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The Vice Busting Diet - Julia Griggs Havey Discusses Permanent Weight Loss with The Diet Channel

For most people, the word “diet” is synonymous with deprivation and food cravings. After all, who hasn’t been on a diet that made their stomach growl constantly and gave them torturous dreams of cinnamon buns dancing in their heads? Yet in spite of this daily suffering—to add insult to injury—most dieters regain the majority of their weight soon after their diet plans end.

Julia Griggs Havey, the author of The Vice Busting Diet, has experienced this vicious cycle firsthand. Ten years ago, at approximately 300 pounds, she got fed up and decided to change her life permanently. However, rather than following another diet, she began implementing small incremental changes into her daily lifestyle. Eventually, these changes added up to big results, enabling her to lose a whopping 130 pounds. Today, she maintains her weight loss and is happier and healthier than ever. What are Julia’s secrets to successful weight loss and maintenance? Recently, she sat down with The Diet Channel to discuss her new book…and to give us a couple hints. Thanks, Julia, for sharing with us.

The first small change I made was to give up eating my #1 vice: ice cream.
Then, I started drinking 64 ounces or more a day of water.
After that, I stopped eating fast food.
The next hurdle was giving up Coke.
Eventually, I added exercise.
I tackled each small change gradually until it was second nature to me. That’s when I’d add another change to my regime. If a person is consistent with their health resolutions, it is just a matter of time until all their excess weight comes off! In addition, it's really important to have a community of supporters to help you motivate

Describe the moment when you just couldn’t take it anymore. Do most dieters have this moment? Or is it less dramatic for the people you’ve spoken to?
One of my “rock-bottom/aha” moments (there were several previous “aha” moments before I was ready to commit to change!) was when I went to my doctor to have a lump at the base of my neck examined. I was convinced that it was a tumor and that I was going to die. I was surprised (and extremely humiliated) when my doctor informed me that the lump was merely a fat deposit. At that moment, it dawned on me that (like most of my problems) this situation was of my own doing, and as a result it could only be undone by me. That’s when I vowed to change. Fortunately, I decided to change ONE thing, rather than trying to change everything at once.

Similarly, many dieters have a specific situation they can identify that spurred them to change. However, in talking with the tens of thousands of dieters over the years, I have noticed that successful change happens when a person decides to finally do it all by themselves. Despite the best intentions of spouses, friends, or co-workers who offer encouragement, we don’t lose weight until we want it for ourselves. It is almost like we won’t lose weight if our spouse wants us to because we think ‘they should love us as we are’. It’s like we subconsciously stay overweight to spite them—and to make them prove they love us anyway.

So to answer your question, yes, there is great drama surrounding our desire to lose weight and our conviction to finally get it done. The stories are as unique as each individual’s life and journey. I don’t think everyone needs to hit rock bottom or have a terrible or embarrassing incident that spurs them into change. I really do believe that my Vice Busting program will gently ease them into a new lifestyle, without ever having to realize these worst moments.

How did you stay motivated lose your weight? Is this something you describe in The Vice Busting Diet?
That’s a great question! During the years that I was morbidly obese, I went on dozens of diets. Each time I started out, I was totally motivated to succeed this time. However, like most people, I found the diets themselves overwhelming because they required me to change every aspect of my life overnight. On the first day of most diets, you are supposed to stop eating the large quantities of unhealthy and high calorie foods that you usually eat, and start eating and preparing a strict, low calorie, healthy food diet, which is NOT part of your normal routine. On top of that, you’re supposed exercise like you are Denise Austin, AND drink water, AND be upbeat about it all. You count points, count calories, take supplements…it’s exhausting and virtually impossible!

So, rather than try that approach and doom myself to failure again, I decided to change just ONE thing; I decided NOT to eat ice cream. I didn’t say that I would never eat it again, rather I vowed not to eat it that day…then the next day…and the next day, and so on. I was amazed that I could actually do without it. You see, in the past, every Monday that I started a diet was usually followed by a Tuesday in which I was rewarding myself for my good discipline…with a bowl of ice cream! This time, though, I was simply not eating ice cream. At the end of the first week, I was shocked that I could actually make it a week without any ice cream, so I thought to myself, “Let’s go for another week.” After about 3 weeks of not eating ice cream, my clothes were actually a bit loose around the waist. And I liked the way this made me feel, so I vowed to see what other unhealthy foods that I was eating regularly that I could do without What motivated me was the success; the fact that I was actually able to accomplish what I set out to do.

After these small successes, I implemented a rewards program for myself. Since I had always worked hard to win whatever incentive my boss set for productivity at work, I set up a system for earning rewards based on abstaining from my vices. Every week that I didn’t eat ice cream, I rewarded myself with a manicure, pedicure, new book, etc. Then, when I’d stayed on track for many months in a row, the rewards got bigger—I was giving myself weekend trips and buying massages. Soon, I began wanting these treats more than I had ever craved the foods; and this motivated me to keep going.

Eventually, the weight loss itself became my biggest motivator—to actually be realizing a goal that had eluded me for so long was more motivating than any reward item could ever be.

Although your book is entitled The Vice Busting Diet, you don’t advocate following a “diet” per se. In your opinion, what’s wrong with dieting in general?
What is wrong with dieting is that it requires a person to totally transform how they live overnight, which is a very steep slope of change to scale in one day. The word “diet” means the food indicative to the specie; it does not mean a reduced calorie, food group restrictive program. Yet we keep trying to change our ingrained habits by following a menu plan filled with foods we aren’t familiar with and perhaps don’t even like.

Most people eat both healthy and unhealthy foods within the course of their day. It’s the unhealthy foods that must be addressed. That’s what Vice Busting is all about. It’s much more effective to start out eliminating unhealthy foods from one’s diet than to start following a completely different menu overnight.

What are the worst food habits of the average American?
Without a doubt the #1 worst food habit or “Vice” of the average American (and humans around the world for that matter) is the consumption of soft drinks. There is a direct correlation with the introduction of high-fructose-laced beverages and increase in obesity rates. Recent studies also show that diet soft drinks do not positively affect weight loss. Water should be the beverage of choice.

The #2 Vice would be unhealthy, fatty and high calorie “fast food”. I can tell you hundreds of stories of readers who simply vow to not eat anything from a restaurant that can hand them a bag of food through a window/drive up and have gone on to lose at least 50 pounds! Eating fast food is a fast way to obesity.

You break your plan into 12 weeks. Describe what the “Getting Started” phase of the diet—Weeks 1-3—entails.

The first and most important action that a person does with The Vice Busting Diet is to bust their daily high calorie beverage consumption and replace it with the healthy habit of drinking at least 64 ounces to ½ their body weight in fluid ounces of water.

What happens in the “Ongoing Plan” part of the diet, Weeks 4-12?
The ongoing part of the plan is to identify their #1 food vice (for most people it will be fast or convenient processed foods) and replace it with healthier options. Then, we create the habit of exercise, gradually increasing their fitness level. We do this by eliminating some of the time spent watching television and using this time to get some physical activity instead.

Twelve weeks sounds like a short amount of time for someone trying to overcome a lifetime of poor eating habits. How does the 12-Week program help people maintain their newfound healthy lifestyle permanently?

Twelve weeks not enough time to lose 100 pounds or to erase the damage done by a lifetime of poor lifestyle choices. However, it is enough time to successfully break 2 habits, to replace them with 2 healthier alternatives, and to make exercise a habit. In 12 weeks, you can successfully create a strong foundation on which to continue building a healthy lifestyle.

What role should exercise play in a person’s daily lifestyle?
One of the reasons we have become overweight is that we don’t need to physically work hard to survive anymore—life has gotten very sedentary. But the human body was designed be active! Daily exercise is simply a must for anyone wanting a healthy life and body. I am not saying that you must exercise at the same level as a competitive athlete. But I am saying that you do need to walk approximately 30 minutes a day at the very least, or perform some other type exercise. Ideally, you should engage in 60 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day, in addition to some weight training. To get there, it takes a deep commitment to change, especially considering that most people currently spend 4 hours every day watching television while claiming they have no time to exercise.

In the beginning of this diet, it must be difficult to give up favorite foods. Does Vice Busting get easier as time progresses?

YES! The diet industry has told us repeatedly through the years that we ‘can have the foods we love in moderation and still lose weight’. But I think that the majority of our population is overweight because we can’t moderate the foods we love. We love them, and as a result we eat too much of them. We have been trained to believe that not eating these foods is deprivation, which supposedly leads to binging. But the truth is that abstaining from these foods enables us to realize the weight loss we long for, while eating them deprives us of realizing our dreams.

So, the longer you bust your vices the more you will realize your weight loss goals…and your personal dreams. Remember that the empowerment that you get from finally succeeding at weight loss is far better than any cheesecake ever tasted or ever will! I have not had a bite of ice cream in 10 years, and I don’t want it and I don’t miss it! And I certainly do not feel deprived. I CAN have it whenever I want it. Thankfully, though, I no longer want it. After losing the first 50 pounds, it was incredibly easy to say “no thank you” when confronted with one of my vice foods.

What are some of the biggest obstacles to losing weight?
The biggest obstacle to losing weight is thinking that you can keep doing what you have always done and somehow get different results “this time”. Change—real and lasting change of one’s lifestyle—is the only way to lose weight. So, the obstacle is overcoming the idea that you have to go “on a diet” until you lose the desired amount of weight, and that then you will be able to revert back to the very lifestyle which helped you put the weight on in the first place.

Another big obstacle is the entire concept of moderation—having those foods we “love” in moderation. If an obese person could handle their particular vice foods in moderation, they wouldn’t be overweight! The entire concept of moderation is illogical and misguided. Worse, it dooms a dieter to failure. When a person eats a vice food and can’t stop, they believe lack willpower because an expert/author assured them that they would be able to do so. At that point, they leave yet another failed diet convinced that they are the problem, a failure. But the only problem is they have been listening to bad advice! If you can’t stop at after “one” or “some”, then it is a “diet vice”—and to realize lasting weight loss results, you must bust it!

Finally, what’s the best part about your job as a weight loss motivational speaker and writer?
That’s an easy question! The best part about my job is helping people realize lasting change. If find it incredibly uplifting when I receive an email or have a conversation with someone whose life I have helped to change. People share with me how their health and weight are significantly better, and how they are filled with hope for the future because of something that they read in my books, heard in my tapes, or seen on my program. It is a high like no other.

I really love speaking to live audiences, getting to see the resounding “yes” in their eyes and their expression when I hit on a point that makes sense to them. I am still a bit shocked at the reaction people have to me—it honors me, flatters me and also embarrasses me a bit. After all, I am just a woman who lost a lot of weight; I am not a doctor, or a celebrity, or an “expert”. But I am real and I’m just like them. I think that must be why they relate to me so well—I really know what they are going through and I think they can sense that I really care about their success.

I also LOVE being called a “Master Motivator”. It was the fulfillment of a dream to be in the same category as my mentors: Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, and Mark Victor Hansen. And now, to have many of them—along with Dr. David L. Katz and Dr. Mehmet Oz— endorse my work…I can’t describe how amazing that feeling is!

What to Eat - Food & Nutrition Expert Dr. Marion Nestle talks with The Diet Channel

After a long day at work you make a quick, five minute stop at the grocery store to pick up a $3 gallon of milk. You enter the store and head to the milk section, which is inconveniently located in the back of the store. Along the way you pass brightly colored produce, free samples simmering in a crock pot, and multiple aisles each stocked with in-store specials. You find your milk and make your way back through the maze, passing aisles filled with cookies, candy, chips, and soda. Wandering past the toiletries section, you remember you are out of toothpaste so you grab a tube. By the time you arrive at the cashier, your five minute stop for a $3 gallon of milk has just turned into a half hour long $27 buying spree. What just happened?

In her new book What to Eat, Marion Nestle takes us on a guided tour of the supermarket, unmasking the food industry’s marketing tactics and illuminating the food choices—healthy and unhealthy—we make every day. Marion is a recipient of the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (it’s sort of the “Nobel Prize” for food) and teaches at New York University. No one has thought longer or harder about the modern American’s diet. Thanks to Marion for sharing her insight with us.

Why this book now?
Well, it’s a direct response to Food Politics, which came out in 2002. As I was going around the country giving talks about how food marketing influences food choices, people would come up afterwards and say, “great book, but you didn’t tell us what to eat.” When I heard that for the 10 th time, I thought I had best find out what that was about. I soon discovered that many people feel desperately confused about what to eat. In particular, they tell me they feel at a total loss about how to make choices in supermarkets. So I spent the next year or so taking a close look at the issues and trying to make sense of them.

Food and Politics is a recurring theme in your books. Basically, you cover the whole spectrum of food production. Which food industry sectors have been most receptive to your calls for reform?
All sectors look like they are reforming, on one level or another; whether they are doing anything significant is another matter. Food product makers, for example, are producing lots of packaged foods that are trans fat-free, made with whole grains, vitamin-enriched, or supplemented with omega-3s. But many of these are still junk foods, just made to look more nutritious. On a fundamental level, companies are driven by business imperatives. They must report growth to Wall Street every 90 days. This forces companies to make short-term decisions and to do everything possible to sell more food, not less. And they have to do this in an environment in which far too much food is available—3900 calories for every man, woman, and infant in the country, nearly twice as much as average need. This makes the food industry hugely competitive. Companies are happy to use nutrition to sell products, whether or not the products really are the best nutritional choices.

You have spent considerable time reviewing the meticulous design of supermarkets. What are the most clever tactics marketing savvy grocery stores use to get the consumer to change their buying habits?
Oh it doesn’t take all that much. Research shows that the more you see, the more you buy. So companies pay to place their products where you are bound to see them, especially at eye level, at the ends of aisles, and at the cash registers. I recently was in a supermarket in a low-income area in Los Angeles that had mountains of soft drinks in about ten places in the store. You could hardly get out of there without buying soft drinks. And these are priced so that the largest sizes are a bargain. Research says that the bigger the container, the more calories you eat from it. So these are all “buy more” strategies. If you eat more as a result, that’s your problem—or so they say.

What trade-offs do consumers make when choosing between large corporate produce suppliers and locally grown organic produce?
I am a big supporter of organics and of locally grown food so local and organic would always be my first choice. But east coast supermarkets find it cheaper and easier to get produce from suppliers in California than to buy from suppliers down the road. So you don’t often find local produce in large grocery stores.

It seems more and more is labeled “organic” these days. How “organic” is organic?
If the food is labeled “Certified Organic,” it means that the producer followed rules set down by the USDA that forbid pesticides (reason enough to choose organics), chemical fertilizers, genetically modified foods, hormones, and antibiotics. It also means that the producer is inspected to make sure the rules are followed. This is a clean system; Certified Organic means growers are held accountable for following the rules. With that said, the rules themselves have loopholes and are under relentless pressure from Congress, the USDA, and, of course, large food producers—Big Organics—to weaken the standards.

What types of produce, if any, are more likely to be prone to bacteria, viruses, and parasites?
They all are. I’m always amazed that we don’t become ill more often from eating fruits and vegetables. That we stay healthy is a tribute to the effectiveness of chlorinated water and of healthy immune systems for taking care of most harmful organisms. Imported vegetables have to be grown according to U.S. standards. Even so, it’s always best to wash fruits and vegetables before eating them.

To what degree should consumers be alarmed about genetically modified or irradiated food?
It depends on what alarms you. I think the real issue about genetically modified food has to do with corporate control over the food supply and who decides what gets grown and how. Irradiated foods are almost a non-issue because hardly any are in stores—just spices, really, and fruits imported from Hawaii. Irradiation hasn’t caught on because there is no demand for it and it really isn’t needed to keep foods safe.

Plenty of debate exists concerning milk. It is good for us or not?
I think it’s a matter of quantity, fat, and lactose. If you can handle the lactose, and aren’t allergic to the protein, dairy foods are fine—like everything else, in moderation. I personally prefer the low-fat varieties (except for cheese). I don’t see dairy foods as a poison or panacea. Sometimes a food is just a food.

In your book you discuss some confusion regarding the benefits of soy. What’s the basis of this confusion?
Soy foods are important in the diets of the Japanese, for example, whose health statistics are much better than ours. Of course, the Japanese differ from us in lots of other ways, but we love reductive explanations and soy looks like a good one. It’s a bean, with protein and mostly unsaturated fats, along with some special antioxidants called flavonoids that seem to have some health benefits. But some flavonoids are structured like estrogens and it’s not clear what their effects might be. Some studies show benefits, some show harm. I feel the same way about soy that I do about dairy. It’s a food. Eat it if you like it, just not too much.

There are so many economic, ethical, and nutritional issues surrounding meat. Which are most relevant to you?
I care a lot about all of the issues. I care how animals are raised and I much prefer my meat to be free of antibiotics and hormones. I wish more meat producers offered organics, but they say it’s too expensive to feed organic grains to animals so they produce “natural” meats instead. Because there are no standards for “natural,” it can mean whatever the producer says it means.

Why do you describe fish as the Wild West of the food industry?
Fish are complicated. There are lots of different kinds and lots of issues: where they were caught, where they are on the food chain, whether farmed or wild, how much fat they have, and so forth. And most fish sellers are clueless about what they are selling and can’t really answer questions that go beyond what’s on the labels. Occasionally, fish sellers cheat, selling farmed as wild, for example. And some do silly things like labeling a fish as “fresh, previously frozen.” Since 2005, fish sellers are supposed to say what country the fish come from, but mostly they don’t.

Like meat, there are a host of dilemmas regarding fish. Which resonate most deeply with you?
The main dilemmas are toxins versus omega-3 fats, farmed versus wild, and the whole question of overfishing and the disappearance of ocean fish. The one that most troubles me has to do with methylmercury; we actually could do something about this one. Much of the methymercury that accumulates in large predatory fish like shark and albacore tuna gets into the oceans from coal-burning power plants. We could control mercury emissions from these plants much better than is now required. I think it’s shameful that local waterways in almost every state are so polluted with toxins that the states issue advisories not to eat local fish very often—or at all if you are pregnant.

If you could mandate any changes to food labeling and nutrition information disclosure, what would they be?
I’d go along with the FDA’s recommendation—proposed years ago but still not in place—to list the total calories in a package. Right now, soft drinks say 100 calories for 8 ounces, but a 20 ounce bottle really has 250 calories because is has 2.5 servings. That’s a big difference in perception.

What are the three most important things we as a society should do to head off the childhood obesity epidemic?
I say: get junk foods out of the house (especially soft drinks and juice drinks), get junk foods out of the schools, and forbid advertising junk foods to kids on TV and every other media. I take an extreme position on this, but somebody has to.

What are the best/worst trends you see in the average American diet?
The increase in calorie intake is the biggest problem. Americans are eating at least 200 calories a day more than we did in 1980. No wonder we are gaining weight. On the other hand, I like it a lot that so many people are choosing organics. This may not help the weight problem, but it certainly will reduce pesticides in soil and water, and make for a healthier planet.

Are there any foods or food products you simply refuse to eat due to their negative health impact?
I don’t eat brains.

Let’s play a little word association. I’ll give you a word and you tell us what you think about it.
Olestra — an artificial fat that you can’t digest and works like mineral oil in your intestine? Yuck.
Caffeine — I’m one of those people who metabolizes caffeine quickly so it’s a non-issue for me. It revs up kids; they don’t need it.
Aspartame — I don’t like artificial anything when it comes to food. I much prefer sugar.
Hydrogenated Oil — Ditto. It’s artificial. It was on my don’t-buy list long before I knew about trans fats. I don’t care for the way it tastes.
Sugar — I love it, particularly the brown crystalline kind—but in moderation, of course.

Finally, best part of being one of the world’s leading nutrition experts:
I get to answer questions like these in situations where people might actually be interested in my opinions. Thanks for the opportunity.