When the body is heavy, cumbersome, awkward, and slow going, the mind and heart have to spend precious energy taking care of it. In order to keep its size and shape, you need to constantly perfect your devotion to food, you need to practice it, reinforce it, get better and better at it, until one day you become an expert.
Those secret little subterfuges that send you back to food, they all have to be maintained so as to keep blocking your way to freedom. Each trip to food gets slipped into life more easily. The buildup of tiny acts over time creates a habit with so much character you just end up thinking this is you.
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Using Psychology to Lose Weight
Because Dieting and Exercise Alone Don't Work
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Dr. Kenneth Schwarz, psychologist and psychoanalyst, and Julie North Schwarz, a writer, are the founders of MariasLastDiet.com.
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« May 2009 | Main | July 2009 »
The Weight Won't Change If You Don't
Everyone wants to make personal changes at one time or another. When it comes to losing weight, on any given day, 45% of women are attempting to make changes to themselves through dieting. What does it take to make an important change to yourself like losing weight?
First, you need to identify two kinds of behaviors: problem behaviors and adaptive behaviors. You want to keep adaptive behaviors in the forefront, keep them working well and try, if you can, to make them work even better for you than they have been. You want to have these adaptive behaviors right on hand when you need them. As for the problem behaviors, you want to get rid of them, of course; or at least reduce them to the point of having no more than a minimal effect on you and your life.
But there’s a twist to making the personal changes that are needed for losing weight. For the best chance at success, you don’t just try to change your problem eating behavior; you must do all you can to change your problematic relationship with food. Changing your problematic relationship with food is what makes losing weight possible and permanent.
For a closer look at your own unique relationship with food, try to figure out “why is it” and “when is it” that you head for food.
If you want some more help with the process, look up how to identify and work out your problem behavior in Find Your Issues. If you still need more help, go to Diet Tuffy, plug in your problem, and get the help you need to work it out.
Hey! It's Diet Tuffy to the rescue.
Losing Weight with Zero Tolerance is a Losing Proposition
Relapse prevention refers to helping a person develop strategies for maintaining new behaviors and preventing a "relapse" into old, unwanted behaviors. You can relate the concept of preventing a relapse to kicking a drug habit, giving up alcohol or smoking, or giving up a relationship to food that leads to overeating and gaining weight.
One idea about what contributes to relapse - going back to the unwanted behavior - is something called "zero tolerance beliefs". It goes like this: you start dieting with the idea in mind that absolutely NO cheating is acceptable.
There's a paradox here. Initially, this belief can aid your efforts to regulate your relationship with food. It does, after all, provide a strict rule by which you can govern your behavior: NO CHEATING ALLOWED.
But here's what usually ends up happening. Over time, this belief undermines your effort to lose weight, because of one simple fact: lapses back into old behavior are inevitable. If you have that zero tolerance motto stuck in your head, when the lapse does occur, you have no way to handle it. You simply ruled it out, didn't allow for it at all. So, having no way to deal with your cheat, the most likely outcome is to revert back to more and more cheating. You once again find yourself engaging in the very behavior you are trying to change.
What can you do? First of all, you can recognize that cheats will indeed occur, and it does NOT mean that you've failed. It only means that you are not perfect (who is). Accepting this, you can move on to develop coping strategies for just those times when you have a cheat (a lapse back to your old relationship with food). What can you do after a cheat? How can you regain control of your newer behavior, your newly forming relationship with food and eating? Do you know how to accept your dieting transgression and move on? Can you learn from this mistake?
When you are really trying to change your behavior, why not give up that "zero tolerance belief". Accept that you will have some lapses, and prepare yourself for them. A good way to prevent a total relapse is to have effective ways of handling a cheat when it occurs.
The Art of Eating Secretly
Meg never admitted it to Paula. She even believed it when she said to her best friend that she was keeping steadfastly to her weight-loss diet.
Meg didn't count as dieting transgressions the quick snatches of leftovers or the pop-in-the-mouth bits of food that she was cooking for lunch or dinner. A the times she did her cheating, she was aware. But her awareness faded in the service of Meg wanting to be good and true to her weight-loss diet.
There was one dieting violation, though, that made Meg ashamed. It was her eating secretly late at night after her husband and children were sound asleep. This was a furtive act she kept from everyone, including her best friend and dieting companion, Paula. Meg would stealthily creep downstairs to the refrigerator and get herself a "sleep helper" late night snack. She turned down celery, carrots, and radishes, in favor of more substantial, filling kinds of food. When she was full, she'd come back upstairs, brush her teeth one last time, and then quietly slip back into bed.
There was no apparent reason why eating secretly late at night should be the source of shame while all the other gobbling, snatching, and little morsel popping had no affect. For these were Meg's forms of eating secretly too.
Paula, poor Paula, fell off her dieting routine time after time, dutifully reported her slips to Meg, and then got back on again. Paula believed her friend, and thought that Meg never faltered like she did. But Paula lost the weight, and Meg did not. In fact, some weeks and months Meg gained weight. Yet she insisted to her friend in all innocence that she didn't understand why she wasn't losing like Paula was.
The secret never came out. Paula was left to think that dieting works for some and not others. Meg got to keep her secret (and the weight).
Books
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99 Essential Weight Loss Blogposts
Stop Your Emotional Eating
Diet Tuffy: The Fun Way to Seriously Lose Weight
Psych Your Diet: Volume 1
Start
Psych Your Diet: Volume 2
Stick To It
Psych Your Diet: Volume 3
Keep It Off
Breaking Up With Food:
Maria's Last Diet
How to Break the First Big Rule of Women Who Stay Fat
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