Maria's Last Diet

Changes in Yourself With Successful Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

After you lose your unwanted weight are you more yourself or less yourself? Are you the same self or a different self?

Losing a lot of weight is more than what it is cracked up to be. It is not only a loss of excess weight that is occurring; it is also a very real personal change—back to the person you once were, onward to the person you never were.

Make no mistake about it; reducing your weight has consequences beyond simple weight loss. Everyone knows this. Everyone thinks about it. “I’ll be a lot happier when I’m thin.” It’s even talked about by everyone. “It’s like I’m a teenager all over again.”

This change in yourself is certainly welcomed with open arms. If this is so true, then why, if you have this kind of very positive goal for yourself in mind, do you find it so hard to lose weight?

Do you know why?

 

Changes in Yourself Like Long Term Weight Loss Require Reclassifying

by Maria's Last Diet

What was once desirable is no longer desirable and what was once undesirable is now desirable. An essential part of any weight loss process is reclassifying the things in your life that are good for you and what in your life is bad for you.

Once upon a time not too very long ago eating too much food or eating too many calorie rich foods might have seemed good for you. Now with a weight loss mindset your task is to reclassify eating too much or too fattening food as bad for you. Eating less and eating right becomes good for you; that is if you want to lose your unwanted weight.

Because of your new weight loss goal, you reclassify, not only food, but also anything else that is related to your weight loss goal. This includes personal relationships, feelings, thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, waking and sleeping habits, level of awareness, and much, much more.

Reclassifying is not dieting nor is it exercising. It is a separate albeit essential component of the process of weight loss. So be aware, if you can, that you have to give yourself the time it takes and the wherewithall it takes to reclassify. Rome was not built in a day, and neither is reclassifying.

 

What Changes in Yourself Will You Make for Losing A Lot of Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

What personal changes will you make in order to lose your unwanted weight?

Try putting together a list of personal changes that you know will enable you to reduce your weight. See if you can come up with at least 10 items.

Then rate these personal changes on a subjective rating scale from 0 to 10, where 0 = none and 10 = the most, for each of the categories below.

                                 

Take the example of “stop emotional eating”. It certainly looks like it will be challenging and stressful, but it will also have very high value. Doing it will not be enjoyable and there is some belief but not a lot that it can be done. Perhaps what should be worked on in this case is to find ways of making this personal change more enjoyable and increasing confidence in being able to do it.

What did you find out about yourself by doing this exercise?

Learning New Skills for the Weight-Loss Process

by Maria's Last Diet

Let’s for a moment think of the weight-loss process as a set of skills, a different set of skills from what you’ve been using to eat too much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods, which made you gain weight. Now you want to lose this unwanted weight, and you have to learn a new set of skills to help you accomplish your new goal.

Whether you realize it or not, to reach this new goal of yours to lose your excess weight, you will have to undertake a major reorganization of your skills. Such reorganization requires long-term, repeated activities. At first, you will find the going slow and hard, as you re-teach yourself what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. You will also be trying to give up old ways while you are trying to establish new ways.

You can expect there to be considerable fluctuation in your ability to pull off this reorganization. Sometimes you’ll get it and sometimes you won’t. Don’t get discouraged, though. That’s the nature of the process. Greater stability will come when you’ve practiced and developed a sufficient skill base. The process won’t be a gradual, steady, upward sloping line from start to finish. Old skills, those weight-gaining ones, will be in the mix until your reorganization is complete. They and the variability in new skill learning will make it so that your reorganization will have an up-and-down feel to it. As you grow more skilled, though, you will reach a satisfying, more sustainable stability.

See if it helps you to think of the process of weight loss as a set of skills to be learned, a reorganization of your thinking, feeling, believing, and behaving, as each of these domains pertains to eating and weight control.

 

Diet Behavior: What Can You Expect?

by Maria's Last Diet

Can you go with the flow? Yesterday was a great dieting day. Everything went right. Breakfast was a breeze. Lunch was over before you knew it. Dinner, well dinner, was the capstone of the day. No hunger pangs after eating a diet meal. This weight-loss process is in the bag. Easy, peasy.

Can you go with the flow? Today was a lot harder than yesterday. Nothing went right. I got hungry right after breakfast. I know I didn’t eat enough; or at least I think I didn’t eat enough. I’m just not sure. I couldn’t wait for lunch. I was all ready to make up for breakfast. I squeaked through. Had to have a snack mid-afternoon, though. Then dinner, and another snack while watching TV. Yes, it was celery with some cream cheese on it. That was the best I could do to maintain my diet.

Can you go with the flow? I didn’t feel like dieting at all. So I didn’t.

You’ve got to remember there are going to be days like these. So give yourself a break and go with the flow. Losing your unwanted weight doesn’t have to be a smooth, steady, ever upward and onward process. You can expect lots of variations. Variations in motivation, perseverance, skillfulness, willingness, dutifulness, and even-handedness are a natural part of human learning and performance. They are part of the weight-loss process as well.

 

Changing Eating Habits. Yeah, Right!

by Maria's Last Diet

You have to admit that eating is a skilled act that with practice has become as near to automatic as you can get. It’s as skilled as keyboarding or bicycle riding or driving a car.

As a skilled act, eating consists of many automatic processes and procedures. There’s opening your mouth at just the right time and in just the right way to receive whatever food item it is. There is masticating, chewing the food in such a way that it can be swallowed comfortably. There are so many moves when it comes to eating, not only mouth moves but hand and eye movements ever-so-well timed and tempered to meet the food and direct it into your mouth.

Then there’s the automaticity of taste preferences, texture preferences, being used to a certain fat content, a need to eat starches, and an appetite for protein that are hard to unlearn. They too are well practiced and by now habitual.

Amount of food too is by now fairly automatic. Eating lots at one time. Eating less but eating more often so that you get enough.

All of these eating habits work against you making changes. They have over time become an integral part of your daily repertoire of eating behavior.

That’s not the end of the story. There’s more. There are your habitual thoughts and feelings, some related to food, like “I’ve been thinking about having a piece of pie” or “I’m feeling mighty hungry, even though I just ate.” There are also those thoughts and feelings that you rope into the eating and food arena. “I can’t help thinking how I messed up today’s presentation. I deserve a reward for trying, though. Let me see what there is to eat.” Or, “I’m feeling bored. I’ll just get myself a snack.”

Do you see why it’s so difficult to lose weight? Your eating habits are so much a part of you.

 

What is the Benefit of the Way You Eat?

by Maria's Last Diet

What would you say your eating does for you?

• Your eating gives you an undisturbed space and a comfort zone where you are relieved of the stress of adjusting to others.

• Your eating helps to prevent feelings of emptiness.

• Your eating soothes your anger.

• Your eating calms your feelings of despair.

• Your eating enables you to release tensions.

• Your eating may be a way to get back at others.

What would you say your eating does for you?

 

The Weight Loss Process—Changing Yourself and What to Expect

by Maria's Last Diet

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that changing your behavior is not a linear process: put in a certain amount of effort and over a certain amount of time and you get that very same amount of self-change back.  Changing your behavior is also not a continuous process. You shouldn’t expect that pounds drop off at a certain steady rate, nor should you count on behavior changes to occur progressively from deciding to change to making the change to maintaining the change.

In fact, you will find that the weight-loss process like any set of personal changes you make will be discontinuous and non-linear. There will be sudden shifts where you can go forward or backward or nowhere. In other words, you will experience gains and losses and plateaus.

Why are we telling you this? Because forewarned is forearmed. Being well-informed can help you not feel disappointed or demoralized when you’re not moving forward, upward and onward like you think you should. Realizing that progress in changing your behavior is discontinuous and nonlinear should give you some additional stability to move forward.

 

Do Your Body and Your Brain Fight Against You When You Want to Be Losing A Lot of Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

Can your body and your brain learn what to expect and when what’s expected (e.g., food) is missing, conspire against you to get it back again?

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes

Changes in leptin, gut hormones, and circulating nutrients sense the energy deficit and set off compensatory mechanisms that operate through the energy balance controls in the hypothalamus and brain stem and effect the cortex and limbic system as well.

Then there’s adaptive thermogenesis where metabolic compensation occurs to conserve energy. This also hinders weight loss.

There is also passive metabolic compensation whereby less energy is required to sustain basal metabolism, less energy is spent for physical activity, and less energy is dissipated as the thermic effect of food as you lose your unwanted weight.

So.

What can you do when your body and brain are conspiring against you in these ways?

You can use psychology to lose weight. You heard right. You can “get yourself to do” (that’s the psychology we’re talking about) what you need to do in order to reduce your weight.

There is always cause for inertia and return to homeostatic balance. In the case of weight loss, you are returning the homeostatic balance to a bar you kept setting, inadvertently perhaps, higher and higher until you reached a weight that was no good for you in a lot of ways. You can’t fault your body and brain. They are just going along with you. They are restoring your weight to where they think you want it to be. They’ve learned from you.

Now it’s time to unlearn them. If you are trying to lose some weight and you want your brain and body to follow along, keep setting the bar lower and lower. Remember, though, there’s more than dieting and exercise needed for the weight-loss process. When you reset the bar, there are lots of readjustments you have to make to your psychology in order to realize your weight-loss goal.

If you need help getting yourself to make these psychological adjustments, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog.

If you need more specific help, email us at hi@mariaslastdiet.com and we’ll point you in the right direction.

 

 

 

Losing Excess Weight is a Trip Through Never-Never Land

by Maria's Last Diet

Being in a kind of never-never land, that’s what it’s like when you’re trying to change yourself so that you lose your unwanted weight.

You never quite know whether you can do it or not. You’ve got the diet laid out in front of you. You see what you should eat to lose the weight. You think it’s doable, but you just don’t know. You guess that you can do it. You hope that you can do it. You say it with assurance to reassure yourself. You do what you can to push away your doubts. But you just don’t know, not for sure.

You never quite know how you did it when you did it. For instance: You got through that tough patch last week, the kind of tough patch that’s thrown you before, but this time it didn’t. Something was working right for you. Let’s call it unconscious knowledge or unconscious know-how, and you just did it. You stuck to your diet. You ate less or you ate differently. How and why you don’t know. All you know is you got through the week and the rough patch too.

One of the things you might think is that you maximized the probability of doing just the right things or enough of the right things to help you stay on your diet. This is something you want to repeat. You want to bottle it so you can use it again and again. But you don’t know what you did. You go over it in your mind and come to some more specific conclusions. “It was my attitude. It was a can-do attitude. That’s what did it.” Or — “The way I’ve been dieting just accumulated and became part of me. If I got through that rough patch, then I know I can count on all I’ve worked for.”

Sure, you can think what you want. But are you right? Conscious thinking might not help you understand unconscious know-how. All you know is that something happened. Something good. And you want to keep it like that. Trying to change yourself is a never-never land. There are possibilities and probabilities, but you never, never really know exactly what’s true.

Truth is you ate less or ate differently, and you know that to be so. What made you eat less or kept you eating on your diet remains a mystery. That’s the never-never land of weight loss, and you have to be ready to travel through it if you want to have success in reducing your weight.