It is a truth universally acknowledged that the whole Christmas season is unsafe: It is too delicious.
Weeks of sugary goodness draw unwary eaters off the straight, narrow path and into a quagmire of blubber.
Meanwhile, health-conscious people find ourselves anxious to redirect the ones we love. We sweetly implore them not to eat the whole pie. We tenderly suggest a 5K they might run instead.
Such advice is rooted in concern, but “bringing it up will likely only cause hurt feelings,” Josh Klapow says via news release from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he teaches in the School of Public Health.
A clinical psychologist, Klapow thinks discussing weight ought to be avoided at dinners and parties.
But what does he know? He’s just some “expert” quoted in a news release.
Joseph Banken is also a licensed clinical psychologist - in Arkansas, where he’s on the faculty of the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System. One of his specialties is speaking with people in ways designed to help them recognize and change damaging behaviors.
Banken teaches a counseling style called motivational interviewing, a nonjudgmental, non-confrontational, partnership-like approach that nurtures readiness to change.
If you’re thinking he doesn’t sound like someone who believes in advising your too-fat spouse to go easy on the Christmas pudding, well, you’re right.
Banken told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the problem with lecturing loved ones about overeating is “we all have an innate sense that we should be making our own decisions. And when people tell us what we need to do, we naturally push back.”
Efforts to help are more likely to be helpful when we talk with the people rather than at them.
“I think the first step is to ask them, ‘Do you mind if we talk about this?’ or even to say, ‘I have concerns about your eating and would it be OK if we talked about that?’
“If the person says no,” he said, “then we want to respect that.”
Would he try out this less bossy approach across the dinner table?
“I wouldn’t. But I know people who do,” Banken said. “They kind of look at the dinner table as the stage to give that sort of feedback, as in if we give that feedback in front of other people, maybe it will sink in.
“It embarrasses, it humiliates the person, and we then end up working against or at cross purposes for what we really want to try to help someone with.
“So I think giving advice that’s unsolicited - not asked for - tends to ruin the occasion and makes the person more resistant to any information we might provide at a later point that could actually be helpful to them.”
And meanwhile, we self-appointed guardians of health feel resentment, “because now they’ve rebuffed the information that we have provided them. In the literature it’s called a ‘righting’ reflex: ‘I’m right and I’m telling you how you should be, what you should do, and if you would only listen to me I would help you have a healthier life by healthier eating.’”
But if someone were to accept a humble offer to talk (proffered in private) about nutrition and change, he says, “the other step could be to ask that other person what they know.We oftentimes underestimate what other people know and what their experiences have been.”
Take a few steps back from self-righteousness to listen and learn, remembering that nutrition science evolves, obesity is not totally understood, and sometimes we aren’t so well informed as we think. Sometimes we merely have been lucky. Also, strategies that work for us might not work for another person and it is possible that person has already tried them and failed.
As Banken tactfully suggests, “The idea that we are experts in other people’s lives is very, very inaccurate.”
ActiveStyle, Pages 29 on 12/16/2013