Best way to lose weight? Eat a big, fat, bullfrog every morning

Written by Kim Bensen
Wednesday, 01 February 2012 01:00

There’s an old saying that if you wake up in the morning and eat a live frog, you can go through the day knowing that the worst thing that can possibly happen to you that day has already happened.

Popularized in Brian Tracy’s book Eat That Frog!, the idea here is that you tackle the biggest, hardest, and least appealing task FIRST every day, so you can move through the rest of the day knowing that the worst is over with.

For those of us who have a hard time with planning out our day ahead of time, that’s our frog.

Even though we know that pre-planning will —

1. Help us get prepared,

2. Keep our mind from wondering what we could have next,

3. Greatly reduce our temptation,

4. Minimize ‘sloppy dieting,’

5. Actually save us time in planning what we eat,.

6. Increase our rate of success,

7. Still, we choose most of the time to wing it.

We may have a rough idea in our minds of what we’re going to eat during the day. We may know we will have chicken for supper. Our plan may be to eat out at a restaurant where we know we can order “on program.”

And yet, the majority of the time we will not pre-write out our day so that we know we are not over our calorie/xchanges/points limit. When we don’t set priorities (this week’s topic in our meetings), we tend to follow the path of least resistance.

We’ll pick and sort through the things we need to do and work on the easiest ones — leaving the more difficult and less fun tasks for a “later” that, in many cases, never comes. Or, worse, comes just before the action needs to be finished, throwing us into a whirlwind of activity, stress, and regret. That’s no way to live. And it’s definitely no way to be successful in weight loss.

The step that will best help us is to pre-plan our day is to write it out as if you’ve already eaten it, and then just check it off as you go. But that’s the thing that’s hardest for us to do. It’s our big, fat, bullfrog sitting on our plate.

The thing to do? Just get up and eat it right away. Oh, and when you’ve got to eat a frog, don’t spend too much time looking at it! Just open wide and chomp that frog down. Otherwise, you’ll almost surely talk yourself out of doing it at all.

By the way, a serving size of 100g of raw frog legs contains 73 calories and has 16.4 grams of protein, 0 grams of sugar, 0.3 grams of fat, 0 grams of fiber and 50 milligrams of cholesterol. That’s 1P (one protein) on the Xchanges Weight Loss Program.

Kim is a lifetime dieter who lost more than 200 pounds. She leads motivational meetings at The Kim Bensen Weight Loss Center - 911 Bridgeport Avenue in Shelton. For more information call 203-513-8722 or visit kimbensen.com.