Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

True or false?

1. Loss of weight results from changing old habits.

2. Loss of weight is a struggle to get rid of old habits.

3. Loss of weight is a struggle to establish new habits.

4. Loss of weight is easier the quicker you get rid of old habits.

5. Loss of weight is easier the quicker you establish new habits.

6. New habits are established quicker when you use the same weight loss routine repeatedly in the same situation.

7. Old habits are gotten rid of more successfully when you work to get rid of them in a lot of different situations.

8. Once you’ve reached goal weight and your new habits are well established, old habits don’t recur.




   Answers: 1. True   2. True   3. True  4. True   5. True   6. True   7. True   8. False

by Maria's Last Diet

If you are trying to lose weight, you are most definitely working against some well established habits. What you eat, when you eat, and where you eat are habits that are part of your everyday experience. What gets you to overeat or to eat weight-gaining food is yet another part of your everyday habits.

With great repetition day after day in the same situations, it’s no wonder that habits are so hard to break. But break them you must, and replace them you must, if you want to lose weight.

What is so hard in changing over from weight-gaining eating to weight-losing eating is that habitual behavior is easily elicited by cues in the situations in which it has been repeated, by behaviors that usually precede the habit, and by being liberally reinforced by how well the habit works for you.

With a change in goal there also ought to come changes in habits. Aiming for weight-losing eating is that goal change. But it will be quite some time before the new behavior in support of the new goal will become habitual, which means that the old habits will still be hanging around.

To learn more about building new habits, 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

For Chantelle, as soon as the door closed and she was left alone at home, she began thinking of what she would eat. At other times when everyone was upstairs and she was by herself downstairs, she could feel her desire to sneak into the kitchen for a snack. Being by herself in any way at home was the cue for going to get some food.

Sometimes, most of the time lately, Chantelle had been acting on her impulse and getting something to eat. Of course, she wasn’t hungry and it didn’t matter what the food was. Sometimes it was junk food, at other times it was leftovers, and she wasn’t above having things like cheese and crackers or an English muffin with butter and jelly. Chantelle was an equal opportunity eater.

If Chantelle didn’t go to food, she still thought of food pretty automatically and habitually just as soon as she was left alone. She didn’t have any control over these thoughts; they just came. Chantelle tried time and again to think of why being left alone was such an enslaving cue. The habit was there, but the reason for the habit, its goal, its motivation were not visible. Chantelle wrestled with herself about the thoughts that came out of nowhere. She hoped against hope that battling her thoughts would help her not act on them, as she was prone to do.

by Maria's Last Diet

While the process of losing weight certainly entails dropping some pounds, it also includes what’s involved in “getting yourself to do it.” In each of the three phases of weight loss “getting yourself” to start, to stick to it, and then keep the weight off is even more a part of the weight loss process than shedding pounds.

Instead of relying on willpower and greater self-control to “get yourself to do it”, how about taking another, less strenuous course? For example, the more something gets to be a habit, the less stress and strain there will be on you to consciously direct your actions. Habits practically run themselves. Present the situation and the habit is there. So developing habits that will get you to do what you need to do to lose weight and keep the weight off is the way to go.

For more on habits and weight loss, 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

It’s a bad habit to keep eating so you can’t lose weight. Diet and exercise might be your ways of dealing with your bad eating habits. If you tried to diet and exercise to break your bad habits, did it work? If it worked, great! If it didn’t work, here is another approach to breaking bad habits.

Habits are really well established goals of yours that pop up time and time again in the same or similar situations. Snacking while watching TV after dinner is a prime example of a habit linked to a situation. The same habit encouraging cues fill the air nightly. If your diet isn’t helping you with breaking bad habits like snacking after dinner, go right for the goal of the bad habit itself.

What might be a goal for a counter-productive weight loss habit like snacking on fattening foods after dinner? There are lots of possibilities here depending on who you are. Perhaps your goal is to reward yourself for a hard day’s work or for having a hard day emotionally. Or you might be the kind of person who needs more in order to feel you are enough. You might be trying to assuage a particular feeling or mood state like loneliness or a let down. You could even be snacking to make sure your feeling or mood state stays on the positive side.

Going after the goal of the habit rather than the habit itself is a more foolproof way of dislodging the habit from its comfort zone and then laying it to rest.

by Maria's Last Diet

What’s the deal? You were not hungry, but you ate nonetheless. You snacked, and it was pretty soon after dinner. You definitely weren’t hungry. What do you call this kind of eating? Well, you might say it’s a habit. You’re used to having a little something more, even after you’ve eaten a good dinner. Okay, a habit it may be. Habits take a while to get established. So you’ve probably been snacking like this after a good dinner for a while. One thing about a habit is that it has gotten to be fairly automatic. In other words, you don’t have to think about doing it, you just do it. You reach for some candy or another dessert or something salty. You feed your habit.

But what is your habit feeding. Have you ever asked yourself this? Strange talk this, “what is your habit feeding.” It’s the truth, though. Once upon a time, before your habit became a habit, you felt some things or thought some things that got you to head for the snack rack. These thoughts or feelings are what your habit is feeding.

The thoughts and feelings are probably long gone. Your habit has seen to that. Come after-dinnertime and you no longer have to have any disquieting thoughts or feelings you have to feed. You are only feeding your habit.

Pretty neat the way this works, ay?

by Maria's Last Diet

A good part of what makes it so difficult to break the pattern of weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating is you made it a habit. 

A way out this difficult habit snare is to set a weight loss strategy in motion so this strategy is what gets triggered by the situation or circumstance instead of weight loss defeating snacking or your overeating. Set a strategy in progress and then make sure you use the strategy over and over right in the situation where you would normally be snacking or overeating.

A  weight loss strategy could be replacing your habitual nightly snacking on fattening food with a more mindful approach. Instead of all the usual behaviors you use to select, get, prepare, and consume your snack, replace these behaviors for at least 5 minutes each night with thinking over why you were snacking in the first place on that day.

Don’t focus your thinking on such mundane explanations for the snacking ritual as, “I’m hungry” or “I just want my favorite snack.” Think more deeply about why you are snacking: “I need a reward after such a hard day” or “Snacking like this takes me away from all my troubles in life.” Using a strategy like thinking deeply about why you are snacking changes the usual rhythm of your snacking habit. Habits begin to get broken when you interrupt them and they no longer run so automatically.