutally honest. In the face of a giant, crumbly,
chocolate chip cookie, a bubble bath is the proverbial ninety-pound weakling.
It’s not a fair contest. Not even close.
The other approach recommended by the magazines is this: don’t
give up your favorite foods, just have a lower-fat, lower-calorie version. Yes,
you can have a big gooey cheeseburger, IF you substitute healthy fare for all of
the high-calorie ingredients. Say ground turkey or a Portobello mushroom
instead of beef. Maybe salsa to replace the ketchup. A multi-grain sandwich
thin instead of a big, sesame-seed-laden hamburger bun. This is sound advice,
but only up to a point. It’s one thing to substitute something more healthful
for a really calorie-dense ingredient, say mustard instead of mayo, but if you
go really hog-wild with this concept, eventually the end result ceases to be a
cheeseburger. And then you get to experience the most profound irony in diet hell,
where you consume a poor facsimile of something you love only to find that it is
so unsatisfying that it makes you crave the real thing even more.
The real challenge of the chocolate rebound is not one of
willpower or calorie creativity, but of transcending our culture’s identification
of food with reward. I believe this one concept is a key reason why so many of
us regain after a large weight loss. If you lose weight and want to keep it off
permanently, it’s been my experience that you have to completely disconnect
food from the concept of reward. It’s not a task for the faint of heart, and to
be honest, it’s also something I have yet to master.
While I don’t have the perfect solution to this dilemma, I
have found some work-arounds. I’ve taught myself to crave salads and sometimes
when I need a food reward, I make a salad “parfait” with layers of colorful vegetables.
I’ve also found that sprinkling a little cinnamon on just about any food
increases its satisfaction level significantly. And I really do love steamed
green beans in a vinaigrette dressing. One step at a time, I guess. I hold
onto the hope that perhaps someday, just being healthy and feeling good will be
reward enough.
Steamed green beans in vinaigrette does sound pretty good. Keep fighting that good fight, Sandy!
ReplyDeleteBen
I'll send you the recipe!
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