Gary Foster, PhD is the Chief Scientific Officer at WW. (He also happened to get part of his education at the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater.) He's been studying weight-related issues for the entirety of his professional career.
This is not your typical diet book. It's not about what to eat or not eat. Well, maybe it is since I do recall Dr. Foster writing (and I'm paraphrasing here) if you want the cheese, you should eat the cheese. Which kind of sums up the point of the book. It's not about what you eat or when you eat it. It's making mindful eating a part of your regular life. It's not at all about being good or being bad. It's about being mindful.
Because of how long I've been on WW (many, many years) and how much reading I've done in the past, there was nothing at all earth shattering written here. But Dr. Foster has a nice conversational tone and includes personal anecdotes from others who struggle with their weight.
I started reading this book while on Christmas vacation. It definitely did make me feel better about the choices that I'd been making over the few days before I started reading. And I am positive that reading this helped me get 100% back on track with my eating as soon as I woke up the morning after we arrived back home. (Why my body craves either pizza or a grilled cheese after arriving home from a longer trip is beyond me. I came home, ate my grilled cheese, went to bed and was back on track the following morning. Easily. Because even though I hadn't yet finished the book, I had started my shift in mindset. That was vacation. I was faced with foods that I'm not faced with at home. I didn't want to feel deprived while away celebrating. However, I made mindful choices. I was selective about what I ate and didn't eat it all. I was extremely mindful of what went in my mouth. I felt good about my choices.
The Shift was a reminder that I need to be kind to myself, I need to be grateful for even small things. I need to focus on positive behaviors and positive changes. And most of all, a bad day doesn't make me a failure.
I'm glad I was able to get The Shift from the library. I figured I'd read it and if I felt it was a book that I'd turn to time and again that I'd buy a copy. For me, it's not that kind of book. I luckily got the book at the absolutely perfect time for me. I was out of my routine, in celebratory mode. I'm not sure if the book would have resonated quite so much with me had I read it when I was still pretty much locked-down during my first few months back on the program during winter/early spring 2021.
If you need an extra little something to help you shift your thinking, I would highly recommend The Shift.
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| Homemade pizza! Yum! |
I've been married to my (non-reader) husband for over a decade. If I had a weight problem before we got married, it was only increased once we got married and started living together as he is a wonderful cook! Our relationship blossomed, in part, due to our shared passion about eating delicious and interesting foods. Left to my own devices, I'd try to focus on the intersection of delicious, interesting and healthy... but for him, food is about much more than being healthy or nourishing oneself. (Read my review of Stanley Tucci's Taste to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.) Because of that slight difference of perspective, it's been very hard to follow any sort of weight loss program or even healthy eating program. Until last year.
The first few months of the pandemic, I was constantly afraid that we were going to run out of food and weren't going to be able to get more. I was very careful about making our food stores last. As a result, I lost about 7 lbs in the first few weeks of staying home. Eventually, though, we were celebrating everything that we might have celebrated by being with others or doing some fun out-of-the-house activity with food. For my birthday, we had a big cake. For the 4th of July, we had a huge cookout - for 2! We had cakes for family birthdays, even though they were all celebrated virtually. For Thanksgiving, we made a huge Thanksgiving feast, again for just the two of us. (That one was especially crazy as we often spend Thanksgiving alone. And when we do, we make sure to do something special, like an outing to a park, a walk on the beach. And then eat a pretty normal dinner. But we were in crazy times so our Thanksgiving was crazy!) The days leading up to Christmas were a frenzy of holiday baking. Normally I leave the cookie baking to my husband. But Christmas 2020 I started searching online for Christmas cookie recipes that I might like better than the varieties that my husband usually bakes (our taste in cookies is quite different) and prepared to bake them myself. (I'm still dreaming about the lemon cookies I baked that December.) He made 4 varieties, I made 3. We delivered plates of cookies to all our neighbors, but we still had plenty for ourselves. We indulged in potato latkes for Hanukkah that year, not the usual once, but three times! We left a bowl of mixed nuts on the table at all times, perfect for grazing. We enjoyed our own version of the Feast of Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve and then had a very nice Christmas dinner on Christmas Day, too. New Year's Eve was a cocktail party for two. New Year's Day we had homemade bagels with home-cured lox!
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| The dreamy lemon cookies |
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| Traditional Italian genetti |
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| Homemade potato latkes |
On January 2nd, I woke up and said out loud, in front of my husband, "This has got to end. I restarting WW today and we're going to have to figure out a way for me to stick with it." And over time, we did.
I joined at the perfect time. WW had three different programs at the time geared to three different types of eating. I followed the purple plan which focused on mostly whole foods which didn't need to be weighed or measured exactly. Perfect! Plus lots of our favorites were dishes comprised of whole foods. I do very little of the cooking but for the first few months, I stood in the kitchen measuring all the things that he didn't want to measure.
I also realized there was no way that I could be eating "diet" food while he was eating delicious food so I started spending a lot of time really analyzing recipes and adapting them to make them more WW-friendly. We were going to continue to be eating Rather than shifting what we were eating, we were just weighing and measuring, something that was totally foreign to my husband. I bought a two more sets of measuring spoons so we'd always have a clean set. I moved our food scale from its place on a high shelf to a more easily accessible spot. He's gotten good at measuring as long as I've taken the time to make sure the recipes fit my plan.
We're not restricted to WW recipes although I will always check there first. We're eating a lot more Asian-inspired meals than before, which makes my husband happy, because I seem to enjoy the WW Asian-inspired recipes better than the basic stir fries we'd been used to eating at home.
I plan for a snack while watching TV in the evening. Sometimes it's just a bowl of berries, but more often than that it's a bowl of popcorn. Every night, with the exception of nights where I've had a real dessert either out or with friends, ends with a piece of candy. A real piece of candy. No diet or sugar free candy for me! My favorite is a dark chocolate with caramel and black sea salt bar from Trader Joe's although most nights I'll have a Trader Joe's dark chocolate honey mint (the lower point choice). This year for Christmas, instead of binging on Christmas cookies, I had one Lindor Lindt truffle as my end-of-the-night candy. Some days the promise of that nightly piece of candy is what gets me through. It also works in never making me feel like I'm deprived.
I guess I was embracing a mind shift of my own even before I read The Shift. Reading the book just solidified it for me.
WW changed its plan in November 2021, as it's wont to do every other year. Two months in, we're both adapting to the new Personal Points plan which is not exactly more restrictive but does require more weighing and measuring and a different, more time consuming meal planning approach. I still don't feel like I'm "on a diet" but I am glad that I joined in January 2021 when things were a little freer.
In case you are wondering, I'm down over 40 pounds and currently less than 10 pounds away from the goal I reached when I was 29 years old. And in case you're wondering about that, that was more than a few years ago!
Off to enjoy my pizza...
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