Maria's Last Diet

When You Start Losing Weight, What Can You Expect

by Maria's Last Diet

If you have a habit that is no good for you in one way but good for you in another, you’ve got trouble. If this habit has become an integral part of your daily repertoire, you’re in big trouble. You guessed it. The subject is weight and the kind of eating that makes you gain to the point of being way overweight.

One thing you can expect. When you start to change your habit of eating too much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods that are keeping you in the overweight big leagues, you will most likely feel worse before you feel better. What you’ve been avoiding or defending against by eating the way you have been you will now be uncovering and having to face. As you no longer avoid or defend against and you confront and acknowledge and develop new ways, you will be leaving that awful initial “what have I gotten myself into” feeling behind.

 

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.

 

Bringing It With You: Force of Habit and the Weight-Loss Process

by Maria's Last Diet

You can’t help but react to the weight-loss process with what you’ve learned over the years. The way you eat and what you like to eat will certainly be part of it. But your eating will only be a fraction of what you bring with you to the process of weight loss.

What you carry with you to the weight-loss table are your characteristic ways of dealing with lots of trying situations, like those that required persistence, sticking to guidelines, turning down temptations, being assertive, having patience, staying hopeful. Ways you developed in your relationships, throughout your education, at home with family, at work, and even at play are what we are talking about here.

Your previous ways are most likely to be activated by the weight-loss process if the process of weight loss has some of the same elements as situations that made you develop these ways and sustain these ways in the first place. In other words, it will probably be automatic for you, for example, to treat losing a lot of weight as a test if you’ve behaved toward lots of matters at work, at home, at school, and in relationships as if they were tests. A test mentality might be counterproductive, though, when it comes to losing your unwanted weight. It might put you under the kind of pressure that actually spoils rather than enhances your weight-loss effort.

One thing you can do to combat such automatic activation of your old habits so they don’t get in the way of reducing your weight, is to first acknowledge the existence and likely interference of these habitual ways of yours. Next, set a plan in place that you can use when a particular weight-loss situation occurs. Then practice this plan and have it well rehearsed before the actual situation occurs. This kind of planning and rehearsal will make what you do when that weight-loss situation is upon you less habitual and automatic.

Can you make such a plan for putting too much emphasis on the weight-loss process as just another test in your life? Can you also make plans to circumvent whatever automatic habits of yours you bring to the process of weight-loss?

 

Weight-Control Techniques: Will You Have to Use Them Even After You Lose All Your Unwanted Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

Does long-term weight control require everlasting commitment to weight control behavior?

Can you imagine losing all your unwanted weight, keeping it off forever after losing it, and having to use various weight control techniques to continue keeping the weight off?

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to lose a lot of weight and keep the weight off forever without having to be so mindful of how much you eat, when you eat, and what you eat?

We are creatures of habit, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. When you break your old eating habits, the ones that made you gain so much weight and prevented you from losing weight, and learn new eating habits, the ones that made you lose unwanted weight and maintain weight loss, shouldn’t your new habits, established as they now are, be what you can rely on?

Habit change should be sufficient, and you shouldn’t have to continue being so mindful of every little this and that you do with regard to eating.

A way to make sure your new eating habits work like this for you is take the old emotional motivations out of eating so much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods. While you’re dieting to lose your unwanted weight, if you work on the emotional reasons you were eating like you did, then when it comes to keeping your lost weight off, you will have developed eating habits that reflect your effort and your success with laying these emotional reasons to rest.

 

Here’s Why Habitual Behavior Makes It Difficult to Lose Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

How do I stop eating so much and eating all the wrong foods when I do it without thinking?

Now you might say tsk tsk, you should be ashamed of yourself. Who are you fooling? What do you mean “without thinking”?

But that’s just it; it really happens this way—without even thinking. After all it’s a habit, and that’s part of the description of a habit. It can happen without you even thinking about it. Before you know it, you’ve done it. In fact, you might be thinking about something else entirely when you’re doing something by force of habit.

So what’s that say for changing a habit? How do you go about changing a habit that you’re not aware you’re doing, and you do it before you know it? Let’s go outside the realm of food for an example. Say you’ve been keeping napkins in the right-hand drawer in your kitchen. But yesterday you rearranged your kitchen and it made more sense to you to put the napkins in the left-hand drawer, about 4 or 5 feet from where they were before. For the next week or so, every time you need to put out napkins you go right,  sometimes even opening the old napkin drawer before you realize you’ve moved the napkins. After some muttering under your breath, you decide that the next time you will remind yourself before you automatically reach for napkins that the napkins are now in the left-hand drawer.

In other words, the secret to how not to be a creature of habit is to become aware of what you are doing. You could set a goal for yourself to make sure that as part of your weight-loss regimen, you will heighten your awareness. Since your eating habits are often at the end of a chain of events (Someone hurts your feelings. You criticize yourself later for not saying something, and you criticize yourself again for never saying anything when someone hurts your feelings, and by then you’ve put yourself in a lousy mood. Someone calls and you think you were too curt with them, and now you feel guilty as well. Then—before you know it you’ve popped something in your mouth), it would be good if you heightened your awareness of the entire habit pattern, not just the food part.

 

Good Weight-Loss Progress is Determined by Habit Strength and Your Strength

by Maria's Last Diet

Successful weight loss won’t be yours if can’t get rid of bad eating habits and other bad habits that could interfere with the weight-loss process. On the one side, there’s how strong you are in changing bad habits. On the other side, there’s how strong your habit is. The answers to these two issues can determine whether or not you will lose weight and whether or not you will achieve permanent weight loss.
 
The Self-Report Habit Index is a way for you to check out the strength of your habits. Just plug in a behavior of yours below in The Self-Report Habit Index. Make believe you’re putting the behavior in the blank and then rate the behavior by choosing whether you agree highly, moderately, or slightly, or whether you disagree highly, moderately, or slightly with each statement.

For example, if you choose eating too much food as the behavior, you would then rate "eating too much food is something…"  on items 1 through 12 below, add up your score, and get a total for each behavior—the higher the total, the stronger the habit.

Since your personal psychology is always involved in losing unwanted weight, make sure you include some psychological ways of yours that may be habitual. They might have to do with the way you think, your attitude, your level of frustration tolerance, your feelings, your reactions, even your personal relationships, if they send you to food.

"Behavior X is something . . ."

1. I do frequently. 
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

2. I do automatically.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

3. I do without having to consciously remember.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

4. that makes me feel weird if I  do not do it.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

5. I do without thinking.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

6.  that would require effort  not to do it.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

7.  that belongs to my (daily, weekly, monthly) routine.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

8. I start doing before I realize I’m doing it.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

9.  I would find hard not to do.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

10.  I have no need to think about doing.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

11. that’s typically “me.”
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree

12. I have been doing for a long time.
   7        6        5        0            4               3           2
highly       moderately     slightly    neither agree    slightly    moderately     highly
agree      agree         agree         nor disagree     disagree    disagree          disagree


    Total Score _______


What did you discover? Was it helpful to you?

 

Easier Weight Loss Involves Changing People, Places, and Things

by Maria's Last Diet

The Alcoholics Anonymous injunction to change people, places, and things in order not to go back to old ways works for weight-loss difficulties too. It’s one of the best ways to start to dismantle strong habits. Take the habit out of its familiar context.

Making such adjustments helps you alter your expectations. An alcoholic with only a few months sobriety goes into a bar and she expects to drink. A heavy-set woman trying to lose some weight goes to a restaurant and it’s a challenge to stay on a diet. In each context the strong habit brings up an expectation of doing what is habitual in that context. The expectation reduces a person’s ability to perceive and try different ways of responding to the situation.

So, on the one hand there is avoidance of contexts in which expectations based on strong old habits would certainly prevail. If you’re not involved with those familiar old contexts—people and places and things, then you will be involved with new contexts—new people, new places, new things. In these new contexts your old strong habits and deep-seated expectations won’t prevail. There’s room to appreciate and test out new possibilities.

Go for it!

 

Permanent Weight Loss Comes From Challenging Your Everyday Habits, the Ones That Are Making You Stay Fat

by Maria's Last Diet

You want to lose weight, but you can't just adopt a food plan like you thought. It’s not that simple. Permanent weight loss requires permanent personal changes. This is the challenge you face when you want to lose your unwanted weight.

What you are asking of yourself when you are trying to lose some weight is to change the ways in which you operate. For instance, if extra food has been a comfort for you, then you have to give up this comfort and learn a new way to comfort yourself. When you make this kind of change, you are stopping yourself from being your characteristic self. This is not an easy task for anybody.

How can you change what you do that is so natural and so much a part of you? What will it take for you to let go of your everyday habits that have made you gain weight? What will it take for you to adopt new, unfamiliar ways that will help you lose weight?

You probably can use some help to do make these changes. You can get plenty of help for dieting. There are lots of diet books and weight-loss programs available. There are plenty of exercise routines, gym memberships, personal trainers, and friends to walk with. But where is the help when it comes to making those personal changes without which you won’t lose weight?

The lack of help for changing the way you operate is certainly an obstacle to trying to reduce your weight. But don’t make it an obstacle for you. For more information on how to change those habits that have prevented you from losing weight, you can read lots of blog posts about this at MariasLastDiet.com. There is also the self-help for weight-loss book, How to Break the First Big Rule of Women Who Stay Fat, which is part of the Symmetry Press series Weight Loss Books for Women — Using Psychology to Lose Weight.

 

You’re Not Losing Any Weight Because Your Old Habit Pattern is Still Too Strong. What to Do?

by Maria's Last Diet

After some talk about this and that, Tamika settled into a more serious focus with her therapist.

Tamika: I have this terrible habit of never being satisfied. I always thought it was a good
thing, and it’s what I used as a benchmark for how I was doing; I couldn’t have gotten this far in life without it. But there were times I didn’t like myself for having it. I thought never being satisfied was a bad part of me, something for me to feel guilty about. I always had to have more. In fact, my family used to make fun of me by calling me “ta-more-ka”.

Therapist: Has something come up about this?

Tamika: I didn’t tell you, but I’ve been trying to lose some weight. I put myself on a diet—portion control, no more snack attacks, and healthier food. But I can’t stick to the diet. My habit gets the best of me, and before I know it I’ve reverted to my old ways once again. Got any ideas?

Therapist: Sounds like a situation where your intention needs an increase in power. This is usually the case when you are trying to change a strong habit.

Tamika: So what can I do? I really want to reduce my weight.

Therapist: Well, you now know that when the moment comes, your habit may be stronger than your intention. It will obviously take repeating the new behavior many times before it has the strength of the old habitual behavior. In the meantime, why don’t you give your intention a boost in power. You might, for instance, knowing that there is the likelihood that your habit will be stronger than your intention, prepare for just that contingency.

Tamika: What do you mean?

Therapist: You could have a detailed plan on hand for strengthening your intention when it comes to dealing with never being satisfied. Your plan would include something to do in the moment; maybe even something to do that’s preventive and gives you a chance to anticipate rather than wait for the old habit to happen. You could, in regard to portion control, make sure that before each meal you take steps to set out only the right portions for yourself. People do this by not putting food in serving bowls, and putting only the amount you want to eat on your plate.
     Then, too, you could begin to develop your new habit of feeling satisfied in nonfood areas of your life. Really practice being satisfied all over the place, with the plan that you will bring your budding new habit into the weight-loss process after you’ve gotten used to it elsewhere.
     What do you think?

Tamika: I think I’d like to try it. I’ll let you know how I do.  
 

Unable to Lose Weight? Try Silencing Some Daily Habits.

by Maria's Last Diet

What you do so automatically that you call it habit is what having a weight problem is all about. Practice strengthens a habit while it weakens the possibility of you taking alternative actions. If you are overweight, it’s for sure you are practicing and practicing your weight-maintaining habits. Think what this means if you a trying to lose some weight. Your old ways are getting practiced and your new ways don’t stand a chance.

Habits are made to be broken. That’s what you’re going to have to do if you have your mind set on losing your unwanted weight—break those weight-loss-blocking habits. Habits, though, are like a 500 lb gorilla. And you know what a 500 lb gorilla can do—anything she wants. So how do you break habits like eating too much food, indulging in fattening snacks, and binging now and again—your 500 lb gorilla?

One way is to take the legs right out from under her. A habit’s legs are its goal. You didn’t think habits were mindless, did you? There’s a goal behind every habit, especially your eating habits.

To see what the goal of your eating habits are, try the following:

List the pros and cons for losing weight, and then list the pros and cons for not losing any weight.

            Losing Weight                                                    Not Losing Weight
         Pro                Con                                                 Pro                  Con


Pay the most attention to what you write down for the “pros” of not losing weight. In fact, write as much as you can about what is positive for you—yes, you heard right, positive about not losing weight. This is where you will find your goals for not losing weight. This is where you start to take the legs right out from under that hard to dislodge habit that is doing just what it wants and thwarting your best efforts to reduce your weight.