Maria's Last Diet

Breaking the Habit of Eating When You Don't Want To Eat

by Maria's Last Diet

Stimulus control is a method to use when something automatically evokes a certain behavior in you. If, for example, (like so many people) you get used to eating while watching TV, then you might begin to reach for food every time you sit down in front of the TV, hungry or not. In other words, the TV serves as a stimulus for eating.  

What you can do in this case is begin to break the connection between eating and watching TV. You might designate only certain specific places in your house where you will eat, and even certain times—all away from the TV. At first, when you watch TV, you’ll still think about eating, maybe even crave some kind of food, or have the urge to go looking through the food cabinets. But if you keep to your new stimulus control method—that is, eating away from the TV—the experience of sitting in front of the TV will begin to lose its power to evoke eating behavior in you. Ultimately, whatever those alternative places are that you designated will become the places associated with eating, and the TV will lose that connection.  

Gaining Weight Over the Holidays

by Maria's Last Diet

Does this go against what you know to be so? Two pieces of research show that people aren't gaining weight over the holidays, at least not much weight to speak of.

One study showed an average gain of three-quarters of a pound over the six week Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday (The New England Journal of Medicine 2000). The other (Nutrition Journal 2006) showed an average gain of one pound before and after Thanksgiving vacation for students who were not overweight. For students who were overweight or obese, the gain was about two pounds on average. Not much weight, right?

Actually, popular wisdom has been that gaining weight over the holidays is a sure thing, and it can be as much as five pounds. Even the participants in these aforementioned holiday weight studies believed they gained more weight than they actually did.

But…here's the kicker: people tend not to lose the weight they gain over the holidays. Thus, the three-quarters of a pound and the one to two extra pounds are likely to be there with you when the next holiday season comes around.

Do you see yourself in these findings? Got any suggestions for the rest of us? We don't want to be stuffed turkeys.

Making It Easier to Lose the Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

The main goal of a dieter is to achieve weight-loss success. This is usually way off in the future. An alternative to concentrating on this type of future-driven, long-term goal is to focus on the actions required to meet this goal. In other words, your focus won't be on "I have this much weight to lose". Your focus will be on the actions you are taking right here and now, as well as the actions you plan to take next.

By making your focus the day-to-day actions you take, you increase your chance of successfully reaching your future goal.

Here's how it works. Say you want to lose 40 lbs. That's your long-term weight-loss goal. What will make this goal a reality is how you plan and act from now until then.

There are two broad areas in which you need to plan and act. They are the food and the non-food elements involved in losing the weight. The food part has to do with what you eat, how much you eat, and how often you eat. For the food part, the plan can be to start dieting, stop overeating, cut down on junk food, etc. The non-food part is trickier. It has to do with your relationship with food. It has to do with what you might be using eating for—like feeling better emotionally, regulating your moods and temperament, stopping unpleasant thoughts, etc. Planning and acting are needed in both areas.

There is an added benefit. Shifting your thinking from the future goal to the actions you are taking in the present actually requires less effort on your part. Thinking narrowly about only what will happen at some future date is much more taxing and frustrating than taking it day by day.

What actions will you be taking today and tomorrow to keep you headed in the right direction?

Is Weight Loss Success Easier if You're Optimistic?

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you always filled with lots and lots of optimism when you start dieting? Before long though, does your optimism stop working and you fizzle out and leave all your good intentions behind? What can you do about this?

You may be surprised to hear that you can have too much optimism.

In fact, you may be overly optimistic because you think this will help you do better. Or, you may be over-the-top with optimism because you believe that by being so optimistic you’re goal to succeed will come true, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps you based your optimism solely on the great weight loss plans you’ve made, and you’re counting on these great plans to carry you to weight-loss success You might also be the kind of person who is being terrifically optimistic just because you are afraid to not be, optimistic that is. There are all of these possibilities and more for too much optimism.

Here’s the main question—is your optimism realistic? It can only be realistic if you consider your past experiences with dieting. Are your experiences filled with many dieting failures? Are you afraid to think about that? Do you feel that these memories of failure will only drag you down, reinforce the bad, teach you nothing good, and interfere with what you’re trying to accomplish now? Putting these past dieting experiences completely out of your mind in favor of a purely highly optimistic attitude will not work.

A weight-loss plan, even one you make with optimism, should be as realistic as possible in order to be effective. Here’s how you can keep your optimistic outlook and make it more realistic too.

• Use your past experience to plan and guide each part of your current weight-loss effort
• Make very specific links from the past to the present
• Be sure to list impediments from the past that you’ll now be facing again
• Think about past experiences that don’t justify your optimism and prepare for them to crop up again

Remember: Being optimistic is a very good thing, just as long as your optimism is informed by what you’ve been through in the past.

A Must in Losing the Weight: The Drinking Water Debate

by Maria's Last Diet

The Health Journal column in the Wall Street Journal (July 1, 2008) pointed up the ongoing controversy about the advice we've heard so often: Drink eight 8 oz glasses of water a day—to speed weight loss, and for overall optimal health.

Among the research cited by the WSJ column was Dr. Heinz Valtin's (Dartmouth Medical School) 2002 review of studies on drinking water in the American Journal of Physiology. Dr. Valtin found that there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove that 8 glasses a day achieves either of the above-mentioned results.

One thing experts do agree on though, according to the Health Journal column, is that individuals need different amounts of water depending on the physical activity they are engaged in. For example, it goes without saying that if you are exercising, you'll need to drink more water than if you are sitting at your desk doing paperwork.

Weighing in with a different slant, Weight Watchers recommends that dieters drink 6 glasses of water a day, specifically to take the place of snacking. Others in the dieting field also think that drinking water helps people feel full. And some people just seem to feel better when they drink more water.

Try this
What about you? What evidence do you have that drinking a certain amount of water each day leads to speedier weight loss or contributes to your overall health? Do some research (on yourself) and see the outcome. Does it match the skeptics or the converted?

How to Set Goals for Weight Loss Success

by Maria's Last Diet

If you set your goal at learning how to do something rather than setting a goal of performing well, you are likely to be have more weight-loss success.

There's a way to translate this idea into an effective weight-loss plan. You could set your weight-loss goal as this: "I will diet and lose 20 lbs." Or—you could say this to yourself: "I will figure out what things throw me off my diet, and then learn how to deal with those things differently."

The second goal, the learning goal, is more likely to bring you the weight-loss success you are after.

Your Friend Gets Thin. Are You Jealous?

by Maria's Last Diet

Think of it this way. If you are not a model or a movie star or a pop diva, it’s probably not so important to you that you not look like one. That is not your social frame of reference. A model needs to be thin, that is a big part of her life. She compares herself to others in her profession and that is how she sizes herself up.

But not you. You probably look around you in your own world to see how you’re doing. We all tend to do this. We compare ourselves to others who resemble us in the way they live. So if your closest friend did get thin, a woman who is a lot like you, then your comparison to her has much more meaning for you.

In a study of women and body image reported in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin as long ago as 1983, the psychologist researcher Thomas Cash found that women were dissatisfied with their bodies when they compared themselves to the thin bodies of other women in general much more than whey they sized themselves up against models and actresses.

The study worked like this: subjects viewed pictures of very attractive thin women and then were asked to evaluate themselves. A high percentage had a negative view of themselves. Then these same women were shown pictures of thin women who were identified as professional models, and again asked to evaluate themselves. In this case, their self-evaluations were less negative.

Here’s something else for you to consider. In another study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 2007, researchers showed that if a woman is already dissatisfied with herself and how she looks, if she goes around with a negative body image of herself in mind, then she is more prone to be affected negatively by comparisons with women around her.

So, rather than just being a jealous person, if you already disliked your body, then your friend’s weight loss is probably affecting you more than it might have if you didn’t harbor a negative body image.

How to Live a Healthy Lifestyle While You Lose the Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

G. Alan Marlatt, a psychologist working in the field of addictive behaviors, talks about a factor that significantly contributes to ongoing addictive behavior: an imbalance between "shoulds" and "wants". Dr. Marlatt has shown that too many "shoulds" in your life and too few "wants" make you more likely to turn (or return) to an addictive behavior such as overeating.

If you are attempting to stop overeating, but your life is filled to the brim with obligations and demands, then your lifestyle is what Marlatt calls "unbalanced". What's missing is the side of life that contains things you simply want to do, enjoy doing, as opposed to things you should do. Without "the wants" side of life, you are depriving yourself of personal rewards. It isn't hard to see then why you might seek out the immediate gratification of overeating.

It's very important that you let yourself engage in activities for pleasure and self-fulfillment. This is what balances out the external and internal demands, keeps you from feeling deprived, and makes it much less likely that you will feel the need for self-indulgence.

Try this
Ask someone close to you to make side-by-side lists of your OBLIGATIONS (shoulds) and PLEASURES (wants). See which list is longer. What did you find? Is your life seriously tilted toward being a "should" person or a "want" person, or are your "shoulds" and "wants" in balance?

Deciding to Change Your Eating Habits But Haven't Started Yet?

by Maria's Last Diet

The research literature on the way people change is very clear. Deciding to make a change, just deciding to do it, is a very important step on the road to actually making that change. As a matter of fact, key to a successful personal change in a behavior is that you NOT rush into action.

If you have made a firm decision to tackle the weight loss challenge, now it is time to prepare yourself. This is the stage in your change process where you’ll do the planning necessary so that any action you take to lose the weight will be successful. If you were to start dieting, say, without doing your planning and preparation, you would be much more likely to fail.

This period of preparation is transitional. It takes you from making the decision to acting on the decision. During this time you will need to do two things:

1. Strengthen your commitment to losing the weight
2. Develop a sound plan for carrying out your decision and attaining your weight loss goal

In order to do these two things well, you’ll need to consider the following:

• Becoming more and more aware of the negative aspects of where you are now
• Becoming more and more aware of the pros for you of losing the weight
• Making your plan acceptable to you, doable for you, and effective as possible
• Making sure your plan is concrete and includes methods for handling those weak “willpower moments” that always come up when you're dieting

Rest assured that what you have done already is the essential work of making that firm decision to lose the weight. You are on the exact right track. The best thing you can do now is hold off on attempting anything formal with regard to dieting, and pay greater attention to firming up your commitment and mapping out a good weight loss plan.

Body Image Development is a Risky Business for Girls

by Maria's Last Diet

There are several factors affecting body image development in childhood. Three important ones are parents, peers, and the media.

Parents
Parents probably have the biggest impact on how a child feels about her body. If parents comment negatively about their child’s weight, perhaps even encouraging her to exercise to lose the weight, this can contribute to body esteem problems. Another way parents may affect their child’s body image is by voicing their own weight concerns. A parent who is dieting or exercising extensively in order to lose weight can transfer a “not good enough” feeling to her children. A child might then focus on her own body shape and become dissatisfied with it.

Current data about the development of body image in childhood suggests that girls are more focused on having the right kind of body than boys. In order to counter the trend toward concentration on appearance for girls, you can do the following:

1. Encourage your daughter to explore her own physical strengths in order to promote feelings of body competency. For example, encourage different types of body movement such as soccer, yoga, swimming, dance, etc.
2. Make sure you are supportive about appearance and don’t allow any teasing about it in your household.
3. Help your daughter understand what bodily changes to expect during puberty.
4. Appreciate your daughter’s mind, her skills, her ambitions, her ability to communicate ideas, her social skills.

Peers
As early as elementary school, peers have an influence on a child’s development. It is clear that even for the very young child, weight can become a disturbing issue. Peer influences may teach a child about negative stereotypes associated with being fat or even a little chubby. It is thought that sensitivity to these negative stereotypes is greater in girls than in boys.

Media
Children see “the ideal body imagel” all around them. Very skinny girls and women are evident in magazines, TV shows, movies, and the world of pop music. A girl’s belief about herself and how she measures up to “the body ideal” has bearing on her developing body image.

It is a challenge―a very important one―to help your child with a body image problem. It is best to confront this issue sooner rather than later.