Jason Lillis's Blog

It’s no secret that as a society we have become more and more sedentary over the past century. Wonderful advances in technology have steadily reduced our requirement to do things the old fashioned way–you know, like walk and carry stuff. I sit in front of a computer most of the day. More and more jobs require the same. This is part of the reason our collective waistlines are expanding. But there is another cost that not many people understand.

Independent of obesity, total time spent in sedentary behavior (anything that involves sitting) increases the risk for poor cardiometabolic health and also mortality. In other words, if you eat well, exercise regularly, and maintain a healthy weight, you still have an increased health risk if your job requires you to sit at a desk.

Researchers at the Brown Medical School recently completed a study designed to help people reduce their sedentary time. Participants used a smart phone equipped with accelerometer technology, which tracks all movement dynamically and allows for real-time monitoring of sedentary behavior. The phone then gave prompts to take a walking break after registering 30, 60, or 120 minutes of consecutive sedentary time depending on which condition participants were in (the breaks were 3, 6, and 12 minutes respectively; thus shorter interval = shorter walking break).

All conditions were effective at reducing overall sedentary time and increasing light and moderate activity over the course of a week, but the 30 and 60 minute conditions were better. One important side note was that the 30 minute condition, while overall the most effective, was met with the most dislike from participants. One interpretation of that could be that the breaks were too frequent and few participants in the 30-minute condition would have continued after 1 week, while another would be that what is effective isn’t always what we like.

Regardless, there are some clearly useful ideas you can take and implement in your daily life. You are most at risk if you have a lifestyle or a job that involves long periods of sitting. We know enough now that those periods should be broken up. Ironically, technology has a solution for the problem it has helped create. Commercial accelerometers (e.g., Fitbit) are lowering in price and can easily track things like daily steps, active minutes, and so on. Alternatively you can go low tech and simply program random prompts into your phone or calendar to go off to remind you to get up and take a five minute walk.

I don’t know about you, but I feel better, more alert, and more engaged after taking a brief stroll. All that time staring a screen and my mind starts turning to mush. Give the walking break prompts a try, you will scarcely find something easier to do to improve your health.

Source Article: http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%...

-Jason Lillis

Do you see exercise as a chore? Something like a work task that has to be done, despite your own desires? If so, there may be a chance you “compensate” yourself later on with reward-type foods, such as desserts.

A recent study by Werle and colleagues, participants were asked to go on a walk around campus. They told some of the participants to take a “scenic” walk and that the purpose of the walk was to have “fun.” The other group was told to take a walk for “exercise.” The exercise group ended up choosing and eating more high calorie dessert options, such as chocolate pudding and M&M’s, after the walk.

The idea of compensatory eating has been around for a while in the research literature and findings have been mixed. Sometimes researchers find that people overcompensate and eat more calories after exercise. Other studies have not found a relationship between eating and exercise. Perhaps this may be in part due to how activity is perceived, as suggested by the Werle study.

If so, what are the implications? Obviously it would be best if you chose activities that you like and find fun. This we know already. People who enjoy the activities they do to exercise tend to exercise more and stick with it longer. But what if you don’t really like any kind of physical activity?

Try this. Make yourself feel as happy as you have ever felt, right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait…How did that go? Not really possible, right? In the same way, I don’t think you can make an activity fun for yourself. Imagine jogging and saying to yourself over and over, “this is fun, damnit!” But the lesson from the Werle study is still important, because ultimately it is a lesson about perception.

One way you can change your perception of what you are doing is by linking it to things that matter to you. If you are just exercising because it’s a chore you do, that is the least motivating perspective you can have. Now, it you are instead exercising because the fitness, energy, and mobility allow you to keep up with and enjoy your time more with your kids/grandkids, or because it allows you to go no that hike with friends, or to travel to Europe and walk around the beautiful cities without problems, well now you are really doing something of worth. Try thinking and writing about why exercising matters to you and how it connects to that which you hold most important.

Unless of course you find certain activities fun, then by all means do those!

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Source Article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-014-9301-6

My wife and I notice a big difference when we eat at the table versus in front of the TV. At the table we eat slower, enjoy our food more, and linger over conversation. In front of the TV it’s scarf city! Barely aware of what we’re eating, we tend to eat faster, and often more. After the meal we might move right to dessert or even another snack, just out of habit. Sound familiar?

Dr. Suzanne Higgs and colleagues have shown that memory plays a key role in when, what, and how much we eat. In a series of research studies, participants ate a meal with or without distractions. Participants who watched TV or played video games while eating had poor memory of what they ate. They also ate significantly more at their next meal and felt more hungry than their non-distracted counterparts, even if they ate the same amount of food.  

So what does this mean? If you tend to do other things while you eat, you will probably end up eating more throughout the day. This goes double if you are very distracted: think doing an important work task while chowing at your desk.

Eating is something that can be done on automatic pilot, so it’s not surprising we direct our attention elsewhere. Multi-task! The problem is your brain is occupied and it’s not taking in all the relevant information to make a proper memory of what you ate. Without that information, you may default into thinking you need a big meal. “I’ll have that second helping of pasta thank you, I barely ate today!”

You can counteract this with a few simple strategies. Start by eating in a designated area (sit at the dining table or in the break room as opposed to the couch or your desk if you don’t already do so). Pause before you eat and become aware of everything on your plate for just 5 seconds. Try slowing your eating pace a little. Pause a couple of times while eating, put down all your utensils.

At one meal each day, see if you can focus your attention on the taste of your food, if just for a minute or two. Tune out the world and tune into your food. This will not only help you make a proper memory of what you ate, it will also help you become more mindful of your food choices and orient you to any feelings of satiety you may be starting to have.   

You can also keep a log of what you eat. There are many free websites, like myfitnesspal.com, that will help you keep track. It will also give you nutritional information, help you set goals, and track your progress if you are interested.

Being mindful of what you eat, while you are eating it, can help prevent you from overeating. Give it a try!   

-Jason Lillis

The one constant in nutrition guidelines is change. Research finds a link between a macro or micro nutrient and a health outcome, let's say saturated fat and heart disease, and then the media and food industry go into overdrive. We hear about the dangers of eating too much saturated fat on the news and read about it online. Mostly this reporting is done by non-scientists who are basing whole reports over a few sentences and general, often tentative conclusions from complex scientific research. The food industry jumps on this and develops a host of products that are "fat-free." We buy said products in mass quantitates only to find out later that saturated fat may not have been the whole story, and oh by the way those chemicals and the refining process we used to make those alternative foods, yeah, they are really bad for you. 

The impact of nutrition on your health is incredibly complex and extremely difficult to study. This is in part due to the fact that you can't have experimental control over anyone's diet over any length of time that would yield usable results. Not only is it not practical, it's not ethical. So we are stuck to doing large, messy population based studies on the impact of nutrition. Only there's one major catch. We are notoriously inaccurate at remembering and reporting what we eat. This is much closer to an empirical fact than any data we have on nutrition. 

So while we continue to rely on, and draw conclusions from, messy research (our only current option), we will continue to see conflicting stories ("fat is bad...no maybe it's good!"), once banished foods invited back into the fold of "healthy" (like eggs), and a whole heck of a lot of confusion among all of us trying to follow a healthier path. 

The one bright light at the end of the tunnel: More and more the evidence is pointing to processed and refined foods as being universally unhealthy. All processed foods. Not just the frankenutrition found in energy bars and boxed foods, but also the processing done to lower quality meats and dairy. Some day we may learn that your best path to health wasn't really that complex, it was just hard to find: real, whole, unaltered, unprocessed foods of any kind. Mike Pollan has still said it best when he said: Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants. 

Then again, maybe we'll find that is wrong someday too.

Links:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandsty...

 

The stigma of being broken

The world is a harsh place if you are obese. Despite all the talk about “fat and proud,” mountains of evidence keep pouring in suggesting that obese people are frequently targeted for derision, seen as lazy, weak, undesirable, and even unintelligent- attitudes that begin to develop as early as age 3- and are discriminated against at work, school, and even in the doctor’s office. A recent study in NeuroImage by researchers in Italy may shed some new light on what mechanisms play a role in allowing this culture to persist.

In the study, participants were asked to view brief videos of people being touched in their face by either a q-tip (neutral condition) or penetrated in their face by a syringe (pain condition). The videos depicted two non-overweight individuals and four obese individuals. Among the obese individuals, two were described as being obese due to “unknown causes” and the other two were described as being obese due to a disease that was out of their control (Cushing’s Disease). Researchers used an fMRI machine to track participant responses to the videos.

When viewing obese individuals, participants in the study showed reduced neural activity in key areas that are associated with sensory and emotional responses to pain in the brain. In other words, there was evidence of a possible “dampened” emotional response to seeing an obese person experience pain when compared to a non-overweight individual. That’s not great to hear, although certainly not unexpected. The next finding, however, was unexpected.

Participants showed a further “dampened” response to the pain video when viewing the obese people described as having uncontrollable weight gain due to a disease. In other words, if the obesity wasn’t their fault, there was less neural reactivity to the depiction of pain towards them. This flies in the face of similar research done on HIV and other conditions. When a person with HIV is described as contracting it from a blood transfusion as opposed to unprotected sex, for example, more empathy and emotional responding is elicited.

What could this possible mean? Of course, further research is warranted and it makes sense to be cautious when interpreting findings from one study. Having said that, I think it’s worth exploring how deeply stigmatized body-shape is in our society. There is an incredible amount of dehumanization occurring in all of us due to the massive exposure we’ve had to derogatory depictions of people with larger body shapes, countless fat jokes, horrible rants and memes on the internet, stereotypical TV show character depictions, media depictions (frequently highlighting overeating and lack of willpower as causes), and so on. We all have massive programming of “fat=broken.” That’s not to say we all act consistent with that programming, certainly not, but the exposure to those messages is part of us. And this study presents evidence that maybe this dehumanization is occurring somewhat at a neurobiological level. Maybe.

But again the shocking finding here is that, when obesity was described as uncontrollable, participants showed less reactivity to their pain. I wonder if part of what is going on is this. In studies, obese people are rated as less desirable than people with disabilities, amputations, and disfigurements. The pervasiveness of this lack of desirability is profound. What if, the fact that someone can’t change their weight puts them in a different classification. Now, instead of being broken, they are broken and they can’t be fixed.

One thing is for sure. We need to mount a culture change that is built on compassion and connecting with our common humanity in order to help mitigate our own programmed biases and ease the suffering of those around us.

Study: R.T. Azevedo E. Macaluso, V. Viola, G. Sani, S.M. Aglioti (2014). Weighing the stigma of weight: An fMRI study of neural reactivity to the pain of obese individuals. NeuroImage 91, 109-119. Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/...#

 

In all the discussion I’ve seen about labeling obesity a disease, one argument I haven’t seen written about much is that labels tend to dehumanize the people behind the label. When I say alcoholic, what pops into your mind? How about schizophrenic? The label “obese” is doing that now whether we call it a disease or not. If you hear “obese,” if you are like most people, including this author, you might have think “fat,” “unattractive,” “not likeable,” “weak-willed,” “lazy,” or maybe even “bad.”

Now, I’m not saying anyone in particular reading this blog post either agrees or would act on such thoughts, but the sad truth of living in our society, a society that is incredibly intolerant of larger body shapes, is that we’ve been repeatedly exposed to these stereotypes and internalized them to a degree.

My pie-in-the-sky dream is that perhaps we some day focus our efforts in a different way. Instead of debating whether or not we should call obesity a disease, maybe we could focus on discussing how to build a society that is more compassionate towards people that have been stigmatized.

Because regardless of whether we call obesity a disease or not, we all have a personal challenge. As we continue to interact with countless labels referring to countless people, we have to fight our natural tendency to interact with the label instead of the human.

How do we do that? Well, doing so requires, first and foremost, to engage people. Simple advice, yes? But think of how little we do that these days. Mere contact, conversation, engagement, has a dramatic impact, pushing us away from our pre-programmed stereotypes and towards an individualistic set of experiences to interact with.

But you can also take additional powerful steps. The first is counterintuitive. Acknowledge that, as a human, you are full of biases and preconceived stereotypes. Your thoughts don’t make you a good or bad person, your actions do. You are in full control of your actions, and if you are well-meaning you can be exactly the person you want to be no matter what kind of automatic-thoughts pop up when you first see an obese individual, or an alcoholic, or a schizophrenic, or someone of another race or gender. If however, you demand that you be free of biases, well, that’s going to be tough.

Imagine this- I am really invested in being “bias free” due to my belief that it made me a good or better person, well then what might happen if I interact with a co-worker and have a biased thought about their body shape? I’d try to suppress it (which we know is hard to do) and I might also stop interacting with that co-worker. Why? Well interacting that co-worker is bring up the “bad thoughts” and I can’t have those because I’m “bias free” and a “good person” and….you get the picture. So now instead of engaging, I might end up avoiding and further dehumanizing other people for the sake of avoiding unwanted thoughts.

Now if instead I say, “My mind is going to say some crazy things to me, part of my programming from simply growing up in this society and being exposed to a lot of crap,” well then I’ve got breathing room to do whatever I want with my behavior. Now, my mind can chatter and say whatever it wants. If I’m mindful of my thoughts and can laugh and say “thanks for nothing mind,” I can go about the business of actually being the person I want to be through my behavior. Mindful awareness is the key that unlocks your ability to choose what you want to do.

So what do you want to do? Well, that is up to you really. The best thing to do is get in touch with your core values. The best way to do that is to talk to someone or write about them. Start with relationships. What kind of person do you want to be in relation to family members? How about friends? Include strangers too.

After writing for a bit, developing values narratives can be very helpful, for example, “Being kind, open, and engaged.” These narratives have several key features. They provide a sort of direction for you to shoot for. You can always check them, like a compass, and see if you are behaving consistent with your narrative. If not, redirect your behavior. Notice also they never end. You never finished being kind. You can always choose to behave in kind ways to others. So narratives provide a lasting foundation from which to base behavior.

So while the discussion about how best to label and address obesity in our society rages on, I put in a humble suggestion that we simultaneously work as a society to address the dramatic dehumanization that is so pervasive and affects all of us in some way or another. Engage others, become aware of and step back from your automatic thoughts, and clarify and follow your core values with your behavior. You can make a difference with every interaction you make in your life. 

-Jason Lillis

The American Medical Association decided recently to label obesity a disease, the basis for which is partially supported by growing evidence of biological and genetic influences on weight. This decision was met with mixed feedback, but mostly critical. So, should we or should we not label obesity a disease? 

Among the criticisms are that obesity doesn’t meet the criteria for being called a disease, that labeling obesity a disease may cause further stigmatization (although some argue it would ease stigma), and perhaps most importantly that a disease-focused message puts the impetus for change on the medical  community as opposed to at the individual, societal, and perhaps political level. The thinking behind the disease label movement is that it will spur physicians to pay more attention to obesity, and, perhaps more importantly, push insures to pay for weight management interventions. Both laudable goals. 

In a recent study, researchers from the University of Richmond tested the impact of a message labeling and justifying obesity as a disease and compared it to an information-based message. The disease-based, relative to the information-based, weight-management message weakened the importance placed on health-focused dieting and reduced concerns about weight among obese individuals. Further, the decreased concern about weight predicted higher-calorie food choices. One positive finding associated with the disease-based message was that it lowered body-image dissatisfaction, however this too predicted higher-calorie food choices. 

So on the one hand we have lower body image dissatisfaction and increased focus on physicians providing better care and insurers paying for weight management interventions. On the other we have the possibility of shifting the focus away from societal changes that could have the most impact, the potential of lowering individual concern about obesity and its health implications, and perhaps decreasing motivation to pursue healthy lifestyle changes in the process. What would you choose if you were in charge? I’m glad I’m not. Whatever side you fall on, it’s important to know that labels have consequences.

Part 2 coming soon: Seeing the person behind the label. 

-Jason Lillis

Links: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/business/ama-recognizes-obesity-as-a-disease.html?

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/01/24/0956797613516981.abstract

http://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreykabat/2013/07/09/why-labeling-obesity-as-a-disease-is-a-big-mistake/

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was asked to contribute to a Redbook article on emotional eating and it seemed like potentially an interesting blog post, so here goes!

The trick with emotional eating is it often happens automatically, kind of in the background. You might not be able to say, “I just had a fight with my spouse and now I notice myself going to the cupboard with the intention of eating a whole bag of chips. Ha ha!” Some people might have examples like that where they are aware of what’s happening when it’s happening, but a lot of emotional eating is more subtle. Maybe you had a difficult day at work, you realize you had nothing planned for dinner, you are passing a fast food restaurant and decide to grab food there for the sake of convenience. Our minds are really good at justifying our food decisions, not matter how unhealthy, and might lead us to believe that circumstances, more than emotions, were the culprit.

Another problem, of course, is that different people will eat for different emotional reasons. Some may eat when they are anxious, or sad, or perhaps bored, and still others may find they eat more in joyous times, as kind of a way of making a fun time even more fun (or perhaps as an attempt to not “ruin” a fun time by putting restrictions on your food choices, which could lead to feeling deprived). This makes it hard to identify a single sign for everybody.

So the best way to see if emotional eating is an issue for you would be to tune into yourself a little more. First, keep at least a rough track of what you are eating. Did I eat more than I had planned to eat today? It would help to write down everything you ate. Second, check in with yourself at least a couple of times a day to see how you are feeling. Am I more anxious, stressed, sad, bored, or happy today or have I been at times throughout the day?

Then see if the two go together. On days when you find you are more anxious, do you also find you have eaten more than you planned to eat? If so, you may have a tendency to emotionally eat. You may think you “know” that you do this intuitively, but it is probably still worth tracking for a few days, or better yet weeks, to see. There is some good evidence that some people over-attribute eating to emotions. In other words, you may think you are eating in response to emotions, but when you track your emotions and your eating you may find there is no discernible relationship between the two.

The food environment is toxic, meaning there is an endless supply of delicious, high calorie, unhealthy, relatively inexpensive food available to you at a moment’s notice. And we know food provides short-term pleasure, comfort, or relief—desired changes from unpleasant emotional states. So overcoming emotionally eating can be difficult. 

There are some practical steps you can take to prevent emotional eating. Eat consistently throughout the day so you never end up too hungry. Plan your meals at least the day before. Prepare your meals and snacks the night before (if you are going to work). Always have something healthy to eat within arm’s reach or a short walk to the fridge. Keep tempting foods out of the house/office. When you find yourself sad, anxious, stressed, or bored, seek social support or exercise. Both provide mood benefits and are positive actions to take.

You can also work on becoming more mindful and accepting of your emotions as they are. Practice basic mindfulness skills like scanning your body to notice any feelings. Observe and describe where and how you feel those emotions. Allow yourself to sit with them without trying to change them or make them go away. See if you can imagine making room for them and allowing them to come and go naturally. Learn this skill well and you can step out of the emotionally eating carousel almost entirely.

Finally, you can orient to the long-term cost of emotional eating. The short-term comfort or relief you get from eating is replaced often by guilt or shame soon after. This can become a vicious cycle because if you feel guilty or shameful about what you ate, and you really want to feel better right now…food is there for you again. And the cycle continues. You may have been stressed from a difficult day at work, but now you added shame to that. That’s a big cost, and the cost is there because you said “no, you must change” to the stress. So there is a cost to being unwilling to feel what we feel, and that has long-term health implications if your primary coping strategy is eating. Practice bringing this cost to your awareness explicitly, “If I eat this cake now I will feel better for a short time and then worse later on, and I will also have harmed my health a little.” The goal isn’t to make the healthy choice every time, but to simply make it a choice, as opposed to automatically eating, and then over time perhaps you start choosing health more. 

I'm an Olympics junkie. Have been my whole life. I don't know why, but something about how hard these athletes work for a once in 4 years shot at a life-changing experience pulls me in and makes me care about sports I have no interest in outside of the Olympics. Heck, I even get into Curling! And before you bail on this post, I promise this has to do with health! I'll get there. 

The big news this week was not an amazing athletic accomplishment, but a post ski interview with Bode Miller. For those who haven't seen it, parts can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fo1Yq... and commentary blasting the interview can be seen everywhere, the NY Times for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/spo....

Bode Miller's brother died this year, something that was clearly on his mind as he competed in these Olympic games. After the race, he was emotional. The general criticism of the interview was this- NBC pushed too far when Bode Miller started displaying emotion, they should have stopped asking him questions and they should have cut away and not shown his emotional outpouring. That is debatable by reasonable people and I’m not taking a stand either way. But lost in this incredible wave of criticism towards NBC is a simple fact. We don't like how we feel when other people express emotion. So much so that we're willing to show up at NBC with pitchforks and demand that heads roll. 

What actually happens is an incredibly human moment. A beautiful one. A man overcome by emotion, expressing that emotion, allowing it to flow through him and hit him in a way that maybe he hasn't before, and then not knowing what to do or say but just sitting in that moment. Of all the crap we have on TV, which houses and endless parade of mean-spirited jokes and glorified violence, what an incredible thing to see. A real human display real human emotion. 

Our collective intolerance of this event can be seen in the commentary that suggested that once he started crying, NBC should have immediately ended the interview, and that it was cruel to put him through that, implying that crying is both shameful and damaging when witnessed by others.

I find this both sad, but unfortunately predictable, as we live in a society that values the absence of negative emotion above almost all else. Simply look at the pharmaceutical industry, which continues to come up with medications for every uncomfortable emotion you are capable of feeling.

And here is where we finally return to health. The biggest factor in the obesity epidemic is clearly the environmental changes that have made low cost, high calorie, high density, highly palatable, poor nutrition junk and fast food widely available at all times to most people. However, these environmental changes have come with a simultaneous, but more subtle, change in the culture’s orientation towards emotion. Negative emotions are seen as bad, something that you need to get rid of fast, something to be avoided, and certainly something that nobody should ever see you experiencing.

This is a really bad deal for health. Why? Well tasty food can change how you feel right now. It can make you feel better in the very short-term. Sure, it slowly makes you gain weight and causes disease over time, but right now, it gets the job done. And if you really want to stop feeling stressed, or bored, or sad right now, food is there for you. If there is no room in your life to experience natural and normal human emotions, food is there any time you want it. See the problem?

It becomes an even bigger problem when you are trying to lose weight. Reducing caloric intake means for sure you will have times when you feel hungry, deprived, frustrated, maybe even a little anxious. If you have no room for those emotions, if you’ve said “I will not experience those,” then your chances of losing weight are low. In fact, to do most anything meaningful in life, you have to be open to experiencing a range of emotions, positive and negative. That’s just being human. The more emotions that are “off limits” to you, the less you can strive for in your life.

So when we watch Bode Miller cry, and we notice that we don’t like how we feel when we see him feel what he feels, perhaps it is a good time to take stock in our relationship with our own feelings. Now might be a good time to open the door an allow space for all of your emotions to breathe, you are strong enough to contain them all after all. It might just be good for your health.

-Jason Lillis

I just got finished with a promotional segment for a radio show in Chicago with co-author JoAnne Dahl. We had a lovely conversation that inspired me to write our first Diet Trap blog post.

The Diet Trap is built on a foundation of self-compassion and self-acceptance, and we teach you how to accept yourself as you are for the purpose of then pursuing a more meaningful life. When I give talks, I always get the same question, some flavor of, "If we teach people how to accept themselves, then why would they want to lose weight?" It's a reasonable logical conclusion, but misguided. So let's talk about acceptance and change. 

Acceptance, from our standpoint, means treating yourself as valid and whole. Taking yourself as is and acknowledging that you are of worth and can pursue things that matter in your life. That is an inherently self-compassionate standpoint. What we focus specifically on accepting are one's thoughts, memories, feelings, and bodily sensations. In our eyes, these experiences are largely out of our control. They are products of our history and the current context (what's happening around us right now). Saying it is "OK" to think what you think, and feel what you feel, when you think and feel it, is acceptance. 

Ironically, this is a very powerful place from which to make important behavioral changes. Confused? Let me explain. 

We all have core values, like caring for and connecting with loved ones, learning and growing, engaging in pleasant and nourishing activities, just to name a few. Often what gets in the way of us pursuing these core values are unwanted or difficult thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations. It may be hard to pursue intimacy because we have been hurt in the past, remember that pain, and have anxiety about being hurt in the future. Pursuing intimacy with someone means opening up to that pain, it might mean remembering past hurts, feeling that anxiety, and still moving towards intimacy despite being scared. This is an act of courage and it requires acceptance. Acceptance that what you feel and think is valid, OK, and does NOT need to be changed before you move in your valued direction (in this case, towards intimacy). So the very stance of acceptance towards what is happening inside you is what can propel you to powerful change with your behavior.  

How about healthy lifestyle? Well, in order to pursue a healthy lifestyle you may need to make room for some fatigue (simply from being active), feelings of deprivation (when we don't indulge all of our food cravings), and a host of unhelpful thoughts (often reasons why we can't or shouldn't do something healthy right now because...there's always tomorrow/ it's a party/ you'll never keep it off, etc...), or perhaps stress and sadness (which maybe we have often used food to soothe in the past). All of that "stuff" is fodder for acceptance. It's saying "that's OK" to what you think and feel when you think and feel it, in order to make some really powerful and important changes with your behavior. 

In both cases, if you say "no, it's not OK to feel what I feel, to think what I think," then you immediately stop moving in your valued direction. You are now taking the stance that your thoughts and feelings must first be fixed before you do something that matters to you. We frequently take this stance, and it frequently limits what we can do and how much meaning and vitality we can create in our life. Saying "no" to what is happening inside you is a non-compassionate stance, it's suggesting that something about you  is broken or not valid and needs to be "fixed" before you can live your life the way you want.

Part of what we try to do in The Diet Trap is help you see a way out of that stance. It starts by just looking inside and saying "I accept." Doing so let's you look at your behavior and say "I change."  

-Jason Lillis