I have now completed 10 consecutive years
of food tracking - writing all of my food into a computer food journal each and every day.

Congratulations to me!

We’ve all seen those advertisements from companies trying to make money by telling us that 'the holidays’ are coming, and we are somehow too fat for them. .. Like: 

"the holidays are just around the corner,
will you have a body you can be proud of?”

which is, of course, an attempt to make us feel insecure and then profit by playing on those insecurities.

I agree with Ragen Chastain, of danceswithfat, who says:
 

“..now I'm supposed to worry that I'll embarrass myself just by existing in a body that hasn't been manipulated to some size I can be "proud of" which, based on the picture that accompanied the message, would require me to lose about 150 pounds and grow 6 inches in the next two months.

If they were honest their ad copy would have read "The holidays are coming so it would be great if you would hate your body and make a desperate bid to change it that won't work but will make us a boatload of money so that our last quarter numbers look good."

Since I was a kid I've seen what now seem like unending permutations of the message "you're too fat" delivered to me by those who hope to profit from my believing it. "The holidays are coming and you're too fat. It's New Years and you're too fat.  Bikini season is coming and you're too fat."

Screw that.

We may not be able to stop the diet companies from trying to ruin the next three months ...(and the month after that with their New Year's Resolution, and the months after that with whatever they try to use to create a giant chasm between us and loving ourselves)... but we can decide that they aren't going to succeed. 

I recommend a secret little mantra that I've created that I say whenever I see diet industry ads.  My mantra is "HEY, THAT'S BULLSHIT!"  Works like a charm to remind me not to buy into any of this.

The holidays are coming and I'm just fine.  New Year's is coming and I'm just fine.  Bikini season is coming and I'm just fine.  This diet industry that spends so much time and money oppressing me with a product that doesn't do anything successfully except make them money, runs on our time, our money, and our energy.  We take the fuel away and the ma...

Most people who have spent time learning about the issue of self-control are familiar with the famous “Marshmallow Test” study, a legendary experiment on self-control which was invented about 50 years ago.

The article below is an interview with 84 year old, Walter Mischel, the original "Marshmallow Man"  in which he shares his thoughts and tells us about his soon-to-be-published first non-academic book,  The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.

Learning How to Exert Self-Control
             by Pamela Druckerman, 
                               posted in New York Times, 9/12/14

Not many Ivy League professors are associated with a type of candy. But Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia, doesn’t mind being one of them.

“I’m the marshmallow man,” he says, with a modest shrug.

I’m with Mr. Mischel (pronounced me-SHELL) in his tiny home office in Paris, where he spends the summer with his girlfriend. We’re watching grainy video footage of preschoolers taking the “marshmallow test,” the legendary experiment on self-control that he invented nearly 50 years ago. In the video, a succession of 5-year-olds sit at a table with cookies on it (the kids could pick their own treats). If they resist eating anything for 15 minutes, they get two cookies; otherwise they just get one.

I’ve given a version of the test to my own kids; many of my friends have given it to theirs. Who wouldn’t? Famously, preschoolers who waited longest for the marshmallow went on to have higher SAT scores than the ones who couldn’t wait. In later years they were thinner, earned more advanced degrees, used less cocaine, and coped better with stress. As these first marshmallow kids now enter their 50s, Mr. Mischel and colleagues are investigating whether the good delayers are richer, too.

At age 84, Mr. Mischel is about to publish his first nonacademic book, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.” He says we anxious parents timing our kids in front of treats are missing a key finding of willpower research: Whether you eat the marshmallow at age 5 isn’t your destiny. Self-control can be taught. Grown-ups can use it to tackle the burning issues of modern middle-class life: how to go to bed earlier, not check email obsessively, stop yelling at our children and spouses, and eat less bread. Poor kids need self-control skills if they’re going to catch up at school.

Mr. Mischel — who is spry, bald and compact — faced his own childhood trials of willpower. He was...