Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Let’s say you’ve been given a pill con­taining a new breakthrough chemical combination specially formulated for a woman’s metabolism. What it does is make you thin overnight, as thin as you ever wanted to be, as thin as a model. You sim­ply take the pill before you go to sleep and you wake up the next day to see that you’ve shrunk down to the size of your fantasies….

The evolution required to be at ease in this new body simply did not take place. Change did not have the chance to be cre­ated by ingenious you.

You would no doubt be left with un­resolved issues, issues that were embedded in your overeating and extra weight. You can’t circumvent these issues, and that little pill that took the weight off by pure magic did not set them to rest. These unresolved matters might very well send you back to that same balm again, that same way of self-medicating, or calming yourself, or rewarding yourself, or distracting yourself, etc.—because you didn’t develop better ways….

It’s a good thing, when you stop to think about it, that there is no fabulous pill to do all the work for you. If there were, it could lead to chaos and more disappointment. Instant thin, like instant wealth, might bring more trouble than it’s worth. To have a dream come true is very important for sure, but it’s not a magic trick, and it doesn’t happen at light speed in five easy steps or anything like that. It’s a journey after all.

     Excerpt from the new book    How to Break the Seven Rules of Women Who Stay Fat. by Julie North Schwarz & Kenneth Schwarz Ph.D. Symmetry Press, 2016.

by Maria's Last Diet

How patient are you? Can you wait? Can you accept yourself where you are? If you’re not ready to take the next weight loss step, what do you think of yourself? Are you self-critical or self-accepting? What if you don’t push? What if you did stay right where you are? Is this so bad?

Look what can happen when you are very accepting of your limitations. Instead of pushing and prying at yourself to take the next steps to losing weight, you keep the pressure off. You watch and wait until you are ready to move ahead. You might even during this down time think of ways to help you inch forward from not being ready to being ready. Perhaps you set smaller, more achievable goals that enable you to go from here to there.

When you are self-accepting during the weight loss process, you will be more in alliance with yourself. There are enough pushes and pulls involved in the behavior changes inherent in weight loss. You don’t need to add any more. Being tolerant of, adjusting to, and learning to live with your very own weight loss pace, will bring you a more peaceful and productive weight loss experience.

by Maria's Last Diet

When it comes to how to lose weight and keep it off, do you find that attempting to do your “very best” can result in you feeling dissatisfied with yourself? If only you had set the standard at doing “well enough,” you might have felt more satisfied with yourself.

What’s involved with doing your best versus doing well enough? Take a look and see if by aiming for the best you open yourself up to more self-criticism for what you didn’t do but could have done. See whether you have more regret for not choosing some option other than the one you chose. Check too that when you aim to do your best, you could be comparing yourself more with what other people have done, and find yourself not measuring up. Doing well enough, on the other hand, is a more self-accepting standard.

It helps to keep the difference between doing your very best and doing well enough in mind, and every so often check to see where you are with this.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you have a tough time talking about your weight? Have you ever talked about your weight with your significant other or with your physician?

What is it about weight that makes it so hard to talk about? There are all those personal issues that easily lead to feeling too vulnerable, like your self-esteem, guilt feelings, your self-image, your worry about what others think of you, etc.

Maybe it would help you open up about your weight if you started by confiding in yourself first. Does this seem like a funny idea? You could certainly talk to yourself about your weight, how you feel about weighing what you weigh, what you’d like to accomplish regarding your weight, and what you’ve been through with this weight issue of yours. Writing about your weight is another way to take a step toward talking with others about your weight. Writing about your feelings and experiences, as the research clearly shows, is also a way of gaining emotional relief.

by Maria's Last Diet

Here are 5 practices that will serve you well when you want to lose weight.

1. Being aware of your internal experiences.
    When I’m eating I notice how the amount of food I eat makes me feel.
    I can think about how I feel emotionally.

2. Being able to describe your internal experiences
    What she said hurt me, and I’m not getting over it easily.
     I feel too full.

3. Being fully involved in what you are doing.
    I am aware of my eating behavior.
    I am conscious of how I act when I’m with friends.

4.  Reacting and not reacting intentionally.
     I don’t have to react if I don’t want to.
     I can stop and think before I just go ahead and react.

5. Being non-judgmental.
    I try not to criticize myself when I am wrong.
    I accept the fact that my feelings can sometimes be too over the top.

by Maria's Last Diet

Just because you have a weight loss diet plan, don’t be fooled into thinking you’re home free. Far from it. With a weight loss diet plan you will know what food to eat and what food not to eat.  But you won’t know how to do it.

After all, it’s your behavior you will be using to go on and stay on the diet. Think of it as your weight loss behavior. Weight loss behavior includes weight loss thinking, weight loss motivation, all the feelings you have during the weight loss process, and the action you take. You can have a well-defined diet, but if your weight loss behavior is undecided and as yet unformulated, what then?

Going on a diet will require new and different behavior than what you are used to. On the diet, you won’t be using your familiar weight-gaining behavior. It’s weight-losing behavior you want to apply.

Weight losing behavior, though, is not laid out clearly and specifically in front of you like a weight loss diet. You will find yourself in uncharted territory with behavior that is unknown and unformulated. A perfect illustration of this circumstance is when you say in connection with a diet, “I have to start thinking differently?” Then what do you do about thinking differently? Don’t you have to formulate how you are going to think differently; and eventually how to get yourself to follow through and actually think differently? 

Beware! The diet being so carefully formulated and already laid out can easily mislead you into believing the diet should tell you just what to do. Those of you who have dieted before know differently. You must develop the weight loss behaviors that will make this perfectly laid out diet work. Weight loss behaviors are never an inherent part of a diet. You must invent the weight loss behaviors that will power your diet. You will have to work them out step by step from the very way you think to how you will act. You will have to formulate these behaviors and shape them to fit the occasions when you need them. You’ll do this without the benefit of an explicit guide.

Let’s take a look at a universal weight loss behavior you will be dealing with—“doing without?” “Doing without” is unquestioningly an essential weight loss behavior for staying on a diet. “Doing without” stands in direct contrast to your old weight-gaining method of “not doing without.” Your job now is to change your thinking and behaving from “not doing without” to “doing without".

A weight loss diet is all about “doing without,” even if it’s a diet that is not restrictive. Dieting in moderation requires you to abstain from overeating, give up bingeing, and forgo comfort foods and snacks that are fattening. This is the food part of “doing without.” Then there is nonfood “doing without,” like doing without the reward that comfort food used to give you for doing a hard day’s work or relinquishing a chance to kick up your heels and eat off your diet at the 4^th of July block party.

How will you handle “doing without?” What will you do when it comes time for your daily reward? How will you go about formulating the weight loss behaviors that will help you “do without” your old weight-gaining eating and weight-gaining thinking and feeling? Perhaps you’ll try something and see if it works. If it works, great! If it doesn’t work, you’ll look for some good feedback and it’s back to the drawing board for you.

Having to formulate the unformulated and make what you devise be a good fit is what causes losing weight to be such a hard task. If only you could use a template for weight loss behavior like you do for diet food. Wouldn’t weight loss be a lot simpler?

Symmetry Press, the publisher of Maria’s Last Diet Blog, is giving away a copy of 99 Essential Weight Loss Blogposts before it’s released.

To enter: Like Symmetry Press' Facebook page and then tell your biggest struggle while dieting. After you've commented, share this post to your own wall.

A random winner will be chosen on June 1st. Must be 18 years or older and living in the continental U.S. to win.

The link to the giveaway is: https://www.facebook.com/SymmetryPress

by Maria's Last Diet

There are a million and one reasons women give for not losing weight. “I don’t have the time.” “I can’t stay motivated.” “I just have to have my comfort food.” “I’ve tried before and I don’t want to go through that again.” These reasons may or may not be accurate, but whether they are accurate or not, they don’t tell the whole story.

For every woman who says she can’t lose weight there is a backstory. The backstory is a set of events that precede and lead up to the current main plot where weight isn’t getting lost. This historical backstory gives a more accurate reason for not being able to lose weight?

Do you know what your backstory is? What were the past events in your life that made you gain the weight you are now maintaining? See if your backstory is still very much a part of you, and this is why you can’t lose weight. If so, you will have to do more than diet and exercise. You’ll definitely have to do something about your backstory.  

by Maria's Last Diet

Here’s some stuff about reducing your weight that is off the beaten track. How are you with such things as withstanding difficult conditions? Do you recover quickly from them? Can you adapt and make the most of a bad situation? How’s your bounce back quotient from experiences that disturb you? What about your flexibility? How flexible are you in dealing with changing demands? 

Watch out. You may be concentrating too heavily on shedding pounds and staying on a diet as your primary weight loss methods. Opportunities for successful weight loss may pass you by unless you go off the beaten track and work on adapting and recovering, two high-ranking skills for weight loss.

by Maria's Last Diet

What above all else will make it possible for you to lose weight?

It’s “getting yourself to do it.” That’s what.

“Getting yourself to do it” is primarily a psychological course of action.

The very first psychological step you have to take to lose weight is to “get yourself to” START. A good start comes from being able to support your well-meaning intentions.

When you try to STICK TO IT, you will be replacing old behaviors with new behaviors.The psychology in this phase of weight loss is built into a series of actions and steps for you to take.  

In the KEEP IT OFF phase you will no longer be losing weight. Gone will be the safety net of a weight loss diet and the motivational satisfaction of losing weight. More than ever, keeping your lost weight off is the time to have all your psychology working for you.