Maria's Last Diet

Helping a Friend With Unwanted Weight Gain

by Maria's Last Diet

Maria remembered the time when her good friend Wendy dispensed with all the small talk. She was calling Maria back then to talk about her weight. So there was none of the usual chitchat about the mundane and the politically mundane, Wendy got straight to the point. She was alarmed because she had started to gain some of her old weight back. Maria picked right up on this and asked if there was something eating at her. Get that? Eating at her. Wendy said that’s why she was calling Maria. She learned from her struggles with weight, from knowing Maria, and from reading Escape to Thin that emotions and emotional patterns were heavily involved in weight control. So Wendy and Maria made a date to talk more about this.

When they met a week or so later at Wendy’s house, Wendy took Maria into the den, where the two women settled themselves, Wendy on the couch and Maria in an overstuffed rocker close to Wendy. At first, Wendy rooted around for an answer to her weight gain. Maria asked her friend, “Has there been anything different going on in her life?”

“No,” Wendy said. “Not that I can think of.”

Maria followed up by asking Wendy to “Try to name, guess at if you need to, any changes in your life since you started putting on weight.”

Wendy couldn’t think of any changes, and Maria encouraged her to work at it some more. “Try,” Maria exhorted her friend.

Wendy ran through all the usual things in her life. Her children were fine, her marriage was okay, work was work, her parents were healthy. “No,” she said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Maria took a chance at being a pain and tried to get Wendy to narrow down her observations, to think more specifically. Maria knew there had to be something that happened. But Wendy couldn’t get to anything else. She said to Maria that she was back on her old diet, the one that worked so well for her before. So, for the time being, Maria knew that she had to leave it like that. She had learned that people can’t be pushed. Pushing at them wasn’t a form of help. And it spoiled the possibility of helping at a future time.

 

Is There Any Weight-Loss Magic? Yes, There Is.

by Maria's Last Diet

Once upon a time there was a woman who lost a lot of weight and kept the weight off for year after year. She could now eat anything she wanted and not get fat.

Sound like a fairy tale to you?

It is indeed a fairy tale in certain ways.

It definitely has a happy ending, one that you wouldn’t have predicted from all the unforeseen forces this blessed woman had to contend with. There were giants galore, big personal giants that this mere mortal of a woman had to fight off and tame and banish from her life. There were elves too. These were the little things, her day-to-day, minute- by-minute battle with all that she had to do to keep up her resolve to lose her unwanted weight.

But the biggest surprise of all, after it was all said and done, was that she could eat anything she wanted and not get fat.

This part of her story was truly a fairy tale. The woman had worked so hard and long taming the giants and keeping up with the elves that some good fairy must have rewarded her by having her want only what would not make her gain back the weight she had lost.

Oh—from time to time, she ate a little too much here and there. Fattening foods sometimes. Still, there was plenty she had learned to do about such matters, and without giving it too much thought, she would dust off some of her old weight-loss magic and set it to work.

 

How to Maintain Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

It’s important to start early on in the weight-loss process to insure weight-loss maintenance once you’ve lost the weight.

The statistics for maintaining weight loss are abysmal. They run as high as 80% of people who lose unwanted weight do not maintain their weight loss. And many of these people not only gain all the lost weight back, but they gain additional weight as well.

So start early in the weight-loss process to build in weight maintenance strategies. You can begin to think about the problem of weight-loss maintenance before you undertake any weight-loss steps. Although this might seem counter-intuitive, it’s not really. Giving lots of thought to how you will maintain your weight loss will enable you to do things during the weight-loss process itself that will help you with weight control later on.

The weight-loss methods you choose should have a lot to do with good weight control. You might not want to choose too strict diets and liquid diets because they won’t give you the practice you will need for controlling your weight after you’ve reached your goal weight.

And how will you prepare yourself for not being on a diet for the rest of your life? After dieting and weight-loss, there is no need to keep to a diet that is meant to help you lose a lot of weight. You’ll be on your own more, with the freedom to choose what you’ll eat and how much you’ll eat. When will you learn these things? If you wait until the weight-maintenance phase, you’ll have to learn right in the very situations that you will need to deal with. It’s better, of course, to have learned how to deal with these matters before they occur.

Practicing these weight-control skills while dieting gives you the preparation you need for later. While they are called weight-control skills, they really have to do with you and your self-control. So let’s call them self-control skills, for that’s what they really are.

One opportunity to practice the self-control that’s needed for weight-loss maintenance is when you cheat on your dieting plan. How you learn to handle your feelings, your thinking, and your behavior around a diet cheat is most likely how you’ll use what you’ve learned to modify your off-diet eating patterns after you’ve reached goal weight.

These are only a few ideas for preparing early and often how to maintain the weight you will lose. For more specific strategies go to the Reading Room, which is to the right of this blog post, or you can read about maintaining lost weight in Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 3. Psych Yourself to KEEP IT OFF.