Maria's Last Diet

Are You Ready to Lose Weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

What do you have at the ready for losing excess weight?

Yes, you’ve picked a weight-loss diet plan. And yes you cannot stand the way you look and the way you feel carrying all that weight. This gives you some motivation.

But do you have enough of the goals, sub-goals, actions to take, and contexts and opportunities in mind that you will need in order to start your diet and sufficiently stick to the diet?

Why don’t you see what you already have at your disposal for making your weight-loss intention come true. Make a list of your psychological resources. Are your goals and sub-goals good enough? Are they well thought out? Do they cover what you need to cover? What about the actions you will have to take to reach your weight-loss goals? Are these actions familiar and useable when it comes to losing a lot of weight? Then there’s your experience with contexts and opportunities. When an opportunity to take action arises, will you be ready to exploit it? Do you easily associate contexts and opportunities with the weight-loss steps you might take?

What you have at the ready for losing weight is an important part of your weight-loss strategy. In fact, it is more important than your weight-loss diet plan. It is what makes your weight-loss diet plan viable.

 

In the Process of Weight Loss, Knowing What to Do is Never Enough

by Maria's Last Diet

In the midst of trying to lose some weight, you are often called on to deal with yourself in ways that either facilitate or impede the weight-loss process. You may know what you are supposed to do, but you can’t always do it. Your intellect (knowing) might be way ahead of your emotional and behavioral readiness to do what you have to do.

Take the case of eating out. Before you started your weight-loss routine, any time you ate out, you ate more than usual. You always had a drink before dinner and wine with your meal. Dessert was a tossup, except when there was something on the menu that was one of your favorites. Then dessert was in.

Now, though, things have changed. You’re trying to lose some weight, and by-and-large you’ve been doing a great job. Tonight’s jaunt to the restaurant with family and friends will be a test of your resolve. Only your resolve is only one-third of the way there. You know what you should do, but you aren’t really ready to emotionally and behaviorally do it.

There is a clear difference between what you should do and what you can do in the restaurant situation, and perhaps in many other weight-loss situations too. Keep in mind that you will have an easier time doing whatever it takes to lose your unwanted weight when your emotional and behavioral capacities are on par with your intellect.

 

Build Up Trust and It Will Come (Losing A Lot of Weight)

by Maria's Last Diet

All right! You want to lose weight. You want to lose a lot of weight. It’s going to be a big, big project. Where do you start?

Why not start with the small, less significant aspects of your daily life? Why start there? If you’re going to undertake something as big as a weight-loss process to which you will entrust your goal of losing a lot of weight, why not build up your trust in yourself first. After all, it’s you who are going to carry out the process of weight loss.

Once you are immersed in a weight-loss process, you will have to endure, cope with, and come out on top of many difficult feelings. That’s what it means to make any self-change. By seeing that you can tolerate, learn to think about, and cope with your small daily feelings, you will be building the trust in yourself you need to tackle the larger, more discomforting feelings of the weight-loss process.

As you work over the small feelings of your everyday life, you will, besides building trust in yourself, be honing your template for how to successfully deal with your feelings.

With template and trust in hand, you can enter the weight-loss process feeling safer and more secure that you can now cope more effectively with weight-loss feelings.

 

Getting Ready to Start Your Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Too many women with excess weight to lose believe that all it takes to start a weight-loss regimen is a decision to do so. Their logic goes like this: “I haven’t decided to start dieting. Once I decide, I’ll start.”

To these women, “deciding to” looks like it works. But weight-loss failure is so prevalent that the belief that “deciding to” works has to be a form of false optimism. If anything, the naïve belief in simply “deciding to” contributes to false starts and sudden stops, making it impossible to lose weight. Once a dieter is truly ready, “deciding to” takes on new meaning.

So what exactly does it take to get truly ready to start your weight-loss journey? Probably first off, you have to want to do it. Wanting to is your point of departure. A lot goes into “wanting to”. “Wanting to” is not a homogeneous motivation. It has depth and breadth and lots of parts. It is most likely made up of many experiences over a great deal of time, making wanting to a conclusion that you’ve come to from these experiences.

Some of these experiences that make up the “I want to” will be bad, but definitely motivating. You will “want to” start dieting to avoid having these bad experiences again. For example, feeling way too full and bloated can scare you into wanting to do something about it. Seeing a very fat woman in your very own personal mirror can start you thinking about how you do not want to look fat. Experiences that make you uncomfortable enough to start thinking about doing something about being really heavy is where a truer than true “I want to” comes from. 

There are also your good experiences that make you truly motivated to lose weight. Let’s say you were recognized for some achievement you made, and you felt proud of yourself. You might take this prideful feeling and use it to feel ready to take some small, but mighty weight-loss step. 

As you can see, “wanting to” is part of the process of becoming mentally prepared to reduce your weight. “Wanting to” is very different from “deciding to”.

So next time—diet-wise and weight-loss-wise—make sure you “want to” and not just “decide to”.

In other words, to be ready to lose unwanted weight, you should have at least some of the motivation you need. You don’t need all of it; you need just enough motivation to be ready. You have to “want it” just enough to get ready—ready to start. The rest of the motivation you can pick up as you go along. In fact, with success comes the feeling I can do it. And along with the feeling that you can do it, comes more motivation to do it.

As part of getting ready, you will also need emotional wherewithal to use your motivation well. Emotional wherewithal is what you bring with you to empower your motivation. It is not really separate from motivation, but without it as an integral part of your motivation, you will not have what it takes to turn your wish into realistic thinking.

Having the emotional wherewithal means that emotionally you have what it takes to ride out the bumps in the road. In this case, it will be the bumps you encounter in your motivation. For the past month or so, for example, your motivation might have been down. You sapped all your motivation that you worked so hard to build up by being so caught up in work issues or family matters or any number of motivation depleting issues. With these two diet-readying resources, motivation and emotional wherewithal, you have the makings of a commitment to yourself, and an “I want to” that stands for something. 

   excerpt from  Using Psychology to Lose Weight: Because Dieting and Exercise Alone Don’t Work.

 

Help! Weight-Loss Challenges Are Coming. What Should You Do?

by Maria's Last Diet

What do you do when you can’t change something that’s going to be hard for you, yet you will have to face it soon? Isn’t this often the case when you’ve set your mind on shedding those extra pounds? Aren’t there lots of things about changing your pattern of eating that you know you will have to face despite the fact that they are going to be very hard for you?

Can you in advance of what’s coming do something to lessen the impact on you so that you can take whatever it is more in stride?

Here are some ideas about what you might do. You might enlist the help of a friend or family member, someone to talk to about what you will be facing. You could work with yourself on taking a different perspective of what you’re facing, or by taking a broader perspective. What about becoming more knowledgeable, gathering information that might help you feel better informed and more prepared. There’s practice too. You could do a run-through, a dry run, and see what’s involved, and what you will have to do when the time comes. Practicing might just ease your mind, make you more confident, and that could be all you need to clear the way.

The goal of course is to get yourself prepared to cope with what is so hard for you. The harder the challenge, the more extensively you should prepare yourself to meet it. In almost all life’s challenges, good preparation is the key.

 

The Weight-Loss Process Has to Start. What Gets You Ready to Do It?

by Maria's Last Diet

Plain and simple. You start thinking, I’ll do something about this extra weight I’m carrying. What got you to think this way?

Might it have been an oh so casual remark that someone made to you or you made to someone else?

Could it have been a quick glance in a storefront window or when you got a good look at your whole body passing the full-length mirror this morning?

Was it the benefits of being a thinner woman that you were thinking about last night as you were falling off to sleep?

Perhaps it was the new confidence you’ve been feeling as a result of helping your daughter for the past year get over being jealous of her younger brother.

What made you start thinking, I’ll do something about my extra weight? Do you know?

 

Women and Their Weight—Training to Shed Those Pounds

by Maria's Last Diet

What skills are you going to need in order to lose your excess weight? Will you have to think differently, feel differently, and act differently? Yes, you will, and that’s a tall order. What if you trained to lose unwanted weight? Is that unheard of? What if you went into training, and then took what you developed in the training period with you into your actual weight-loss regimen. Wouldn’t you be better prepared?

The training would be in thinking differently, feeling differently, and acting differently when it comes to your pattern of eating and what affects your eating pattern. 

Let’s look at the job that lies ahead of you—losing some weight, losing a lot of weight. What will the job entail? Don’t just say “going on a diet” or “sticking to a diet”. There is probably much more to the weight-loss process for you than exercise and dieting. For example, are you an emotional eater? If so, you will have to deal with that. Do you easily feel deprived? Then what are you going to do about feeling deprived? Are you prone to breaking promises to yourself? If so, losing weight and keeping it off is one big promise to yourself, isn’t it?

All of this, including dieting and exercise and sticking to them, can be practiced beforehand. That’s when you can work out the kinks, develop the wherewithal, learn what you need to learn, and then apply it when it comes to the job of a lifetime—reducing your weight to where you want it.

 

Are You Up For the Emotional Situations That Each Weight-Loss Step Brings

by Maria's Last Diet

What do the demands and pressures of the process of weight loss call for emotionally?

When you’re trying to lose unwanted weight, you will be dealing with a variety of emotionally laden situations in which you will have to use your emotional knowledge and emotional management skills. It would help to anticipate what the weight-loss process is going to require emotionally and see if you have the emotional wherewithal you will need.

You might, for example, need to more fully express your feelings, not hold them in so much. Holding them in over the years is what led to you making yourself feel better by eating so much. Or, maybe for you it’s just the opposite. You should work on reigning in your feelings, manage them and not let your feelings always get the best of you. That’s what got you to be where you are with your weight.

Weight-loss activities bring with them their own demands and pressures for emotional competence. Are you prepared to get through days and days where you can’t have a fattening food fix? That’s what you will face when you are dieting or when you change your pattern of eating.

If you are really interested in losing some weight, then you have to be prepared—well-prepared—for what the demands and pressures of the weight-loss process calls for emotionally.

 

Getting Yourself Prepared Before You Even Start Dieting

by Maria's Last Diet

Hi, I’m Genevieve. Yesterday we talked about how I was getting ready to start a weight-loss regimen, and for me getting ready was making a good diet choice. Well, today, I’m reporting on the fact that I’m still toying with what to do about being tempted.

If you remember, I’m afraid I can be tempted all too easily by calorie-rich food. That’s been my history. I am going to be following a diet plan that puts me far away from such fattening food. But I know that all the best diet food in the world won’t be enough when that time comes. You know that time. It’s when all your resolve goes completely out the window, and there you are back again into an old pattern of eating that you haven’t yet done away with.

So here’s what I’m proposing for myself. I’m going to have a plan. Yes, a plan. And when that time comes, I’ll be ready for it. I’ll know what to do.

First, I’ll make a list of all the situations I used to be in where I was so tempted that I would automatically give in to temptation. Here are just a few of these me out of control eating situations: parties—any kind, holiday eating, nighttime eating, Sundays, brunches, snacking while watching TV. You get the idea; and these are only a few of the situations where I can’t stop eating food that makes me fat.

Then, I’ll plan what I’ll do when that situation is upon me. For example, I can’t do away with Sundays. They’re going to come each week like they always do. I could go out, away from my apartment, where I won’t be so tempted. I could do that. But that’s not very realistic. Although…I could do that at the beginning, when I just start dieting. If I can avoid Sundays at home for a while, I might even convince myself—a little—that I don’t have to (that’s “have” with a capital H, and an exclamation point worth of emphasis) give in to temptation. That will make me feel stronger.

But what will I do on all those other Sundays when I don’t or can’t go out and get away from what tempts me? I’ll have to have a plan for those Sundays too. I need to do some more thinking. I’ll get back to you on this.

You know, talking to you like this is really helping me shape myself up, not only to want to start dieting, but to want to start dieting and actually be ready for what losing weight by dieting really entails.

 

Getting Yourself Better Prepared to Start Dieting or Begin Some Type of Weight-Loss Regimen

by Maria's Last Diet

Genevieve was all set to shed some of those extra pounds she had come to totally dislike. She had been gearing herself up for weeks, months actually, if you take into consideration her dismal moods of the past few months.

Over the past 3 to 4 weeks, Genevieve took a number of more decisive steps toward developing a weight-loss regimen. She decided that she would be following a diet plan once again. For her, the best diet food has to be food that is very different from the food that has been making her stay fat. This is a smart move because she is anticipating a potential trouble spot—being tempted by that old, well-established eating pattern of gulping down fattening food. This is part of her history and why she gained too much weight. She knows her downfall is to give in to temptation. Since being tempted, is still something she hasn’t mastered yet, she is going to rely on her diet choice to help her not be tempted.

What Genevieve did was recognize her shortcoming and plan for it ahead of beginning a diet. She did this by choosing a special diet, one that would take her as far away from her usual fattening foods as she could possibly get. Nip being tempted in the bud—always a good idea.