Chapter 16: Weight-Proof Your Life
On my diet I feel deprived, I run to the kitchen, I eat. For a while
I am strong, I have the power, then I lose it and I gain 10 pounds
again! I do this over and over. I feel so stupid! Now I have the
power again… —Anonymous Most of us understand exactly where Anonymous is coming from
in this quote. For me staying on a diet used to feel like being a car
with a very small gas tank. I would fill the tank up with willpower
and my diet would run fine for a while. Then the tank would empty and I’d be
off my diet. With such a small tank I couldn’t go for long. I think that is what
Anonymous is saying with “Now I have the power again.”
But the power doesn’t last. You won’t stay motivated to eat less and exercise
more. You can’t rely on your environment anymore to help you maintain
a healthy weight. This is why you are among the first generation of people
completely responsible for their own weight loss.
Your willpower tank empties one slip-up at a time. A slip-up is when the
threats cause you to eat more or exercise less than you intend. All it takes is
one slip-up a week for you to gain weight. What can you do if you can’t rely
on willpower or your environment?
You create your own environment to minimize your chances of slipping
up. These environments are called Safe Zones. A Safe Zone is a protected
area you createusing strategiesin which you naturally achieve your goals
without relying on willpower every minute of every day. There are Safe Zones for many important parts of your life: Personal,
Home and Family, Activity, Portion Control, Car, Shopping, Work, School,
and Community. Each of these life areas can be changed to make it less likely
you’ll slip-up. And the less you slip-up the more control you have over your
weight. We’ll talk about how to create each type of Safe Zone in later chapters.
You are by no means limited to these Safe Zones. Create Safe Zones wherever
they make sense in your life.
The process of creating Safe Zones is called Weight-Proofing. Weight-
Proofing protects you from diet slip-ups by turning diet danger zones into
Safe Zones. Using Weight-Proofing strategies, you systematically remove diet
slip-ups from your life by creating ever widening circles of Safe Zones around
you and your loved ones.
Safe Zones are created by continually thinking of strategies that put you
in the best position to succeed at four goals:
❖ Eating to your diet
❖ Burning more calories
❖ Finding more joy
❖ Avoiding slip-ups
The Designer Way and Weight-Proofing are perfect partners. Safe Zones
are created by making little changes over a long period and that’s exactly how
the Designer Way works. Over time this creates an environment in which you
don’t have to rely on motivation to control your weight.
❚ Weight-Proofing is Like Baby-Proofing your Home
A good way of thinking about Weight-Proofing is that it’s like baby proofing
a home. The goal of baby-proofing is to remove any threat that could hurt
a baby. The goal of Weight-Proofing is to remove any threat that could cause
you to fall off your diet.
When baby proofing a home, you try to think like a baby and remove
every possible way a baby might hurt itself. When Weight-Proofing your life,
you try to think like the threats and remove every possible way they might
cause you to slip-up and fall off your diet.
Think about how you go about baby proofing. You don’t put up post-it
notes asking your baby to please not touch the power outlets. You don’t have
a heart-to-heart talk to tell your baby not to go near the stairs. Why? Because
babies don’t understand. In the same way your body doesn’t understand that
it is no longer 25,000 years ago and not every food commercial means it’s time
to eat and you aren’t going to starve if you don’t eat for a few hours. Weight-Proofing in real life looks a lot like the same process. When baby
proofing a home you walk through the entire house looking for any possible
threat to the baby and then implementing a strategy to counter the threat.
You know what is dangerous because you have a good idea what might harm
a baby. Let’s say you walk into a kitchen and you notice a door leading down
a flight of stairs. Stairs are definitely dangerous for babies so you buy a gate
for the door. You look around the kitchen some more and you notice the cupboard
drawers are easy to open, so you buy child proof locks. You repeat this
process until all the threats to the baby have been neutralized.
When Weight-Proofing a home, you walk into the kitchen too. Only, this
time you open the refrigerator because you know possible threats to your
diet lurk there. Tucked in a side pocket are a few of your favorite candy bars.
Half the candy bars are gone and you bought them two days ago. You know
one of the threats says the easy availability of food leads to overeating. You
also know you need to be extreme with candy bars because you find yourself
automatically eating them during the day. There’s a strategy we’ll talk about
later of removing all tempting foods from your house. So, you toss the candy
bars and as a result you are much safer from the threat of temptation. Repeat
this process anywhere and everywhere that could pose a threat to your diet.
I call this process of finding all potential threats in a Safe Zone “making a
slip-up survey.” Weight-Proofing is: paying attention to your life, knowing what might be
dangerous to you, and then removing the danger. Perform a slip-up survey in
every Safe Zone we talk about in the following chapters. Look for any forces
that might cause you to slip-up and do the best job you can at neutralizing
them with counter strategies.
You can’t change your genes or the world in which you live, but you can
use the same incredible human qualities that made the modern world—your
ability to think, learn, grow, and adapt—to create Safe Zones in which you
have no choice but to succeed.
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