Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Patients who were finishing their psychotherapy had been saying to their therapist as they departed, “I’ll call if I need you.” The therapist responded, “Call before you need me.” Can the same be said for women who run up against some obstacle and find they need help losing weight?

First of all, whom can these women call for help? And secondly, should they call before they need help losing weight?

The answer to the second condition is a definite yes. Getting the help you need before your need turns into an imperative is always the better course of action. But this still leaves the question unanswered, whom to call.

You probably don’t have a therapist helping you with weight loss, so calling your therapist is out. Will a family member or friend or your physician be able to advise you on a course of action that will help you avoid a weight loss disaster? If so, by all means give that person a call.

Most likely, though, you’ll have to call on yourself. You’ll have to come to your own rescue. So why not get prepared to do just that. See what you can do about anticipating the weight loss disaster that might lie ahead. Identify it and prepare for it. Be ready so you can call on yourself to do something about the chain of events that will take you from smooth sailing into choppy water.

“I’ll call if I need you.” “No, call before you need me.”

by Maria's Last Diet

Secretly, Maria always wanted to own a bookstore. She loved looking through books, and over the years had changed her reading interests from time to time, which gave her the chance to go through lots of different store sections for books.

Her longest, most infamous section sickness was diet books. You could say she had an insatiable hunger for diet books. Whatever bookstore she frequented, she always went directly to the diet book section, usually buying at least one book, sometimes two or three. Maria read each and every one of her diet books. She probably tried each and every diet as well. Back then  Maria was trying her damndest to lose weight. She must have owned a hundred or more diet books. Just about 1¾ books for each pound she needed to lose.

Times change. Maria conquered her weight problem—really squashed it out of existence, for good. She still went to bookstores, but her section sickness was over and her section selection changed. She never—that’s never—went to the diet section first. Sometimes she didn’t even go there at all during a visit. Her old diet book habit was hard to break, and for old time’s sake Maria found herself checking out the latest in diet fashion, every now and again.

by Maria's Last Diet

Women who are trying to reduce their weight try all kinds of weight loss activities. Which of the following have you tried and what were the results?

• cut back on calories
• used willpower
• started your own exercise routine
• limited your eating of certain types of foods
• took diet pills
• went to a commercial weight loss program
• tried psychotherapy
• used meal replacements
• went to a gym
• got advice from your doctor or other professional
• used herbal supplements
• used a diet book
• went to an exercise class
• used a personal trainer
• used some kind of self-help book
• tried hypnotism
• used an internet site for weight loss
• attended a clinical program for weight loss

What determined your choice of weight loss activity? Did you get the help you needed? If you didn’t get the help you needed, can you describe what you believe would work better for you?

by Maria's Last Diet

Losing your unwanted weight, whether you do it yourself or you join with others to do it, always—that’s always with a capital “A”—requires lots of inspiration, motivation, how to, and support. What if you were transported to a place where you could get all of these, without having to leave the comfort of your favorite armchair?

Front and center comes the weight-loss story. A woman did it. She lost weight, reached goal weight, and kept the lost weight off. How did she do it? What did she have to go through in order to reach the pinnacle of success?

Immersion into this woman’s life by reading about her struggles and exploits inspires, motivates, teaches, and supports. It’s the kind of self-help that seeps its way into your psyche without you even having to lift a finger. Ah, at last, something that’s easy about the weight-loss process.

As you read, you absorb the character, her personality, her struggles, her triumphs. There is every possibility that you will be affected, perhaps even changed, by this experience. You might even put yourself in the main character’s shoes, especially if what she went through fits you.

At MariasLastDiet.com, we’ve tried to give women who want to lose weight this kind of experience. Some of the blog posts, as you probably noticed, are based on a character-driven form of self-help. So too are parts of each of the books in the Symmetry Press series Weight-Loss Books for Women — Using Psychology to Lose Weight.

Breaking Up With Food: Maria’s Last Diet, one of the books in the series, is a novel of passionate weight loss in which the main character’s psychology is the key to her weight loss. 

So take the easy road to weight loss whenever you can and immerse yourself in a story about weight loss.

by Maria's Last Diet

Self-help guides aren’t much help—if you don’t really use them to help yourself.

A diet book, an exercise regimen, weight-loss psychology: put all of them under the heading of self-help tools.

After you’ve bought the new diet book, looked up a good exercise regimen, learned about the importance of the psychology of weight loss, the hardest thing is to get yourself to use these weight-loss aids. This is a chronic problem for many women—actually using the self-help guide they have at hand.

Interestingly, this problem of using what’s good for you—called adherence or compliance—is rampant. Many people can’t get themselves to do what is best for them. Take the surprising case of your doctor prescribing a necessary, maybe life-changing medicine for you. What’s surprising is that the adherence rate—those who take their medicine—is only about fifty percent. What’s with the other fifty?

That’s what you’re up against when you try weight-loss self help. But in weight loss the adherence statistics for a regimen that leads to permanent weight loss are much worse. At least eighty percent of you aren’t going to make it. Actually doing it, and sticking with it, of course, is necessary for good results.

Recent research shows that specific planning is the catalyst you need to Psych Yourself to START, Psych Yourself to STICK TO IT, and Psych Yourself to KEEP IT OFF. In the simplest terms, specific weight-loss planning means that beforehand you select any number of situations or opportunities you know will occur and spell out a plan for what you can do when these situations arise.

Can you see the benefit of getting yourself to make these specific plans? What you’re doing is putting yourself into action (thinking action) when it comes to self-help

Examples:

Dieting Help—“I will keep to the set number of calories on my diet weekdays, but give myself some relief on the weekends. This will accomplish two things for me: 1. I won’t feel so restricted and 2. This will give me practice in going “back on”, which is what I’ll need to know how to do when I’ve reached my weight-loss goal and am no longer on a diet.”

Good Exercises to Lose Weight—“I don’t like exercise, and anyway the research shows that exercise doesn’t help you lose weight. I’ll make sure I work harder on the calories-in side of the equation. BUT…I know when I exercise that my body feels better. That’s one thing. I know too when I exercise I feel better as a person—more motivated. So, I’ll do what’s called lifestyle exercise. I’ll make sure I park at the far end of the parking lot and take a nice walk to and from the supermarket. I’ll even go up and down the stairs a few times each day rather than making it all in one trip. I will count all that I physically do as exercise so I don’t feel discouraged about never exercising. After all, exercise is not simply treadmilling, elliptical training, working the weights, or walking those two to three miles with my friend each winter morning.”

Psychology for Weight Loss—“Since I know that very specific planning will enhance my chances of starting a diet, sticking to the diet, and maintaining weight loss, I will plan to plan. I will plan for not feeling motivated too. For I know that’s always been my downfall. I have even set up some key words for planning. They are ‘when’ and ‘then’. When such and such happens, then I’ll do such and such.”

It’s strange to say, but you probably know it—self-help needs your help.

by Maria's Last Diet

Help! Somebody do something!

No answer.

Somebody tell me what to do to lose this weight already!

Silence.

But you said this diet would work better than any other, and it hasn’t. So I want my money back.

The only sound—raindrops on the roof.

Well, I’m just a big fat failure.

The words echoed in her head.

So, I guess I’m doomed to weigh 170 pounds for the rest of my life. Looks like it, doesn’t it?

The phone rang, she didn’t answer.

Other women can do it, I’ve read their stories of success. So why not me?

The refrigerator whooshed, the heat came blowing in from the vent.

Look, I can’t be the world’s worst overeater. There must be help for me from somewhere.

The sun began to set on the day.

I don’t want to be fat any more.

She smiled, just slightly.

Somehow, it felt like something had finally changed.

by Maria's Last Diet

Maybe you have thoughts and feelings about how much your eating bothers you.

Who else have you told?

It can really help to talk about it with someone, someone you trust to listen with an open mind and heart. Some women talk to a close friend, some to a sister, some to a therapist or counselor.

What happens when you let someone else in to your struggle is that the interchange can make things clearer to you. First of all, just saying out loud something like: I’m driven to eat when I don’t really want to—just saying it, admitting it, letting someone else hear it who might not think it’s the worse thing in the world can help you understand yourself better, and even accept yourself better.

Then, other people can often help you figure out what to do, if the problem has been too difficult for you to solve. Other people can give you fresh insights, maybe coming from problems they themselves have had in life and were able to solve.

Being secretive about certain things because we’re too embarrassed to talk about them can sometimes hurt us. Reaching out to another person for help and support can break you out of a problem, especially one that you’ve not been able to find an answer to.

by Maria's Last Diet

Asking for help and getting it are important components of weight-loss success. 

How many times have you tried to muddle through a dieting regimen without getting the most help you could from your family and friends? What kind of help are we talking about here? Well, everything from lots of encouragement to outright changes your family and friends make to insure your success. For example, your family eats what you are eating; friends get together with you on occasions other than lunches and dinners.  

But did you know that it is hard for people to ask for help? Is it hard for you to ask for help when it comes to dieting and losing the weight? What prevents you from asking for help? Is it one more of the following:

• You are uncomfortable doing so
• you feel too vulnerable
• you are embarrassed
• you want to save face
• you feel the pressure of having to be self-sufficient
• you feel that it will strain the relationship with your helper

So, what to do if this describes you. One possibility is to choose wisely. Choose a “helper” who you can tell will take your feelings very much into consideration. Another possibility to break your pattern of not asking for help is to think of yourself as the “helper”. What if your friend needed your help, how would you respond? Wouldn’t you help her? Then try to put yourself in your friend’s shoes. Wouldn’t she want to do the same for you?

by Maria's Last Diet

You mean it when you say it. You are serious about it. You want to lose the weight, so you promise yourself you’ll start dieting. But how many of these dieting promises have you broken? How many times have said you’d do it and then put it off and put it off?

So many women want to lose the weight but have trouble getting started. This is understandable, especially for someone who has dieted before and failed. If you’re one of those people, you know how hard it is to overcome past failures and feel confident about attempting a weight-loss diet plan again.

Why not try a new way to get yourself ready to go? Why not try something completely different this time so you can finally stop procrastinating and start being the dieter you want to be? That’s what Maria did. She started by writing a letter.

Dear Food

I’m breaking up with you.

Don’t be surprised. I’ve certainly tried to do it many times before, but I always weakened and went back to you.

I finally woke up and realized this relationship is not good for me. I’m not getting what I need from you. It’s hurting me, not allowing me the space to grow in the ways I need to grow. You’re holding me back.

I know I’ll have separation anxiety, but I’ve stayed with you too long, way past when I should have. This just isn’t working for me. You don’t listen to me. You don’t give me attention. You don’t care about what I’m going through. It’s almost like you don’t have any feelings for me at all, yet I’ve stuck close to you, helpless and dependent.

I know you won’t let go of me so easily. I know you’ll keep calling me, asking me to come back. But please, let me go now.

In the beginning you were always there, ready to calm me and soothe me, but it went too far. I came to rely on you. I looked to you for everything. In all fairness, it was too much to ask of you. No way could you fulfill all my needs. For so long I’ve settled, afraid to go out there and find something better for myself. I need to do that.

I now withdraw my heart from you so I can be free to put it elsewhere, some place where I can be loved back. I’ve tried to break up with you before. This time it’s real. I want to be on the cutting edge of my own life, and I can’t do it while I’m still tied to you. Thinking about being free scares me, but I want it. I must have it. I think I’m brave enough at last.

I know I’ll long for you. I know I’ll think of you a lot, especially during those hard times. I know I’ll be tempted to come back to you. But this time I’ve got a plan, things I’m prepared to do when I get lonely and sad. I’ve been thinking of other ways to celebrate when I’m happy or proud. I have remedies in place for being bored or tired.

At this point you’re a troublemaker in my life and I intend to keep my emotional distance from you. So in a way, this is goodbye. Of course, I’ll still come into contact with you day to day, but let’s just be friends, not lovers.

Don’t cry (although you never do, it’s me who does all the crying).

If you’ve been struggling with a weight problem, you undoubtedly have your own unique, complicated relationship with food. Do you know how it works with you? Laying out the problem honestly the way Maria did can give you the extra push you need. It is like a breath of fresh air, taking you from procrastinator to starter in one heartfelt step: Dear food…