Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

What do you do with yourself between starting a weight loss regimen and the time it takes to reach goal weight? Usually the time between the two is long and arduous.

Let’s say you choose following a specific diet to try to lose weight. What do you do so the amount of time it takes to lose weight isn’t burdensome to the point of affecting your motivation to diet?

If it’s just you and the diet and all that way to go until goal weight, then you might indeed feel that keeping to your diet is a strain. To take some of the hardship away, you could set up sub-goals. These are smaller goals that you can reach in a more timely way. Adding other activities besides the diet is yet another way you can take pressure off your diet as the only means to keep moving toward your goal. Problem solving can be one of these activities. Identifying problems that stand in the way of you losing weight and dealing effectively with these problems (obstacles) should make time more of an ally than an adversary.

So to keep yourself upbeat, self-assured, and secure in your resolve to reach goal weight, do all you can to lessen the burden of waiting a long time for results. It helps to construct a path to weight loss that gives you lots of results along the way. Most likely this means formulating sub-goals and getting involved with weight loss activities that take pressure off relying on your diet alone.

by Maria's Last Diet

There is an aura, a whole system of belief and credibility, given to a diet, as the principal way to lose weight. As far as losing weight is concerned, the diet is inert. It is inactive. It’s just a listing of what to eat and how much to eat. In this respect the diet is a placebo that has no special ingredient or technique to get you to act so you will lose weight. The active ingredient in a diet is you and your behavior, and the changes you make to your behavior that affect  your eating and weight.

One of these very specific, active changes you make is to adhere to the diet. You, not the diet, somehow, perhaps because of your belief in the diet, keep doing what the diet recommends, which may be to eat less, eat smaller portions, don’t eat sweets, eat fewer calories, pass on the carbohydrates, or stick to mostly proteins. But then, like most placebos, the diet doesn’t give lasting relief or cure or control. At some point, the diet fails you. This can happen during the time you’re dieting so you stop losing weight and revert to weight gaining eating. Or by dieting you lose all the weight you wanted, reach goal weight, and then don’t maintain your lost weight.

Placebos have been around in medicine forever and ever. At one time, like the weight loss diet of today, placebo was the primary form of medical treatment. Leeches, blood letting, rubbing animal dung in wounds, were all top-of-the-line medical treatments that were merely placebos. As the science of medicine began to understand the actual cause of different maladies, the active ingredient or technique of the treatment was designed so it specifically remedied this cause.

The same set of criteria should hold true for losing weight. Causes of weight gain ought to be treated with what will remedy the cause. If the cause of weight gain is a person’s behavior (including how a person thinks and feels), then the most potent form of treatment, the only correct form of treatment for weight gain is behavioral change.

This is not to say let’s do away with the diet. The diet can still be used as a food guide. But as a cure for weight gain the diet is as misleading as rubbing animal dung in wounds. The diet is a procedure that for the most part only gives dieters false hope.

by Maria's Last Diet

"Do you know what the biggest challenge to a dieter is?

Ordinary, everyday life—believe it or not. that’s because when you have a weight problem, it is almost certainly woven right into the fabric of how you live every day. In fact, all that you do in relation to keeping the weight problem going is so very well incorporated into your usual behavior, it’s hard to recognize.

It’s like breathing, or walking, or talking. You hardly notice. You just feel like everything is running per usual. So, the idea is to pay careful attention, catch yourself in the act of doing the things you do. Up your self-awareness.

One woman started out her weight loss plan by simply making notes about her behavior the first week. Anything she did that she thought might add to her weight problem got written down. It was amazing. She told us that in one week she had written down thirty-two different acts she committed without being fully aware. She also said that becoming aware, in and of itself, had begun to significantly change her behavior."

   excerpt from   Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 1. Psych Yourself to Start. By Kenneth Schwarz PhD and Julie North Schwarz

by Maria's Last Diet

After all your hard work to get started and then to keep at it, what would be the best thing to happen? Lose weight, of course. But there is something else that is equally mind-blowing. Wouldn’t it be when you routinely eat on your new diet? In other words, when eating diet food, actually coming to like it, and you stop needing the old weight-gaining standbys, perhaps even losing the taste for them. In short, what is also a wonderful reward is when all that you’re doing becomes a habit.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you dabble in dieting but still expect to lose all the weight you need to lose? In other words, you’re on a diet here and there, for a brief time last week and again for a few days this week? Or is your dabbling of a different order, like being on a diet all the time? Only the lifelong diet you’re on doesn’t ever get you to where you want to be, weightwise.

What’s the diet psychology for dabblers? Is it paying lip service to losing weight, with the attitude, that’ll do just fine, thank you very much? Could it be a self-sabotaging never being in control of yourself kind of thing? Perhaps the motivation for diet dabbling is a way not to change your eating habits because the way you eat gives you too much of what you really want. In this case, diet dabbling is just a big cover up.

What do you think? Do you dabble in dieting? Does any of this apply to you?