Maria's Last Diet:

It’s smooth sailing for emotional eaters. They sail right over their feelings. Dive right into the fattening food to stay afloat.

Where the waters get turbulent is when the emotional eater tries to do something about her weight-loss difficulties or her eating pattern. Straight up dieting and exercising do not come to her rescue. Something more is needed. That something more carries with it the danger of being capsized by the very feelings she is sailing over.

If you are an emotional eater, who has weight to lose and a pattern of eating to change, you will have to include right along with your exercising and dieting a way to reduce the impact that your own unpleasant feelings have on you. You’ve probably tried a number of techniques besides eating over them: suppressing them, distracting yourself, reassuring yourself (“that’s not so bad”), criticizing yourself.

Have you tried anticipating these feelings and the situations in which they might occur? In other words, before you’re in the throes of the emotion that might make you turn to comfort food, think about it, anticipate it.

Some feelings and situations repeat themselves over and over again, and these you can anticipate far in advance—a week, or even a month. Then there are those situations which you won’t anticipate until the day before, the day of, or closer to when they are upon you.

Once you anticipate, you can go on to size up the unpleasant emotion. How big and unpleasant do you think it will be for you? Use a subjective rating scale, if that helps you see the upcoming emotion for what it is. On a scale of 0 to 10, for example, is the upcoming emotion you’re anticipating a 4, is it a 7; what is it?

Next see if you can think differently about the emotion you’re anticipating. Let’s say it’s going to be another tough work day tomorrow, just like it’s been for the past week, and you’ve been rewarding yourself with eating too much food for dinner each night. Well, you can anticipate feeling the same again tomorrow night.

So, what to do about it?

Why don’t you see what the tough emotion is that you want to sail through. It could be anger, frustration, fear of failure, anxiousness about getting yourself motivated to do all that work again. Maybe it’s a bit of all of these feelings. In any case, is there a way you can think of the emotional situation that would make you more comfortable?

Perhaps you can make it a challenge: “Let’s see what it will take to make it more pleasant for myself.” Or, you can think of the work as more circumscribed: “I’ve done a lot on it so far. It should be over in a couple of days.” You could even decide: “I’ve been stressing myself out more than I have to by feeling picked on by my manager. That’s a ‘poor me’ pattern that’s been too much a part of my personality. I’d like to get rid of it. Here’s a chance to try.”

Remember, the goal is to make it easier for yourself emotionally. No more eating over it for smooth sailing. If you prepare for the rough spots, which any able-bodied seawoman would, then your journey will result in changing the way you eat and successful weight loss.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 in Emotions and Eating | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

No Self-Control Needed. How to Lose Unwanted Weight Without the Struggle

by Maria's Last Diet

One of the biggest problems that women encounter when they want to lose a lot of weight is they don’t have all the self-control that losing unwanted weight requires. They struggle with their self-control to get started. Then they struggle with their self-control to stick to it. And finally, after losing all that weight, they struggle with their self-control to keep it off.

Is there a way around self-control? You bet there is. You don’t need to exercise self-control if something doesn’t tempt you. This is definitely the way to go—if you can.

Do you know how to pull this off for yourself— the no need to exercise your self-control because you’re not even being tempted mindset?

There are probably lots of things that don’t tempt you. Right? Think of them. Think why they don’t temp you. Here are some possible reasons. You are just not interested. These things aren’t who you are. It would frighten you to do it. You’d be ashamed to be that way. It would be too hard to do. It’s not your cup of tea.

The task when you want to lose weight without having to struggle with your self-control is to put some of these more central who you are and who you aren’t parts of you to work on your pattern of eating. In other words, when it comes to filling yourself up on comfort food, that can no longer be you. Instead, what if you “filled yourself up” with better relationships, or pride in your achievements, or even good diet food? Or, what if you didn’t have to fill yourself up at all—because you didn’t deplete yourself in the first place? You didn’t deplete all your good feeling by criticizing yourself for being ___________. You know. Fill in the blank.

See. It can be done. Only the goal is different. You don’t aim for more self-control. You aim for no temptation.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Monday, February 20, 2012 in Self-Control/Lack of Control, Temptation | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

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.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, February 19, 2012 in Making Mistakes | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Using Your Experience to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

by Maria's Last Diet

Dear Maria

Hi. I’m a 37-year old woman who wants desperately more than anything else in her life to lose weight and keep it off. My history goes like this: diet after diet since age 16, lost some, gained it back, and now I have at least 50 pounds to lose; well, maybe 60 pounds.

I followed lots of different diets, all the popular ones at the time and others as well. All sorts of things happened to me besides losing and gaining weight. I got fed up, frustrated, and quit many times. I couldn’t get over certain cravings, and so I blew the diet. I felt like a failure. At times I was high on success. Yes, I had lots of experiences, some good, some bad, many more than I’m telling you right now.

You’d think that I could benefit by my experience. But I didn’t, and I don’t—still don’t.

I’d like to discover how I can benefit from my experience. I have so much. How do I use my experience to help me learn how to lose my excess weight?

—Sonya

Dear Sonya

Unassisted learning, called discovery learning, is a good idea for some things, and for some people, sometimes. It makes you feel really good about yourself when you are able to dig out the information or solve the problem on your own. You may, though, need more guided learning, not a set of instructions necessarily, but maybe examples of how other women did it. This can be a great help.

As you well know, diets alone are not enough of a guide. So many women have dieted and dieted, just like you, and have ended up just like you.

Why don’t you take a look through the articles in the Reading Room, which you’ll find in the right-hand column of the blog. There’s lots there to guide you through your problem of still not losing weight. A good guide can be just what you need to know how to put your lifetime of experience to work for you.

Best of luck.

—Maria

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Thursday, February 16, 2012 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

What You Want in a Weight-Loss Coach

by Maria's Last Diet

Have you ever wanted a weight-loss coach, someone who could tell you what to do to lose weight and keep it off?

What kind of a weight-loss coach would you want? Would it be someone who yells at you when you make the wrong move? The tough love approach. Is that what you think you need? Or, could it be someone who is more of a player’s coach? In that case, more sympathetic, more of a gentle motivator, more a teacher than a task master.

Most women don’t have a weight-loss coach. So you have to be your own coach. That works, but only if you don’t raise your expectations about having negative experiences and negative expectations about losing your unwanted weight.

There are, however, going to be adverse events along the way. These need to be anticipated and planned for. It is in how you present these things to yourself that will make the difference in how you perceive them. For example, the way you explain to yourself the necessity of not eating sweets when you first start dieting makes a big difference in the way you perceive your first cheat. “If you eat sweets, you’ll ruin your diet.” “If you eat sweets at the outset, that’s only natural. You can go right back on your diet again. Don’t worry.” See the difference?

They say that coaching is an art. True. True. But where there is science to lean on, coaching also takes what it can from science. And science says that “stimuli that would never normally produce pain began to do so after verbal suggestion” that the stimuli would indeed produce pain.

The take-away message is clear. Be the kind of weight-loss coach who makes you feel as comfortable as you can in facing the adversities of weight loss. In other words, be very careful with how you frame your weight-loss instructions to yourself.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, February 12, 2012 in Support | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

How to Get To Successful Weight Loss? Smart Planning.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you plan? Yes, plan out the where, when, and how you will do what you need to do in order to lose unwanted weight? Do you do this religiously? In other words, do you take account beforehand of what you will be encountering in this weight-loss process you’ve chosen to undertake? Or, do you just wing it?

If you haven’t tried it—planning, that is, put it at the top of your list. It works for starting a weight-loss regimen, sticking to the regimen, and in the end it works for maintaining weight loss too.

It’s planning, after all, that supports your intention to stop being heavy. What to do. When to do it. How to do it. These are all part of planning. Don’t do them unintentionally. Do them with forethought. Make your plan for when, for what, and for how very specific—as specific as you can make them.

A good form to put your personal weight-loss plan in is When X, then I will do Y. For example: “When I get hungry between meals, I will stop and think about whether I’m really hungry or not.” But, if it’s to be a specific plan—a very specific, specific plan, then you’re going to have to know how you will do this. You’ve never been able to do stop yourself from being dictated to by your so-called hunger before. So why should you be able to stop yourself now? In other words, how will you pull off this feat of simply investigating what is making you hungry if you’re not really hungry.

This is what it takes for successful weight loss. This is what the successful weight loser—or, better put, the successful weight winner—does. She plans for just this kind of happenstance. She knows herself. She knows her limitations when it comes to paving the weight-loss road with her good intentions. She knows planning’s the thing, and she gets so good at it—planning, that is—that when the time comes for what she intended, her intention has her full support, almost automatically, by that very specific—yes, that specific of specifics plan she made ahead of time.

Get it?

Go to it.

Go do it.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Saturday, February 11, 2012 in Goals/Planning/Intentions/Expectations | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

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Here’s One Way to Stop Emotional Eating

No Self-Control Needed. How to Lose Unwanted Weight Without the Struggle

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

Using Your Experience to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

What You Want in a Weight-Loss Coach

How to Get To Successful Weight Loss? Smart Planning.

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