20190529 Daily report
If you watch carefully, thin people will show you how they stay thin. Staying thin takes work, but some people don’t believe that. In my series on how to start losing weight, I describe the problem: many of us are convinced that getting thin and staying thin just is natural for some people. Some call it genetics, some call it metabolism, I call it a myth. People who are thin and stay thin, care a lot about how they look. They carefully monitor their shape or weight, and they have systems for staying thin, that involve regulating how much food they eat. It’s not hard. Being thin doesn’t make you better, or smarter, or more together. It just makes you someone who cares about being thin, more than almost anything else.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – Half slice Costco pizza (380)
- 380 calories
Lunch – grilled chicken, beef, and vegetables, small amounts of rice salad and avocado salad (350); fruit parfait (60)
- 410 calories
Dinner – Vegetable curry and rice (400)
- 400 calories
Snacking – tea with half and half (120); pretzels and hummus (200); Nestle Li’l Drums ice cream cone (120); eleven Costco chocolate almonds (160)
- 600 calories
Total for the day: 1790 calories (limit 1800)
Secrets of the thin
The parfait listed for lunch was quite small, but was probably 100 calories total. I didn’t eat the whole thing, based on advice from a thin person. More on that in a moment. I was at a technical training workshop today (and tomorrow), so I ate with strangers. Most of them were quite thin. Because there was no way to measure what I was eating, I took the above picture of my plate. It’s not a lot of food, but it was quite good.
I have observed before that thin people use social cues to help regulate their diets. First, I noticed that nobody went back for seconds, though the food was excellent. I also noticed that most of the men took both desserts (churro and parfait); most of the women just took the parfait. I took the parfait – you can just see it in the top right corner of my picture. Anyway, when I sat down, one of the thin women mentioned the parfait was too sweet. I agreed on tasting it. Instead of whipped cream between the fruit layers, it was a pudding that tasted almost like cake icing, which rather overpowered the fruit (a layer of blueberries, pudding, then raspberries and more pudding).
When I agreed with her, she showed me her half-full cup and said, “really, you could just skip everything below the fruit.” I think she was being nice, but she was also showing off a bit. Do you see? She had a system for eating fewer calories! Maybe you think that’s subtle, the difference between 50 and 100 calories. But together with the facts that no thin people went for second helpings, that the women only took the one dessert, and then only ate half of it, that all added up. Since I have taken up watching thin people eat, I am getting a real sense of the effort they put into staying thin. None of them are naturally thin!
Believing that people are naturally thin is a harmful belief. It makes you feel like there is nothing you can do about it. It’s a martyrdom. You may be overweight, but only because you’re not one of those naturally thin people! Ha. If you only were willing to see the dedication thin people put into their task! And it’s not magical, it’s just that being thin is more important to them than almost anything else. What would you give up to be thin and stay that way?
-The Doctor
