There is hope for all.
Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise.

What to do during this Holiday Season?

How can we manage to engage in a way of eating that will help lose weight, or keep us from gaining weight?  I, personally, have never found  a workable solution to this problem, but here's some advice that we may, ... or may not, ...  find helpful.

This Holiday Season,
 Stop the Wrist Slaps and Write-Offs

                    By Yoni Freedhoff, M.D.    December  2012.

I've seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people go through the holiday season hoping to manage their weight. I've seen large gains, small gains, the status quo, and even some losses. But one thing's for sure: As far as long-term likelihood of success goes, extremes are bad omens.

In categorizing holiday strategies, there are really only two possible extreme holiday behaviors—the wrist-slappers and the write-offers.

The wrist-slappers are the folks who feel that their own weight management supersedes humanity's cultural and time-immemorial use of food in celebration. Consequently, they spend the bulk of their holidays slapping their wrists rather than enjoying indulgent fare.The write-offers are the folks who decide that celebratory eating trumps thoughtfulness and that holidays represent the carte blanche of caloric indulgence.

The wrist-slappers will often lose weight over the holiday season, while the write-offers often gain substantially. But in the end, both tend to fail at long-term weight management.

Wrist-slappers fail in the long run, because the human condition prevents people from perpetually denying themselves the ability to derive pleasure from food, and without a middle ground, these all-or-nothing people regularly go from strict periods of "nothing" right back to "all." These are the folks who rapidly lose huge amounts of weight and then, often just as rapidly, gain it back again.

Write-offers fail in the long run because the human condition is such that regularly giving oneself inches generally leads to regularly giving oneself miles. What might begin as holiday write-offs more often than not will devolve into vacation write-offs, illness write-offs, times-of-higher-stress write-offs, weekend write-offs, and eventually just all-the-time write-offs.

Given the calories in our indulgent holiday fare, given the role of food in celebration and social gathering, and given the human condition, my experience has taught me that gaining 1 or 2 pounds over last two weeks of the year is par for a thoughtfully navigated course and nothing to be too worried about.

This holiday season, instead of wrist slaps or write offs, why not live a life of thoughtful reduction? No blind restrictions, but also no blind consumptions. Ask yourself whether or not something's worth its calories and how much you need of it to be happily satisfied. Remember, too, that what's worth it on Christmas Eve, might not be worth it on just plain Tuesday, and that the healthiest life you can enjoy over the holidays, when seen through the lens of our shared human condition, ought to include some thoughtful indulgence.

 Yoni Freedhoff, MD, is an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa, where he's the founder and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute—dedicated to non-surgical weight management since 2004. Dr. Freedhoff's book "Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work" will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in April 2013.

We got a very tiny Christmas tree this year, because of our new adopted kitten, Layla.  I found her at the SPCA, where someone brought her after she was abandoned by her previous owner.  She is a tortoiseshell, now about 5 months old, and very, very sweet. I got a book to refresh my knowledge about training new cats, and have been working to Think Like a Cat.

I'm been thinking a lot about what my next steps will be online, after this immediate DietHobby Hacking crisis has passed. 

There are some of you who share my dieting interests and who have been very close to me during this past year while I established this website, and I feel confident of your continued support no matter what I choose to do here. 

I spent many thousands of my hard-earned savings along with more than a year of long days of very hard work to establish this DietHobby website, and to buy the equipment to make the videos that I've posted here and on youtube.

The day before this Hacking happened, I  paid $600 for an order of 2500 custom-made buttons to pass out to my YouTube grandbabies at VidCon 2012, and along with the registration fees, travel expenses, hotel bills that are connected with VidCon, attending this event at the end of next month will be very expensive. 

I don't make any money on this website, or on my youtube channel, and these buttons, along with all of my other expenses and my work have been intended to be a gift of kindness.  

I've spent my entire life working very, very hard to earn a living, and to do what I could to help people with their personal problems and their legal problems. There are many things I could choose to do to enjoy my final years of life, now that I'm retired, and old. 

What I've chosen to do this past year is to share some of my knowledge and support with others.

This was received quite well by many thousands of people of different ages at YouTube, but there were also a few who didn't like me or what I had to say, and those people have been very unkind.  The most disturbing so far, is of course, this recent hacking and destructive vandalizing of what I have worked so hard to build -- simply for the hacker's personal amusement. 

The hacker's mindset does not seem unusual to me, because for a time I practiced criminal law, and I saw a great deal of that type of unkindness and disregard for the rights of others in the people who the court assigned me to defend.

When acting as a court-appointed attorney I've even experienced having to defend the legal rights of paternity of a father who had abused, molested, and then killed his 3 year old daughter. That child was dead. He was in prison for life, but he refused to give up the legal rights to his other 2 small children so they could be adopted. He had no chance of winning, but the law required him to have a lawyer, and the court assigned his case to me.  

I also remember when I first begun my legal practice the court appointed me to defend an adolescent boy after he beat up his grandmother for absolutely no reason except his bad mood, and another time, the court appointed me to defend a 13 year old boy who broke an old lady's arm when he stole her purse, and pushed her over, while riding past her on a bicycle. 

I've visited many clients in prison. You understand… at that time I was a young DEFENSE attorney, and my job was to try to help the one who had committed the criminal act. Dealing with such people is never fun, and this situation reminds me of those past times in my life.

I've been able to turn Dieting into an enjoyable hobby which is a good thing because Dieting is not really a choice for me if I want to maintain my body at a reasonable size. 

I have a great many other hobbies, and they are for my enjoyment  and bring pleasure to myself and others.  One of my hobbies is sewing, Another is gardening. Another is building stained glass windows.  Another is writing.  I've enjoyed learning about computers, and when my nephew was young, I enjoyed playing playstation RPG games with him. The Final Fantasy series was a special favorite. My nephew grew up and became a Marine in Iraq and Afganistan where he received 2 purple hearts.  My most recent hobby has been making videos.

Except for dieting, if a hobby stops being fun, then I choose to engage myself in a different hobby, and right now, I'm not finding Google/YouTube itself to be much fun, and dealing with the haters, trolls and bullies on YouTube is also no fun. 

I believe that haters, trolls and bullies should be avoided and ignored, and if I have to leave youtube and even close down this website to avoid and ignore them, then I am prepared to do that.  There are many other wonderful things in my life that I can focus on.  My 25 years of legal practice contained some very difficult experiences, but now that's over. I'm retired, and I don't have to do that anymore.

So I am thinking about what I want to do to avoid this type of situation in the future, and while I am in the process of writing this, it's keeping me from sitting here on the sofa stuffing myself with cookies for comfort.

I love that picture of the fortune from the cookie that I put at the top of this website.. "I cannot help you, for I am just a cookie"   Life events are often difficult, and I get to choose whether to focus on the negative or the positive.  I remain aware, of course, of both negative and positive, but I can choose to direct my FOCUS toward the positive.

For those interested, here's a link to my latest video,
"R U a Good Guest? - Ask Grandma - Episode Forty-five".
which has now been posted here at DietHobby in the GRANDMA section,
and is located in the Ask Grandma category. 

This video was taken on the patio in my back yard.  The pink flowering tree
is a stencil painting that I painted there about ten years ago.