Maria's Last Diet

Need Help to Lose Weight? Try the Opposite of Your Willpower.

by Maria's Last Diet

Stop and smell the roses. Or is it stop and smell the coffee. No matter. Mine is wake up and smell the bacon. I hate to tell you but I’ve been eating bacon all along. I’d love you to know that bacon and other such goodies are now guilt free. Yes, I’ve done it, after a ga-zillion tries. No use crying over spilt milk. Well, to tell the truth, I don’t have to cry over spilt milk—not ever again.

What’s all the excitement? I lost all my unwanted weight and I know how to keep the weight off. In fact, I’ve been keeping weight off successfully for the past three or four years. See, I don’t have to be precise anymore. I no longer count the days or the weeks or the months or the pounds.

What’s my secret? There are no secrets when it comes to successful weight loss and successful weight maintenance. Everyone who has ever tried losing some weight can tell you what she did right and what she did wrong. I did lots wrong but look at me.

OK, I’ll share my biggest weight-loss key. It’s won’t-power. Not willpower. Won’t-power. It’s whenever I did one of those wrong things for the umpteenth time and I was sick of myself. That’s when my won’t-power kicked in. Actually it was all my doing. I kicked it in. And it worked. Let me tell you it worked. Almost by osmosis I began relying more and more on my won’t-power. It kept working. So I kept working it.

 

What exactly is won’t-power? No secret there either. We all have won’t-power. It goes like this. “I won’t ever do that again.” And then you do. So you take it up a notch: “I WONT EVER DO THAT AGAIN.” And another notch if you need to. And so on and so forth until it becomes a regular part of you.

Your won’t-power becomes a bad habit that does good. Keep doing it, and it’ll be there when you need it. It’s not that you’ll never do wrong again. I do the wrong things still. Too much of a fattening food. Sometimes I forget that I know how to eat less. When I visit my aunt and uncle—my favorite aunt and uncle—there’s no stopping me. If you were there, you’d see first-hand, some out-of-control eating. Well, out-of-control eating for someone who has taken the weight-loss journey, arrived at her destination, and upped her won’t power capability along the way.

If I eat too much, I still worry and watch it. But now I believe my worry and watchfulness is part of my won’t-power. My guilt is part of my won’t-power. My dissatisfaction with myself is part of my won’t-power. I don’t have to exercise self-restraint to the point of regret, and that’s why each morning I can say to myself if I wish, “Wake up and smell the bacon.”

Tempted by Comfort Food. Where is My Willpower and Self-Control?

by Maria's Last Diet

How do you up your willpower enough so you can avoid being tempted, and lose weight?

That’s the question of questions, isn’t it? Well, there are ways. Here are two that you may find work very well.

• Let’s say you are on a diet, and you come face to face with a big, gooey, sweet, luscious, creamy, fluffy temptation. The danger at this moment is that the short-term goal of satisfying your immediate urge to have it can easily overpower your long-term goal of losing weight. Some women find that in an urge-moment such as this, a little mental work can do wonders. What you do is this: Call up in your mind what’s really important to you in your life. Interfere with this weak moment. Remind yourself about what you really want. Is it truly pecan pie with ice cream that will make your life better? Or is it losing weight, and all that it means to you? Just the act of stopping to think about what it is that has real value—what will make your life significantly better—can be all you need to send your self-control into high gear.

• Start small. Like this: try calling upon your willpower in a limited situation at first. Instead   of hurling yourself into a diet full-force, where you are required to limit pretty much everything you eat, why not start with something very doable? You might decide, for instance, to give up having a sweet after dinner…not ALL sweets, just a sweet at this particular time. It’s no so hard, and you most likely have the willpower to do that. Once you accomplish self-control in this circumscribed way, you can move on to other small acts where you can exercise your willpower. Remember, small things add up to big things! You may just find that when you have amassed a number of these more limited self-control abilities, you are much more ready to go on that diet.

 

 

Why Do Dieters Need the Skill (not the will) to Diet?

by Maria's Last Diet

Dieters need skills to break away from old patterns, from old habits that hold them hard. Going for seconds, unquenchable desires for something sweet, eating to assuage various emotional states, making sure you always feel full, these are some of the patterns dieters have to get away from.

Skills are what help the dieter disassemble these old patterns, and skills also are the building blocks of the shift to dieting and weight loss.  

Why skill and not will? Think of it this way. You might have the will to build your own house, but don’t you need to have the skills as well? This is true of anything—riding a bike, knitting, cooking, even something that looks simple like saying what you mean.

You may be willing, and that’s important, but are you also “skilling”?

 

Willpower and Weight Loss Diets, What's Up?

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you have the willpower it takes to delay gratification and bypass a dessert that's not on your weight-loss diet plan?

You may not, and here's why.

Sienna had been doing just fine with dieting. She was in the early stage and hadn't been at it long. She didn't have the confidence of someone who had been dieting for a while and could count on pretty steady dieting motivation. So she worried if she went off her diet, even the slightest, she could easily return to overeating, "oversnacking" actually. But in her dieting zeal, she wasn't figuring in all of those other factors, the non-weight-loss ones that could cause her to impulsively eat off her diet plan.

Here is one of those factors that could get anyone to lose their willpower in favor of gratifying themselves. Sienna had unexpressed anxieties about a number of important matters, the most important one being her relationship with her husband. She sort of just lived with this one. But it was always there, the anticipation that something would go wrong. In fact, that was just what was wrong, the pins and needles, the eggshells she automatically avoided stepping on. 

Sienna couldn't see the connection, but gratifying herself was important, even necessary for her, because she had to deny herself so much in her marriage. The loss of her ability to use her willpower when it came to food was a sign that something was wrong in her life. Only Sienna couldn't do anything about it. The tense relationship she had with her husband was the same tense relationship she had with food.

About Willpower

by Maria's Last Diet

Willpower is a funny duck. It quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, but it’s not a duck. Here’s why.

It’s a mistake to think of willpower as a unity. Willpower is actually a combination of “skills”.

Here’s a partial list of those skills:

•    Self-control
•    Self-regulation
•    Delay of gratification
•    Directing attention
•    Distraction
•    Adherence to long-term goals
•    Planning
•    Practice
•    Preparation
•    Rehearsal
•    Impulse control
•    Good-enough emotional outlets

Sound daunting? Well, put this way, it is.

Try looking at the list this way.

A woman goes into the supermarket to shop for the week. She has a family of four: herself, her husband, and two children, one adolescent and one pre-adolescent. She is dieting, of course, trying to lose over 35 lbs. She is in her second week of dieting and has lost 2½ lbs so far. She is feeling somewhat defeated by this little bit of weight loss, but is still game to go on. Being in the supermarket and shopping for the week is a test of her willpower.

Here’s what she did before she went. She had a great, I mean really great morning with her husband. She made a truly detailed list of what she was going to buy, right down to the exact amounts. She knew her weak points and prepared herself by visualizing them beforehand and also visualizing what she would do to deal with them. For two days before shopping, she practiced tempting herself with food and non-food items, and practiced turning down each temptation. On the back of her shopping list, she wrote her weight-loss goals; not just the number of pounds, but the look, the size, the health, and other things she was looking forward to.

She did two other things that didn’t make sense to her family until she explained them. Ever since she last went to the supermarket, which was the week before, she had often put off the very things she used to do quickly and efficiently. Instead, she did something else that seemed terribly peculiar to her children. For example, instead of brushing her teeth first thing, she went in to make the coffee. Instead of taking some sips of coffee while cooking breakfast, she waited to have the coffee with her breakfast. No one, including her husband, understood her.

What she was doing is easy to spot if you have the “skills” list in front of you. She was getting a head start on the skills of delaying gratification, directing attention, and distraction. She would need all of these if she was to stick to her plan at the supermarket.

So, there you have it, willpower in a large nutshell. It’s not a duck, even though it quacks and waddles.

Willpower - Don't Worry, You Can Get It.

by Maria's Last Diet

What exactly is willpower?

Is it innate - something the lucky ones are simply born with, and the rest of us aren't?

No, that's not it at all.

What is called "willpower" when you are trying to lose weight is usually this:

• sticking to whatever weight-loss solution you have chosen
• not giving in to the temptation at hand
• eating in a totally different way than before
• keeping up your weight-loss motivation
• no overeating.

Are people born with the ability to do all this? No, but you can learn how to. All the things you learn how to do to help you stick to it - all these, collectively - you can call "willpower".

For example:

--- You can learn techniques for delaying gratification.

--- You can figure out the most significant causes of cheating for you.

--- You can anticipate upcoming situations that present a barrier to sticking to your diet plan.

--- You can create a plan to effectively deal with those situations.

--- You can consider how much your emotions affect your eating.

--- You can cut down on social situations that contributed to your overeating in the past.

--- You can set a series of smaller, attainable goals for yourself. 

These are only some of the things you can do. There are more ways to help you, teach you, give you skills, confidence, stamina, and determination. 

Then you can stick to it. That's what willpower means, and there are ways you can get it.

If you want more information on willpower, go to "The Reading Room" and "Find your issues". Then look up all that's available about willpower.

A Weight Loss Success Story is More Than Commitment and Willpower

by Maria's Last Diet

So you have the will to lose weight. You want to. You need to. You set your weight loss goal.

But...

Just your commitment to a weight loss goal cannot take you there. Commitment alone will not instantly transport you to where you want to be.

The weight loss challenge is to take the whole journey, and there are no shortcuts to be had by way of commitment and will. The sheer strength of your willpower will not cause you to overcome all obstacles on your path to your ultimate weight loss destination.

When you start out on any journey, just because you know your destination point, doesn't mean you know how to get there, does it? No. You need a map, or you'll get lost. And if you go the wrong direction, your will isn't what will get you going back in the right direction. You need to be prepared in advance for your trip. You need to know there will be adventures along the way, bumps in the road, twists and turns.

Questions will come up: Can I make it? What if I get lost? So besides will and commitment you need:

• coping strategies
• a map showing the locations of danger spots
• ways to recognize early warning signs of trouble ahead
• tools to fix a breakdown

Your will and commitment work a lot better when you have the benefit of these other weight loss supports.

Q: Do you have enough willpower to diet?

by Maria's Last Diet

A. Probably not.

You don't have enough willpower to carry you through all the ups and downs and ins and outs of a diet. Willpower - the strength of will to carry out your decisions, your plans, and your wishes - is not consistent, not for any of us. It is strong at times and weaker at times. It is unreliabile. When it's working, it's great. When it's not, what then?

First, know about this going in so you won't be shocked or panicked or at a complete loss. It will be somethng you anticipated. Then make a solid plan for handling an inevitable bout with low willpower. Here's a good way to prepare yourself. Write out 5 things you will do to hold on when you feel your willpower fading.