Maria's Last Diet:

What are the telltale signs that you’re putting too much pressure on yourself to lose weight? The signs of pressure may be so much a part of you that you may not recognize them. So go ahead, take stock of yourself. Are you or are you not putting undue pressure on yourself to lose weight?

A sure sign that you’re under pressure is that you feel guilty. What’s the pressure point here, you might ask? Guilt is guilt. Not so. Guilt is the result of believing you did something wrong, something you shouldn’t have; or not doing something you should have. You didn’t lose all the weight you wanted to. You didn’t lose any weight. You went off your diet, yet again. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure.

A second cousin once removed from guilt is regret. You should have, but you didn’t. You shouldn’t have, but you did.. Regrets, regrets, regrets. Pressure, pressure, pressure.

What other pressure signs can you think of? What about the old standby “being good?” How many times have you put the screws to yourself because you weren’t “being good when it came to losing weight?” Then, of course, there’s your self-esteem. Just think of how many women suffer from low self-esteem because of their weight. One more familiar sign of putting pressure on yourself to lose weight and then it’s on you to come up with a few more of your own. You are disappointed in yourself, sorely disappointed, for being so heavy in the first place and then not being able to lose this weight the way you know you should.

Now it’s your turn? What are some of the telltale signs that you’re putting undue pressure on yourself to lose weight?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Thursday, November 26, 2015 | Permalink

For True Weight Loss Success What’s It Going to Take?

by Maria's Last Diet

What are you waiting for? A miraculous diet pill? Genetic engineering. Some marvelous breakthrough?

Why not take a page from the most common form of childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia? Acute lymphoblastic leukemia was fatal 80 percent of the time in the 1970s. It is 80 percent cured today. And there were no spectacular medical breakthroughs that brought this about. The advances were made over time by carefully selecting and integrating successful treatments, eliminating ineffective treatments, providing supportive care and follow up to continue and monitor progress and prevent relapse or recurrence.

Can permanent weight loss, which has an 80 percent failure rate today, have a success rate of 80 percent some time in the future? What would it take to identify effective treatments, select and combine treatments if necessary, drop out the ineffective ones, and give the kind of support and follow up needed to maintain the changes?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Friday, November 20, 2015 in Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss | Permalink

I Eat Too Much. I Can’t Help It

by Maria's Last Diet

What kind of situation might make you do some weight-gaining eating?

   Being home all by yourself
   Taking a morning/afternoon break
   Watching TV after dinner
   Being awake by yourself at the end of the day
   Exercising
   Mealtimes
   Social occasions
   Seeing a sad movie
   Watching a TV food show
   Having to passively suffer indignities
   Celebrating
   Having to face going to sleep
   Doing something hard
   A relationship problem

Is this something you’re working on?

If you need more help, 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 [email protected] and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, November 18, 2015 in Influence | Permalink

Eating to Lose Weight—Which Way is Your Way?

by Maria's Last Diet

How do you eat to lose weight?

1. Do you avoid and refuse calorie-rich foods you really want? Do you rigorously count calories? Are you eating diet food to make sure you don’t gain weight? Is skipping meals part of how you go about losing weight?

2. Or—do you take smaller portions? Are you especially conscious of the food you are eating? Do you think of your weight when you are choosing what foods to eat? Will you intentionally eat less at the next meal if you ate too much during your last meal? Will you eat healthier to compensate for eating unhealthy food at a previous meal?

3. Or—do you eat more in tune with your hunger and fullness signals? If you are less hungry, do you eat less? When you are full, do you eat less? Do you choose food to eat based on how satisfying and healthy it is? Are you able to eat to lose weight without dividing food into good food and bad food categories?

What’s your way of eating to lose weight? Is it number 1, 2, or 3, or some combination of each of these?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, November 11, 2015 in Eating/Weight/Diet Problems | Permalink

Are You Desperate to Lose Weight? Is Better Self-Control the Answer?

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you definitely need good self-control? Should you be ready to break out the word “no”—and mean it. And the prescription, “enough is enough,” is it to be taken literally. Tough to do, ay?  

The crux of the matter is how are you going to pull this off. What gets you to say “no,” follow the prescription, and effectively exercise your self-control?   

There is no new sheriff in town. The old standbys, use your willpower, be highly motivated, and be committed, are past their prime. They never worked, at least not to the extent that the majority of women could rely on them for eventual weight loss success.   

A new sheriff in town is badly needed. Whatever it is that is causing self-control to slip through the cracks must be sought out and dealt with.   What if, just what if, chasing after self-control is a fool’s errand? You would certainly want the new sheriff to conscientiously piece together the evidence and go after the real guilty culprit. If there were a new sheriff, here’s what she might come up with:

          The crime that was committed was a crime of passion
         and desire. While it looked like food was the goal, food
         was only the means. The goal was something inside the
         perpetrator, as it is in all crimes. If you find out what was
         inside the perpetrator that made ditching her diet so
         all-fired important, you will have the actual convictable
         offender.

A new sheriff who could spare women the relentless effort to maintain self-control and seek justice in a different direction would certainly be worth searching for.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Monday, November 09, 2015 in Self-Control/Lack of Control | Permalink

Trouble Losing Weight—It’s Too Hard. I Can’t Do It.

by Maria's Last Diet

How often in the midst of trying to lose weight have you said, “that’s too hard?” What did you do then? Did you stop trying?

I bet you would have gone ahead and done whatever it was if it was easier to implement and required much less effort. Take sticking to a diet, for instance. If you’ve been rigorously staying on your diet and today you hit a wall and just couldn’t sustain such diligence, what about easing off and making it easier on yourself? Would changing your dieting strategy be all the motivation you need to keep on keeping on and not give up?

Of course, there’s “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” But not always. With weight loss you can’t always tough it out. Sometimes, when there’s no gas left in the tank to stay on a diet, it’s best to adopt an easier, more comfortable strategy. The fact that you progressed and didn’t quit as a result of going easier on yourself may actually act to increase your diet motivation.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Sunday, November 08, 2015 in Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss | Permalink

Emotional Eating—See What Gets You to Do It

by Maria's Last Diet

A tough weight loss challenge is emotional eating? Does it seem like you're so tethered to emotional eating that you’ll head straight for some fattening snack food, indulge in overeating, or have a binge? Emotional eating is not the way to handle your feelings, and everyone knows this. And yet it’s as if the connection between your feelings and food makes it so you can't stop emotional eating.

While emotional eating is most often thought of as a way to deal with negative feelings, you must also have done some emotional eating in relation to more positive feelings like happiness, joy, rejoicing, and so forth.

Do you know which emotions make you susceptible to emotional eating? Check on the different emotions below and see. Rate how frequently each emotion leads to emotional eating, Then, if you like, make a bar graph to fix the results firmly in your mind.

Sad Worried Frustrated Discouraged Lonely Guilty Excited

Always

Often

Sometimes

Rarely

Never

There are plenty of other emotions and emotional states that lead to emotional eating. Some of these are: angry, bored, jealous, on edge, and irritated.

Do you have specific emotions and emotional states that are your personal slippery slope to emotional eating? If you do, try rating them right along with the emotions in the table above.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Saturday, November 07, 2015 in Emotions and Eating | Permalink

What Can the Psychology of Weight Loss Tell Us About Making Weight Loss Easier

by Maria's Last Diet

Once you develop the weight loss skills so that your skills easily meet the demands of mostly all weight loss situations, what do you notice? Is it clear sailing for you from here on? Have you transformed weight loss from a struggle to an experience that happens more automatically, and is much more enjoyable, and rewarding?

So having skills that meet the demands of various weight loss situations will most likely result in ease of effort and enjoyment. What else might contribute to you feeling like you’re clipping along with ease? Under the heading of establishing clear goals, knowing exactly what to do should fit nicely with weight loss skills. Then there’s the need for keeping careful track of your progress so you can use it as feedback to fine-tune your weight loss strategies.

If you can develop the skills, have clear goals, and effective feedback, you won’t have the kind of intense and effortful weight loss journey that too often leads to throwing in the towel and not finishing what you started.

If you want to know more about weight loss skills, goals, and feedback, 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 Friday, November 06, 2015 in Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss, Weight loss psychology | Permalink

Are You Up to the Weight Loss Challenge?

by Maria's Last Diet

Sometimes it seems like there’s a weight loss challenge waiting around every corner. A snack attack hit last night. Running around like a chicken without a head this morning. Just grabbed something to eat and out the door. Needed some mood food the other day as a pick-me-up. Relationships suck. Will eating off the diet lead to forgetting about how sucky the relationships are?

Weight loss is indeed a personally taxing set of challenges. Coping with what’s taxing and with what exceeds your resources at the moment is a must when you’re trying to lose weight. Can you, for instance, manage the demands imposed by the challenge? It helps to be able to reflect upon the challenge and how to resolve it. You can also cope with a challenge by regulating your emotions so you can decrease the emotional distress the challenge is causing you.

So beef up your coping skills and be ready for the challenges. Weight loss success will follow.

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Thursday, November 05, 2015 in Difficult to Lose Weight/Easier Weight Loss | Permalink

A Weight Loss Psychology Question—Are You Engaged?

by Maria's Last Diet

What if you heard that being psychologically engaged during weight loss makes all the difference? Would you believe it?

See how many of the following indicators of psychological engagement you can check off.

___ have good concentration
___ find it interesting
___ get enjoyment
___ realize you’re making a difference
___ act purposefully
___ be thoughtful
___ be focused
___ be excited
___ willing to exert effort
___ find it meaningful
___ up for the challenge
___ building your skills
___ it’s personally important
___ see the value of the experience

What did you find? Are you as fully psychologically engaged as you need to be?

Posted by Maria's Last Diet on Wednesday, November 04, 2015 in Weight loss psychology | Permalink

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Need to Lose Weight—Need to Lose Weight—Need to Lose Weight.

For True Weight Loss Success What’s It Going to Take?

I Eat Too Much. I Can’t Help It

Eating to Lose Weight—Which Way is Your Way?

Are You Desperate to Lose Weight? Is Better Self-Control the Answer?

Trouble Losing Weight—It’s Too Hard. I Can’t Do It.

Emotional Eating—See What Gets You to Do It

What Can the Psychology of Weight Loss Tell Us About Making Weight Loss Easier

Are You Up to the Weight Loss Challenge?

A Weight Loss Psychology Question—Are You Engaged?

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