Many people, including doctors, nutritionists, even well-meaning friends and family, like to give those of us who need to lose weight the same advice:  make small changes to what you eat.  They give this advice as if the words alone instruct us how to make these changes. They do not.

To successfully make small changes to your diet for the purposes of sustainable weight loss, you need to navigate a two-step process.    First, you have to examine your current food choices and select those frequently consumed items which you believe are most susceptible to permanent, positive changes.  And second, you must determine how, in fact, to make the changes. 

In other words, while the big picture advice is sound? There’s a lot more to it than just a slogan.

Since making changes is a two-step process, I’m going to discuss it in two blog entries.  This entry will focus on the selection of items in your diet to change.  Click here to read the follow up about how to make those changes.

Let’s Make a Deal

The best way to judge food items is to view them in the overall picture of your weekly diet. You certainly can evaluate individual foods completely on their own merits, but doing so has some obvious flaws.

First, you’ll often be lacking context.  Presented with a high-calorie breakfast option on Monday morning might lead you to think this is an optimal place to make changes, but if you aren’t certain what lunch and dinner will bring later that day… perhaps those calories would have been necessary for you to have met your goals.  Or you might cut foods you think are high in calories, without realizing that you’re removing a prime source of protein that you didn’t otherwise have covered from other meals later in the day or week.

Again, I’m not saying you cannot evaluate meals and food choices on the fly.  Television game shows have made their living off of these kinds of decisions.  Do you keep your $100 gift card or trade it for the unknown item behind Door #1, #2 or #3?

Without question, every contestant would be thrilled in the above challenge if each of those doors were wide open and all the prize options revealed before they had to make their decision.  It would make for lousy TV for sure, but the decision-making would be spot-on.

If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you read my blog entry on tracking your food.  You’ll see that if you spend a week or two honestly tracking everything you eat and painting a complete picture of what your current diet looks like, it’s the equivalent of laying all the cards on the table, opening all the doors… whatever game metaphor you’d like.  It will allow you to look at what you eat in context.  In this way, when you begin the process of identifying foods to change, you’ll be doing so fully understanding how each item impacts your overall diet.  It’s a lot easier to make choices with that kind of information.

Building Your Tower

Ok, so you’ve tracked your food for a week or two.  Now, how to begin the process of selecting foods to change?

Imagine each of the items you eat in the course of a week as an individual wooden block. Now form a tower by carefully stacking these blocks.   This tower represents your current diet.

If the image in your head is the setup for a game of Jenga, then you’ve really got it.

For those who aren’t familiar, Jenga is a game popularized in the mid 1980’s, in which players take turns removing wooden blocks from a tower and placing them on top to make new levels.  The goal is to keep building the tower higher and NOT be the person who makes the structure lose stability and collapse.

In other words, the purpose of Jenga is see how long the player can keep making good choices in order to make the tower appear more slender… before the whole thing falls apart. 

I mean, technically, a Jenga tower is getting TALLER rather than THINNER, but the effect is the same.  It would just sound odd for friends to stop asking “how much weight have you lost?” and instead start asking “how much height have you gained?”  But I digress.

The focus is now on this Jenga tower of your typical diet.  Now that you can see it all in context, you’re ready to pick which blocks you want to remove. And as any Jenga player knows, while all blocks look the same, they are not. There are tremendous differences between the amounts of resistance you will find in removing certain blocks, which is an instructive way to approach our food decisions as well.

Category 1: Loose Blocks

In the early rounds of every Jenga game, players seek out the loose blocks. These are the ones that they can remove from the tower with little or no resistance, and which have no structural role in the support of the tower.  It doesn’t take much to remove these blocks, just a little tap or pull is all.

The first foods you’re seeking to change in your diet are the equivalent of those loose blocks. While these foods will obviously be different for everyone, they do share some commonalities.  Most of all, these are not going to be much loved foods.  If they were, there would be “resistance” to making changes to them.  Instead, these are typically unhealthy foods that you often find in your diet through convenience, tradition, or even just outright laziness.

Examples might be bad delivery pizza you order far too often when you haven’t felt like preparing dinner.  Or a lunch spot you frequent out of habit every week, even though the food isn’t very good.  Or that candy bowl on a co-worker’s desk that you always grab a piece or two from when you pass by during the day, even though it’s not even a candy you particularly like.

Again, think foods you don’t really like, but you eat out of convenience. These are your loose blocks.  And the number of loose blocks you have is normally directly related to the amount of weight you have to lose.  Once you start clearing up these loose blocks, you’ll start seeing weight loss.  Step one is to identify them.

Category 2: Light Resistance Blocks

Once you’ve exhausted the truly easy choices in a Jenga game, you move on to the blocks that might offer up a bit of resistance, but still don’t really pose a threat to bringing the tower crashing down.  You proceed with extra caution to insure you’re completely aware of the impact of removing these blocks.

In food terms? We’re often talking about guilty pleasures.  Foods you otherwise know are not good for you and you SHOULD remove from you diet, but the fact that you have some affinity for them makes the idea of change at least a little challenging.  These could also be childhood favorite foods that you’ve outgrown but still make their way into your pantry each week. Much like the loose block foods, these foods are ones you’ll eventually have little trouble changing, but the fact that there is some connection with them at least poses some initial resistance.

Another quick word on food tracking. If you’re someone who does not see the benefit of tracking what you eat, you might move on to these light resistance foods earlier than necessary.   Someone who has honestly cataloged their food for a few weeks will have a full picture of their diet, and be able to more easily sift through items and find the loose block foods.  But if you skip that step, and are just taking foods one at a time, the opportunity to change a food that provides ONLY some resistance might seem too good to pass up and lead you to prematurely make such changes.

Category 3: Foundation Blocks

The final component of any Jenga tower is the foundation blocks. Good players know to avoid these at all costs.  If the blocks offer severe resistance, the force necessary to remove them will likely cause a tower collapse.  If the blocks offer limited resistance it means they are load-bearing and their removal will corrupt tower stability and lead directly to collapse for that reason.

You might think the food/Jenga might not apply, therefore, to this set of blocks.  But it certainly does. By foundation foods, we are talking about foods that might be unhealthy and worthy of changing if looked at objectively, but they also rank right up there with your favorite foods.  So to change them would mean you’d be depriving yourself of something… an emotion which, when it builds is almost always what undercuts and sabotages any weight loss effort.

In truth? What we’re really talking about though, is diets.  Up to this point, we have been concerned with a personalized targeting of foods which, for you, make the most sense to change.  But for people who sign up to follow any of the generic diet plans out there… that’s not how it works.

A diet is based on the strict following of a set of rules, most of which are based on some form of deprivation.  While some of the rules of a diet might fortunately line up with your particularly loose block foods, inevitably a few rules are always going to hit foundation foods.  And because of that, people will do their best, by sheer will, to keep their tower from falling while they pull these foundation blocks from their diets… with the inevitable results that the program will fail.

If you’ve been on ANY diet in the past, you can look at it through this filter and you’ll see it more clearly.  You’ll also see why it wasn’t your lack of will that made it fail, nor your lack of commitment.  It was simply that eventually, one of these rules that were not written for you, hit on a foundation block which was one turn too far to keep your tower standing.

Playing the Game

While that diet discussion paints a bit of a grim picture, here’s the flip side. If you’ve identified your own loose block foods and changed them (again, we will discuss how in a subsequent blog entry), you don’t necessarily have to move on to the harder-to-remove blocks.

As any Jenga player knows, when you start pulling out loose blocks and placing them on top of your tower to form new, higher levels… something interesting happens.  The weight and balance of the whole tower shifts.  Which means, that after some time, new loose blocks actually appear.

How does this apply to food? When you first start making changes, you’ll be conservative. Changing only the most low impact foods in your diet.   But as you lose weight, your motivation to make more changes builds.  Your confidence that the program works makes you excited to keep moving forward.  You still do not want to push yourself too far, but if you continue to track your food, you’ll see new loose blocks appear every so often.

Honestly, if you’re patient and convince yourself that weight loss isn’t a race, you can lose substantial amounts of weight with never having to pull anything other than loose food blocks.

Game Over

The Jenga/weight loss analogy finally breaks down at game’s end.  But only in Jenga, you’re forced to keep taking turns until someone eventually topples the tower.  But in weight loss, you can simply stop playing.  Once you’ve pulled all the blocks you safely can pull, you simply stop.   At that point you are likely eating in such a way that you’re losing weight at a nice clip.  All you have to do is continue your current eating program.

And since you didn’t make any changes that weren’t easy for you, that shouldn’t be a problem, should it?

A Final Note

I hope you now have an understanding of how to select the foods in your current diet most practical to change for a successful weight loss journey.  If so, that’s a big success.  However, it is not the solution.  Follow up now and read about the actual types of changes you can make to these foods. In addition, you should read about the importance of tracking your food as it will be a big help as you start to identity those loose blocks in your diet.