Maria's Last Diet

Turn Body Dissatisfaction into Body Satisfaction. Give Yourself a Second Chance.

by Maria's Last Diet

How you view your own body affects not only your self-esteem but also your eating habits.

What if you wrote about your body for 15 or 20 minutes for the next 3 to 5 days? What if you picked one or more stressful body issues or experiences to write about, and expressed your deepest emotions and thoughts about them? What do you think would happen?

Body image research reported in the British Journal of Health Psychology says that this kind of self-disclosure can make a big difference in how you then think of yourself and your body.

Writing and getting it out there right in front of you helps you not be so automatic in your judgments about your body. You can get to see when, where, and why you might have developed a lesser image of your body. If the body image experiences you write about were traumatic, writing about them gives you a second chance to reduce the effects of the trauma.

Try writing and see what you find.

 

How to Achieve Weight Loss (in a Nutshell)

by Maria's Last Diet

How you perceive yourself is definitely one of the biggest influences on whether you’ll have insurmountable weight-loss difficulties or lose weight successfully. In fact, your self-concept is key to any kind of achievement you want to make in your life.

On the other hand, the achievements you make on the way to your goal of losing unwanted weight will definitely have a big influence on your self-concept. 

Some advice: Before you undertake a weight-loss program, do what you can to enhance your self-concept. Be sure, though, to cover both bases, not only the effect of self-concept on achievement, but also the effect of achievement on self-concept. Make sure you develop the skills you will need to make steady weight-loss progress and reach your goal weight.

You can find information on weight-loss skills by going to The Reading Room (in the right-hand column of this blog) or in the Psych Your Diet series. Please stay tuned for more on enhancement of your self-concept.

 

Being an Overweight Person, and the Importance of Acknowledging It.

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you aware that you’re an overweight? This question is not as silly as it may sound. According to analysis of the 2003 – 2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 25% of women who were overweight did not perceive themselves as being overweight. 

Analysis of the Survey’s data on16,720 adults showed that 98% of the women who thought of themselves as overweight wanted to lose weight. 

Perceiving yourself as being overweight was the most important predictor of wanting to weigh less. The odds that a woman would pursue some type of weight-control method was 67 times higher when she perceived herself as an overweight person versus perceiving herself as having the right weight.

 

Weight Loss Difficulties? How Did You Get to Be the Way You Are?

by Maria's Last Diet

Here you are, almost fifty pounds overweight? How did you get to this point in your life?

I don’t know. Before I knew it, I weighed more than I ever did before. I remember when I used to gain some weight. I’d lose it again within a reasonable amount of time. It was no problem for me back then.

When was back then?

Mmmm. I guess I might have been a freshman in college. Before that I never had a weight problem. Not really. But I thought I did.

Thought you did?

Yes. I never liked the way I looked. My thighs were always too fat, and I didn’t think my calves looked slim enough. I was OK on top, and my butt, I guess, was OK too. Anyway—I thought I was fat. This was especially the case in high school. I often thought that boys didn’t like me as well as they liked some of my friends, and that was because I was too fat in places.

So, let’s go back to when you were a freshman. What happened?

I started putting on more weight in my thighs, and in my butt too. I became more self-conscious about how I looked. The boys I wanted to hang out with didn’t want to hang with me. I had to take what was leftover. That’s what made me work really hard to get rid of my excess weight. It wasn’t easy at times, but I did it.

When did you start gaining weight and keeping the weight on?

I don’t know for sure, but I think it was after college. I felt so alone. My life had been college, and after that I was going nowhere. I didn’t have much of a life. I roomed with two other girls and went to work as an office assistant. My degree in English didn’t get me anywhere. Looking back, I think I had very little hope for myself. I hadn’t met anyone yet, and I was having a miserable social life. My relationships with men had all been awful.

Sounds like you were dealing with a lot—too much for you.

You know, I guess I was. I couldn’t say that back then. I thought it was me. I still think it was me. I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, pretty enough. Although I’m married and have two children, and a job that I like, I haven’t gotten over being that old me. There’s no question about it now. I’m just fat. It’s not the thighs and the butt, it’s fat me, and I don’t have to worry about how I look or who I am.

 

I Hate My Body. Too Many Times Too Many Women Have Said This. What’s Body Dissatisfaction Have to Do with Women Losing Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

What’s with women being dissatisfied with their bodies? All women—well, almost all—want to weigh less. That’s the kind of body dissatisfaction that sixty percent of American women can’t seem to satisfy.

There is a drive for thinness going on, and it has been going on forever—or at least during the entire lifetimes of today’s women. You might not be surprised, therefore, to learn that all types of eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, crash dieting, yo-yo dieting, purging are so much more prevalent for women than men. Roughly, it’s about a 7 to 1 ratio, women to men. (Eating disorder fact: Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.)

So why are women killing themselves over how their bodies look? And, by the way, you’d expect that if having a thin body is so important why are they not thin? The weight stats: On any given day, 45% of women are trying to diet. BUT…60% of women age 20 to 74 are overweight or obese. How do you explain this?

From time in memoriam women were found to be wanting, in one way or another. Not good enough to vote. Not good enough to be a person in her own right—just chattel. Couldn’t fight for her country. Basketball was too strenuous beyond a few bounces of the ball. The glass ceiling. Just sex objects, despite the fact that they were mothers, wives, daughters, sisters. Women had to be better than men to be accepted in medical school—and then their success was attributed to their manliness.

What’s a woman to do when it’s been such a man’s (read, mad) world? The only way to settle her predicament is for a woman to look at her body—because that is the most basic feature that distinguishes her as a woman—and say, “it’s not good enough”.

Keeping too much unwanted weight on for a woman makes her feel not good enough or equal enough. If this develops into one of the common eating disorders, it is a sure sign that help is needed, not just with eating control and weight maintenance, but also with more important matters like the sense of self-worth. It’s self-worth more than anything else that drives the engine called women. And why shouldn’t it? It does for men too, but they don’t count in this discussion. Women have a completely different history.

 

Body Dissatisfaction Isn’t Just a Throwaway Line. It Has Consequences.

by Maria's Last Diet

Is it easier to try to lose weight if you are dissatisfied with your body? You’d think it should be, wouldn’t you? Being motivated to start a diet, to exercise, to do something about your body should be at the boiling point if you’re dissatisfied with your body. But not liking your body can be the “motivation” you need to do just the opposite and keep your body just the way it is, weight on and all.

What we are talking about here is a woman who is discouraged because her body isn’t the way she wants it to be. As a result, her dissatisfaction with her body does not give her the motivation incentives she needs to get out of this dilemma.

Is this a form of depression? Probably serious discouragement is a more appropriate diagnosis.

How many of you suffer from this state: body dissatisfaction, loss of motivation, deep discouragement that is so much a part of you when you try to lose weight, and then you don’t even try?

What will it take to change your state of mind? If this is you, the problem you will have to solve is how to not get discouraged to the point where being discouraged becomes “a way of life” when you want to lose weight.

This means finding ways out of the discouragement pit you’re in. In this regard, take a look and see how self-critical you are because you are not able to lose weight. Self-criticism, especially excessive self-criticism, may be a key factor here. You might not even recognize that you’re so critical of yourself. It may, along with chronic discouragement about your body image, have become so much a part of you that you don’t even know you’re doing it.

You might also have to fight through your discouragement and try to find some things about your body that satisfy you. Here’s a short list of possibilities—your body’s good at: sex, what it takes physically to do housework, holding and hugging the kids, activities like driving that require coordination, taking you nicely through each work day.

In fact, identifying the ways in which your body is working well for you can increase your body satisfaction, which lessens your dissatisfaction. As a result, you become better able to use this moderated amount of dissatisfaction as good motivation to try to lose weight. 

 

What is Your Image of Yourself When You Try to Lose Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

What fluctuates when you try to lose weight? Yes, it’s your weight. But it’s also your image of yourself—what you think of yourself.

You’re bad. You’re lazy. Why can’t you stick to anything? Feel frustrated—when you do it yet again. When will you learn? There’s no hope for me.

Aren’t these indications that your image of yourself is suffering terribly?

What happens, though, when you’re clipping along with your weight-loss strategies and having success? What about your self-image then? Isn’t there a world of difference?

Weight loss isn’t only about losing weight. It’s about self-image and the effects of  a good or a bad image of yourself on being able to stay the course when it comes to your desire to lose excess weight.