Maria's Last Diet:

Dieting leads to weight cycling. Dieting causes binge eating. Overeating and even purging are the result of dieting. In other words, there are bad consequences awaiting those who diet. So dieting is no good for you. This is one view.

Another viewpoint is that dieting works miracles. The weight will simply drop off you. Just go on this, that, or the other diet. Follow the diet plan religiously and slimness will be yours.

The views that dieting is bad for you or it will work miracles for you are, of course, much too extreme conclusions. The evidence is not there for either viewpoint.

In any case, dieting shouldn’t be the issue. Dieting is simply a food plan for losing weight. Your main concern should be the dieter. She is the one who has to choose a suitable (emphasis on suitable) food plan. The dieter is the one who has to work the food plan so she accomplishes her goal of losing her unwanted weight.

If you are going to evaluate the harm or value of the most important element for weight loss, the dieter not dieting or the diet should be your focus. After all, it is the dieter who chooses a diet regimen that is so restrictive it is harmful. And it is the dieter who believes that this diet or that diet will work miracles for her. It is the dieter’s psychology and not dieting that needs to be investigated. What do you say to this?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Saturday, August 31, 2013 in Eating/Weight/Diet Problems | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Weight Loss Secrets, Weight Loss Lies, And Secret Eating

by Maria's Last Diet

“I haven’t lost any weight,” said Darcy. “I don’t know what’s the matter.”

What Darcy didn’t tell Melissa was that after staying on a diet at mealtime, in between meals and before going to sleep she secretly snacked on pieces of cookies, slices of dried fruit, and whatever else she could find .

As for Emily, her doctor strongly advised her to lose some weight because she was borderline diabetic. Emily is one of these women who eats off their childrens’ plates. No one in the family is the wiser because Emily is the one who does the dishes after the rest of the family clears out.

Then there’s Avery. Avery gets up at night after everyone in the family is asleep and goes to check the leftovers in the refrigerator. She is especially quiet and careful so her secret will be safe. Avery would feel terribly embarrassed if her husband or teenage daughters found her eating like this.

Abby who, on most days of her life can be found dieting, would vehemently deny that she cheats on a diet. No one, not her friends or family, even suspects that Abby isn’t true to her diet. They’ve all begun to think, though, that in Abby’s case diets don’t work. What they are not privy to is Abby’s big lie—that diet cheats are Abby’s way of staying on her diet day-in and day-out.

Do all women who are trying to lose some weight harbor weight loss secrets and weight loss lies and indulge in secret eating? Do you do this? Do you know someone who does?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Friday, August 30, 2013 in Cheat on Diet, Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Weight Loss Stress is a Real Spoiler

by Maria's Last Diet

What happens when you are clipping along on a favorite diet and suddenly up pops something that might spoil your diet? How do you react? Do you feel threatened? Do you get stressed? Does the something that could very well spoil your diet fill you with diet anxiety?

If this is the case for you, it would be good to develop some more stress resilience. You are going to need it if you intend to go all the way in the weight loss process. What is stress resilience anyway? You could say that it is seeing that very something that could spoil your diet as a weight loss challenge rather than a weight loss threat.

Now it’s easy to say see it as a challenge and not a threat. It is a lot harder to pull something like this off. But pull it off you can if you are willing to put time and effort into more accurately perceiving and expressing your emotions, understanding the causes and consequences of your emotions, making sure you integrate your emotions well with your thinking, and managing your emotions so they help you adjust to and ride out the stress.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Thursday, August 29, 2013 in Stress | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Weight Loss Psychology Is Just Not Possible When You Are Eating Out

by Maria's Last Diet

There’s a whole lot of weight loss psychology you can use when you are trying to lose some weight. There are things you can do to increase your motivation, solidify your commitment, plan and prepare for all types of contingencies, and prevent slips and cheats. Eating out defeats even the best weight loss psychology.

When you eat out, there is little or nothing you can do about the average meal being over one-half your daily calorie requirements. And try as you might, your consumption of sodium for one meal will most likely exceed your sodium requirement for the day. If this doesn’t beat all, you probably will also get from that one meal out almost ninety percent of the recommended fat intake, over eighty percent of the daily saturated and trans fat you need, and sixty percent of the daily cholesterol limit.

For more on the perils and predicaments of eating out, see the research reported in the July 22, 2013 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, August 28, 2013 in Problems and Obstacles | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Seeing the Weight Loss Process Through to the End

by Maria's Last Diet

Completion of your weight loss regimen is a major reason for successful weight loss. Unfortunately, it is all too common to drop out of the weight loss process before completing it. Have you tried to keep to a weight loss routine and somewhere along the line quit? If you are one of the many women who failed to keep up your weight loss regimen, do you know what made you quit?

Did your quitting have something to do with your personality? In other words, are you a quitter at a lot of things? Are you an impatient person who has trouble staying with it for the long haul? Perhaps you frustrate easily or you are flighty and have trouble focusing and committing. There are lots of personality characteristics that can play havoc with completing a weight loss regimen.

Could it be a combination of your personality and choice of a weight loss routine that made it impossible to stay with it to the end? Who after all chooses diets that are so restrictive and disagreeable that failure becomes the only plausible conclusion? If this is you, what would you call yourself for such a choice, a self-defeatist?

If completion of your weight loss regimen leads to successful weight loss, then without a doubt you must do everything you can to be one of the completers. Changing your personality, if your personality characteristics are the cause for you dropping out, is certainly no easy matter. But if that’s what it takes, guess what?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Tuesday, August 27, 2013 in Sticking with it | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Your Weight Loss Psychology, Making Decisions, and Successful Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

When you undertake a weight loss regimen, you will have lots of decisions to make. How good are you at making decisions, and what helps you make sound decisions when it comes to losing your unwanted weight?

Do you, for instance, have a habitual pattern of decision-making? If so, can you characterize this pattern? Are you a hesitant decision-maker? Do you jump right in with both feet? How spontaneous are your decisions? How often do you avoid making decisions? Are you dependent on others for your decisions? Are your decisions impulsive ones or are they more thought out and thorough?

As you can see, your decision-making style has a lot to do with the amount of weight loss progress or lack of progress you make.

If the kind of decision-making you’ve been using is interfering with your weight loss progress, the first step in correcting this is to become aware of it. Awareness or recognition may be just what you need to put the brakes on. Simply identify or label your decision-making style and see if it is good for you or not. Next bring some of your creative thinking to the enterprise and come up with a few good alternative ways of deciding. If you decided too impulsively, try being more deliberate. Get the idea?

Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and practicing making decisions in a new way also takes time. So make a decision to give yourself the latitude you need. If you do this, you will be pleasantly surprised at how steady weight loss progress will follow.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Monday, August 26, 2013 in How to Get There | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Your Flexibility and Permanent Weight Loss

by Maria's Last Diet

Successful weight loss, which means permanent weight loss, can only be had if you increase your flexibility.

Think of it like this. Right now if you are overweight and you’ve gotten that way by eating too much food or too much fattening food, you are rigidly turning to food rather than more flexibly dealing with non-food matters such as your thoughts, feelings, and relationships.

Diets help insofar as they limit your abuse of food so you have to deal with these non-food matters more directly. For example, a relationship problem, whether it’s a personal relationship or a work relationship, when you are dieting, has to be handled without resorting to eating calorie-rich food or eating too much food. At first, you might not handle the relationship problem well, and you might resort to cheating on your diet. As a committed dieter, though, you now have a conflict, and if you resolve this conflict by staying on a diet, you will have to find better ways of handling your relationship problem.

You flexibility increases the more you don’t resort to your old pattern of eating, and your permanent weight loss success quotient rises right along with it.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, August 25, 2013 in Emotions and Eating | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Choice of Diet or Using Psychology to Lose Weight

by Maria's Last Diet

Don’t, whatever you do, get hung up on what diet to go on. It’s not the diet that is going to do it for you. All the research shows there is little difference among diets as far as how much weight they help you lose. The key factor when dieting is to adhere to the diet, and this certainly means you should pick a diet that you can stick to.

Rather than asking which diet should you go on, you should be asking about how to stick to a diet that you choose. In other words, if you are serious about losing weight, you have to find out what will help you stay on your diet. In this regard, you can also dig more deeply into the reasons you might not adhere to your diet. These two issues, what will help you stay on and what makes you go off, are part of the psychology of weight loss. It is weight loss psychology and not choice of diet that will determine whether or not you lose your unwanted weight.

If you want to learn more about using psychology to lose weight, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog.

If you need more specific help, email us at and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Saturday, August 24, 2013 in Psychology | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Your Cravings As Thoughts

by Maria's Last Diet

Let’s say you are trying to lose some weight and you modify your eating according to the new diet you went on. The diet doesn’t allow for any sugar and you find yourself on some days craving something sugary. You think of all sorts of sugary foods you could eat. This is the usual explanation of craving. You crave some type of food, in this case something sugary.

Here’s a new way of thinking about cravings. You don’t crave a particular type of food or food at all. What you crave is an end to the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you are having. Even the thought of the specific kind of sugary food, which you call craving, is your way of trying to turn off your disquieting thoughts.

What do you think? Is this a more accurate description of what a craving is and does? What’s your experience?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Friday, August 23, 2013 in Cravings/Urges | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Hunger Needs and Control Over Eating

by Maria's Last Diet

The experts say that it’s best to eat only when you’re hungry. The trouble with this dictum is that it is very, very difficult to know when you’re hungry.

Hunger should be identifiable as a pattern of bodily sensations, which are caused by a biological need for food. When hunger is researched, however, only a small percentage of the subjects in the research reported physical symptoms. Even with such subjective measures of hunger as emptiness, hollowness, and rumbling, again only a small percentage of research subjects reported experiencing these physical sensations.

If you can’t determine if you are truly hungry from the physical sensations you are experiencing, what can you use as a guide for when you eat and how much food you eat?

There is a lot to think about in this regard. For example, you might use non-hunger measures such as time of day (e.g., breakfast, lunch, dinner). You could also use subjective impressions of your fullness as times not to eat, such as stomach feels full and comfortable so you don’t need food now. Or your stomach feels uncomfortably full and you definitely don’t need food now. You can also be guided by the goals you have for yourself. They can be general lifestyle or personal value goals like always acting in moderation. Or you can use weight loss goals like wanting to lose a specific number of pounds.

What do you use to tell yourself when and what to eat? Are you one of the few who can be guided by your physical hunger sensations?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Thursday, August 22, 2013 in Hungry Feelings | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

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Is Dieting Safe? Is There a Miracle Diet?

Weight Loss Secrets, Weight Loss Lies, And Secret Eating

Weight Loss Stress is a Real Spoiler

Weight Loss Psychology Is Just Not Possible When You Are Eating Out

Seeing the Weight Loss Process Through to the End

Your Weight Loss Psychology, Making Decisions, and Successful Weight Loss

Your Flexibility and Permanent Weight Loss

Choice of Diet or Using Psychology to Lose Weight

Your Cravings As Thoughts

Hunger Needs and Control Over Eating

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