Maria's Last Diet

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.