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Tipping the Scales
Weight loss alternatives help Toledoens shed pounds.
published January 21st 2009
There’s no joy in forcing oneself to eat nothing but brown rice for six days. Just ask Genoa resident Rebecca Booth, who has suffered through this and countless other fad diets in her decades-long attempt to lose weight.
“It was disgusting,” she said. “I’ve done Weight Watchers and the cabbage diet. I tried Atkins and ate all that meat, even when there was that little voice inside my head saying, ‘Really, how much bacon can you eat and have that be healthy for you?’ But the brown rice diet was the worst. Just the thought of it makes me queasy right now.”
Booth is not alone. BusinessWeek Magazine recently reported that Americans shell out $40 billion a year on weight loss programs and products, and it’s at this time of year when the industry booms. After three months of indulgence, hopscotching from Halloween candy to Thanksgiving turkeys to Christmas hams, each January many Americans take a look in the mirror and are unhappy with what they see.
Many of us view the new year as a chance to begin again, to make a fresh start. We resolve to get our lives on track and finally shed a few pounds. And this, we tell ourselves, is the year we’re really going to do it. Nothing’s going to stand in our way. This year, we’re going to try Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, or that new diet we saw on Oprah or read about in US Weekly — that one where we consume nothing but water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup for two weeks — and we’re finally going to drop this weight. No messing around this time. A new year, a new us. Right?
Unfortunately for most of us, after the first few weeks, when everything has gone according to plan and we’ve lost seven pounds, all of our determination and good intentions are not enough to carry us through. Then, come the end of January, we find ourselves slumped onto the sofa with a plate of chicken wings while we watch the Super Bowl. We resolve to start over on Monday or the following week. March at the latest. Definitely. That’s when we’ll do it. For sure. Or maybe April, when the weather’s nice.
Rebecca Booth knows the story. Her struggle to manage her weight started at an early age, and since then she’s been locked in the loop of yo-yo dieting. It’s not just her physical health that has concerned her. The shame and disappointment she’s suffered over the years have also taken a toll on her self-esteem.
“I was twelve or thirteen when my mom and dad put me on my first diet,” she said. “It devastated me. It was like, ‘Oh, they don’t love me unless I’m thin.’ That’s when the emotional eating started. I’ve been a chronic dieter ever since.”
But things have changed. Booth turned fifty a few years ago, and for the first time in her life, she says she feels truly in control of her eating. And brown rice has nothing to do with it.
Like many people who are fed up with celebrity diets and wacky colon cleanses, Booth has found that diets simply don’t work. If a person wants to lose weight and get healthy, latching onto a strict and forbidding scheme of deprivation designed to melt away the pounds in no time is like trying to cross the Atlantic in a leaky rowboat. You might make it over the first few waves, but ultimately it’s not a matter of if you’ll go under, but how soon and how deep you’ll sink.
“People have been saying it for years, but the only way you can really get healthy is to change your lifestyle,” Booth said. “It’s not just about what you eat, but how you live. If you want to lose weight, you’ve got be mindful of how you eat and what you do. But, really, you’ve got to change your life.”
Diets don't work
Booth’s new attitude and her subsequent success, she says, came shortly after she was introduce to Pat Altvater, creator of “Journey to WOW — Choose Health Now,” an alternative weight loss program that uses the Law of Attraction — an esoteric world view that Altvater explained as a “universal law that says when a person puts her focus and attention on something, she attracts that into her life”— to help clients “initiate and allow change, especially in regards to their body.”
Altvater, who worked with women for eight years as the owner of several women-only franchised fitness locations, says that her new program is directed at women who are addicted to yo-yo dieting.
“Yo-yo dieters are always looking for the quick fix and constantly going back to dieting,” Altvater said. “I hate that word ‘diet.’ It sounds like we’re going to ‘die at it.’ And the reason diets don’t work is that dieters have all sorts of other interests in their lives, but all they think about is food. ‘When do I get to eat? How much do I get to eat? Why can’t I have that?’ And this creates so much negative emotion around deprivation, by the third day they’re cheating, and when they cheat they feel guilty. That creates more negative emotions and, according to the Law of Attraction and the way I believe, that just generates more negativity.”
Altvater’s program begins with what she calls the five-step Conscious Transformation Process in which the client first Asks for specifically what she wants. She then Aligns herself with “ways to keep herself positive about” her goal, then Acts in a way that will move her toward that goal, and Accounts for what she’s doing to achieve it. The final element of the process is to Allow.
“Allowance,” Altvater explained, “is a Law of Attraction term meaning ‘let it come in now.’ Allow is mental work, believing that you can do it and detaching from the outcome. Some dieters get on the scale four times a day to see if they’re making progress, and when they’re not it de-motivates them. Detaching from the outcome means knowing that if you’re taking these steps you’re going to get to where you want to be. It doesn’t matter if it happens tomorrow or seven months from now. You’ll get there.”
The steps Altvater speaks of come from a list she’s compiled of twenty-six behaviors of health-conscious people. “These are body, mind, and spirit behaviors,” Altvater said, “like portion control, releasing negative judgments, nurturing your spirit, making healthy food choices, exercising, drinking water, managing stress, and conquering emotional eating.”
After providing clients with this information, the Journey to WOW program offers a support system that involves daily inspirational emails from Altvater as well as circles of three to six other clients who are all working towards a similar goal to provide encouragement and accountability.
Ultimately, Altvater’s program is designed to focus clients on the positive choices they can make to reach their goals rather than on what they can’t eat.
“Positivity,” she said, “is what helps them to attract what they want.”
It’s difficult to work our minds out of the murkiness of
negative, self-defeating thinking, and many find that no amount of conscious effort can achieve this. For some, the solution is to bypass the stubborn conscious mind altogether and retrain the subconscious.
A Stronger Subconscious
Carolyn Ruby is a certified hypnotherapist and Reiki Master at Lite the Way, a store in Lambertville specializing in providing “metaphysical” services and products. She and her daughter, Kimberly Zapf, co-own the store and use hypnosis as a way to help clients realign their subconscious to aid them in their quests to get healthy.
“We do hypnosis for a lot of things,” Ruby said. “To help people recover from a break up or stop smoking. But much of the time it’s to help someone lose weight.”
After a brief interview with the client, Ruby asks them to lie down and, with soothing music playing in the background, she guides them through a session of hypnosis. She suggests ways in which clients might change their behaviors. The individualized session is recorded, and a copy of the recording is sent home with the client and they listen to it for twenty-one days.
“It takes twenty-one days to retrain the subconscious,” Ruby said. “Hypnosis places a reminder in the subconscious always telling you that you need to drink water, or that this or that food isn’t good for you to eat. It’s like a little trigger. Sometimes I’ll give people suggestions like if they eat more than one piece of candy or cake, it’ll make them feel sickly, or I’ll suggest that fatty foods will taste unpleasant and oily in their mouth, so after they eat a couple French fries they start to get that yucky feeling in their mouth. And that’s all there in the subconscious.”
Ruby is quick to point out, though, that this hypnosis isn’t a quick fix that’s going to blast away the inches.
“It’s something you have to want to do,” she said. “You have to come to a realization that you’re going to do it. Hypnosis isn’t going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. It reminds you about what’s healthy and what isn’t.”
Acupuncture's Right Touch
Diane McCormick MD, a Toledo physician who practices acupuncture, another aid people use in their struggles to manage their weight, echoes Ruby’s sentiments that, just like mainstream methods, alternative weight loss methods aren’t going to do the work for you.
“Acupuncture can help increase energy, so you feel like working out,” Dr. McCormick said. “It can decrease pain — joint pain, back pain, neck pain, whatever kind of pain keeps you from exercising. But it does not really increase your metabolic rate. It definitely can assist someone in their weight loss program, but you can’t do it by itself and expect to lose weight magically.”
Barbara Phibbs, a board certified Oriental medical practitioner and oncology nurse who uses hypnotherapy, acupuncture, meditation, and “food therapy” to help clients who are struggling with weight, says that, while these alternatives to mainstream diets won’t erase fat, one of their primary functions is to dissolve stress. And stress, she says, is often at the center of a person’s unhealthy lifestyle.
“Whether it’s someone with pain, someone who wants to quit smoking, or someone who wants to lose weight, I find that stress is the biggest factor. In our society everything is so stressful. The whole focus of Oriental medicine is to get people on a healthy journey, to use healthy eating and exercise not just as a way to lose weight, but as an integrated part of life. Stress is a big obstacle to that. When I use acupuncture and hypnosis, it’s to free a person so they feel like they can use their body and avoid unhealthy foods. If you don’t have the stress, you won’t do the stress eating.”
One of the methods Phibbs uses to help manage stress is auricular therapy, which focuses on stimulating acupuncture points in the ear to trigger the release of serotonin and endorphins that relieve stress and curb cravings.
Phibbs understands that some people who are uneducated about Oriental medicine are skeptical, but her clients keep coming back.
“I think people just need to do what works for them to get healthy,” she said. “Oriental medicine is a bona fide medicine. We’re under the legislature; we have our own boards across the country. So it’s not a bogus type of medicine, and it’s well accepted across the world.”
It's all about Energy
Whichever method we use to slim down, whether it’s harnessing the power of the cosmos or tinkering with the psyche, ultimately, there’s no escaping the physiological facts.
“The odds are really stacked against you,” says Dr. Debra Boardley, an expert on public health and nutrition and professor in the Department of Public Health & Homeland Security at the University of Toledo. “It’s just very difficult to lose weight, and there’s no magic bullet.”
Dr. Boardley is not critical of these kinds of alternative approaches, but she makes it very clear that the bottom line of weight loss is about burning more calories than you consume.
“It’s always interesting to me,” she said, “that when I say the word ‘calories’ people react as if I’ve said something bad. But calories are just a unit of measure that measures energy. Without energy our bodies don’t work. Most of the time that people have been on the planet, the issue has been having not enough energy. People really had to physically work to get food. But now, with calorie dense processed foods available to us without our having to expend any more energy than it takes to dial the phone, it’s not hard to see what the outcome of that would be.”
According to the Center for Disease Control, that outcome is that in 2007, over 25% of Ohioans were not just overweight, but clinically obese. Overweight and obese individuals are at an increased risk for a number of diseases and health conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and gallbladder disease. Americans spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on medical expenses to treat conditions attributed to obesity. And this is on top of the billions spent each year on diet products.
The discrepancy between what we want and what we accept for ourselves is alarming. But people like Rebecca Booth are learning that our eating habits shed light on more than just how a cheeseburger will affect our waistlines.
Our world moves at a pretty fast pace, but it’s a current we can always choose to row against. In the struggle to lose weight, it might always feel like we’re paddling across the sea in a tiny boat, but alternatives to dieting like hypnosis and acupuncture remind us that we don’t have to paddle without any oars.
Booth, who has lost fifteen pounds with “Journey to WOW,” says she feels better than she ever has.
“We have a million choices,” she said. “That’s the critical issue. You can make getting healthy joyful or you can think of it as a drag. And if you approach things joyfully, then it feels like the whole world’s opening up in front of you.”
