Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

There is no doubt, is there, that self-control is essential for dieting and losing the weight. Getting yourself to the point where you can count on not doing what you’re not supposed to do and doing what you’re supposed to do is a goal devoutly to be wished.

Self-control is bypassing being tempted. Being tempted is the kind of short-term goal that is so attractive it prevents you from sticking to your long-term goal of losing the weight. A party with drinks, good food, lots of social influence is much more immediate and attractive and tempting than your way-in-the-future long-term goal.

Self-control, if you can muster it, entitles you to respond to threats to your long-term goal. Being able to exercise self-control makes achieving long-term goals like staying on your diet and losing weight more likely.

Exerting self-control also gives you better mental access to your long-term goal. The long-term goal comes to mind easier, is better defined, and is more prominent in your mind.

Self-control makes it possible to approach just what you need to achieve, that weight-loss goal of yours. Good self-control helps you not undermine your goal-seeking efforts. It bestows upon you the sagacity to select the most relevant memories, thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and situational factors out of a whole array of diverse possibilities.

So, hats off to self-control. It’s your ally in your quest to lose the weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Say you are trying to lose the weight, trying very hard to do your best.

...then, say you engage in some bad eating habits that go directly against your effort to lose the weight.

This, of course, is human nature, bound to happen.

So, what to do?

Here's a good tip having to do with weight-loss psychology. There is a definite difference between dealing with shame and dealing with guilt.

The given, the thing you can't change, is that you reverted to your old bad eating habits.

What you can change is your response to your lapse. There are 2 ways to go. You can

• feel you are a bad person because you did it

• feel guilty because of your momentary lapse

Feeling you are a bad person has to do with pervasive shame, feeling flawed, inadequate, like a failure. Feeling guilty has do with focusing on the behavior you engaged in at that particular time.

Guilty feelings about a particular instance can be very productive. The more pervasive feeling of shame is not productive. It is demoralizing and usually interferes with further action.

Try to focus on criticizing the "sin" and not the "sinner", the behavior and not you as a whole person. Then you can be active and devise ways to act better next time. This is completely doable, whereas trying to make your whole self over is much too daunting and unnecessary a task.

by Maria's Last Diet

Setting goals is what you do when you no longer want to be overweight. But what if the goal you set actually impedes getting to it?  This often seems to be the case when you are trying to lose the weight. The goals you set are just too big, too far away, or they are not good guides for the action-steps you need to take.

When your goal remains too far away from the actual progress you’re making, you begin to expect less and less of yourself and finally you probably give up. When your goal doesn't almost call out the action steps you should take to reach it, it is not serving its function as your guide.

The best thing to do if you want to successfully change your status from overweight to the weight that is comfortable for you is to set lots of goals that are within your reach. Try to make it so these goals compliment each other and not compete with each other. Give yourself the advantage of reaching your goals and reaping the rewards.

Losing the weight if you are overweight is not easy to do. With something that’s hard for you, all the goals you set will feel like a lot of work. So try to work against the everyday kind of “feel like a lot of work” goals. Use your ingenuity to set goals that inspire and reward you, goals that practically call out the action-steps you need to take to reach them

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you stuck? Can you not break out and solve a problem like feeling too defeated, craving comfort food, procrastinating, keep gaining the weight back, breaking your promises to yourself, overeating, feeling not resourceful, or any other weight-loss rut?

Don’t just dig yourself in deeper by the same old thinking and the same old behavior. Try something new. Be creative.

You don’t always have to use traditional, logical thinking. You can be creative, and think more freely and more openly. The essence of open, freethinking is that once you have an idea, no matter how silly or implausible or impractical it seems, you take it and run with it. Even if it doesn’t work out in the end exactly as you first thought it would, that doesn’t matter. Even if the idea isn’t a ready-made solution to the problem at hand, it propels thinking onward. It gives rise to new thoughts and leads to new answers. It gets your thinking process “unstuck”―and that’s exactly how to un-stick yourself from a persistent problem.

Now why don’t you put a dieting or lose-the-weight problem you need to solve to the breakout-thinking test. If you need help, call Diet Tuffy to the rescue. To read more about how Diet Tuffy can help you with this, click on the link to your right.