Chapter Eleven: Staying the Course

11 Staying the Course

You are the hero of your life.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt 1910

Outdoorsman, conservationist, cowboy, historian, author, boxer, Commander in Chief, father of six children—Teddy Roosevelt may be the most irrefutable example of a Sexy Beast to ever roam the planet.

Roosevelt, who once gave a speech with a bullet in his chest only minutes after being shot, knew successes and he knew failures.

As Sexy Beasts, it’s good for us to adopt a page out of his playbook. Often, when we start a journey, there are naysayers who predict our failure or delight in pointing out when we stumble. From the moment you announce that you are going to reach a healthy weight and stay there, negative comments from such defeatists should be to you like water on a duck’s back. Shrug and get on with it.

You aren’t beaten until you quit.

Is this familiar?

Here’s a common scenario: You were doing fine for the whole week, but come Friday night, you went out with the buds and stuffed yourself with beer and pizza.

Now you’re filled with guilt and self-recrimination.

Maybe you should become a disciple of Silas that creepy albino who practices severe corporal mortification in the Da Vinci Code. You could buy a cat-o-nine-tails and self-flagellate.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit overboard but, since you do feel bad, you’re likely to question your resolve to see this thing through. In those moments recall Roosevelt’s quote above and stay tough.

Here are some strategies to use in your no-holds-barred campaign:

Patronize restaurants that print their calories on their menus.
Start with an antipasto plate {note to author: include a list of what should be on it}
- Reward yourself for big and little wins. Here is a link to 155 ways to reward yourself: https://www.developgoodhabits.com/reward-yourself/
  A few of my favorites:
  —Buy a new book and read it.
  —Plan a night out with friends.
  —Binge watch your choice of TV shows.

Ask your lover to reward you as only she can. Do I need to explain this one to you?
Make it a badge of honor to leave something on your plate at every meal. Especially at restaurants.
Split an entrée when eating out. Save money and lose weight.
Don’t wait to eat until you’re starving. You are too likely to go overboard when you do finally eat.
Buddy up. {Note: See Refuse to Regain 148} Enlist friends and family.
Use small plates at home.
Don’t eat because you’re bored. Get busy with something else. Take a walk. Start a project. Play Texas Hold ’em online.
Grate your cheese. You’ll use less and, because of the greater surface area grated cheese provides, you’ll actually enjoy increased flavor.
Take cold showers.
Weigh yourself daily. Studies show people who weigh themselves daily are more successful at losing weight and keeping it off. Likely this is simply because getting into a daily routine of weighing yourself is a great way to remind yourself to watch what you eat.
Use a pedometer. Set reasonable goals but work toward a goal of 10,000 steps daily.
Keeping it interesting: While the saying “variety is the spice of life” may get a Sexy Beast who’s in a committed relationship into deep dog poop, the robust variety of recipes suggested in The Sexy Beast Diet serves to keep eating interesting as well as satisfying and healthy.
Keep a food log. I’m telling you, writing down everything you eat is a pain, I’ve tried doing it—unsuccessfully. But it is proven as one of the most effective ways to stay the course. Why? Because we tend to forget that chocolate chip cookie we snared from the plate in the break room, or the Starbuck’s cappuccino, or the two bites of our lady’s chocolate mousse cheesecake.
Go high-tech. I am a fan of the Lose It app for my iPhone. It is a quick, high-tech way to keep a log. {continue this}
Train yourself to eat small portions throughout the day. This is called grazing and has been shown not only to help you lose or maintain your weight but also to be more healthy than eating a few large meals a day.
When you are cooking, make more than one serving at a time. Freeze or refrigerate the extras so you’ll have something healthy and delicious the next time you don’t feel like doing anything more than tossing something in the microwave. Break some servings into 100-calorie snack size for between meals.
Buy snacks that are already proportioned. {Have a list on the SBD website and link here.}
Get a life. A lot of times we eat simply because we are bored. Stay busy and stay thin.
Get enough sleep. Sleep deprived individuals…
Renew your motivation. “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing–that’s why we recommend it daily.” –Zig Ziglar. Reread Chapter 2 “Need More Motivation?”
Don’t go grocery shopping when you are hungry.
Celebrate waymarks. Pounds lost, weeks, months, or years at your new weight,
Eat fluffy stuff. Popcorn, Trader Joe’s corn puffs, Rice Krispies
Use contrasting colors for your dinner plates. A Georgia Tech study showed people tend to put more food on a plate that is the same color as the food.
Eat salad first. Don’t ask me why, but, unlike Americans, Europeans eat their salad course last. Since Europeans are touted as having better eating habits than we do, it’s nice to have something we can brag about: According to a Penn State study (Go Lions!), eating a low-fat, low-calorie salad before a meal lowers caloric intake at that meal by up to 12 percent.
Eat Vegetables Second. It probably didn’t take a Penn State study to tell us that filling up on low-calorie foods before tackling a higher-calorie main dish helps us eat less of the main dish, but to continue with a good idea, eat your vegetables right after your salad.

Chapter XXXX lists 35 foods that The Sexy Beast Diet allows you to eat all you want of. I also list 15 foods you can eat almost all you want of. In Chapter XXXX you’ll find a bunch of simple recipes using some of those 50 items. Mathematically, the number of combinations one can get from 50 items is staggering. [go here]

Sexy Beasts are creative beasts so I encourage you to devise your own recipes. Experimenting with different concoctions adds interest to your meals. Make sure to stock a lusty selection of spices.

Send me your recipes (Mettee@TheSexyBeastDiet.com) and I’ll put the best ones up on The Sexy Beast Diet website giving you the credit.

Cooking for yourself.

Have the right tools.

{Is this a sidebar, for the recipes chapter?}

It’s a lot more fun to cook if you have the right tools, pots, pans, and dishware. They don’t have to be expensive, Dollar Stores often sell fun, cheap ceramic boats and interesting tools to try out.

{add to list here}
A good set of knives

Make it easy on yourself. Buy your lettuce washed and cut in bags.

Precommitment

Ulysses (Odysseus) and the Sirens. Herbert James Draper, 1909

Contrary to some people’s beliefs, Sexy Beasts are not afraid of commitment. It’s just that we like to keep our options open for as long as possible. And, while Sexy Beasts are, uh, selective in the commitments they make, a true Sexy Beast will box, brawl, gnash, and scrape to keep his word.

One strategy Sexy Beasts have used for centuries to keep their commitments is the practice of setting up a situation in advance so it is difficult, expensive, embarrassing, or even impossible to not take a certain course of action when the time comes. Of late, this strategy has been dubbed “precommitment” by nerdy students of behavioral science.

Let me give you some historic examples.

The ancient Greek hero Odysseus, knew he would be greatly tempted to succumb to the beautiful but deadly songs of the Sirens—bird-women who lured passing mariners to their deaths on rocky shoals. Utilizing precommitment, Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast of his ship, giving orders to his men that they were not to free him no matter how much he pleaded until their ship was far past the danger.

Centuries later, in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro engaged in precommitment when he landed on the beaches of what is now Veracruz, Mexico. Cortés’ plan was to conquer Montezuma and his huge Aztec empire. Fearing he and his outnumbered troops wouldn’t find the resolve to see the invasion through, Cortés had his men burn their boats. Retreat at that point wasn’t an option.

Four hundred and seventy-five years after Cortés, in May of 1994, after a hard night of drinking, Dwayne Woudchcowski woke up in a strange bed with the ugliest woman he’d ever seen asleep on his left arm. He knew if he stirred even a little bit, she would wake up. Appalled at his situation, Wouldchcowski gnawed off his arm and escaped without waking her. Later, to make sure this would never happen again, he gnawed off the other arm. This is where we get the terms “coyote ugly” and “double coyote ugly.”

While these are robust examples of precommitment, precommitment can be as simple as setting up automatic paycheck withdrawals to meet savings goals, putting your alarm clock across the room so you’ll have to get up to shut it off, or bragging to all your friends that you will finish writing a bestselling diet book by March.

Precommitment can be an effective way to make sure you meet your dieting goals. One way to practice precommitment is to not buy high-calorie snack foods. Naturally, if unhealthy foods aren’t in your pantry or refrigerator when you’re raiding the kitchen, you won’t be tempted to throw your diet to the wind. Another tactic, if you have trouble getting to the gym, is to precommit yourself by making an appointment to meet a friend to exercise together.

I am often invited to important cocktail parties where I meet with important people to talk about important things. In these instances, I use Odysseus’s type of precommitment. I know that these parties, with their calorie-laden hors d’oeuvres constitute dangerous territory diet-wise so I fill up on healthy, low-calorie snacks before leaving my home or office. It isn’t as colorful as lashing one’s self to the mast, but it is effective.

A different sort of precommitment is recognizing when danger lurks ahead and thinking about how you’ll deal with it when it shows its unsightly face. This works for me when I’m forced to go to Incredible John’s “eat-all-you-want-pizza” Emporium for one snot-nosed kid or another’s birthday party. Before I walk in the door, I tell whoever I’m with that I am going to hit the salad bar two times before I allow myself even one piece of pizza. This works because, after I’ve announced my intentions, my huge ego requires that I follow through.

There are websites to help you with precommitment. Public Humiliation Diet; stick.com, and egOnomics Lab are three great ones.

Prepare your pantry

Go through your refrigerator and kitchen cabinets and toss out all the high-calorie food.
Do this today.

Cookies? Trash them. Regular ice cream? Into the bin on top of the cookies. Potato chips? You got it, throw ‘em out.

If you don’t have unhealthy, high-calorie foods in your home, you won’t be tempted to eat them. Don’t worry, you won’t go hungry, you just won’t be eating crap.

If you don’t live alone, you may run into a bit of resistance as you clean out the cupboards. Sit everyone down and have a quiet, reasonable talk. Go over Chapter 2 “Need More Motivation?” with them.

If that doesn’t enlist your housemates into your campaign to eat healthily, put the high calorie foods all together in one cabinet and forget that cabinet exists. I suggest a cabinet in the laundry room or garage, but this too may run into a bit of resistance. Same for the refrigerator, pick a shelf or a drawer and relegate the bad guys to it.

The weird and wonderful thing is, as those you live with see your resolve and your results, they are likely to begin to eat more healthily too.

Shopping: A Short Course

Use these strategies when shopping:

Don’t go shopping when you’re hungry. This will help you ignore those high-calorie impulse items supermarkets are wont to display floor to ceiling.
Take the list. Go to TheSexyBeastDiet.com and print out the shopping list of the XX all-you-want foods and the XX almost-all-you-want foods. Use the list to guide your purchases.
Check out the Nutrition Facts label on packaged foods. Focus your purchases on low-calorie foods. Don’t even think of buying any item in which a single serving exceeds 500 calories.
Buy brands such as Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and Healthy Choice. Generally, these are quick, healthy, and taste good but, if you expect what you pull out of the microwave to look like what the photo on the box looks like, I have a good deal on a North Dakota timeshare for you. Here’s a link to some of my favorite quick prepackaged meals. LINK
Spend most of your time in the produce aisle. Completely skip the chips, crackers, candy, and cookies aisles.
Buy a wide variety. Having a variety of appealing low-calorie choices when you open the refrigerator helps alleviate any lingering cravings you may harbor for high-calorie foods. This also allows you to experiment with different creations when cooking.
Stock up on spices. Sexy Beasts aren’t bland and we don’t want our foods to be either. My favorite spices include sage, rosemary, garlic, basil, and fresh-ground black pepper, but my spice cabinet boasts at least 70 different spices. Fresh is always better, but dried spices work fine and are easier to have at hand 24/7/365.

Oh, yeah, and pick up one of those little bottles of liquid smoke. Its great mixed with ground turkey or added to marinades, soups, or beans. Use a few drops added to olive oil to baste whatever you’re broiling or barbequing, including vegetables. Be careful though, start with a few drops, tasting as you go. They don’t sell it in small bottles for no reason.

Someone else is doing the cooking at your house

If you’re not the household chef, you may find eating healthily difficult. If this is the case, you have a few strategies to choose from:

Enlist the cook in your Sexy Beast Diet plan.
Ask that the he or she fix a special menu for you.
Take over the cooking duties yourself.
Eat double portions of the healthy items like salad and politely pass on the unhealthy dishes.
Prepare your own food without getting in the head cook’s way.
Some combination of the above.

I understand that any of these strategies may meet with resistance, just remember that this is a matter of life and death (yours) and, when implementing them, use your best diplomatic skills.

Restaurants Gone Wild

Years ago, I used to be in the restaurant business and my partner and I found the worst thing we could do was let a customer leave hungry. An exciting menu, fabulous prices, great service—nothing trumped making sure the largest eater at the table left satiated.

Why? Because, when two or more people are deciding where to eat it’s common for each person to have veto power. We knew that if one person was worried about not getting enough to eat at our restaurant, he or she would nix going there. Because of this we loaded each plate.

This is still a concern with many restaurateurs. Be aware of the portion sizes served you and leave surplus calories on your plate. When you are done eating, ask the busperson to take your plate so you won’t be tempted to nibble away as the others at the table finish eating.

As you may have noticed, this is a poorly-formated, unedited and unfinished chapter with bracketed {notes} to myself. Please feel free to add suggestions and comments in the comment box below.