I needed a gauge to see if thin-thinking really worked for getting the quickest way to lose belly fat. I don’t weigh myself anymore, but I’ve been keeping tabs on my size by putting on a pair of black leather jeans — size 10 — about every month. As I pulled them off the hanger to get a baseline, I realized that a lot more time than usual had passed since I’d checked the fit.
One leg in, then the other. The leather slid over my hips, but when I buttoned them, yikes! Muffin-top spillage galore. Since my last try-on, I’d gained at least five pounds.
Instantly, my heart raced. Not good! How had I let myself balloon like this? I felt the panic response, and remembered Rule 7: Give yourself a break. “People don’t expect perfection in any other area of their lives,” Ed Abramson, Ph.D., an eating and weight-control expert inLafayette,CA, had told me. “But if you think like a typical dieter who wants to find the fast way to lose his belly fat, there’s no forgiveness. A slip-up or a pound gained equals unworthiness.”
Relax, I thought (thinly). I tried a few deep breaths and then decided it would be easier if I unbuttoned my tight pants first. Thin-thinkers, if they gain a few pounds, shrug and move on: I would do the same. No stewing, no shame, no worry about losing the weight. I put on stretch jeans and got on with my day.
Not only do thin people not obsess over their lapses, they just don’t have the same complicated emotional relationship with food that perpetual dieters do — and they’re better off for it. “It’s unhealthy to think of food as bad or dangerous,” explained David L. Katz, M.D., an associate adjunct professor of public health atYaleUniversity. Equating a cookie with pure evil will bring on deprivation thinking (not allowing yourself to eat certain foods — or at all). “If you skip meals, all you’ll be able to think about is food. When you do eat, you’ll binge — and that’s a pattern commonly associated with obesity.”
Well, yes. Any dieter worth her low-sodium salt knows that you should never let yourself get too hungry, right? You run the risk of falling into a blind, food-shoveling trance and regaining consciousness in front of an empty fridge, covered in barbecue sauce, wondering. How did I get here to lose fat? But, as it turns out, that doesn’t have to happen. Thin-thinkers don’t fear hunger or freak out when they feel it, so they’re fine with waiting until their next meal — and then they don’t binge, I learned from Judith Beck, Ph.D., a cognitive therapist. By contrast, “people who struggle with weight are often afraid that hunger will be intolerable,” Beck told me. “They imagine their empty-stomach pangs will get worse and worse unless they eat. I asked people who feared hunger to go without eating for up to six hours and record their sensations on a discomfort scale, rating it from the annoyance of a mild headache up to the pain of childbirth or surgery,” she explained. “Even between hours five and six, when the subjects had empty-stomach hunger, their discomfort levels ranged from ‘none’ to ‘mild.’”
Rule 2 was “Let hunger happen.” So I, too, had to accept that a little stomach rumbling wasn’t bad or scary or agonizing. On Sunday night, I was roasting a chicken for dinner. Only problem: I forgot to turn on the oven. An hour went by before I realized dinner would be long delayed, and I was already peckish — the perfect opportunity to reenact Beck’s experiment myself.
“Hunger is intermittent,” Beck had tipped me off. “It might last 10 minutes, but then it goes away.” So when my younger daughter, Lucy, complained that she wanted dinner, I figured if Lucy and I could wait out our hunger, it might not return until the chicken was done.
How to distract ourselves and get the really quickest way to lose belly fat? By applying Rule 8: Exercise for fun! Thin-thinkers equate activity with happiness. Lucy herself often chose fun over food. I flashed to a summer morning inMaineat Steve’s family’s lake house. I’d prepared a fabulous breakfast — bacon, eggs, French toast — but Lucy blew it off, racing out the door to go swimming instead and never looking back. In that same spirit, I suggested we break the no-TV-before-dinner rule and play Wii while we waited for our meal.
Lucy was thrilled, and we played Wii tennis, match after match. She beat me badly, but we both won by laughing, bonding, and even breaking a sweat. When the oven timer went off — it seemed like no time — we didn’t want to stop. Our hunger had become a non-issue.
