Add in, don’t take out.
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“I really don’t want to look like I’m incompetent,” I fretted to myself nervously… I was sitting in a sterile, clinical, hospital office in New York City, getting ready to see a new client, and my palms were sweaty. My feet were sweating too. This wasn’t my full-time, high profile corporate job where I would have been comfortable meeting someone new. This was a weekend “personal growth for me” nutrition client and I was very new at helping people in this way. I was seeing him for free but that didn’t make me feel any better. His name was Jeff, but I didn’t know much else about him. He was one minute late. That was just enough extra time to feed my anxiety as I stared at the second hand on the wall clock tick-tick-ticking around in a circle. I tried to mentally grasp everything I’d recently learned about plant-based nutrition so it wouldn’t fly out of my head the second he walked in. Finally, he walked through the door, looking 10 times more nervous than I was, eyes skirting around at the empty chairs, searching for one that would fit his obese body. He chose to stand, so I stood up too. We both stood for the whole meeting. I don’t remember everything about that first conversation, but I do remember that when I asked him how many times a week he ate red meat, he replied, “How many times a week? Ummmm… 21? I eat it three times a day.” I didn’t comment. The program I studied had a specific mantra when it came to diet change. Add in. Don’t take out. So that’s what I did with Jeff. I told him to drink a smoothie in the morning before he stopped at McDonald’s for breakfast and to eat a large salad before he started his lunch. I gave him a simple recipe for the most basic of vegetable soups and had him eat that before dinner. Within one week he’d stopped the McDonald’s breakfast because he said it was faster and easier to just have two smoothies in the morning because he was getting the blender dirty anyway. (He really got into smoothies… I think the art of the perfect smoothie became a minor obsession for him.) Jeff was my first success story. Add in, don’t take out really worked for him. Over time, the plants squeezed out other, less healthy foods and he dropped weight in that way men can that really pisses women off. Last year, I led a challenge to help people start counting plants. The goal was to eat 40 different plants a week and the directions had nothing to do with removing any food from anyone’s diet. The challengers really loved that program and add in, don’t take out was everyone’s favorite part. No one wants to feel like they’re losing anything and adding in just isn’t that hard. |