The Missouri National Guard Way
The obesity epidemic doesn’t discriminate against soldiers: The U.S. Military discharges more than 1,200 enlistees each year due to weight issues. To address the problem, in 2010 the Missouri National Guard adopted the Warrior Spirit Training Program (now called “FIT-P” for Fitness Improvement Training Program), a two-week training course that provides guidance in nutrition and fitness. Fit-P sessions at Fort Leonard Wood include courses in psycho-education on the following topics: getting structured, understanding triggers, the power of self-monitoring, lifestyle change, stress management, motivation and emotional eating.
Six weeks after the first seminar, the group of 46 soldiers lost 356 pounds combined, and the average body composition dropped 2.6 percent.
Jefferson City Magazine checked in to find out how you can apply some of the program’s principles to your own life.
As a psychotherapist and obesity expert, Lee Kern’s expertise is helping people understand and change their relationship with food. As the clinical director of Structure House, a nationally recognized weight management treatment center in Durham, N.C., he’s helped many overcome and control their battle against the bulge. Now members of the Missouri National Guard are benefiting from Kern’s expert knowledge of behavioral weight loss.
As part of the Missouri National Guard’s Fit-P, Kern spends a day with guardsmen and teaches strategies for maintaining a healthy lifestyle during six sessions. According to Kern, these skills are applicable to military personnel, but they also apply to the average person.
The case for structure
There are many psychological reasons that people turn to food, Kern says. For those working to control or maintain their weight, Kern suggests eating to fill nutritional needs rather than eating for calming, rewarding, stimulating or soothing.
“Making your food choices healthy and low calorie, that is what we called structured eating,” Kern says. “Structured eating is maximizing nutrition: eating mainly for nutrition and nourishment and lessening the degree that food is used for psychological reasons.”
For most people, structured eating translates to three meals a day plus one or two planned snacks. One pound equals 3,500 calories, which means that it only takes 300 to 400 extra calories a day of psychologically driven eating to lead to a significant amount of weight gain each year.
Understanding triggers
Most episodes of overeating begin with a trigger, and Kern teaches the ABC model to help patients understand how triggers lead to weight gain.
Every behavior is preceded by an antecedent and followed by a consequence. For example, boredom leads to eating cake, which leads to weight gain.
“Overeating doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens for a reason,” Kern says. “When I go to food, I’m asking for something, like entertainment, stimulation, soothing, comfort, relaxation.”
The three main triggers, according to Kern, are habit, or an automatic response to a time of day, a commercial or another trigger, boredom and stress.
The power of self-monitoring
Kern touts the benefits of using a food diary: a place to track meals, overeating and exercise.
Kern gives patients and participants from the Missouri National Guard a spiral-bound notebook where, for nine weeks, they plan and track meals and exercise. At the end of nine weeks, participants complete a self-evaluation and submit that, along with their diary and weight chart, to Kern.
“Nothing good will happen if you don’t have focus and a plan,” Kern says.
Lifestyle balance
“The main message here is to remember that a person’s relationship with food lives within a larger context, so how we eat is reflective of our larger life, what we do with our down time, our interests, relationship patterns and environment,” Kern says.
Therefore, to change a relationship with food, Kern says it is important to add healthy choices to an environment to make it more difficult to act out with food. It is all about balance: balancing work with self-care, which consists of time to relax, exercise and establish and maintain positive relationships.
“If I want to change what I do with food, I can’t ignore the house I live in,” Kern says. “You can’t ignore lifestyle, and you have to have balance.”
Coping with stress
The link between stress and eating is strong because food is often used to distract and soothe from stress.
However, eating to counteract stress is counterproductive, Kern says, as it most often leaves people feeling worse than they did before.
“It is important to learn functional rather than dysfunctional ways to deal with stress, ways that don’t involve calories,” Kern says.
Kern suggests building a toolbox for self-soothing. Tools such as spending time with family, viewing challenges as opportunities and perceiving problems in a more productive way are all calorie-free coping mechanisms.
Keeping it going
The challenge of every weight-loss program is keeping up the momentum. You’ve kept the weight off for six months, but can you do it for two years? As part of his time with the Missouri National Guard, Kern focuses on addressing motivation and honoring the fact that inside everyone, there are always competing desires to change and to stay the same.
Kern encourages patients to write a “Dear Me” letter, an honest reflection on the negatives that add up when they aren’t doing well with food or fitness. Some write that it is harder to climb stairs or that they can’t bend down to garden.
The letter also captures positives to keep patients motivated. Some write that their belt buckle went down a notch or that they were able to reduce their medication for diabetes or that they aren’t huffing and puffing when they walk the stairs.
“Everyone will have a bad day, but you can rebound with positives,” Kern says.
The biggest piece of advice Kern has to offer is the advice that most people don’t want to hear: There is no magic drink and no magic diet for long-term weight control.
“We like to think of it as a total lifestyle change,” Kern says. “It will take the use of tools, it will take focus and being mindful and being willing to do some work. If you do it, you’ll have success.”
