Maria's Last Diet

Need Help Losing Weight? Here’s What to Do.

by Maria's Last Diet

If you are like so many women, you’ve probably asked yourself many times: How am I going to lose weight? This isn’t exactly a wrong question; it’s just not the right one to start with. This question propels women toward weight-loss plans good and bad, gym memberships, food scales, calorie counters, controlled portion sizes, eating diaries, quick weight-loss diets. These things can be excellent weight-loss tools for sure, but they don’t work the instant wonders we want them to work. If they did, anyone would be able to get thin and stay thin without a struggle.

…Instead of asking: What can I do to lose weight, try something different this time. Ask yourself: What have I been doing to keep this weight on? If you ask this question first, it will breathe new life into your weight-loss process.

          excerpt from  Breaking Up With Food: Maria’s Last Diet. Symmetry Press

 

Mind What You Eat: What’s on Your Mind If You’re Eating Too Much Food

by Maria's Last Diet

If you let your mind go just where it wanted to go, what would your mind make of your eating too much food and carrying all your unnecessary weight? Would it be too concrete—you’re overweight because you’ve been overeating—and not lead to anything constructive? It could intellectualize—a BMI of 29 and the need to go on a low-calorie diet. It might rationalize—because it’s become such an important crutch for me.  

What if your mind went to a forbidden place, somewhere you haven’t dared to go before, but a place that might solve the riddle of why you eat too much food and are carrying all that unwanted weight? What would that place look like for you? A suggestion: Try making up a fantasy, a real fantasy of what you’re trying to do for yourself by overeating and weight gain.

Examples: 1. The riches (delicious foods) fill the woman (you) and make her worth a lot more. 2. There’s a little child in me that needs love and tenderness (food), and she won’t live if she doesn’t get what she needs. 3. The fairy princess (food) is always there when I need her. She chases away my sadness, fills me with joy (eating), and lets me know she’ll always be with me (full stomach and bulging hips).

 

Creative Thoughts Cure Weight-Loss Difficulties

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you bring any of your creativity to the weight-loss process? Is it even important to be creative when it comes to losing your unwanted weight? It's not only important, it's necessary—especially when you run up against weight-loss difficulties.

Let's say you have been trying to lose some weight, but you're finding that like always you're making excuses, all sorts of excuses for why you haven't done this and why you haven't stuck to that. You recognize what you're doing, but you can't stop yourself from doing it—not in time anyway, to prevent cheating, buying treats, having seconds, eating emotionally, and other types of diet spoilers.

You need to generate some ideas for what to do to get out of this rut. You could try ways to be more careful and avoid making excuses. Here you'd have to focus on your tendency to make excuses and ward off the impulse to do so before it occurs. You could get creative and invent some ingenious reminders. In any case, trying 'not to' is going to require quite a bit of concentrated effort, persistence, self-control, and the like.

What about going in a whole different direction? Instead of trying to avoid making excuses, try substituting something equally as attractive to you as making excuses, something that takes you toward your goal rather than away from your goal of sticking to your weight-loss regimen. What could you substitute for 'making excuses' that would be equally (or more) attractive? The solution to this is the creative act in the weight-loss process.

 

Weight-Loss Psychology: Is Your Flexibility and Creativity Limited by Trying to Prevent a Negative Outcome

by Maria's Last Diet

We are always being told to think positively, work toward a positive outcome rather than trying to prevent a negative outcome. In working toward a positive outcome you don’t have to be so cautious and conservative. You can be explorative, think flexibly and more abstractly, and are freer to be more creative. “I will lose weight by going on this great diet I found for myself”, is an example of positive thinking with a positive outcome.  

If you take a more risk aversive position by working primarily toward preventing a negative outcome, you are likely to be more vigilant, more controlled, and consequently, much less creative. At least, that’s how the story has been told up until now. While this can be true, it doesn’t have to be the whole truth here. “I will have to make sure I don’t go off my diet”, is a clear statement of working toward avoiding or preventing a negative outcome. Can you be flexible and creative in this case too?

Psychological research shows that when creativity and originality are called for in order to achieve their goal, people who work primarily toward avoiding a negative outcome can become less cautious and conservative and more creative. They do it because it’s called for, and this shows that they have it in them.

So don’t lose heart if someone says you are being too negative, too cautious, too controlled in the weight-loss process. You too can be creative and original. It may take some effort to override your cautiousness. You may need to see that being creative at this point is the only way to get to your goal. These are the factors that should spur you on to add some creativity to your otherwise cautious, controlled approach.

 

Try Your Own Talk Therapy for Losing Excess Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

When you want to lose a lot of weight, dieting and exercise alone don’t help you with the very personal reasons you weigh too much. It’s these personal reasons that make it such a problem to lose weight and keep it off. Trying to lose the additional weight is more like you’re dealing with your own therapy than you are with weight loss.

So don’t fight the ‘therapy’ part of losing unwanted weight. Use the idea of therapy to get at those pesky personal reasons. Here’s how you can do it.

Pretend you’re talking to a therapist about your weight. See how openly you can talk about all that’s involved for you in being an overweight person.

Of course, there will be your feelings about yourself because you are overweight, or because you’ve failed to lose weight, or because you haven’t really tried to lose your unwanted weight.

Then there’s your history. How long have you been an overweight person? When did you start to gain so much weight? Were there any precipitating factors that you can think of? What were they? What did they have to do with? Is there a pattern to your weight gain? Is there a pattern to your overeating, your binging, or your consumption of calorie-dense food?

Tell all of this, if you can, to your pretend therapist. Talk out loud because talking out loud makes it possible for you to listen better and evaluate what you are and what you might not be saying.

As a further step in this ‘therapeutic’ process, take a recent example of eating so much or eating too often, or whatever food-related incident that you know to be the cause of you gaining or maintaining so much weight. Describe this incident to the fullest. Include the day and time the incident occurred. Describe the preceding circumstances, your feelings, thoughts, and expectations, and resulting consequences and effects. Describe too the impact this incident had on other aspects of your personal life.

If you find this kind of 'therapy' helpful, make more than one appointment with 'your therapist' so you can keep talking, listening, evaluating, and making the most of this 'therapeutic' relationship.

 

Unable to Lose Weight? Can’t Stick to a Diet? Be creative.

by Maria's Last Diet

Reducing your weight if you’re an overweight woman is a creative act. Just to stick to a diet successfully requires a lot of ingenuity. There is a lot to do battle with. Too many battles often lead to diet failure. If it takes too much out of you, you won’t want to sustain such an enormous effort.

“No, I can’t have that—or else.” “I have to make sure I _________.” “Oh, no. I did it again, when I didn’t mean to.” “I’m not going anywhere.” “I can’t face one more minute of this.”

This is where the creative act comes in. What can you figure out to do that will avoid battles altogether? No way this is going to happen. There always have to be battles when you’re trying to lose unwanted weight. So, what can you do to reduce the intensity and frequency of the battles, so you can stay in the weight-loss process?

There are people, and you may be one of them, who look for every opportunity to reach their goal. They keep themselves moving forward to the goal by taking this or that chance with themselves. Then there are those who are trying to down-regulate the possibility of “failing”. They are self-protective. They are looking for relief, and they try not to venture into “unprotected” territory.

Guess which one is going to be the more creative, the one who is going to generate insights, ideas, and solutions that take them more easily through the battles of losing some weight. So—take a page.