Maria's Last Diet:

A two-dimensional approach to weight loss is concentrating narrowly on dieting and exercise. A three-dimensional approach to losing your unwanted weight is one in which you take a look at your psychology to see what about your psychology will help or hinder you during the weight loss process.

Let’s go right to the three-dimensional approach to reducing your weight. How easily can you recognize the feelings that send you right to food? What will you have to do to deal more directly with these feelings you are subduing or avoiding by weight gaining and weight maintaining eating? What conditions might make it difficult for you to do something about these feelings? What will it take for you to recover from an eating bout and get back to trying to deal more effectively with your feelings? These are the kinds of questions you will be asking yourself if you take a three-dimensional approach to losing your unwanted weight.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, August 27, 2014 in Psychology | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Women’s Weight Loss Isn’t One Size Fits All

by Maria's Last Diet

One size doesn’t fit all. How often have you heard this when something isn’t right for everyone? Look what happens, though, with weight loss. What’s the usual recommendation? It’s dieting and exercise, isn’t it? You’re absolutely right if you are thinking this isn’t an example of one size fits all because there are a variety of diets and lots of different exercises to choose from. But that’s not the point. The one size fits all criticism is based on the fact that exercise and dieting don’t do justice to what is involved in changing your behavior. You might say here that one size doesn’t fit at all.

Losing weight and keeping it off is primarily about changing your behavior. Every woman knows this. The one-size fits all recommendation for dieting and exercise assumes that everyone can go ahead and diet and exercise to the point where you lose weight and then stay at your goal weight.

Dieting and exercise as a prescription for weight loss do not take into account the struggle women have with starting on this prescription, then sticking to it, and finally keeping lost weight off. The one size fits all doesn’t give a woman what she must know about herself in order to change her weight-gaining and weight-maintaining behaviors. Why is it, for example, you are unable to stop eating those in-between meal snacks when you know full well they are adding up to you getting fatter? What makes it so you can’t stay on your diet? Why have you given up exercising after only a couple of weeks, especially since you told everyone how much better you feel and how proud of yourself you were for sticking to it?

These are the kinds of personal issues that can be addressed through the addition of weight loss psychology to the one size fits all formula, dieting + exercise = weight loss. Weight loss psychology is knowing how to deal with your weight loss issues, because it is your very own psychology that makes the difference between a cookbook weight loss one size fits all model and an approach that is a much better fit for the problems you have to face and solve.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Friday, August 22, 2014 in Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss, Psychology | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

To Drop Your Weight You Must Have…

by Maria's Last Diet

I hate to break it to you, but the process of weight loss calls for a tremendous amount of diligence on your part. Losing your unwanted weight means working assiduously at weight loss activities that will be beneficial in the long run but probably trying in the moment. You will have to persevere, exert effort, and sustain interest for days, months, maybe even a year. This is certainly a tall order. The diligence, which is called for in weight loss, is difficult to keep at for any length of time. Yet keeping up your diligence day after day is just what you have to do if you hope to significantly reduce your weight.

What helps you maintain diligence? Have you found ways to infuse the weight loss process with experiences that make being diligent easier and more pleasurable rather than tedious and unappealing? If not, go to it.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Tuesday, August 19, 2014 in Sticking with it | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Weight Loss Information About Meal Planning and Fullness

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you know that how full you are does not necessarily determine the size of the meal you eat? You would think that fullness would be the natural way to tell yourself you ate enough. There’s another, maybe more natural way you go about regulating the size of your meal. It’s all in your pre-meal planning.

It turns out you, along with most people, are highly proficient at gauging just how full you will get from different foods and you take this estimate into consideration when you plan your meal. From countless times doing this, you learn how much food and what kind of food to put on your plate for the level of fullness you are seeking.

Losing your unwanted weight, then, starts with meal planning and not with what you put in your mouth.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Monday, August 18, 2014 in Weight Loss Advice/information | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Feed My Face with Food Because Fantasy Failed Me

by Maria's Last Diet

Where does fantasy fit in when you feed your face with food? Is it food, food, food because your fantasy of the perfect life, the perfect relationship, the wished-for fulfillment of all your needs wasn’t met? Is it food to sop up your terrible disappointment that your wish to have this fantasy come true didn’t happen? Is it food you feed on because this is the closest you can come to fulfilling your fantasy?

If you eat too much fattening food or just eat too much food, have you checked recently to see what your fantasy life is like? You can start by seeing what you wish for. Ideally, what would you like to happen that you haven’t been able to achieve? Next, determine how central and important is your fantasy. Then see what giving up your fantasy means to you. Does giving up your fantasy mean you would be giving up everything?

If giving up your fantasy means you would be giving up everything, then food and the way you are using it is your substitute way of sustaining yourself. It’s your way of preserving your hopes and dreams and it is a replacement for the more reality-oriented practices that you find difficult to perform.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, August 17, 2014 in Emotions and Eating | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Overeating and Weight Gain Triggers—What Not to Do

by Maria's Last Diet

An idea that’s been around for a while is you can reduce the possibility of getting a headache by avoiding the ‘triggers’ for your headache. The most common headache triggers are things like stress and unpleasant emotions, lack of sleep or excess sleep, foods like chocolate and cheese, eyestrain, noise, odors, alcohol, menstruation, and high humidity, heat, or cold.

In a recent research study in which avoiding predisposing factors or triggers was compared with learning to cope with triggers, learning to cope with headache triggers proved to be more effective in reducing headache episodes.

Do you think learning to cope with your triggers rather than avoiding your triggers for a weight-gaining, weight-maintaining pattern of eating would also prove to be more effective? Why don’t you try out this idea and see if it works for you.

First of all, if you are trying to learn to cope, don’t avoid. Stay with whatever the trigger is and see if indeed it does cause you to eat too much food or to eat fattening foods. After you do this little experiment, you can do it over and over again with each of your triggers. In other words, if you think a down mood sends you to food or a certain time of day or even the odor of a certain food, check this out by exposing yourself to the trigger.

If you find triggers that do predispose you to a weight-gaining eating pattern, try exposing yourself for longer and longer periods of time to see if you can get used to the trigger and not have it propel you into food. Finally, during the time you are exposing yourself to a trigger, see if you can think of the trigger as a problem you need to solve. Determine what you can change in the situation or in your reaction to the situation. Make sure to analyze the change you wish to make so you come up with short-term goals that are sufficiently challenging to maintain your interest and also reachable to allow you to be successful.

Remember, you are doing all of this to learn to cope with your weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating triggers and not to avoid them. It works for headache triggers so why not for your eating triggers.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Friday, August 15, 2014 in Influence | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

The Usual Weight Loss Strategies Are Not What They Are Cracked Up to Be

by Maria's Last Diet

Among the weight loss strategies you are using, how often do you find yourself resorting to avoidance strategies? You probably will be shocked to find out that some of your most popular weight loss strategies are really ways to avoid losing your unwanted weight.

Take exercise for example. Everyone says that exercise will bring you weight loss. Your doctor says it. Your friends are doing it. The government broadcasts this belief loud and clear. Guess what? If you want to lose weight, really and truly want to lose weight, exercise is an avoidance strategy.

Here are the facts about exercise. Research shows that exercise will not help you lose weight. It will, however, help you maintain the weight you lost. The average calorie burn for an hour of exercise is somewhere between 200 to 300 calories. If you continue eating the way you have been, knocking just two to three hundred calories off will not make you shed your extra pounds. Just a doughnut here and there will be an additional 300 calories that you will have to exercise for an hour to burn off.

Next up is a focus on food. If you, as so many woman do, make losing excess weight all about the food you eat, you will once again be using an avoidance strategy. Why is this so? It’s so because losing a lot of weight and keeping the weight off permanently is about changing your behavior and not simply about food. A good saying to help you keep this in mind is “it’s not just about food.”

One other influential weight loss strategy is in fact another avoidance strategy. The diet. Now diets are something every woman has tried as her weight loss strategy. In truth, diets can be a good strategy for reducing your weight. But when the diet is thought of and used as the single-best method of losing your unwanted weight, then dieting is an avoidance strategy. A diet at best is a guide to what foods to eat and how much to eat of these foods. If you had a pattern of eating that was weight gaining and weight maintaining, you will most likely be making a big, big change if you diet. This big change is a personal matter, and you will probably find yourself struggling to make this change. It’s this struggle that is at the heart of the weight loss process and not the diet.

You may not want to hear that some of your most prized weight loss strategies are merely avoidance strategies. If, however, you dig into your inner self and dig in deeply enough, you will see just how right this idea is.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 in Strategy | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Maintaining Weight Loss—Why Is It So Hard to Do?

by Maria's Last Diet

Most people who want to lose weight are able to lose at least some of their unwanted weight. They work hard at staying on their weight loss routine and perhaps even add in regular periods of exercise. Then there are some people who can adhere to their weight loss regimen long enough to reach goal weight. These people lose the amount of weight they set out to lose. Few people, however, are able to sustain their weight loss without regaining weight even after they work hard and reach their goal weight.

The statistics show only 20 percent of people who lose weight are able to keep off permanently the weight they lose. Twenty percent means that only 1 out of 5 achieve permanent weight loss maintenance. Now you can imagine if you were having some type of heart procedure and the doctor told you that your chance of success was only 20 percent, what you would do?

So why are you, along with everyone else, so willing to engage in a procedure where you can expect only a 20 percent success rate? For long-term weight loss maintenance it has become obvious that there needs to be a new, more effective procedure, a procedure that gets results. Dieting and exercise just aren’t cutting the mustard. This is not surprising, since the single biggest factor involved in long-term, permanent weight loss is being capable of sustaining the changes in behavior needed to prevent regaining lost weight.

For more on maintaining lost 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 Monday, August 11, 2014 in Maintain Weight Loss | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

On Your Weight Loss Journey, Here’s Something Else to Take With You

by Maria's Last Diet

There’s the diet. There’s exercise. There are motivation and commitment and perseverance. And then there’s action replay. You are probably familiar with all of these components of your weight loss regimen, except for action replay.

What is action replay? Well, it’s when you replay the action, of course. And why is action replay integral to the process of weight loss? It just is, and in fact it is as vital as a diet and exercise and motivation and commitment and perseverance.

Take any of the familiar pitfalls of the weight loss process, such as a diet cheat, disinterest in exercising, loss of motivation, a wavering commitment, and difficulty persevering. Here’s where action replay comes in. Replay the action, which is simply a way of saying rewind your thinking and review what happened to make you susceptible to the particular weight loss pitfall. Action replay affords you the opportunity to search for which issues to review, understand, and see what you can do about them. Action replay raises your awareness and helps you focus on an issue that was too difficult to recognize and confront during the weight loss activity itself. Action replay is your way to analyze the problem so you can come up with an appropriate solution.

So remember, when you gather what you will need with you for successful weight loss, make sure you include action replay right along with dieting and exercise, motivation, commitment, and perseverance.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, August 10, 2014 in Monitoring/Feedback | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Talking About Your Weight. Is This a Good Idea?

by Maria's Last Diet

Who have you talked to lately about your unwanted weight? Was it a friend, a family member, a co-worker, or your doctor? If you did talk to someone about weighing too much, how did the talk go? Were you put off by anything the other person did or said? For instance, was the other person a good listener or did she say what she thought without hearing what you wanted to say? Did you feel embarrassed or annoyed by the other person’s use of terms to describe your weight that seemed too derogatory to you, like “fat” or “obese” or “large”? Or did you feel comforted when the other person called it your “weight problem” or “weight gain”?

Being overweight might, on the other hand, be something you don’t talk about with anyone. You keep your thoughts and feelings about your unwanted weight to yourself. You keep it a private, very personal matter that will never see the light of day until you lose a lot of weight and reach your weight loss goal. Then and only then will it be okay to bring up the subject of your weight.

Weight loss support, though, is an important factor in keeping the promise to yourself to stick to your weight loss routine so you can shed those extra pounds. Research clearly shows that the support of a family member, friend, weight loss buddy, and even your doctor can make the difference between unsuccessful and successful weight loss.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Saturday, August 09, 2014 in Support | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

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Losing Unwanted Weight the Three-Dimensional Way

Women’s Weight Loss Isn’t One Size Fits All

To Drop Your Weight You Must Have…

Weight Loss Information About Meal Planning and Fullness

Feed My Face with Food Because Fantasy Failed Me

Overeating and Weight Gain Triggers—What Not to Do

The Usual Weight Loss Strategies Are Not What They Are Cracked Up to Be

Maintaining Weight Loss—Why Is It So Hard to Do?

On Your Weight Loss Journey, Here’s Something Else to Take With You

Talking About Your Weight. Is This a Good Idea?

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