Maria's Last Diet

Don’t Struggle and Make It More Difficult to Lose Weight Than You have to.

by Maria's Last Diet

When you’re attempting to lose a lot of weight, it’s possible there is a struggle going on inside you between the following:

   Getting explicit instructions on how to go about losing weight

   and

   Making discoveries about yourself about  the right weight-loss steps for you to take.

As you immerse yourself in the weight-loss process, you often wish you had the answer and you look to diet books, diet advice, seeking as much diet support as you can.

But you also make lots of discoveries about yourself and what it takes for you to stick to a weight-loss regimen despite the very nature of who you are and the personal lifestyle you have created for yourself.

The value of discovery-based learning and explicit instruction has been the subject of a great deal of research and debate in educational psychology. For the purpose of reducing your weight, though, there’s no need to get into such a debate. There’s plenty of room for both an explicit guide to losing weight as well as opportunities for more free-ranging discoveries about what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Lose Weight Now Is What Every Woman Wants. It’s a Recipe for Weight-Loss Failure.

by Maria's Last Diet

Where are you on the way to reducing your weight?

    Are you not even thinking of losing some weight at this time?

    Are you considering the idea of shedding some pounds?

    Are you deciding among certain weight-loss strategies in preparation for
    losing your unwanted weight?

    Maybe you’re further along. You’ve decided how you will do it, made
    your plans, and are taking actions like following a daily dieting plan,
    getting online weight-loss support, and keeping up the motivation to stay
    on your diet.

As you probably know from experience, you can be in any one of these stages of readiness to shed those extra pounds. That’s just the point. Where you are counts. Where you are on the readiness-to-lose weight continuum determines what’s best to do now and what’s best to do next.

So don’t hurry yourself along needlessly. Work the stage you’re at. If you work the stage, “I’m not even thinking about losing weight”, you’ll be surprised to find that, by doing this, you’ve moved yourself along to the next stage, “I’m considering the idea of losing some weight.” And so on.

The Weight-Loss Process Works Best When You Take It From Where You Are

by Maria's Last Diet

Losing unwanted weight is a process of change, and it is important to realize that not everyone is ready to snap into action. Dieting and weight-loss programs may be a number of steps too soon. Engagement in the weight-loss process should start with where you are emotionally and motivationally. Going on a diet when you aren’t really ready to start a diet is an example of snapping into action too soon.

One good way to start is to find and mobilize your strengths. See what motivations you do have. Focus on these and see how these motivations can be used to start you on the process of change.

Take your overinvestment in eating and food, for example. While you may think it isn’t right the way you eat and keep weight on, you may be doing it to help you deal better with personal issues that would otherwise be too challenging. See what strengths you have for dealing with these issues more directly. Success in dealing with such personal issues can give you the encouragement you need to be less taken up with food and eating.

Tackling weight loss from where you are gives a whole new definition to taking action. Taking action doesn’t have to be start your diet if you’re not ready. It doesn’t have to be stop eating the way you do if you’re not ready. Making yourself ready can be enough of an action step, at least for the present.

Make Sure You Get a One-Way Ticket for Your Weight-Loss Journey

by Maria's Last Diet

Whenever there’s a big change in anything, it always necessitates a process of blending the old with the new. This is true when you remodel a house, or change what political party is in power, or even when you lose unwanted weight.

The old “you” may have eaten too much purely out of habit. Or, the old you may have used food more purposefully, as a way to negotiate the ups and downs of life. The old you may have had a pretty fixed image of being very overweight. The old you may have felt hemmed in by extra weight, not able to fly free in life.

So now here’s the new you. Losing a lot of weight was hard, but you did it. You are proud, and God knows you look a thousand per cent better. But this big change is not all there is. Always, always, there is leftover from the old. This must be taken into account, acknowledged, dealt with, and used creatively. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of inadvertently falling back into the old, and losing all the new ground you have gained in your life by losing so much weight.

How does one accomplish this amalgam of old plus new? The first and foremost thing to do is simply recognize that just because you lost weight—even if it’s a significant amount of weight—doesn’t mean that the things you did and thought and felt before are all gone. By no means is this ever so. You are new in some ways, that’s for sure. But you are a combination of your past and you present, and if the future is to turn out the way you want it to—in this case, if you are to continue keeping weight off—you need to keep in mind ALL of you.

 

Stop It! Stop It Right Away! You’re Not Losing Any Weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Bam! I quit! Cold turkey. I’m shutting the door—tight. No wiggle room. Got to. No margin for error. No going back. Just “I quit”.

I didn’t bring any into the house. None at all. Like the AA saying, I changed people, places, and things—just so I wouldn’t be around it. No temptations were going to grab me at the outset. I had made up my mind and now I was putting some teeth into my decision.

It’s been a couple of weeks, and it’s really working. Or should I say I’m really working it.

So I didn’t keep any around—any of the old best comfort foods, I mean. But this wasn’t the only thing I didn’t keep around. I got rid of my cravings too. Just quit them without looking back. Well, a peek or two.

I could see that my cravings were the result of a pattern of thinking that I had. Of course, I quit that pattern of thinking too. Cold turkey again. I did it by catching myself in the pattern. It had become habitual, and I had to work hard so that it didn’t take me by surprise. Thinking things like l feel all alone, I’m not good enough, all that I didn’t do rather than all that I did do, was the path that made me a compulsive overeater. I set about quickly destroying the path.

I destroyed the old path that was eating away my brain by taking a new path. The old path was there. I could see it off to the side. I stayed on the new path, and after a couple of weeks I noticed some weeds growing in the old path. That’s because no one was taking care of it.

Yeah, quitting cold turkey isn’t exactly quitting cold turkey. Your world doesn’t turn around simply because YOU QUIT. What does happen, though, is by quitting cold turkey you set a decisive process in action. This decisive process is you—and all you are doing to uphold the I QUIT vow you made to yourself.

Do I recommend going cold turkey? Yes, I do. It does the job if you do the work. It’s not for everyone, though. Some people have to sneak up on their resolve, build it up, work on it over time. Cold turkey, for those who can work it, is a wonderful way to kick start a diet, stop yo yo dieting, get right on the road to your weight-loss journey, prove to yourself that it’s not true that you cannot lose weight, stop thinking like an overweight woman, and show yourself that you can have a lot of control over eating.

 

See What Caused Your Diet Problem and Made You Not Stick to the Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Achieving your goal is a worthwhile thing, but it is not without its problems. If you have difficult moments when you’re on a diet—times that seem to catapult you right back into overeating and stuffing—here’s something to try:

We call it a “Trackback”.

Imagine yourself going on a diet—let’s say on Tuesday morning after the big July 4^th weekend. You’re gung ho, really up for it; your confidence is good. You do great until Friday, follow the diet to the letter, and you feel good about it. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, one of those difficult moments hits and you find yourself perched on a precipice, in great danger of falling off.

Okay, so here’s where “the “Trackback” comes in. What preceded this moment?

Then you can trace it back, let’s say to just an hour before. Where were you? What were you doing? What were you thinking? How were you feeling?

You may find some clues there, but probably not enough answers to what got you in this predicament. So then, you can continue your Trackback. Think back to, say, six hours before, and ask yourself those same questions: Where was I? What was I doing? What was I thinking? How was I feeling?

Then you can reach back even further, perhaps to the night before, then to the previous day. You can even go all the way back and call up images of the last diet you went on, and what problems you had with it. And you can go back more than that, if the spirit moves you.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and nothing happens without a history. Exploring history can tell us so much, from the history of the earth, to our own personal histories. Where we’ve come from has everything to do with who we are, and what we’re able to accomplish.

If the Light Bulb is Dim, Then Losing A Lot of Weight is Slim—to none

by Maria's Last Diet

Weight loss is a learning process. This is especially true when you are unable to lose weight.

If you cannot lose weight, you have to learn how to do something you’re unable to do. You need to learn what’s going on that is making it difficult to lose weight. You also have to learn how to get around whatever obstacles are making you not able to lose weight. You have to learn what it will take for you to lose your excess weight.

So that’s the case for learning. Now hear this.

To learn, you have to be interested—interested, that is, in learning. And when the learning ain’t easy, you have to be doubly, even triply interested.

• How interested are you when it’s learning about the weight-loss process and your difficulty losing weight?

• How interested can you get yourself to be about losing weight?

• What’s involved anyway in helping yourself in the interest department?

If losing unwanted weight is a learning process, especially when you’re experiencing weight-loss difficulties, and having a high level of interest is necessary for learning, then being interested, as interested as possible, is key.

How can you up your interest level so you can learn better, more easily, more comfortably, more effectively?

Two personal characteristics that make a person interested are curiosity and openness to experience. You can see how related these two qualities are to learning. They are probably part and parcel of persistence as well. In fact, if you want to stretch it just a bit further, you could say that curiosity and openness make for more interest, and more interest makes for better learning, and better learning—although we’re really not talking about it here—makes for stronger willpower. (Ah, that old willpower thing again—so important for losing additional weight.)

Being interested enough to learn how to surmount weight-loss difficulties. in the simplest of solutions, may come down to you creating a process of weight loss that is interesting enough for you—one that makes you more curious and open to your experiences, and to learning.

 

You Don’t Solve A Weight Problem Just Because You Lose A Lot of Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

In anorexia, for example, a general rule of thumb for deciding whether a person has recovered from anorexia is if she reaches 85 to 95% of what is considered her normal body weight. 

But the criteria—close to normal body weight—is being questioned (as it should be for excessive weight gain as well). In anorexia, one can regain weight and approach normal body size, and still be struggling with thoughts and behaviors that are so much a part of the disease. 

So, let’s say an anorexic woman got professional help, and was able to eat enough to gain back the 40 pounds she lost. But—she still obsesses about every bite of food she takes; she still considers herself fat, and is severely critical when she looks in the mirror; she engages in exercise compulsively; she is still unable to carry on without food and eating thoughts absolutely ruling her every day activities.

Can you really say she has recovered? It doesn’t sound right, does it?

It is virtually the same if you’ve become overweight, even though the effects of being overweight are not usually as severe as the effects of anorexia. You can lose excess weight, you can even reach your ideal weight, but if you haven’t set to rest all the other problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that were the cause of you eating so much, have you really solved your weight issues?

It doesn’t sound as though you have, does it?

 

Can You Learn Self Control As You Try To Lose Some Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

Compulsive eating, without any doubt, comes under the heading of lack of self-control. So, if you’re a compulsive eater—can’t stop yourself from eating so much and just have to have that food treat, then you’re not exercising self-control.

Having enough control over yourself is complicated. It is not something that you either have or don’t have—but it can look like that. For some who have little control by the time they reach adulthood, lack of self-control has gotten to be a character trait. For most people, though, their capacity for being self-regulated is less a matter of who they are than what situation they’re in. In other words, most people have self-control when they need it, but show a lack of self-control in certain situations.

When it comes to the weight-loss process, self-control is a must. Lack of self-control is what makes weight-loss progress such an iffy proposition for people—both kinds—character trait and situational. 

Making a plan to lose weight, as you can see, must include what it will take you to exercise self-control. Learning to have more control can be accomplished by setting self-control goals right along with your weight-loss goals.

• A common goal: “I will stop eating when I’ve eaten a normal portion. (I may have to redefine what is a normal portion.”)

• The plan: “I’ll do this at every meal, whether I eat home or eat out.” I’ll start slowly by doing this at breakfast. Depending how I do at the end of a week, I’ll add lunch to the plan. And then a week later, dinner, as well.”

• The reinforcement (aka reward): “I’ll write down my feelings of pride and self-esteem after each time I do this.” (intrinsic reward) “I’ll ask my husband to write down his feelings about me when he sees me do this.” (extrinsic reward) “I’ll also give myself a small, but meaningful (non-food) gift each time I reach 10 or more successes in a row.” (another extrinsic reward)

• Practice: “Since I’ll be practicing every day, I’ll have 7 practice sessions the first week, 14 the second week, and, by the third week, I’ll have 21 practice sessions per week. Just to see how I’m doing, I’ll rate my ease of self-control each day using a subjective scale from 0 to 100. Zero will be self-control is not easy at all. One hundred will be self-control is the easiest thing possible.

• Successes (plural): “I will make sure I have lots of successes, big and small, when it comes to learning how to have greater control.

• Transfer of learning: “While I’m learning how to have self-control in relation to my compulsive eating, I’ll remember the good control I have over myself in some non-eating situations and bring this control to bear on solving my compulsive eating pattern.

 

When You’re Taking Steps to Lose Weight, Is This You?

by Maria's Last Diet

When it comes to the weight-loss process, is this you?

• You can’t stop thinking of your failures when it comes to losing unwanted weight.
• A few failures make you feel like a total failure.
• You pay more attention to your mistakes than to anything else.
• When you look over your weight-loss progress, you become critical and negative.

If this describes you, trying to lose excess weight will be an anxiety-filled endeavor.