Maria's Last Diet

Thinking Your Way Through Your Weight-Loss Journey

by Maria's Last Diet

It’s a tall order, but it’s best if you can apply many of the following thinking skills to the process of weight loss.

It helps, for instance, if you know the assumptions you are making about yourself and losing your unwanted weight. If you don’t know the assumptions you are making going in, you should have ways of discovering them as you proceed. How are you at making inferences? You knew what you were supposed to do yesterday to stick to a diet, let’s say, but you didn’t do it. Can you infer from the information you have what made you go back to an old pattern of eating? Could you have predicted this lapse? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, can you formulate some hypotheses, and test them out? And what if all this straight up thinking isn’t working, can you get creative and generate some new and original ideas?

It’s a tall order, but you not only have to think things out ahead of time to make the weight-loss process a go, you have to also think on your feet from moment to moment, and think in retrospect as well about what happened and what to do about it.

Weight loss isn’t just about the food. So put your thinking cap on too.

 

Have to Lose A Lot of Weight: Thinking It but Not Doing It

by Maria's Last Diet

When you’re working away at shedding extra pounds, do you spend lots and lots of time thinking about something you intend but you don’t actually do it. For example, do you think about getting rid of all that snack food, stocking up on only healthy diet food, and yet after all your thinking, you don't do it? What’s going on here? All that thinking should lead to taking action, but it doesn’t. It stays at thinking, and that causes you to lose heart.

The goal is there. It is clear, but you don’t go beyond thinking and thinking about it. What can you do? Do you have a way of breaking out of this kind of morass before it takes you and your weight-loss regimen down?

Perhaps, just perhaps, you are having trouble getting out of the repetitive thinking mode and taking the actions needed to reach your goal because you haven’t truly incorporated this goal into who you are. If this is so, it means that you can’t fully stand behind your goal of getting rid of the snack food and replacing it with healthy diet food. That’s why you might not take action, and you only dwell on the goal to the point of demoralization, making it even less likely you will take action.

 

How Do You Choose Weight-Loss Activities, Weight-Loss Steps, Weight-Loss Strategies and More

by Maria's Last Diet

How do you go about making decisions when it comes to all the different weight-loss activities, weight-loss steps, and weight-loss considerations? Do you check out all the options before choosing the absolute best one? Or do you lean to the other side of the continuum, bring to mind a limited number of options and select one that is good enough?

No matter which way you go, do you find yourself satisfied with your decisions and with the steps you take, or are you generally dissatisfied with the choices you’ve made?

The research shows that people who sought more options and tried to choose the absolute best option were more dissatisfied and had more regrets than people who opted for picking a step that was simply satisfactory. This was true despite the fact that the people who selected only the best had better outcomes at times. Seeking more options and selecting only the best creates higher expectations that are more difficult to meet, and is at greater personal cost.

 

When You Want to Lose Your Unwanted Weight, Here Are Some Other Things You Have To Do Besides Exercise and Dieting

by Maria's Last Diet

What are you like when you are dieting? Do you think clearly with good direction, reason, and purpose? Are you open-minded when it comes to thinking through what you are doing and how you are doing it? Do you do any research to back up your thinking? What about your personal biases? How do you handle them? Do you confront yourself about them and make changes when needed? Can you keep up a questioning attitude so as not to foreclose any possibility too quickly? Are you the kind of person who carefully considers and then selects the criteria by which you will guide your weight-loss efforts?

As you can see, there is a lot more to losing your unwanted weight than just dieting and exercise.

 

Can’t Stop Eating The Calorie-Rich Food. Here Might Be Why.

by Maria's Last Diet

Is it more difficult for you not to eat too much food or eat too many fattening foods than it is to overeat or eat fattening foods?

If you find yourself in this dilemma, take a look at what makes one more rewarding than the other. You might find that you are not where you think you are in the process of wanting to lose weight. You could be talking to yourself about eating less and eating differently but your heart might not be in it yet.  The positive feedback and reinforcement you’re giving yourself for eating right may not square with the fact that you think of cutting back on calorie-rich food as depriving yourself of something you really want. If this is the case, then you might do best for the time being to accept what you really want and inch forward from there.

You may also be keeping secret from yourself the fact that despite saying you want to change, you don’t really want to give up the immediate pleasure and gratification you get from wolfing down those delicious treats that you’ve come to rely on. Keeping secrets from yourself is not so far-fetched as it may sound. Think back on how long it took you to realize you didn’t want to do something you thought you should be doing, like in “I should stop that awful habit”, but you didn’t.

Then too you might have gotten yourself to believe that you are improving when it comes to overeating and eating fattening foods, but you can’t help feeling hopeless and helpless still about making real progress. Which part of yourself do you support? Will you feel good about the improvement and reward yourself for that, or will you acknowledge your hopeless, helpless feelings and do more in that department? Perhaps you should do both.

As you can see, changing your pattern of eating so you can have the weight loss you want takes a lot of heavy thinking, careful thinking, precise thinking. The diet books and exercise routines don’t tell you this, but it’s there and an important part of the weight-loss process nonetheless.

 

Weight Loss Is Hard Because You Act Before You Think

by Maria's Last Diet

You act before you think. This is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to taking weight off.

Before you know it, you did it; something you didn’t want to do. You ate off your weight-loss diet plan. You swore you wouldn’t this time, but you just couldn’t help it? Right or wrong?

Right! You really couldn’t help it.

Your old ways were there. No time to reflect and stop that runaway train. This is the cursed part of act before you think.

To turn things around, you’re going to have to put in a lot of time correcting these old weight-gaining and weight-maintaining actions of yours and put new ones in their place. That’s what dieting and changing your pattern of eating is all about.

Now for the blessing. Once these new behaviors, new attitudes, new thinking, new feelings (Whew! That’s a tall order.) are in place, guess what? Your will again act before you think, but it will be the new you.

 

Unwanted Thoughts About Your Favorite Foods Can Wreck Your Weight-Loss Progress. What to Do, What Not to Do.

by Maria's Last Diet

Gaining unwanted weight isn’t just about eating so much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods. It’s also about having unwanted thoughts and unwanted images about food. These thoughts and images about food often interfere with your weight-loss regimen and prevent you from having successful weight loss.

Do you have thoughts about food that you cannot stop?
Are there images about food that come to mind that you cannot get rid of easily?
Do you have persistent thoughts of certain foods?
Do you try to get rid of these thoughts and images of food?
Are there foods that you try not to think about?
Do you have lots of thoughts about food that you don’t tell anyone about?
Do you keep busy just to keep thoughts and images of food out of your mind?

What have you noticed if you’ve tried to suppress unwanted thoughts and images about food? Has the result been like saying to yourself “Don’t think about so and so,” and then you can’t stop thinking of it? Did you get this kind of rebound effect?

One thing you can do if suppressing food thoughts and images doesn’t work for you is to be more accepting of them. You can tell yourself they are only thoughts and they will pass. You might also try waiting out the thought or image. Thoughts and images actually have a pretty short life. If the thoughts and images you are having are more persistent, try riding them out, like you’d ride the crest of a wave—just like you’d ride out an urge that you don’t want to act on. Another thing you can do is to give your food thought and image a subjective strength rating. How strong is it from zero to 100, where zero is “no strength at all” and 100 is “the strongest possible food thought or image in the world”. Rating it gives you some control over it. Every food thought or image you have is probably not of equal strength. Seeing that some are lightweights helps you to feel that you’re not always battling Goliath.

Let us know what you discover and, of course, how you do.

Using Psychology to Lose Weight—A Heads Up

by Maria's Last Diet

You know what the weight-loss process is. You work on starting. You address the issues involved in keeping at it. And as you go along, you work at keeping off the weight you’ve lost while you move closer to your goal weight.

You know the weight-loss steps you will take, are taking, and have taken to get you to where you want to be.

You know the different weight-loss activities, the weight-loss programs, and the different diets you’ve been on.

You know the ups and downs, the heartbreak, and the exhilaration of going from here to there to lose your unwanted weight.

You know what’s coming out of your head that is guiding you to do what you’re doing in the weight-loss process.

What you probably don’t know is what's going on in your head, what went into making you think the way you did. You most likely aren’t aware of the complex of thoughts and feelings that set the scene for you to start a diet today, or the thoughts and feelings that pulled the string on a diet cheat just when you were doing so well.

If losing weight is primarily governed by how and what is going on in your head, and you’re not aware of just what this is—if you really believe this could be so—then your best efforts at losing your unwanted weight and keeping it off for good should be geared to becoming aware of what’s going on in your head, and making any necessary changes there, and not just making changes to what’s happening on your plate.   

Losing Unwanted Weight Made Easier by the Way You Think About It

by Maria's Last Diet

Is losing a lot of weight a skill? You might not think it is. Losing weight isn’t portrayed that way. You just do it—that’s the way it’s been promoted. You have a diet. You go on it. You exercise. The weight comes off. Where’s the skill in that?

Thinking of losing a lot of weight as a skill, or a set of skills makes all the difference in the world. Skills imply learning and developing, and everyone knows that learning and developing skill take time. So patience and forbearance are involved. You expect that of yourself. Frustration and failure are better tolerated, because you know you are just beginning to get the skill under your belt. Expectations of accomplishing your goal are put off on purpose because you know you are learning. You don’t rush yourself into early expectation of “getting there”. You know you have to develop proficiency, and so you lengthen out your expectation of reaching your goal, and you connect “getting there” with all you have to do to become proficient enough.

Thinking about losing a lot of weight as a set of skills instead of “you go and do it” is using psychology to lose weight. How you think about it determines how you go about doing it. And how you go about doing it, since you’re building skils, makes your skill building into a successful weight-loss journey.

 

You’d Be Surprised to Know What’s Keeping You On the Large Side

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you place food and eating at the center of your life? Do you feel more like a success when your eating pattern is fattening food or when you’ve eaten too much.? Is your happiness, satisfaction, and sense of well being tied to packing on the pounds or putting yet another delicious bite in your mouth?

Is this the way you think? If so, it’s important to know this. It might be what’s keeping you from doing what you need to do to reduce your weight. The corrective would be to work on these issues. See what you can do about changing the way you think about yourself. Put yourself on a psychological diet that consists of healthier thoughts and less fattening strategies.