Maria's Last Diet

Let’s Make Mistakes. It's A Good Way To Start Losing Weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Mistakes are not only common during the process of weight loss, they should be expected and used to further active learning of what to do and what not to do for successful weight loss and successful weight-loss maintenance.

Trying to avoid making mistakes is a common approach in anything we do. Not making mistakes because we have made what mistakes we needed to in order to learn what to do and what not to do is vastly different from trying to avoid making mistakes altogether.

In fact, if you think about it, all the learning you have ever done had at its core, learning from your mistakes. Learning to walk, way back when. Learning to read, way back when. Learning to how to have sex. Learning a job or a craft. Learning to be a parent. Learning to be you. It all involved making mistakes and learning from your mistakes.

This is true of the weight-loss process as well. So face it. It’s best if you embrace the idea—don’t wince— that mistakes are good.

Here’s what openly accepting mistakes can do for you.

• make you stop and think about what caused you to make a mistake

• inform you about what knowledge and skills need further improvement  

• give you the feedback you need to correct and improve

• reduce unpleasant emotional reactions like feeling frustrated, worrying too much, and being self-critical

• free you to engage in better planning, monitoring, and evaluating your progress

• encourage you to revise strategies

• get you to think about the issues and deal with the issues from different perspectives

• promote the kind of thinking and doing and personal presence that is useful in brand new, never-before encountered situations

One rather traditional mistake during any attempt to lose weight is cheating on a diet. Here’s where mistake acceptance fits right in. Instead of excoriating yourself up one side and down another for cheating, why not use the cheat (read: mistake) and learn from it. You can learn why you cheated so you can deal with this issue more head-on. You can learn how to recover from a cheat. That’s important not only for sticking to the diet, but it is also a necessary chance to practice slipping up a bit and recovering, which are two processes you will have to be up on after dieting, when it comes to maintaining all the weight you lost.

 

Will Guessing at What to Do Next Ruin Your Chances for Successful Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

The weight-loss process for the most part requires you to have an “I know what to do” attitude.  “I will stay on my diet today despite the fact that I’m going out for lunch.”

Nevertheless, there are times when you have to take weight-loss steps that you aren’t so sure of. “What should I do, I’m feeling hungry and it’s only ten o’clock in the morning?"

Is there a right answer? Should you guess at what to do, even though you could be wrong?

You’ll be pleased to know that guessing, even if you’re wrong, can have a positive impact on your curiosity, and curiosity is a motivator for finding what works best for you. A wrong guess can also make you be more attuned to the feedback you get from it, and paying attention to feedback puts you on the road to doing something constructive about your mistake.

So when it comes right down to it, it is better to guess at what weight-loss action to take and be wrong than not to guess at all.

 

Making It Easier On Yourself As You Lose Your Unwanted Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

Making the weight-loss process a learning experience can help you avoid the heartache—yes, heartache—of having to perform at your best.

Support for this idea comes from research on mistake training, which shows that people not only learn from their mistakes, they do more outside-the-box thinking and they do not experience the frustrations and other emotional drains that would ordinarily cut into their work effort. In other words, making mistakes when you’re trying something as hard as the personal change it takes to lose some weight is not only inevitable, it improves your learning.

In fact, setting learning goals such as, “I will learn how to stop emotional eating at the end of a hard day”, makes the process of weight loss a set of things for you to learn.

Setting performance goals such as, “I will lose 2 pounds this week”, makes your weight-loss regimen a set of performance standards.

The difference between a learning goal and a performance goal is that the learning goal gives you a lot more flexibility. You don’t have to feel that the weight-loss difficulties you encounter are a test of your ability, that either you have the ability or you don’t. No. If you have difficulty losing weight, it simply means that you haven’t yet learned to overcome or avoid this kind of weight-loss obstacle.

So take the heartache out of each and every one of your weight-loss steps. Make them learning experiences. Set learning rather than performance goals, and by all means don’t rake yourself over the coals when you make a mistake.

If you need help, please come to The Reading Room (left-hand column of this blog).

 

Only Yourself to Blame for Weight-Loss Difficulties

by Maria's Last Diet

How many times during the weight-loss process have you thought to yourself, if only I hadn’t done that, or if only I could have done this, but I didn’t?

It is thinking like this that produces lots of internal tension. And it is the build up of too much internal tension that makes it difficult for you to stay on your diet and keep trying to lose unwanted weight.

The more you believe that you could have done it differently and the more you believe that doing it differently would have led to a better outcome, the more you will blame yourself for not doing it that way, and the worse you will feel about yourself.

Yes, you will have regrets when things don’t go the way you want them to. But playing the blame game only makes it worse.

 

If You Want to Lose Weight, You Must Do Something About Your Own Mistakes

by Maria's Last Diet

If you are carrying too much additional weight, it means that you’ve made a lot of mistakes in the way you have been eating. These mistakes will come back to haunt you when you start your diet.

You may want to think of this dilemma as you now have a whole bunch of mistakes that you practiced over and over again, that will definitely interfere with you doing it right.

Just think if you were a pianist, and you had practiced and practiced for your upcoming concert, but you practiced your three pieces with lots of wrong notes. Your concert is coming up in a month, and a colleague of yours just told you about the wrong notes. How are you going to get the wrong notes out of your mind, out of your ear, out of your eyes, and out of your fingers? Not an easy task, but you settle in to do it.

It’s the same when you start dieting. It’s going to take time and practice—retraining actually. Habit change to be specific. How do you give up one habit and learn a new habit? Slowly and carefully. Consciously and conscientiously, with a lot of effort, good frustration tolerance, sufficient confidence in your relearning skill, enough motivation, and lots of other personal ingredients.

No easy task, this dieting venture. It’s the YOU part that is so hard to change. Your mistakes stand in the way, and they have to be changed.

What are your mistakes when it comes to you having put on all those extra pounds? What are your favorite mistakes? Your famous mistakes? Your worst mistakes? Do you know? Try writing them down. These are what you have to tackle when you are trying to shed some pounds.

Make no mistake about it. You have to get rid of those well-learned mistakes and replace them with what you need in order to stay on your diet, lose weight and keep it off.

 

Need Help Losing Weight? Check Out Your Moods.

by Maria's Last Diet

There you are clipping along eating the best diet food, but out of the very corner of your eye you notice a little slippage here and there. You thought you had your diet motivation down pat. Unwanted weight was coming off in a steady stream. You began to feel pants looseness, and faith in your own efforts was slowly being restored.

Noticing this little slippage, though, put a damper on your mood. You could tell your mood was going downhill because you became more aware each time you made one little slip.

What’s a little slip? One woman’s meat is another woman’s poison. A little slip could simply be it got harder on Tuesday to stick to the diet. Or you might have felt cravings when you thought the craving period was over. Or you could have eaten too much diet food. That’s possible too. In any case, slippage is in the eye of the beholder—you.

Now why is slippage so important? It’s not. It’s what the beholder makes of the slippage that’s important.

Once you have diet breakdown after clipping along nicely, your sense of yourself as a determined dieter is affected. You may not be conscious of the effect at first, because seeing it out of only the very corner of your eye, you may not be sure what’s happening to you. Your first realization that something is wrong might be the change in your mood. And this change in mood is at first just a vague reminder that something is wrong.

As you can see, clipping along on a diet is a mood lifter. Slippage is a mood downer. Warning: Mood downers can cause more slippage—until slippage becomes stoppage. Forewarned is forearmed. While slippage isn’t clipping along, it doesn’t have to be the end of your world either (diet world, that is).

You can use your down mood, especially when you’re dieting, to realize that something you’re doing (or not doing) has clipped your dieter’s wings, and they need mending so you can keep clipping along.

 

Are You Going on a Diet to Do Something About Losing Weight ? Whether You Do or Don’t, Either Way You Face a Dilemma.

by Maria's Last Diet

Is it better to do nothing about losing weight than doing something and fail to live up to your expectations?

It could be so.

Psychological research on people feeling regretful about their actions and regretful about not taking action shows that people feel embarrassed, guilty, and other painfully self-conscious emotions when they act wrongly, and don’t feel this strongly when they don’t act at all. 

What this means for dieters is that in both cases, going on a diet and not going on a diet, may cause regret; but taking action brings with it the risk of greater self-condemnation.

If you cheat on your diet, for example, you’ve transgressed and violated what you know was the right thing to do. By not even trying to diet you avoid this risk.

What do you find? Are you more likely to condemn yourself for not even trying or for trying and failing to live up to your expectations?