The Yoyo Effect

The Yoyo Effect

Recently, I mulled around an art fair, while I waited for a table in a nearby restaurant. I came across an artist who had beautifully crafted oak into yoyos. I picked one up and gleefully tossed it toward the floor. Many years had gone by since I had used a yoyo. Soon, I was able to make the yoyo “walk the dog” and “swing in the cradle” as I had done as a child.

The yoyo is an object consisting of an axle connected to two disks and a piece of pull-string looped around the spool. The idea is to insert one finger into the slip knot and throw the yoyo with force toward the ground to spin it and to unwind the string, then allowing the force of the unraveling to draw the yoyo back to your hand with a quick pull upward.

No amount of time passed before I realized that this yoyo was me. I had lost and gained this damn extra ten pounds now about fifteen times in the last year. I go from believing that nothing is more important than balance and health, to teetering on the idea that a little over-indulgence isn’t a bad thing. This lack of consistent belief is the cause of the yoyo effect.

With as much as a flick of a wrist, I gather more food toward my mouth. With as little as a lift of my hand, I take the cycle back into my palm, where it stays for a little while, until I forget my purpose again. I’m a frigging yoyo getting dizzier by the day with my uncommitted ways.

Yesterday I caught my mother eating leftovers from a Tupperware container just after dinner. I asked, “Why are you eating again so soon after supper?”

Her response, “I didn’t want to put this little bit back in the refrigerator.”

I responded wryly, without much compassion, “You might as well count on adding a pound by tomorrow morning, because that’s just about how much that extra food is going to add to your stomach.”

Soon after that, as kind of a joke, I wrote a contract out for the entire family to sign. The contract was a resignation from the “Clean Plate Club.”

She laughed as she hesitantly signed it. But since yesterday, both of us have lost a pound. None of us really want to resign from the club. We love to eat and particularly like eating snacks at night, which is the cause of most of our weight gain. I know I am rarely hungry when I go for that fifth piece of bittersweet dark chocolate.

I am a food addict. I never used to be one. But I admit to you now that I have taken to using food to make me feel good occasionally. What I want to do is admit it, call myself out on it, and make a change before it gets worse. I am down five pounds off of my intended weight. Every day, when I look in the mirror at my stomach, I’m reminded that I don’t look like myself anymore. I teach my yoga class, and I’m supposed to be the model for the rest of the class. Therein lies the problem. I can’t seem to live up to the ideal, nor do I want to.

Trust me, this isn’t a negative spiel about not being willing or able to do something about myself. This is simply a confession that sometimes we get helpless in our desire to make effective change in our life. No one is judging and no one really cares if I succeed either.

But there are people who, if you asked, would encourage you to your best until you reached it. Then these same people might help you discover why you keep finding the worse case scenario and reaching toward it, instead of your highest self! There is a reason why I act the way I do.

I was the fifth of six children from a low-income family. By the time Dad’s payday came around, we had been eating hot rock soup for three days, each of us having diarrhea as a result. Six kids running to our one bathroom wasn’t pretty at all. I remember periodically going outside or in the basement. You did what you had to do to survive, and just forget about privacy.

So, we never had enough. Now that I have plenty, I take too much, as does my mother. My partner just eats everything on his plate because he had a somewhat militant father who told him there were hungry people in China waiting to eat his leftovers.

I often think about how ludicrous such a statement was. How could our leftovers possibly affect anyone? Yet, we believed it and felt as if we were the fortunate ones with food. I remember the commercials on television with the emaciated children begging for the gruel. It’s not that I don’t believe that this kind of poverty exists, it’s that parents convinced children to eat more than they should, even though they had no intention of giving any of the leftovers to the poor. We got the same stories about bums on the street.

I’ve talked to bums on the street. They are hungrier for drugs and alcohol than they are for a solid meat and three. Go figure.

So, I know how I got this way. How do I set out to change my behavior and stay in stasis?

Well, a great way is for an entire family to get on the same page together. We have all decided to monitor what each other is doing and encourage one another to stop eating when we are full and, perhaps, save the rest for later, instead of wasting it. When it comes to those damn sweets at night, I’ve taken to doing more exercise, so that I can afford to take a couple bites of chocolate once in a while. It feels like a better choice, than to give up something I enjoy so much.

However, I must say, as a Health Coach, if you are trying to lose a large amount of weight, you do have to make some sacrifices for a while, until you reach your target weight. It is then that you can make a conscious splurge, keeping the balance of sweets and exercise at a constant.

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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