by Maria's Last Diet

Women who need to lose weight, and people in general, are complicated. Weighing too much doesn’t just happen because you don’t want it to. You might not want to be overweight, but you also want to overeat and you put up with suffering the consequences of being so heavy despite all the kicking and screaming about how you don’t want to be such a fatty.

 Therefore, you have to raise your awareness of what you haven’t faced, what you are not able to face, what you don’t want to face within yourself. You will have to raise your awareness of what you find so you can look at these parts, realize they are there, examine them carefully, and in doing so have a better chance of correcting them. You don’t just set up a behavioral routine of pushing yourself away from the table as a way of sticking to a diet. You need to see what it is within you that makes losing weight so difficult, and you can push yourself toward that; expose what’s outside of your awareness, approach it, become conscious of it, and not avoid it.

by Maria's Last Diet

There is no escaping it. For breakfast should I have one of my favorite banana muffins or should I stick to my diet-faithful scrambled eggs with cheese? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Conflict, conflict, conflict. What’s eating if you want to lose weight but a bunch of decisions and conflicts? 

With conflict, of course, comes frustration, indecision, avoidance, and quitting. Better to follow a prescribed diet and avoid conflict altogether. But that’s impossible. There is always going to be conflict, even when you are on a food plan that tells you what you should and shouldn’t eat. You might not feel like eating just so much of this today or have not enough of that tomorrow. There is always conflict in human affairs.

So what to do? Conflict doesn’t have to inhibit your choices; it can augment your choices as well and prove useful to your decision-making. In this regard, just think how often you have taken a proactive approach to a conflict you were facing. It’s a mindset, isn’t it? If you establish a mindset that is ready to deal with conflicting feelings, ideas, goals, beliefs, and what to eat and what not to eat, you will already have the inner resources to deal more effectively with conflict. A mindset such as this could mean that you will spend time thinking out the conflict, be more systematic, and use a variety of information to solve the conflict.

by Maria's Last Diet

Before you know it you become the victim. The attack is amazingly quick and sure, indisputable. You don’t see your attacker until it’s too late. There is not even a stealthy approach to alert you. Your assailant is so adept that you have virtually no protection against the crime.

When you are selected as the target, your attacker has already figured out just how vulnerable you will be. Good targets don’t put up a fight; they don’t throw together much resistance. Easy marks just go along. So too will you.

Beware of the attacker who presents as if the approach is normal and non-threatening. In a flash the trap will be sprung and you will be put in the position of having to succumb. You may be threatened with bodily harm if you don’t instantly submit. When you see what looks like a gun pointed at you and you are being told to do it or else, you have no other choice but to go into full capitulation.

Is any of this familiar to you? Have you been in this kind of situation? Don’t be too quick to say no. Think about it. What happens when you don’t sustain your weight loss effort, when, before you know it, you are breaking your diet? How often during the weight loss process did you have to fight off a snack attack or some other crime against your diet goal or weight loss routine?  

Make no mistake about it. The criminal you will be battling is not just some dummy who stumbled into a life of crime. You’re up against a highly skilled foe with plenty of practice over lots of time. Going straight is not in the cards for such a relentless adversary. If you want to get out from under this constant threat, you are going to have to stop being such a wuss and ruthlessly take down this offender.  

by Maria's Last Diet

You will find it is often the case during the weight loss process that your actual attitude will be one thing and your desired attitude will be another. For example, you may hold as your actual attitude an unwillingness to face some emotional issue and an all too convenient willingness to resort to emotional eating instead. Your desired attitude, however, is to face the emotional issue head on and stop your emotional eating. The result of these two very different attitudes is that you are in conflict with yourself. To do justice to your weight loss regimen, you will have to solve such conflicts.

Conflict is an integral part of the weight loss process, from the simple “I shouldn’t eat that” to all the less obvious internal dealings with yourself in your daily life that get in the way of weight loss. If conflict is so fundamental to the weight loss process, then it must not only be solved, but it also has to be lived through. You can defend against it somewhat and for some time, but basically you have to endure the conflict, ride it out, minimize it if you can, and certainly in the best of all possible worlds, solve it. In other words, while resolving your conflicting thoughts, feelings, and beliefs is great if you can do it, being able to live with a certain amount of conflict is going to be necessary if you want to lose weight.

Are you up for this?

A frequent cause of the kind of conflict making it difficult to lose weight is fear of failure. Another is fear of success. In fear of failure, you are motivated to avoid failure more than you are to achieve success. In fear of success, you are motivated to avoid being successful more than you are to avoid being a failure. To see which is which for you, look closely at your motivations and study your personal history. The answer to fear of failure or fear of success lies there.

Let’s tackle your motivations first for fear of success. If you were to go ahead and lose your excess weight, all of it, what would be the downside of this accomplishment? Would you look too good so that you might outdo others? Would that be too competitive for you? If so, fear of success is probably a conflict that keeps you at your current weight. This is just one motivation for fear of success. Other motivations for fearing success might be things like fitting in unobtrusively, not showing others up, not wanting to lose approval, being seen as a showoff, afraid you will be a target for the jealousy of others. See what motivations for being afraid of success that you come up with for yourself.

Now let’s get to fear of failure. Once again, presuming you were planning to lose your unwanted weight and reach goal weight, what in the realm of fear of failure would prevent you from actually doing it? One mighty motivation is believing you will not be able to do it. You might think that losing all that weight is just too hard, too impossible. In other words, it is too big a task. Then too you could see yourself as not capable of changing the way you eat. Would this be a case of low self-confidence, poor self-esteem, or could it even be a realistic appraisal. There are other motivations for fear of failure. Some of these are shame, embarrassment, fear of future negative social evaluation, the threat of appearing unable. What would you say your motivations for fear of failure are?

When you are trying your hardest to lose some excess weight, you are prone to being ambivalent in lots of different ways. You might have mixed feelings, or opposing beliefs, or your feelings may be inconsistent with both what you think and what you believe. You can feel torn and conflicted between what will satisfy you right now and what you think you want in the long run. Distant goals and outcomes might be discounted when more immediate rewards are at hand.

Ambivalence can also be the cause for you to go to quite some lengths to stop yourself from giving in to a short-term goal while you are trying to achieve a long-term weight loss goal. You might only go to the supermarket on a full stomach or not go at all until you lose more weight. You could refuse to keep certain tempting foods at home, which is something you probably have not only thought of but tried as well. You could, like a lot of other women, take appetite suppressants. And like many women, you might even mete out punishment to yourself if you violate any of your weight loss intentions.

If you are unable to decide or to follow through on your decision to lose your unwanted weight, you might be suffering from a condition known as ambivalence. Ambivalence means you have contradictory tendencies or mixed feelings about whether you can or cannot or whether you want to or want not to, and your contradictory tendencies or mixed feelings are of equal strength for and against. You can see advantages and disadvantages to both sides, do it and don’t do it. So there you are sitting on the fence, stuck between doing and not doing, deciding and not deciding. 

Ambivalence is different than being neutral or uncertain or indifferent. It is a form of psychological conflict that usually is an unpleasant experience for the person who is ambivalent. When you are still deciding whether to change or not to change, a certain degree of ambivalence is to be expected. Once you decide to change, though, being ambivalent may very well undermine your motivation to stick to your decision. This is because change requires you to make a choice between what you are ambivalent about. If you tell yourself that in order to stay on your diet you have to take some pretty big weight loss steps and you keep putting this off because you are ambivalent, the imperative to go ahead and do it is a force you are applying to yourself to choose between the two sides of your ambivalence: take these steps to lose weight or stay right where you are. If you cannot choose between the two equally attractive or unattractive options, you will be stuck, not knowing which side to choose, and it is at this point your motivation for staying on your diet will falter.

There is not a lick of a chance that you will go without conflict. The promise for a conflict-free process of weight loss cannot be made. The only pledge that you can count on is that by using psychology to lose weight you will not suffer the awful mind snag you would otherwise get from your ambivalence and conflicts. The psychology we are talking about here is giving your pseudo-belief in a one-sided desire to lose weight a good shaking out.

Don’t be surprised then to find there are things other than weight loss that you desire even more than losing weight. You will not want to think about this at first and take a look at what this means. If, however, you commit to just a little weight loss psychology, you will be able to look at what is making it difficult for you to lose weight. It is that you are conflicted. You do and you don’t want to do what you have to do to lose that weight of yours.

Here is where that handy-dandy device of a pros and cons chart comes in. Only this is a pros and cons chart with a twist. It will not be the pros for losing weight you will be keying on. Weight loss psychology says it is the pros for not losing weight that need to be identified loudly and clearly. You probably have been keeping the pros for not losing weight muted or absolutely silent in some cases. You need to take these pros of yours for not losing weight out of the closet and bring them into the light. The same will be true for your cons, not the cons for not losing weight, but the cons for losing weight. Bet you will be startled to learn just how many cons for losing weight you actually have. These cons for losing weight, when set side by side with the pros for not losing weight, will give you incontrovertible evidence from two different sources, and your conflicting goals for yourself will be out in the open.

Remember, successful weight loss will only be yours if you can bring your conflicts out into the open so you can first face them and then fix them.   

Hey, it is not easy to lose a lot of weight. In fact, almost everyone—practically 99.999 percent—finds it difficult to lose weight. So much control is required to shed those extra pounds, and this makes it hard. BUT—what makes it even harder is what you cannot control because you have a conflict. Here is the usual conflict: to eat it or not to eat it. Seems simple and straightforward enough. But, oh no. It is like you have two heads, one telling you this and the other head telling you that. This is a case where two heads are definitely not better than one.

It is one thing if you are of two minds about what to do or what not to do and you know you are of two minds. There are those times, lots of them unfortunately during the weight loss process, when you are not aware you are of two minds. You see only one, a mind made up. The other “mind” is there, though, out of your line of vision, tucked neatly away from any suspicious inkling on your part that this other mind even exists. Let’s for reality sake call this your unconscious or your nonconscious, because you are not aware that you are of two minds and they are in conflict. 

During your attempts to achieve successful weight loss, this blind spot happens more often than you would like. It is front and center when you go to eat some fattening food like a luscious piece of cake on the restaurant menu and you are hot and heavy into dieting so you can lose your unwanted weight. In fact, you have wanted to lose weight for the longest time and you’ve been actually doing it. So what’s with the cake?

You think of the cake as a diet cheat. It is that, but it is a lot more. Wanting the cake is a competing goal. This goal of yours became activated as soon as you made plans to join some friends for a meal out. You did not know it then, but you got a warning trace of it later as you skimmed down the menu to the dessert section to see if there was any fruit for dessert. You passed the list of cakes to get to the one fruit dessert on the menu.

The unconscious goal of eating cake was already on your menu, though. You had no idea it was there. Thinking of going to a restaurant activated it. Being so good on your weight loss regimen got your unconscious juices flowing and also activated the reward-for-being-so-good goal of having a piece of cake. You did not know any of this, because all of it took place outside of your awareness. You did not know when you stepped foot in the restaurant that you were going to have a conflict.

Your unconscious intention to have cake was part of the old you, always lurking because old habits die hard. The new you—the one that you were conscious of, was still not fully formed, not yet fully effective, and it loses the battle and you order cake.

The conflicts you will meet on your weight loss journey, and you will meet them time after time, are what you do not know that is going on inside of you; that “other head” of yours. If you are to have success with your conflicts and move on, you have to do something about what you cannot see and what you do not realize is there.