How to Stay Healthy in a World Designed to Make Us Fat and Lazy

Trying to stay in shape and eat a healthy diet in today's stressed-out, super-sized, sedentary environment can sometimes feel like a daunting task. As many as two-thirds of us have given up the ghost and decided to just make friends with our spare tires and jiggly butts. We convince ourselves that the culprit is getting old, our slowing metabolism, or hormones run-amok. The truth is, we sit too much and eat way too much food. This book will give you the skills you need to be a lifestyle rebel and stay healthy in our Humpty Dumpty culture. Let me disabuse you of the notion that you don't have the willpower to change your habits. Exercising extraordinary self-control is not the key to maintaining your girlish figure. Think about it. Prior generations weren't more disciplined than we, they just lived in a time when people cooked, ate reasonable amounts of food, and walked a lot. Instead, the solution is to change your immediate surroundings to minimize the constant temptation to overeat and to move your body often enough that the motion detector doesn't give you up for dead. The concept is simple. Create a personal micro-environment-your own version of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon-that will make it easy to become the healthy, lean, fit fighting machine you've always wanted to be. Here are some proven strategies and simple techniques to get you started. Don't Look: If you don't go down the chip aisle at Ralphs or drool over the mouthwatering handmade sweets at Whole Foods, these highly caloric, nutritionally bankrupt snacks will not jump into your shopping cart. Brain Tricks: Visuals are important too. An easy trick like drinking wine from a fluted glass rather than a large goblet will mislead your brain into perceiving that there is more booze in the tall glass. Why not try using a salad plate instead of a large dinner plate so that you can fill it to the brim and not stuff yourself? Repurposed Taste Buds: Addicted to fast food? There's hope for you! Start substituting real food and your taste buds will adapt to and prefer the healthier food within three months. Chew Away. Stop drinking your meals. If you think you're too busy to eat, you might want to examine your lifestyle. We tend not to count liquid calories. Let the trendy Nutribullet gather dust. Food as Fuel: Another reason many of us go the plus-sized route is that we sabotage ourselves by using food to satisfy other needs. In primitive times, humans ate when they were hungry and needed fuel to gather food and hunt prey. Although our biology hasn't changed, now we often eat for reasons having nothing to do with hunger. Our rotund bodies tell the tale when we hijack food to satisfy a smorgasbord of needs unrelated to its intended purpose. Have you ever devoured a quart of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey after a stressful day at work? Worked your way through a bag of Lay's Cheddar & Sour Cream Chips because you were bored? Are you a foodie who uses eating out at the trendiest restaurants as entertainment and bragging rights? If any of these scenarios describes you, then it's worth taking a deeper dive into your psyche. Exer-Snacks: Our bodies are designed to move. What a shame that we've set our world up so that sitting for hours at a time is our go-to position. When we do think about exercising, we typically think in terms of a strenuous gym workout. Broaden your horizons and find any excuse you can to get moving. Take exer-snacks-10 or 15 minute walks throughout the day. Research shows the snacks to be more effective than a single longer bout of exercise.