Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:00]:
Hello, fabulous. Dr. Stephanie Fein here with Weight Loss for Fertility. I'm so happy to be with you. If you're new here, welcome. You're in for a treat. I'm revisiting a basic. We haven't done a food date talk in a hot minute, so we're going to do that today.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:17]:
So if you're new, perfect. And if you're not, it's been a while since we've talked about a food date. So this will be a great refresher. By the way, if you're not new around here, thanks for being here. So nice. New people, thanks for being here too. I was just giving a little squeeze to my OGs. Okay, so we're talking about a food date today.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:00:43]:
It really has been a while. So it's been about almost 2 years since we had an episode dedicated to the food date. And I talk about it all the time when I'm working with clients. We talk about a food date. And I actually teach them this. It's such an important skill to have. And I'm just going to teach it to you here. When I'm working with someone, we have accountability.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:01:09]:
I can show them exactly what to do, get feedback, all that sort of stuff. But the basics are really straightforward. So I want to tell you about them because this is such an important skill to have when it comes to particularly maintenance of weight loss. Now, this is very important while we're losing weight, but it's one of those skills— now that I think about it, all the skills that I teach and lean on, which is hunger scale, the food date. I was going to say planning, but the truth is the food date incorporates that. It really is. It's hunger scale planning and food date. It's one of the pillars, right? If we're a three-legged stool, it's one of the, one of the legs.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:02]:
It's a really valuable tool. It absolutely helps in weight loss. That's where we're learning how to use it and it's vital. But what I thought about this week, because I have a lot of clients losing weight, And we're starting to talk about maintenance or what it's going to look like in— I am always looking years into the future. That's just my nature. That's what I like to do with people. I'm teaching things that will work forever. So I'm always thinking about that.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:02:33]:
And when you're at the weight you want and you are maintaining your weight, the food date is vital. Because what can happen, and I've seen it over and over again, if we stop checking in, the weight creeps up. And this is what I love about the food date. It's a weekly food date. So you're doing it once a week. And that's the title of this podcast is A Food Date is the Fail-Safe for Your Weight Loss. It's the fail-safe. It's the protection.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:12]:
It protects your weight loss. Without it, it's almost guaranteed that your weight will creep up. And it could be a slow creep, right? But if we're not paying attention, portions grow. If we're not doing our hunger scale as tightly because it's been years now, it's so important. Things change, your kids are growing up, all these things that are happening in the future. It's really important that we have something in place to protect our weight loss. It's insurance. It's a failsafe.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:03:50]:
Some examples— that word failsafe is such a perfect word, but it's not like in regular use all the time, so I don't always know what it means. So what I really like to think about in terms of the food date is bumpers in a bowling alley. When they have kids or anyone, I guess, who's new at bowling, they can put bumpers— like, it's like soft pillows, but they're really long because they go into the gutters of the bowling alley on both sides— so that when you bowl your bowling ball, instead of it going into the gutter and you just lose the turn, it can't go in the gutter because the bumpers are there. So it just always goes down the middle. Now, not straight down the middle, right? It could bump from side to side, but it stays in the path that we're looking to stay in. And that's what I always visualize when I'm thinking about the food date and protection. It keeps you where you want to be. It keeps you going for the gold, right? You're going in the right direction if you're not in the gutter.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:02]:
And there actually have been studies to show that weight creeps up over time if we are no longer paying attention. And this is one of the basic ideas that our brains will default. They will just get used to— we talked about anhedonic adaptation. They just get used to where you are. And then if you have a little more, one more bite. It just adds up over time. Remember, we're talking about over time. You could end up gaining weight in a year.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:05:36]:
But if we have the food date in place, it won't happen at all. And prevention, you know the saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's really true. If we prevent weight gain, it's so much easier than having to change things to lose weight again. So a food date ends up being a great idea because it's insurance, it's protection from weight gain. When you're humming along, if you're doing the hunger scale and you are looking towards your week and you're doing this evaluation process, which I'm going to tell you about more in detail, Then you're good. And the beauty of a regular food date is it does not take very long. It's just that checking in, the mindfulness, the awareness of what's going on, seeing what worked, what didn't, and what you're going to do differently.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:06:38]:
It makes all the difference in the world, truly. And I highly encourage everyone who's listening to this to have a weekly practice of checking in. And the way I'm going to describe it is what I would highly recommend. I was looking for another example to illustrate the whole idea of a fail-safe, the insurance, the protection, the bumpers for bowling. The bumpers for bowling is really my favorite, but then I read this one and it's a little scary, but I don't mean it to be scary, but it also is very illustrative of what I'm talking about. It's elevator brakes that engage when cables snap. So this is so— it's not my favorite, but it's very effective in in terms of an image. If there's an elevator and the cable would snap— so rare, never happens— but because it would be so devastating, they actually have a protection in there so that even if the cable snaps, the car won't fall.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:07:40]:
And that's an elevator brake. So they baked that into the system, that there's something that will catch you if You're going in the wrong direction. That is what a food date is. It's designed to catch you before you go in the wrong direction. So valuable. So how do we do a food date? It depends on what's going on, but in general, if things are humming along, it should take 5 to 10 minutes. That's once a week. That's not even every day.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:19]:
Although I just had a client recently who likes to do it every day and amen to that because that would work even better. You're even more aware. But a weekly food date will work really well too. So when you're going to do the food date, I recommend it's a time that you can sit down. Again, you're going to see if you're doing this for the whole rest of your life, you're going to figure out what works for you. And different seasons may call for different things. If you're picking up the kid from preschool, you have a couple of minutes there. You know what I mean? So seasons will change in your life and you'll be able to do it.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:08:58]:
But when you're losing weight, I definitely recommend sitting down in a quiet place if you can. What you need is either your phone someplace to write things down or pen and paper, however you want to do it. And I do recommend that you look at your calendar. So if you're by the computer or you have a calendar journal, a hard copy kind of thing, however you do that, you're going to want to see what you were doing the week before. Now, if you've been logging your food and hunger scale, then you'll have lots of data to look at, which is amazing. I love data. If you want to be doing that, that's a fantastic thing to do. The way you log hunger scale is you write down the number on the hunger scale that you ate at and the number that you stopped eating.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:09:50]:
You can write what you ate, and that would be fine if you were like lasagna and salad and grapes. You don't have to write 6 ounces of lasagna and 25 grapes. It can just be the food because the hunger scale takes care of that. You'll know about how much you ate if you ate at -2 and stopped at +2. And if you overate, you'll know that was more than your body needed. So if you have that information for the week, amazing. Not everyone has to do it that way. I think data is amazing, but It's not mandatory at all.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:30]:
Nothing's mandatory, right? You're a grown-up. You can do anything you want. But I do highly recommend the food date. Like underline highly. So if you have more data, wonderful. I also like people, especially when they're in weight loss mode, to weigh themselves once a week. Not more than that because there's normal variation. And so once a week is perfect.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:10:57]:
Just by the way, in maintenance, I'm okay at that point with weighing every day because at that point we've had so much experience with the scale that it doesn't flip us out as much anymore. Really, it— I'm going to say shouldn't flip us out. What I mean is your mind thinks differently about the scale. It's much more about data. And if you weigh yourself every day, even if you're at the weight you want to be, there will be fluctuations. There'll be water weight if you're having your period, if you're ill, if you're taking medication, there's a million reasons, but you will be taking that into consideration. You'll understand it. So then it just becomes, it's always data, but it just becomes shorthand for what's going on with me.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:11:45]:
You still could just do once a week, which would, work out really well. And in weight loss, I do recommend once a week. Okay, so if you have that piece of information too, amazing. So you have a weight to compare with the week before, you have your calendar, you have your log if you've kept it, and now you're sitting down and you're going to work on 3 categories. First is what worked? And by that, I mean what worked during the week? And here we're talking about weight loss. So what worked for my weight loss? In maintenance, you can say what worked for my food this week? What worked? We have to start with what worked. We have to basically force our brain to come up with what worked. We do this because our brain naturally wants to find everything that didn't work.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:12:39]:
That will be very easy for your brain to do. It loves to pick out the things you did wrong. So we don't need to do that first. We are taking this opportunity to practice looking for the things that worked. There always is things that work. There always is— I was going to say there's always something that worked, but there's always multiple things that worked. If you're sitting down writing the food date, that's one of them. If you did the hunger scale, one meal out of the 20 meals? Did you bring your lunch? Did you eat a new food that you wanted to try? Did you— the hunger scale has a million opportunities, right? Did you stop when you were satisfied? Did you eat when you were hungry? And if you're doing these food dates every week, then you'll see you had something that you were going to do differently.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:13:31]:
Were you able to do that? There are definitely things that worked. And now is the time to write them down. So what worked? When we do that, we're priming our brain to see, oh great, I did a lot of good things and good job. And then we can relax. We're relaxed a little bit, which is just where we want to be. We do not want to be tense or triggered in any way. And that can happen when we're talking about food, especially in the beginning if we're losing weight, our diet mentality brain can come on board, and that's not what we want. So we start with what worked, gets us in a good frame of mind.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:15]:
Then we can go with what didn't. And with our kind brain knowing that there were— we did a lot of things that did work, what are the things that didn't work? And we can just be factual about them. We're not beating ourselves up. We're not saying how terrible. We're not We're not doing any of that. We're being factual about, oh, I ate 2 positive 4, 3 times this week. And that was not my intention. I skipped breakfast because I overslept and I was really hungry.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:14:47]:
Anything like that. And you just notice, oh, I was with my family and they made a comment and then I ate more. Anything that can happen can go in this list of what didn't work. So we have what worked, we have what didn't, and then the third and last category is what am I going to do differently? So based on these two previous categories, what worked and what didn't, what am I going to do differently? And we can use the what worked to help inform what we're going to do differently with the things that didn't work. So if packing our lunch is working, maybe we can pack our breakfast. If going to bed earlier was something we wanted to do and we put an alarm for, or we only watched one show or something that worked, maybe we can use that for something else that didn't. So that's what we're doing when we're looking at the week that just passed. So now we have a couple things.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:15:50]:
Hopefully the list is not too long, and what I mean by that is that we're not requiring too much of ourselves. We can pick a couple things on that list and we can plan to do that going forward. So now we've done the part of the week before. That's why we needed the calendar to jog our memory if we didn't have the data from a log. And now we're going to look at the week ahead. Okay, Now we're going to do our plan. We're planning for the week. Are we going out of town? Is a friend coming over? Do we have plans to eat out 4 times this week? Are we going to be super busy and we're going to order in? When are we going grocery shopping? What am I going to make? This is the time to set up your week going forward and planning as much as makes sense.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:16:43]:
So I'm going to have time to make my lunches, that'll be great, I'll be bringing them. Oh, I'm not going to have time to make my lunches, I know where I'm going to order from and I like these 3 things. Any decisions we can make ahead of time are better decisions than making them when we're hungry. Hungry brains do not make good decisions. So if we use our prefrontal cortex, which is exactly what we're doing when we're planning, then those decisions tend to be better. And that's why we make them ahead of time. Now we're going to indicate for ourselves, you know, what we're doing. I'm going to the market tomorrow at 5, and, or I'm ordering today and I'm going to pick it up tomorrow, whatever.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:17:27]:
And it's great to make a plan that works for your actual life. So we're not making crazy mean diet plans, right? Where you're only having stalks of broccoli and you can only have 4 of them in the whole day. We don't do anything like that. We are planning very realistically food that we're going to enjoy, that's easy to make. So we're not going to be Julia Childs if we don't want to. That may be an activity that we want to do one day, and that's amazing. But if we know that we don't like cooking or we don't have time for cooking, then Planning to cook is not a good plan. And that's really important.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:06]:
That can end up being something that we're going to do differently. Having the plan ahead of time really makes a difference. So you have the decisions that you've made with your prefrontal cortex that makes sense. Amazing. And you want to stick to that as much as you can. That's why we're realistic about it. So we're not making you have something that you hate or that you can't make in the time allotted for yourself. We want to be very realistic.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:18:42]:
That's important. The hunger scale works so beautifully with this. You can have any food you want. You eat it when you're hungry, stop when you're satisfied. As you're checking in and learning about your body and learning your hunger signals and satisfaction signals, you're also going to notice what foods help your body feel its best, and you'll lean more towards those foods. Amazing. There's no restriction. Doesn't mean you can't have dessert.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:19:08]:
It probably feels better in your body to have dessert with a meal so that the sugar is, for lack of a better word, diluted. It's not such a shock to your bloodstream. But you're going to find that kind of stuff when you're paying attention to what's going on. And you're doing that because of the hunger scale, you're checking in. So as you're planning your week, you're taking all the information into account, including the things that you love, how tired you're going to be at the end of the day, not asking your future self to do some heroic, I don't know, bike ride after work when you know you don't have the energy. We're going to plan realistically, and then we're going to stick to it as much as we possibly can. If we end up not being able to stick with it, like it didn't make sense, that will be in our food date next week. What didn't work? That plan didn't work.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:03]:
Great. What are we going to do differently? And you'll try something new. So the food date has the two parts. First part is looking and evaluating the week that just passed. Second part is planning for the week that's coming up. If you do that every week for the rest of your life, you will be the weight you want the whole time. You absolutely can do this when you're pregnant too. Your body is changing, especially in the last trimester, and you can make that plan in your Food Date.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:20:43]:
All of it can be taken into account. You can make a food date for a vacation because we're being realistic in our planning. We are not being restrictive or mean in any way. We are being realistic and then making the decisions ahead of time. So food dates are the failsafe for your weight loss. They help you with weight loss and they help you keep the weight that you want to be. Period. That's what a food date will do.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:12]:
And that's why it's super and fabulous and wonderful important to do it every week. Finding the time to do it is another thing that could work or not, and you may wanna do it differently. So finding the way that you can do it is amazing. I definitely have some clients who already had a grocery list that they would do on Sunday or whatever, and it fit right in there. That's often a really good place to do it. But you'll see, because maybe it's at home or maybe it's at work, You'll see which works the best. That is a food date revisited because we haven't talked about it explicitly in quite a while. It's the failsafe for your weight loss.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:21:54]:
It helps you stay connected to what you want your relationship to food to be like. And that is such a valuable use of time. So food date, you look at the week that just passed, what worked, what didn't, what am I going to do differently? Remember, you start with what worked, you can't skip that. And then you look to plan the week ahead. You have your weight for the week and you're comparing it to the week before. If it's not what you expected, you can investigate that a little bit. If it is, you able to keep going. You can investigate why that worked and keep going.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:22:37]:
That's the food date, my friends. I am so happy to talk to you about this. If you have any questions, you can DM me @stephaniefeinMD on Instagram or LinkedIn. You can always reach out on my website, stephaniefeinmd.com. There's a Connect With Me button. You can also Lose Weight With Me. There's a button right there and we can work together. I can show you how to do this in real time and we can be connected and I can be your accountability buddy.
Stephanie Fein MD [00:23:05]:
I love that. And I love you and I think you're amazing. And any part of doing this will benefit you. And I know you can do it. I'm sending you so much love until next week. Mwah!
