Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Seeing an overweight woman should be a sign to the rest of us that indeed a murder has been committed. Only we, for the most part, see the woman as just overweight. By characterizing the condition as “just overweight”, we seriously minimize the crime

The crime is right there for everyone to see. There’s a body all right, and the murderer is getting away Scott-free. Overweight women are blind to the fact that a crime had been committed. Just because something’s right before your eyes, doesn’t mean that you see it.

It’s serious, the body being murdered. But it’s not only the body that suffers the murderous blow. Soul murder. It’s soul murder, too. It’s where the heart and soul of a woman don’t survive. It may look like the person is all there, that she is a living, breathing, personable person. That’s not the case though. The woman, as she could have been, as she should have been, gets killed off.

Women who have gained a lot of weight and cannot lose weight have been murdered right before their very own eyes. It’s often a slow death characterized by a kind of numbness to the fact that it’s happening.

Women have tried and tried to lose weight, some practically for all their lives. Each time they failed, they betrayed themselves and this was one of the factors that kept contributing to their slow death. Murder by repeated failure and betrayal.

You’ve probably heard many women say it was murder to diet. What they meant colloquially was that dieting was very hard for them. What is not being talked about and squarely addressed is that there was real murder committed too. To find it, you only have to look at what women who have gained so much weight have done to their bodies. They murdered them. They not only murdered their bodies, they also murdered parts of themselves: feelings, thoughts, aspects of personality, belief, hope. That is what happens when you gain weight to the point of being overweight or obese. That is what happens when you try and try to lose all your unwanted weight over and over. You can’t help but kill off parts of yourself.

Yes, the woman who is overweight has definitely been murdered. Only she is the one who committed the murder. She pulled the trigger and riddled her body repeatedly with food; too much food. Dieting is not the antidote it is purported to be. Every woman knows that. Dieting is a shot in the dark. Only very few dieters ever bring themselves back from the brink. It usually goes: by the time a woman gets to diet, she is already a gonner, and no diet, no matter how strong, will cut it.

Please take pity on the murderer. Don’t condemn her. Don’t punish her. She is not only a murderer, she is a victim too, a victim of her own mayhem. She is the victim of her own crime. Yes, she is guilty of murder. She took her own life. She is victim and murderer—and witness too. Don’t forget witness. An eyewitness. Like most eyewitnesses, though, her testimony is probably not as accurate as she might make it sound. After all, she was there at the beginning when the crime was being plotted, in the middle when the crime was happening, and in the end when she was dying, and she probably can’t give a straight account of the whole thing.

by Maria's Last Diet

Way deep down inside, that’s where my eating problem was. It wasn’t what I ate, when I ate it, or on the surface why I ate it. Deep within me were the seeds of my eating problem, ever since I was a child.

The nearest I can come to reconstructing it starts with my mother telling me I have a skinny body. So what’s wrong with being skinny? Nothing really, except it was the way my mother said it, with such derision. And it was when my mother said it; when she was angry with me, when she was too frustrated about something or other and took it out on me. This, I think was the beginning, or at least part of the beginning.

There were other parts at the beginning too. I was great in my mother’s eyes as a baby, a toddler, a little girl. But as I got older my mother was less patient with me, definitely not doting like she had been early on. You see, I think my mother preferred little kids, very little kids. As I was getting older, I was no longer the special one in her eyes.

So there I was with my skinny body, which I knew my mother didn’t like. I was getting older, more mature, which I also knew my mother didn’t like. I tried to make it up to myself and to her by being smart and clever, charming and engaging, collecting honors in school for being such a good student. I was always on. I was fun and cute and had winning ways.

But inside of me, in my skinny body where it really counted, I was unsure of myself. That’s why I was doing all this compensating on the outside of myself—being smart, always on, things like that. I was a whirlwind on the outside and a big bag of wind inside. I wasn’t real. I wasn’t substantial.

I stayed skinny into my twenties, all the while not being able to throw over my insecurities. Oh, I accomplished all right, on the outside of course. My first big weight gain in my 20s was not my last. There were many more weight gains (and weight losses). More weight on my bones was my ‘outside’ way of feeling substantial. If I looked more substantial, I was indeed substantial, as a person, mind you.

For twenty more years of my adult life I gained and lost weight, worked hard to lose it, had no trouble gaining it, all to feel that I was a person of substance, all to deal with insecurities that started when I was a child. You can see why I say that way deep down inside, that’s where my eating problem was.

by Maria's Last Diet

As you lose weight and move closer and closer to your weight loss goal, check out whether you have turned the tide from body dissatisfaction to body appreciation.

Use the following questionnaire* at a number of different times during the weight loss process to see if you appreciate your body more and more.

Please indicate whether the question is true about you

1. Never     2. Seldom     3. Sometimes    4. Often    5. Always.


1. I respect my body. _____________

2. I feel good about my body. _____________

3. I feel that my body has at least some good qualities. ________________

4. I take a positive attitude towards my body. _______________

5. I am attentive to my body’s needs. ______________

6. I feel love for my body. ______________

7. I appreciate the different and unique characteristics of my body. ____________

8. My behavior reveals my positive attitude toward my body; for example, I hold my head high and smile. ____________

9. I am comfortable in my body. ___________

10. I feel like I am beautiful even if I am different from media images of attractive people (e.g., models, actresses/actors). ____________


Add up how often these questions are true for you. Then see to what degree you appreciate your body: never, seldom, sometimes, often, always.  


 *Body Appreciation Scale-2 by Tracy Tylka and Nichole Wood-Barcalow

by Maria's Last Diet

What do you think of your body? Yes, you heard right. Despite being overweight are you satisfied with your body? Not many women who are overweight can say they have a good body image. Being overweight makes it difficult to love your body and think of it as beautiful, satisfying, strong, and fitting.

Dissatisfaction with your body leads to a variety of consequences. Body dissatisfaction affects your self-esteem, optimism, compassion for yourself, interest in being proactive, the likelihood of having positive feelings, and satisfaction with life in general. It interferes with paying attention to hunger and satiation signals. Your bad body image may also deprive you of sexual satisfaction and motivation to engage in physical activity. On top of all this, body dissatisfaction can result in anxiety and shame about your physique, repeated body checking, over-scrutinizing your body, and weaker defenses against general appearance ideals.

So what can you do if you’re overweight and the deck of cards your dealing with is stacked against you? You can go ahead and lose your unwanted weight. For sure this is a flippant answer. Nevertheless, losing your unwanted weight is the right answer. And it’s a dependable answer too for establishing a more positive body image.

If you need help to lose your unwanted 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.

by Maria's Last Diet

“I’m so fat.” “No, you’re not.” “I, not you, am really the fat one here. Just look at all of this arm flab.”

Fat talk. Back and forth it goes between you and a friend or between you and a family member. You make disparaging comments about your weight and your body and the other person refutes your self-criticism. Or the other person may respond to you bad- mouthing your body by disparaging her own body.

What’s the sense of fat talking? It looks like disparaging your body and your weight facilitates your interaction with another woman in a self-humbling way. But at the same time you're using your self-consciousness and concern about your weight and body in this socially acceptable manner to feel less vulnerable to shame and other weight loss motivators. Does this mean that fat talk removes the incentive to reduce your weight? Yes, it does.



Take this short quiz and see how much fat talk you engage in.

      A lot     To a great extent     Somewhat     Very little     Not at all

When I am with friends or family I complain that…

I am fat
I am not in shape
my arms are too flabby
I eat too much
I have fat rolls
my clothes are too tight
I eat fattening foods
I have a big butt
my jeans make me look fat
I wish I had your thighs
I feel too big all over
my stomach sticks out too much


What are your favorite fat talk lines? And please don’t say you have none.

by Maria's Last Diet

How much does your weight affect your life?

Take the following questionnaire and find out.

Rate each statement using the scale below. Then tally up how many times you used each of the ratings in the scale and you’ll have your answer.

  Very much like me   Somewhat like me   Very little like me   Not at all like me

1.  I care too much about my weight. 

2.  Worrying about my weight takes up too much of my time. 

3.  I can’t control my negative thoughts about my weight. 

4.  My mood is determined by my weight. 

5.  I shut down when I feel bad about my weight. 

6.  I would spend a lot of money on losing weight.

7.  I define myself by comments others make about my weight. 

8.  I will never be happy unless I lose a lot of weight. 

9.  When I start thinking about my weight, it’s hard to do anything else. 

10.  My feelings about my weight must change before I take important steps in my life.

11.  My negative thoughts about my weight keep me from enjoying life. 

12.  My relationships would be better if my weight did not bother me. 

by Maria's Last Diet

What is self-objectification and are you guilty of it? Self-objectification is when you believe your body represents most of your identity. In other words, you put the most stock in your physical appearance and not the other things that are important about you, like your achievements or your personality.

When you self-objectify, you are quite concerned about how other people see your body. In fact, if you are a self-objectifier you take on the perspective of how your body looks to other people. You see your body as an object something other people admire or criticize. Other indications of self-objectification are frequent and habitual monitoring of your appearance and persistently comparing your body to the bodies of other women or to a so-called ideal body.

Are you guilty of self-objectification? If you are, you probably are quite familiar with the consequences, which can be considerable dissatisfaction with your body, painful focus on your body’s shortcomings, shame in regard to your body, anxieties about your body, worry that others are evaluating your body negatively, and disordered eating.

by Maria's Last Diet

Like all of us, from time to time, or maybe even more frequently than this, you probably compare yourself with other women. How do you look compared to so and so? How well off are you compared to this friend or that woman? Are you as smart as? Do you get as much done as.

When you compared yourself like this, what did you find was the result? Did you feel good about yourself? Perhaps you got down on yourself.

What do these social comparisons and appearance comparisons have to do with losing your unwanted weight? Well, we’re asking. Do you know what effect comparing yourself with other women has on your efforts to lose your unwanted weight?