Had a busy weekend and not much time this morning, but here's a quick link: People losing weight for charity.
Annie Retter was so shaken by the hunger she witnessed on a recent trip to Africa that she slashed her food budget — and consumption — to send her savings there. Her sister [Linda Clute] did the same.
Each has dropped more than 60 pounds thanks to the "Africa diet" they started in March. They now send $400 to $500 a month to a children's meal program in Namibia….
Retter has traveled to Namibia every year for the past four years to support the project and/or do research. But this year's visit with her sister really broke her heart. Sitting at the kitchen table at her sister's house last week, she opened a photo album showing children lining up in front of a corrugated tin shack offering free meals.
Both Retter and Clute weighed more than 200 pounds at the time….
The article also describes some "lose a pound, donate a pound" type programs.
Of course, food shelf donations are good, so don't take this as advice not to try such a thing. I have to say I'm a little skeptical about the weight loss effectiveness of programs where you link how much you donate to how much weight you lose. I think you might be setting yourself up for nothing more than a higher-stakes guilt cycle, and one where (if you happen to reach your goal weight) the motivation disappears right when you need it most. (Though maybe you could vow to donate 40 lbs of food every year that you keep off your 40 lbs.)
But linking food donations (and an awareness of the plight of truly hungry and malnourished people worldwide) to your daily behavior — as the sisters in the above quote do — now that seems like it could be motivating, effective, and the trigger for a lifetime of healthy eating and community activism. Eating very simply and sparingly as an act of solidarity, and/or donating the cost of the excess food you're not eating anymore (or even donating that volume of food directly to a food pantry)? Well, there's an ongoing motivation.
A lot of what turned things around for me was sheer revulsion at my own behavior. Mine was not triggered by any specific experience, but it's easy to imagine that revulsion and embarrassment being triggered by being a (relative) glutton in a land of starvation. Perhaps we should all imagine ourselves there, once in a while.
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