Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

You may think you’re alone and doing it on your own when you’re slogging through your weight loss routine desperate to lose weight. Of course, there are other women going through much the same thing you are. But I don’t mean you’re not alone in this way.

I mean you are not an island unto yourself when you try to lose weight. Your life is filled with relationships, current and past, and these relationships are there right with you when you try to lose weight. The weight loss steps you take, the weight loss routine you choose, the goals you set for yourself are in part, sometimes in large part, determined by these relationships that you are having now and those you had in the past.

Believe it or not, making the change from overweight to weight loss is as hard as it is because of the hold on you of all these relationships. Your hard to change habits of overeating, snacking on fattening food, binging, and weight gain are not entirely yours. They come from imitation, from influence, from social and familial domination, from belittling, from any number of relationship issues. The weight-gaining measures you adopted are a bulwark against moods and feelings and beliefs and ways of thinking inculcated by your relationships.

This is what makes me say you are not alone when you try to lose weight. You are filled to the brim with relationships.

So you can see why a diet regimen and exercise routine are no match for such hard to shake influences. At least they are no match on their own. In order to make diets and exercise lead to change, it’s best to supplement them by taking stock of your relationships and doing something about their impact on you and your attempt to lose weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Immerse yourself in a story about a woman's weight loss journey and see what happens.

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?

As you read, you absorb the woman’s 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.

Immersion into a 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.

by Maria's Last Diet

What kind of situation might make you do some weight-gaining eating?

   Being home all by yourself
   Taking a morning/afternoon break
   Watching TV after dinner
   Being awake by yourself at the end of the day
   Exercising
   Mealtimes
   Social occasions
   Seeing a sad movie
   Watching a TV food show
   Having to passively suffer indignities
   Celebrating
   Having to face going to sleep
   Doing something hard
   A relationship problem

Is this something you’re working on?

If you need more help, 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 [email protected] and we’ll point you in the right direction.

by Maria's Last Diet

Social influences often determine your behavior whether you like it or not. Actually, how much you eat or don’t eat can also be the result of the same social forces. For example, what and how much you eat may depend on whom you’re eating with. In other words, with some people you eat as little as they do, and with others you eat as much as they do. Even your snacking pattern might be different depending on the social circumstances.

Social influence is something you will have to keep in mind and do something about when you try to lose weight. Some women, however, are reluctant to acknowledge that social situations have an impact on their eating behavior. Others seem unaware of the social effect on their eating. In both these cases, an underlying motive for not identifying the social influence on their eating could be the belief that giving in to such influence is a personal failure.

Where do you stand on this issue of your eating being social influenced?

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you to blame for weighing so much? This might sound like a silly question. Who else would be to blame if not you? After all you’re the one who eats too much food and snacks on fattening foods. But this not the end of the story by any means. You’ll be surprised to learn that there are other people in your life who are to blame for your weight gain.

Think about this carefully. Who in your life is at least partly to blame for your weight gain? For instance, did you have an argument with anyone recently that sent you to food? Did you feel put down or ignored or abandoned altogether? Were you left with too much responsibility, the kind of responsibility that made you feel overwhelmed and in need of something to relieve the tension? You might say to all of this that you should be able to handle it; that’s life, you really have no one else to blame but yourself. Are you sure this is true?

by Maria's Last Diet

What was it about your parents that led to you gaining so much weight?

Now you might think opening up an inquiry into your parents when it comes to your weight issues is completely irrelevant. Or you may think such probing is nothing short of irreverence. Try, though, to think of checking up on your parents’ contribution as part of a thorough investigation of how your weight got to where it is now.

You certainly credit your parents for lots of things they added to your life. You may also discredit your parents for adversely affecting your life by doing or not doing certain things or just for being like they were. Weight is no different. The trajectory of your weight can likewise be the result of how your parents brought you up, how they interacted with you, what their beliefs were, what standards they held you to, and so forth.

What was it about your parents that led to you gaining so much weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

An idea that’s been around for a while is you can reduce the possibility of getting a headache by avoiding the ‘triggers’ for your headache. The most common headache triggers are things like stress and unpleasant emotions, lack of sleep or excess sleep, foods like chocolate and cheese, eyestrain, noise, odors, alcohol, menstruation, and high humidity, heat, or cold.

In a recent research study in which avoiding predisposing factors or triggers was compared with learning to cope with triggers, learning to cope with headache triggers proved to be more effective in reducing headache episodes.

Do you think learning to cope with your triggers rather than avoiding your triggers for a weight-gaining, weight-maintaining pattern of eating would also prove to be more effective? Why don’t you try out this idea and see if it works for you.

First of all, if you are trying to learn to cope, don’t avoid. Stay with whatever the trigger is and see if indeed it does cause you to eat too much food or to eat fattening foods. After you do this little experiment, you can do it over and over again with each of your triggers. In other words, if you think a down mood sends you to food or a certain time of day or even the odor of a certain food, check this out by exposing yourself to the trigger.

If you find triggers that do predispose you to a weight-gaining eating pattern, try exposing yourself for longer and longer periods of time to see if you can get used to the trigger and not have it propel you into food. Finally, during the time you are exposing yourself to a trigger, see if you can think of the trigger as a problem you need to solve. Determine what you can change in the situation or in your reaction to the situation. Make sure to analyze the change you wish to make so you come up with short-term goals that are sufficiently challenging to maintain your interest and also reachable to allow you to be successful.

Remember, you are doing all of this to learn to cope with your weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating triggers and not to avoid them. It works for headache triggers so why not for your eating triggers.

by Maria's Last Diet

“I don’t need you to tell me this too. My mother says it. My doctor said it to me just the other day. And now you, my best friend, are telling me I have to get motivated to lose weight. Don’t you all think I know this? If one more person puts me under pressure to lose weight, I’m going to scream.

The truth is, I’m not ready to lose weight, and pressure from family, friends, and my doctor is just rubbing in the fact right now that I feel it is impossible to lose weight. What happens when someone keeps at you to do something? Do you do it? Well, I’d like to do it, but I simply cannot lose weight, at least not right now.

I know my weight is a problem. I feel it and see it and live it. Yikes, do I live it. So back off for now, please. My weight is like anything else in my life. I’ll do it when I’m ready.”