© 2011 Nancy Appleton PhD & G.N. Jacobs
Resolutions, we’ve all made them. Usually, they last two weeks. So how do we give ourselves the best chance of meeting the next batch due in just a few weeks?
Perhaps the problem is that we attach too much to New Years as a time of new beginnings. We get too worked up over the change in calendar, which could put so much pressure on “I resolve to eat better and exercise” or “I resolve to read more books.” The pressure can cause us to freeze up and fail the resolution.
One possible way to give yourself a chance is to shift the New Years metaphor to some other date. Start the regimen in March quietly and without fanfare and maybe you’ll last long enough to change a few bad habits. My son, a writer, for the past two Novembers has tried to write a 50 thousand word novel in thirty days. He got close both times glad to take a half-loaf victory until he came across a suggestion to shift adherence to the challenge to August from another writer. Apparently, this writer admitted he enjoyed the fall TV schedule too much.
But, deferring the promise to yourself until an easier time with less pressure may not be enough to make things work. Some of us still need to figure out a way to eat less sugar and exercise more, right now. In almost no cases do I recommend anything like going cold turkey when it comes to such difficult things as cutting down on sugar, losing weight or becoming healthier. Few people can just quit sugar or any of the other harmful addictive foods in their diet. This is how New Years resolutions crash and burn.
My favorite trick is the half as much as yesterday approach, which I first discussed in my first book Lick the Sugar Habit. Take stock of your sugar intake today and then eat half as much tomorrow. Repeat the process the day after that. In a purely, mathematical sense using half as much sugar means you’d never completely cut out sugar. But, in the real world there is a fuzziness in measurement that means eventually within a week or so you’ll be eating so little sugar that making the last jump to eating no sugar becomes easier.
I used a similar technique when I first got my kids off sugar. Many years ago we were traveling in England and I told them they could have one sugar filled item per day. Of course, I’d already dumped the cakes and colas that were waiting for us at home. My children went with the new regime without complaint and three weeks later we came home to house where the only sugar my kids ate came from outside the house.
Lastly, it is real important to seek help from other people trying to deal with your resolutions. When all else fails talking to other people with the same concerns can help when making major life changes. This is how Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups work. People contemplating that piece of cheesecake can sometimes only be talked down by a friend. In my area of expertise, nutrition, I’ve dealt with many support groups that can help people from eating too much. My favorite is Food Addicts in Recovery because they seem to specialize in sugar addiction, but I’ve seen equally good results from Overeaters Anonymous and Food Addicts Anonymous. I don’t have as much experience with the for profit weight loss programs like Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, but I support anything that comes with a support system.
A person with the right plan and support can do anything, so whether waiting for an off month to start, using some variation of the half as much plan or reaching out for the right help any reasonable resolution is achievable. Do your best.
Dear Dr. Appleton,
Thank you for your information, especially the idea of enlisting support to get off the sugar. I never thought of that before. When people know you need them to help you, they change their attitude. They suddenly quit encouraging you to eat things that are bad. That is a big plus, even though they want you to try their new dessert. This is a big problem because some people’s identity and worth seem to be due to their cooking and baking with sugar, then sharing the products with others to get their approval. I am in a club like that. It is a county extension club. I love the ladies but not the food, since I am trying to stay away from sugar, too. I believe I will ask them to help me stay away from the sugar. Maybe they will change their cooking methods. Actually some of them already have. In one-on-one conversations most of them admit that sugar causes indigestion more as they get older, and they actually need inspiration to stay away from it too. At our last Christmas brunch I noticed an absence of the numerous sugar and flour dishes. There were also a lot of complaints because the food was not like it was before. I like to think I had something to do with it (also because of all of your books I own and have read). You gave me courage to speak out. When people have argued with me about sugar I told them, “You might want to read one or several of Dr. Nancy Appleton’s books about the deadly aspects of sugar.” Then I recite several of your titles. I appreciate you more than you will ever know.
Jo Kendall
I respect your mission regarding sugar awareness but was appalled when I read your comment about doing a dance when the Czar of New York banned cola’s over 16 oz’s…..as if that is the answer. My question is what kind of dance will you do when these same Tyrants come after your book profits, medical license, home, bank account, or any other damn thing they want from you? When government revenue goes down because of all the bans on everything from water and soda to cigarettes and electricity your taxes will increase and our freedoms will slowly whither away.Bullying by government is not the answer to bring about a healthy society! Government is Brutte Force nothing less. So, lets figure out a way to help each other without involving our pathetic polititians! I’m enjoying your book btw!
The doctor believes what she believes. Yes, government does overreach.
But, so do the corporations who sell sugar and then A) try to tell us that sugar is just another carbohydrate that we need to use responsibly (this is their industry line in the past 18 months, previously it was “brush your teeth more vigorously but sugar is absolutely fine”). B) They infamously deny the statistics created by what independent research exists to show what the dangers are and C) fund their own competing research by several magnitudes more hoping that three Pro or Not So Bad outcomes arrived at by thumbing the scales will drown out the one Con research paper.
D) They lobby legislators at all levels of government at levels previously seen only by Big Tobacco in order to fight regulations like no sugary drinks in vending machines at schools despite nearly 20 years or more of verified correlation between less sugar and higher grades. E) Try to co-opt the movement against them by trying to get certain carcinogenic products like Diet Coke out from under by funding an anti-cancer campaign with Subway.
Look, speaking personally and not as the doctor’s front man, I’m as appalled about Government intervention as the next man. But, in the face of the well-financed opposition determined to maintain their business at our expense, the only force that can restore any kind of balance is that government. I really hate living in a world where moderates like me who believe that you pull gently on all levers available (e.g. Modest tax increases and a real effort to cut the worst aspects of government spending, at the same time) are lumped in with liberals because we have allowed certain parties to run amok using their superior financial position to chisel more concessions from government through lobbying and the legalized campaign bribery of the Citizen’s United decision. I feel Government Intervention becomes inevitable in these circumstances because no one else has the muscle to counteract a corporation that forgets why our capitalist society created the concept of the corporation: to make the government’s work easier by providing the goods, services and investment opportunities to citizens in the usually most efficient way possible.
Please consider that the people who want Mayor Bloomberg to back off the 16-ounce soda also want the US without a post office despite stated assumptions that at least 20-percent of addresses in the country would be without any package or letter service because population density is too low for profitability. So far FedEx and UPS haven’t answered how they would address this issue when their cronies in Congress stage manage their purchase of various Post Office obligations and resources.
You may pick an industry that has such tiny by comparison government involvement and ask if that involvement makes things better. Does a society that carefully nurtures Sesame Street over forty-five years suddenly become less or more of a society by ending that crucial third of the funding split between government, corporations and subscription viewers? Do we lose the ability to fully educate a citizenry that will grow up to be the consumers, employees, managers and owners of the corporations that drive our economy? Is it really a good thing if for lack of funding we pare back our society to only those things that make money in the marketplace? At dinner parties (the primary method of perpetuating the species because social animals have to TALK to the lady across the table before gettin’ busy), we would only be able to talk football, NASCAR, Justin Bieber and this past’s week episode of CSI. But, to bring the questions back around to the soda ban does the government also support society by doing things to support and promote the health of its citizens when no one else cares because they’re making too much money? I say yes, even though the ban has a huge hole in it (the bottomless fountain cup at fast food joints). At least, the consumer has to burn a single digit number of calories getting up to refill their Coke. The ban will have more effect on to go orders where people tend to buy one drink per meal.
So, while I appreciate your comments enough not to delete them out of hand, we live in an unbalanced world where as an acquaintance once said “neither corporations nor government should be allowed unchallenged superiority over the other. Corporations taking over government is Fascism, Government taking over business is Communism. Neither is acceptable.” Obviously, the doctor and I stand by everything we say.
You are totally missing my point about government intervention!! Big business, regardless of what you think of them, do not have the power to force you or me to do anything. Government on the other hand can, will, and does take away our rights everyday…..and they won’t stop unless and until folks like you start to value our freedoms. If you are on a mission to help educate about the bad effects of diet etc fine but when you demand results, ie force others to live like you want them to, then you are overstepping your bounds. Teach, set an example, and then leave the rest to the individual…..as its none of your business from there on out. Isn’t that how nancy turned her life around ???when she reached a dead end with her health. You can,t force health upon anyone!!!!!!! People should be free to choose. It amazes me how the same people who want to micro manage everyone’s life are the same people who fight for women’s right to choose to abort. Quit asking the government to fight your battles unless of course you want to live in socialist tyranny. Business will get the message when you educate enough people about the dangers of sugar. Thanks for your time!
I should’ve thanked you for your readership for which I’m sorry. But, I did not miss your point, we (the doctor and I) simply see a different world based on allegedly the same facts. We see a world where the distinction between government and business is frightfully blurry because business plays on popular apathy and gets away with quite a lot because they fund government’s ability to sustain itself with campaign contributions, political junkets and other forms of completely legal bribery. This means they don’t have to be more overtly coercive because they pay the government to do it for them. You see government taking away rights and I might agree with you once everybody popped the hood and actually looked at the engine. But, the question isn’t – are there ever cases where in the normal push-pull of partisan and interest-based politics where certain rights we used to have get trampled? The question is for whom the trampled rights were enacted.
Consider the last nine years of activist conservative courts, it is now legal for eminent domain to be used to take property from smaller landowners to benefit larger (usually corporate) landowners who can play Monopoly with the land by improving it with a hotel, office complex, or strip mall and thus increase property tax revenues while simultaneously reducing the ill-defined concept of urban blight. And I’ve already brought up Citizens United. In that same time, there have been failed attempts with SOPA and other similar bills to redefine intellectual property law completely in the favor of the copyright holder at the expense of the consumer of IP AND THE EQUALLY LARGE BUSINESSES WITH THE PRIMARY BUSINESS OF DELIVERING CONTENT! The bills failed not nearly as much because the online community participated in protests (including all of my sites, so yes, I do my best to set an example), but because Google saw their business hurt by Warner Brothers and had to back the protest as a way of forcing the content providers back to the table to redraft the bills as a Meet in the Middle Nobody is Really Completely Happy Compromise that I was taught in my eighth grade civics class is how society is supposed to work.
In most of the above examples, I and people like me aren’t actually advocating anything like socialism, but rather a government that acts as mediator between the various flavors of responsible capitalism. Who gets in the room with Google and Hollywood and cuts the baby so that criminals who steal movies get driven out of business while protecting the rights of consumers to create new content based on the previously existing content that requires a certain amount of Fair Use? Who hears the small landowner on a case by case basis about to lose that asset through government action to benefit a larger landowner that perhaps that piece of Florida or Montana doesn’t need another hotel? Who hears smaller blocs of voters completely frustrated by this interesting bit of logic underpinning Citizens United that “Money Equals Speech?”
Yes, you’re right that Nancy Appleton Books has a primary responsibility to teach, write articles and books and to set the best example we humanly can. Yes, you’re right that that things are better in the last 18 months because between us and a lot of bigger people who read us, replicated the research we cite and then wrote their own books, we are finally making headway. This remains our primary raison d’être and the sine qua non of what we do and our recent results are gratifying. But, for the doctor it has been thirty five or more years of outright ridicule, hostility and derision funded by the very wealthy forces I have mentioned in these responses to your opinions. In fact, I will relate to you what she said to me in 2006 when I bought the right to front for her in the business realm for a completely awesome insider price. She said “Coco Chanel (one of her personal heroines) ran her company well into her eighties while I am barely seventy and I’m tired as hell and want out. Why is that?” My answer was this “Coco Chanel was never in a business with nearly the same official resistance as being the nutritionist to tell the truth about sugar. All she did was do up several seasons worth of nice dresses and make women smell good with the ubiquitous Chanel Number Five.” It really sucks to be the first one with a new and controversial idea, especially when it means powerful have to change their business methodology.
So thank you for your opinions and your readership and we will just have to agree to disagree.
G.N. Jacobs for Nancy Appleton