You’ve been here before, we all have. One more New Year and another resolution to eat healthy, exercise more, and regain your energy and drive! Take heart, healthy senior eating is possible but it often involves practice and perseverance.
This year, I’m joining all of you in adhering to a healthy eating plan to lose some weight. More importantly, I want to improve some of my biomarkers for metabolic health. New Year’s Resolutions are never perfect, but the winners are always those who show up, participate, and start over when they encounter a slip. If healthy eating is your goal, including weight loss, make this New Year your year to start even with the probability that you’ll slip, reset, start again and never give up.
It can be done, I am living proof, along with my husband Rob and many senior friends. No, there’s no perfect path and we’re no strangers to slipping and sliding. Each New Year starts out strong, and then things happen. The difference between those who succeed and those who just shrug and accept failure is one of persevering—of getting back up on the horse. It’s not “Just Do It!” It really is “Just do it, then do it again, then, keep on doing it.”
My Tips to Reboot Your Healthy Senior Eating
Yes, get out your pen and make some lists. This is your list about you and your eating habits, the good, bad and ugly. You know a lot about yourself and your eating habits, where you go wrong, and what helps you. Making a list will clarify what needs to be different this time.
Make one list, a list of three items, or all of them, whatever will help you.
- What happens when you don’t eat healthy?
- What happens that triggers unhealthy eating?
- What works for you to stop the slippery slide of gaining weight?
- What will you do differently this year?
- What is the most important element in your weight loss program?
- Where do you need the most help?
- What is the first step you will take to get back on track?
- The 2nd step?
- When will you start?
Bright Line Eating and a 14-Day Challenge to Lose Weight
This is an interesting program for healthy eating, and it comes with a good track record of helping people lose weight and keep it off. I suggest you check out their site, and view the videos from Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. She’s an expert on the psychology of eating. I first learned about her program from reading her book, Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free.
There are a lot of weight loss programs out there, but very few have a success rate for clients who are able to sustain weight loss long term. “Bright Lines” refers to non-negotiable eating rules, such as eating three meals a day, not eating any sugar or flour, and attention to quantities.
Breaking Free from Unhealthy Eating
Losing weight involves more than common sense. The reason logic and common sense doesn’t work is because many of us have altered our brains in response to unhealthy foods. Many of us have become addicted to sugar and flour (refined carbohydrates). Like an addict, we rebel at the thought of being deprived. Worse, it takes more and more of our drug of choice (sugar and flour) to get a dopamine reward or fix.
Using neuroscience and 12-step recovery tools, Dr. Peirce Thompson has compiled a comprehensive program to break free of food addictions by sticking to three basic rules or “Bright Lines:”
- Don’t eat sugar or flour
- Only eat at meal times, three meals a day, with 4-6 hours between eating.
- Eat measured quantities of real food, avoiding unhealthy oils and processed food.
Healthy Eating for Seniors
It does me no good to follow a “diet,” I’m too good at excuses and cheating. I do better when I address the psychology of what drives my behaviors. Also, when I consider the neuroscience and how some foods trigger overeating, I know I have much to learn to avoid the allure of sugar and flour.
The Knowing-Doing Gap
Whatever has led you to weigh more than is healthy, as a senior, you probably already know what to do. Knowing isn’t the issue. It’s doing. Your brain directs more of your eating behaviors than you can imagine. But now days, scientists are discovering work-arounds for overcoming overeating and successfully losing weight.
Granted, it will be a long time before we stop the obesity epidemic that is destroying people’s health and lives, including our children. There are too many invested corporations with money to lose if everyone started eating healthy food.
But it’s no longer impossible for each one of us, as free thinking individuals, to become educated in eating behaviors and apply them to healthier living. For seniors, this is an imperative for living healthy, happy, and free.
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