Kenny Frazee is an eternal optimist.
Frazee, who is 55 and works as an insurance fraud investigator in New Jersey, says he’s done the dieting thing so long, he was one of the first people to go on the Richard Simmons “Cruise to Lose” in the 1990s.
“I did Weight Watchers on and off several times, I did something years ago called the Cambridge Diet. I did Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig,” he explains.
But he always gained it back.
“With all those food programs, especially Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem, none of that is real food. It was all freeze-dried, almost like cat food out of the can,” he says.
As enjoyable as it is to daydream about the 2.0 version of yourself, researchers have found we are more likely to stay motivated if we set small daily goals and make those goals as convenient as possible rather than setting an impossible standard that will take years to achieve, if it can be done at all.
He still has photos of himself from the cruise: one where he’s sporting a loose white polka-dot T-shirt, sweating and snapping his fingers to the oldies in front of a crowd that includes a woman in hot pink tank top and parachute pants. Another shows him standing next to a frizzy-haired Simmons in front of a decorative life preserver with the word “Norway” inscribed on it.
Frazee, who talks a mile a minute about experiments in fitness where he’s seemingly tried everything except the operating table, says he can’t remember a time when he hasn’t struggled with weight.
Food for him is an emotional crutch. He eats because he’s stressed or at night because he has trouble sleeping.
“I don’t have a photo of when I was thin. I was never the thin kid, there was never a time it was under control,” he says.
He remembers during his college years in Nashville that he cooked only two dinners at his apartment the entire time.
“The rest of the time my college friends and I ate pizza buffets, sometimes twice a day,” he says. Those habits haunted him far beyond college where he turned to dieting as a way to cope with overeating.
Even the idea of being on a diet now seems to leave a bad taste in his mouth. He recalls his doctor trying to put him on one that felt like he was eating “bad potato chips” for every meal.
He’s been a fan of ABC’s “Extreme Weight Loss” from the first day it aired because the show gave him hope that no matter how many times he had failed in the past, he could change.
He started taping the show so he could catch the name of the place where its fourth season was filmed, which was the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center in Aurora.
“I freeze-framed the picture,” he remembers. “I called the center, I wanted the book … the boot camp thing came along, and I thought I’m just going to go for it.”
Last October, Frazee was one of 130 participants to take part in the center’s first Destination Boot Camp, a week-long weight-loss vacation designed around the center’s participation in ABC’s “Extreme Weight Loss” program. The program is geared to help participants lose weight like they see on the show.
“It was like a Disney World,” he remembers of the first day he set foot inside the 95,000-square-foot facility on East Montview Boulevard.
The wellness center is full of eye candy — from the $32,000 egg-shaped Bod Pod you climb into that measures fat throughout your entire body, including organs, to the elevated running track with its sweeping, chameleon-glass partition. It’s also home to futuristic-looking human performance and research laboratories, a metabolic kitchen and a grocery lab sponsored by King Soopers.
For a week, he woke up at 4 a.m. in a nearby hotel room, jumped on a shuttle and worked out at the center for a minimum of four hours a day. He would also try out new activities everyday that included water aerobics, hiking, spinning, and yoga.
But the rest of the time he would take part in what the center calls “mindset” training, where he worked individually and in groups with dietitians and exercise psychologists.
The mindset training would sometimes be as simple as talking about what made exercise hard. Everyone had similar responses, he remembers. It’s too hard to plan healthy meals, there’s no time with work, everyone at the gym looks better than me.
Finding the right kind of fuel to fire any goal, dream or hope is the right way to start any routine. We talked to medical experts, weight losers (and gainers), Olympians, climbers and even martial artists to hear how they find inspiration to keep working past this month, next month, next month and the next year.
But for Frazee, this psychological part of program was even more important than the physicality of it.
“Truthfully all the other programs don’t really have mindset built in to them. The others (say) eat less and exercise,” he says.
Frazee says focusing so intensely on how he perceived exercise was what made his experience at Anschutz different from the other programs he had tried.
He gushes in email after email about the mindset idea. In one he explains, “It’s getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. And your comfort zone is all in your mind. Where you learn you can do much more than you think you can.”
One thing he learned he could do through the center was purchase and cook real food rather than relying on premade meals for weight maintenance.
The grocery lab contains a mix of healthy and tempting treats to mimic what you would see if you stepped inside a full-size King Soopers in Colorado, and it’s used as a training ground for people who want to develop healthy eating habits.
It uses a nutritional scoring system that ranks food on a scale of 1-to-100 so you can see firsthand whether you’re making healthy lifestyle choices or cheating with food that only appears to be good for you. Next to an apple, which scores an 86 on the scale, a jar of Mott’s apple sauce for example, tallies a mere 4. That is equivalent on the nutritional scale to eating an Almond Joy candy bar and only two points more than a Snickers or Butterfinger.
Frazee says he enjoyed the boot camp so much he signed up for the second phase, which is a 15-week long program centered around “State of Slim,” a book co-authored by the center’s the medical director, Dr. Holly Wyatt, that includes weekly one-hour online sessions with training staff.
He now attends the sessions via video chat from his home in New Jersey.
He says the sessions remind him of watching “The Brady Bunch,” with all of his classmates taking up little squares on his computer screen. But his classmates keep him accountable as well as thoughtful about his fitness, something he wanted to continue working on even after the boot camp ended.
Every week he completes homework assignments given by trainers in the wellness program, and also has to update the class on his fitness progress.
He recalls that for a recent assignment he had to purchase and cook a rutabaga. He says he didn’t really know beforehand what a rutabaga looked like — a member of the cabbage family that is crossed with a Swedish turnip it turns out — let alone that he could just chop it up and eat it raw.
“I sliced it up even though it’s kind of a hard vegetable to cut, I put a little olive oil and a little salt and pepper on it. It reminded me of a healthy potato chip,” he says.
It was a potato chip that tasted much better than anything his doctor recommended.
Since October Frazee, who at the time weighed 256 pounds, has shed 25 of them. And he says this time he’s keeping the weight off.
He may even be able to stop taking medications he’s been on for years for diabetes and high blood pressure by June.
His voice beams with pride as he recalls a recent visit to his endocrinologist.
“He was blown away,” Frazee says of the visit. “They’ve all been after me for decades.”
Motivation and perception
In 2012, Pennsylvania State University researchers examined college students’ intentions to work out as well as their actual activity levels. That study found motivation to exercise fluctuates weekly, and that the fluctuations are directly linked to behavior — those with the strongest intentions to exercise displayed the best chance of actually following through, while those with the greatest variations in motivation had the hardest time sticking with exercise.
Researchers are finding more and more that our physical fitness, or lack thereof, has everything to do with how we perceive exercise.
“It’s not just losing pounds,” says Dr. Holly Wyatt, the medical director of the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center. “If you lose weight and you’re miserable about how you’re living, it’s not going to stick.”
Wyatt, who grew up struggling with her weight, says she spent half of her 21-year career studying the “what” of fitness. She is also an associate professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
She ultimately found it didn’t matter if she followed the exact same diet and workout routine as a healthy person. She didn’t see the same results.
“The ‘what’ alone doesn’t work. You have to have the ‘why’, she says.”
There is of course a physical aspect to the “State of Slim” program, which is about getting a person’s metabolism in the best possible place it can be in — doing that in 16 weeks by increasing physical activity and changing eating habits. The program also encourages participants to exercise six days a week.
But Wyatt says the mental piece of fitness motivation is what gets you beyond just losing weight to actually keeping it off.
She says that “why” lays beyond what’s skin deep.
“You want to be a good mom, but there’s something about your weight that’s holding you back,” she gives as one example.
Last August, researchers in Seattle discovered a specific area of the brain responsible for exercise motivation. But they’re still trying to figure out why, if exercise is so beneficial for us, we’re not all automatically wired to want to do it.
It’s common knowledge that exercise benefits the brain and is a powerful tool for improving overall health. Many studies have even suggested that the parts of the brain which control thinking and memory have greater volume in people who exercise versus those who don’t. Yet we don’t have a firm handle on which types of exercise are most effective, how much is necessary, or even whether exercise works best in conjunction with other therapies.
Wyatt says the mind-body connection is still so mysterious because the topic is difficult to objectively study. She says that’s why researchers have mostly focused on the physical benefits of exercise rather than what motivates someone to get on and stay on a treadmill.
“As a scientist, if I see it, I believe it. Believing you will succeed, and how your frame-of-mind will influence results, it’s hard to measure. And it hasn’t been used in our traditional science classes,” she says.
Scientists for example have found a pretty clear connection between physical activity and alleviating depression. Exercise increases serotonin (the neurotransmitter targeted by antidepressants) or the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (which supports the growth of neurons).
But they’re still working on understanding the mechanisms behind that serotonin boost.
“We know neurotransmitters change, but we don’t completely understand that process. We’re starting to get there, but we’re not there,” Wyatt says.
What exercise-psychologists do know is that people are more likely to stick with a fitness routine when their motivation is intrinsic rather than extrinsic.
Intrinsic motivation comes from jogging simply for the joy of well, jogging. Focusing on how it makes you feel energized in the moment, how it makes you less stressed when you come home to a loved one, how it helps you sleep better. That’s opposed to motivation from external sources such as seeing someone’s CrossFit selfie on Instagram and trying to compete with them, or even exercising because you want to look good for a date or a class reunion.
It was finding an intrinsic motivation that made exercise click for Nashville resident Shelley Freeman, who participated in the week-long Destination Boot Camp in October.
She wakes up to go to the gym most mornings at 4:45 a.m. and runs four times a week, rain or shine, along the greenway near her home in Nashville, but it wasn’t always that way.
Freeman, whose husband is an avid runner, says she saw how he benefited from exercise, but it still didn’t translate for her.
“I’ve had a gym membership 25 years, and my husband goes almost daily, but I never would go with him,” she explains. “There is a perfectionist streak in me that if i can’t do it right, I can’t do it at all.”
Freeman, who is 47 and married with two kids, found during a week of fitness training where she could focus exclusively on herself that she mentally and physically put herself on the bottom of a to-do list that always prioritized her family’s needs.
“I felt I wasn’t worthy enough to be thin and didn’t deserve to exercise or take care of myself,” she says. “That week forced everybody to stop and think about themselves. We all in some way had obviously sacrificed ourself for something else. That week you had no choice but to sit with yourself, to concentrate on yourself.”
Being away and realizing the world wasn’t going to end without her was a revelation to Freeman.
“In the end, I realized my ‘why’ was me,” she says. “I went in thinking it was my kids, my husband, etc, but, really, it’s for me. I felt I was closing in on 50 and was letting life go by because being out of shape was holding me back. There were so many life experiences that I wouldn’t even attempt for fear of either not being physically able to do them or that I would look like a fool because I was overweight. I’m an outgoing, social, adventurous person and my weight was stealing that from me. Not anymore.”
Mind games
Brad Colburn stands in what looks like a corporate conference room, attempting to unravel a large ball of green string. He says it’s for a class activity where everyone will tell an inspirational tale.
He’s leading a “State of Slim” group class that meets every Wednesday at the wellness center.
Colburn is a former alcoholic who says he weighed 288 pounds in college. He says he used to drink because he was insecure and thought he had to be the party guy in every situation to compensate.
It’s hard to imagine that now.
He wears a fitted black T-shirt that shows his toned arms. The fitness coach and endurance athlete’s somber green eyes light up as he talks about a spin class he taught earlier, and how he is going on a strict sugar detox next month to train for a marathon.
A woman in the class asks him what she should serve to a friend who’s in an Alcoholics Anonymous program. “Sometimes I do seltzer water with lime. It reminds me of vodka tonics,” he suggests. It’s Colburn’s willingness to be vulnerable and share his own struggles with body image that makes the class open up in return.
He looks around the room at men and women who range from age 30 to 60.
“Who’s scared?” he asks. “Who’s scared of class ending and going out on their own?”
For the past 15 weeks, the group has met every week to meticulously pick apart what they eat and weigh and follow a rigorous diet as outlined in “State of Slim.”
“I don’t see a reason to change anything,” says Julie Hadel, who is going through the program. “I’m chugging along, and it’s working. I don’t see why I would change anything right now.”
“I’m not telling anyone you have to stop what you’re doing. I’m telling you that you can have a little more freedom of diet,” Colburn replies.
The class says they’re scared that if they give themselves an inch with food, they’ll literally gain all of the weight back.
But Colburn says by doing that, they may find themselves in diet fatigue.
“You need to detach yourself from the program for a while because of that mental muscle,” he says. “That fatigue will start to set in that just wants to live life. To just be able to go out and have a drink, to be able to have happy hour with people from work. You should be able to go and do that, and get back on track. Losing weight is swimming upstream. It’s hard work. Weight maintenance is treading water.”
More than 4 in 5 adults are unsuccessful in making health-related improvements because they say they don’t have the willpower, or the ability to delay short-term gratification in order to meet long-term goals. One reason adopting healthy behaviors may be so difficult is that resisting temptation can take a mental toll. In fact, some experts liken willpower to a muscle that can get fatigued from overuse.
The good news is that, like a muscle, willpower can also be manipulated.
The idea that you will need to trick your brain into sticking with a new habit after the initial enthusiasm wanes has gained significant traction during the last decade of research on motivation.
Resolutions get harder to keep after four to six weeks when the excitement wears off, according to experts. A method that “State of Slim” and other transformational weight loss programs have embraced for how to stay motivated once you’ve reached your fitness goal is to have a backup plan for every time your brain wants to rebel against a new behavior.
It’s a part of the mindset piece that involves accepting the hard truth that you will always be around something that will throw you off track, whether it’s family, co-workers, or most likely, your flawed personality that will do everything it can to thwart your newly-established habits.
During the program, participants are given assignments that are meant to tempt them, like carrying around their favorite Halloween candy with them everywhere they go and not eating it.
Colburn explains the process as learning to have an “auto-pilot” for when those situations arise that trigger wanting to revert back to old habits.
“I get to that point to where I’m tired of cooking the same crap. When you get to that point, you have to have other things that make it easy,” he says.
As enjoyable as it is to daydream about the 2.0 version of yourself, researchers have found we are more likely to stay motivated if we set small daily goals and make those goals as convenient as possible rather than setting an impossible standard that will take years to achieve, if it can be done at all.
For example, if you wake up late and never have time to get your gym stuff together before work, exercise psychologists suggest packing a bag the night before and putting it by your bed.
This is also a concept backed by scientists, who find one’s motivational state rarely matches the task at hand.
NYU psychology professors Gabriele Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer have come up with a self-regulation technique that involves methodically combining positive and negative thoughts about the future as a strategy to replace bad habits with good ones. They call this type of planning “mental contrasting.” It’s the idea that you will have a plan in place if something comes up that distracts you from a goal, something they aptly describe as an if-then plan.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight but you love eating sweets at night, an if-then plan might be: If you crave ice cream at night, then you will have a cup of herbal tea with a spoonful of honey. Or if you’re trying to lose weight by drinking less alcohol and a friend calls to go to happy hour, you’ll ask them instead if they want to go for a walk in the park.
For everybody the plan is different, Colburn explains.
He says there really is no one right answer to what works once you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, once you’ve actually achieved your goal of losing 10 pounds. And you may have to fail more before you find something that works.
“We have people that go through the whole 16 weeks, and they want to stay in the weight loss (part of the program) for another two months. And they lose another 40 pounds. It all depends on your body, your chemistry,” he says.
Experts say that every time you practice a good behavior, you’re building up a network of neurons that make it easier to do the same thing next time.
In the brain, the neurotransmitter dopamine is involved in strengthening the neural pathways that are most frequently taken and most frequently lead to a “reward.” Over time by deliberately following action paths you want to become easier, the brain strengthens those new pathways and indirectly weakens others.
So in the long run, even trial and error may be better than simply doing nothing or doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“What got me here was trying to do something different from Weight Watchers where they do that rah rah cheerleading stuff, put you on a scale, and send you on your way,” says Sam Sherman, who’s happy fitness programs are no longer trying to wrap the experience into one neat package.
The good fight against evil, to get as much good as you can get
Sleeves of Samoas, Thin Mints and those tasty, tasty Tagalongs are just around the corner, and naturally, you’re going to want to toss back a few sugary discs of pleasure. All of that high-fructose corn syrup and overly refined flour is a favorite annual joy ride for the taste buddies. But, yikes, swimsuit season also isn’t that far off, and shedding a few pounds would be appreciated by, well, your whole body. Damn those adorable Girl Scouts of America and their never-ending imposition of cognitive dissonance.
Apologies for the psychy jargon, but that entangled clash between the instant gratification of munching a fistful of toasted coconut with chocolate drizzle and – sorry, ‘nother scientific marble mouth on the way – cortical impulses is a lifelong one, at least on some level for us human beans. And, shocker, it’s the internal war at the crux of starting any diet or exercise routine.
But, what exactly is going on subconsciously inside our melon baskets during those embattled moments of decision-making to make us want to satisfy our sweet teeth? That’s a question many a psychological researcher has spent a lifetime trying to navigate and one with a rap sheet of opinions and answers as dense as it is long. To save your fingers from getting entrenched in what could very well be a never-ending Google search on motivational theory, we spoke with Brian Wolff, a clinical psychologist from Denver, to help shed some light on what the heck is going on in between your ear lobes as you debate the necessity vs. gratification of that high fructose treat.
Why reach for the cookie?
Wolff, who has taught a class on motivation and emotion at the University of Denver for the better part of the last decade, said that on the necessity side of the equation your subcortex (the more animalistic, reflex-oriented part of your brain) tells you to munch away on those buttery delicacies because it’s hard wired into your DNA.
“If we see something that is high calorie, our subcortex impulses see that and, based on evolution, have this impulse to get it — in case there’s a famine or something.”
He explained that our cortex (the judgment portion of our brains that essentially makes us human) is constantly at odds with that pesky, impulse-driven subcortex, with each side constantly debating the merits of that Thin Mint – the cortex reminding us of swim season and the subcortex vying for those quick calories and instant gratification.
“The cortex has a really hard job to do to sustain a resistance to something when there’s a strong desire for it,” Wolff said.
Just say no?
And while these two brain center constantly play devils advocate with one another, Wolff said that a key, simple strategy for winning that battle in favor of resisting subcortical temptation is to hone an age-old aspiration: to trick the brain. The first and perhaps simplest way to achieve that deception, according to Wolff, is not really a trick at all, but merely to subtract a central piece of the equation.
“Limit your access to things you know are going to be hard to deal with. You can’t eat the cookie that never came home with you.
Wolff said. “Now, that doesn’t account for the impromptu times of being at a friends house and they pull out ice cream and you have to figure out what to do.”
Easy enough, sure, but that whole “just say no” to filling your shopping cart with Ho Hos is a lot more appealing in theory than in practice.
To sweeten the pill, make taking the plunge easier and help manage those unexpected crisis situations like having leftover birthday cake lying around the office, Wolff suggested promising yourself a reward for your efforts.
“So much of this is just about pre-planning, but also having a really good reward consequence chart can be extremely important,” he said. ”I think a physical chart works best, so you have a physical reminder of what you’re doing well.”
Wolff added that for best results, having a partner to hold you accountable usually works best as it adds an enforcer and helps to prevent self-criticism, which is fundamentally unhealthy.
“A partner can be the checker and balancer of that system – not to micromanage you, but to remind you,” he said. “It keeps you from narrating yourself and going through that guilt narrating cycle.”
If you’re not much of a pre-planner, or your pre-plans quickly dissipate into Hostess products, Wolff said there are statements of positive reinforcement you may be able to tell yourself in the moment, similar to therapeutic techniques used to treat depression or anxiety. Essentially, coping strategies, which in turn can potentially lead to a thicker, larger cortex and an increased ability to ignore subcortical impulses in the future.
“With people with anxiety you see this more – that being the physical thickening of the cortex with coping strategies,” he said. “They are training their brain to think about things differently, which can physically make the cortex thicker through there, being more neurons committed to coping.”
Life cycle of a diet
In a time when research suggests that only 8 percent of New Years Resolutions are followed to completion, Wolff said that a critical portion in the life cycle of a New Years weight loss regimen is the weight set point. With research dating back to the 1940s, the set point theory centers on the idea that the body gets comfortable at a certain weight, and becomes increasingly resistant to getting out of that homeostasis. But, with legitimate diet and exercise, that homeostasis can be broken and clinked down to the next set point, and from there to the next and the next. Although, months-long plateaus can separate each point, which can lead to discouraging and abandoning lulls.
“It’s like a freight train moving to the next platform,” Wolff said. “You will hit plateaus, and that’s when people get really fed up with diets, and then when it does shift, they get really excited. But it takes time.”
Once that homeostasis is broken and at least that first plateau is achieved, Wolff said it becomes much harder to climb back up, and you’ll naturally be coasting at a healthier level.
“If you can lurch down to those lower points, you’re going to be riding at a good place for a lot longer.”
So, though it may lack any sort of profoundness, a diet’s success is grounded in the first step — that first attempt to get that freight train of belly fat on a new track. And — sorry, subcortex — a good place to start may be to keep the Samoas at arms-length.
CLICK HERE FOR MOTIVATION TIPS FROM AURORA DANCER KIM ROBARDS
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CLICK HERE FOR MOTIVATION TIPS FROM KICK BOXER GRACE CLEVELAND
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