Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Can you see the positives when you’re feeling frustrated and out of sorts because you didn’t follow your weight loss plan to the letter today? Perhaps you see only the negatives at times like these. It’s as if you need someone to remind you that despite your frustration and lousy mood, you hung in there and did do some good things for losing weight. You didn’t do all you were supposed to do, but you did do some. Of course, it would be much easier on you if, at times like these, you could keep such positives in mind.

When you see only the negatives in your weight loss behavior, make sure to double check and see what positives are going unnoticed because you’ve placed way too much emphasis on the negatives.

by Maria's Last Diet

How helpful is being optimistic? Can it help you lose your unwanted weight? If so, how do you become optimistic about something you’ve failed at forever and ever?

If you are optimistic rather than pessimistic, you expect positive outcomes, and you probably make these positive outcomes a reality because your expectation of a positive outcome increases your motivation. When you are more motivated, you exert more effort. This is how being optimistic works.

Now for the issue of how do you become optimistic about losing your unwanted weight? Perhaps you have to take an indirect approach, especially if losing weight has been a losing proposition for you. You could, for instance, work on being optimistic in other areas of your life that might have some bearing on your weight. How about your relationships? Do they have any bearing on your weight? Think carefully here, and remember optimism is expecting positive outcomes, which in turn makes you more motivated, which in turn leads to you exerting more effort.

See if you can devise an optimism recipe for dealing with something in your life related to your unwanted weight and your inability so far to lose it.

by Maria's Last Diet

Have you gotten sorely discouraged when you didn’t lose any weight one week? Have you experienced a desire to quit your weight loss diet when you had a diet cheat? Have you failed at dieting for the umpteenth time because each time you thought the outcome would be different?

If you can say yes to any of these things, perhaps you ought to check out your optimism and see if your optimism is unrealistic. Unrealistic optimism might be what is causing it to be difficult to lose weight.

If your optimism is realistic, you won’t get so discouraged when you don’t lose any weight one week. You will know that weight loss doesn’t go week by week. With realistic optimism cheating on your diet is not a cause to quit your diet goals. If you are realistically optimistic, you take into account lapses here and there in your weight loss routine. And too many dieting failures may be a sign that you have to make changes that you are not making when you unrealistically go on diet after diet with the result being repeated failure.

Remember, being optimistic can make a significant difference in shedding those extra pounds. But keep a keen eye on how realistic your optimism is.

by Maria's Last Diet

What’s the difference if you’re optimistic or pessimistic when you are trying to lose your unwanted weight?

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that optimists and pessimists cope differently. Optimists plan more, accept the reality of stressful experiences, and try to make the best of the situation. Pessimists, on the other hand, are prone to give up with adversity, distance themselves from problems, and, of course, focus on the negative aspects of their experience.

As you can see, optimism and pessimism will probably have very different impacts on your weight loss activities and in determining whether it will be easy or difficult to lose weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Despite your prediction of how much you are going to spend each week, do you find that you are spending more than you predicted? Do you do the same with food: predict you will eat less, but then you eat more?

There seems to be an inherent optimistic bias in this kind of self-prediction. What is missing is the corrective; that is, being able to draw on the result of past experience.

Standing in the way of taking these past experiences into consideration is how up-close you are to your prediction. The predictions you make about the upcoming week will probably be based on how you will implement and pursue your goal this week. If you were to predict whether or not you will eat less one-month from now, your purview will in all likelihood be broader. Odds are that you will base your judgment on a more complete array of your past behavior.

So don’t be disappointed in yourself if you predict each week and each week you can’t live up to your prediction. Take the longer view and make your predictions more accurate.

by Maria's Last Diet

What's the cause of you losing heart and then not keeping to your promise to yourself to lose your unwanted weight? Could it be unrealistic expectations? Were you being overly optimistic about what you'd achieve in the first week? Did you think you could get there much faster than you really could?

Unrealistic expectations may give you the encouragement you need to start the weight-loss process, but it won't help you maintain your momentum. When you begin to realize you can't meet your expectations, not by a long shot, your motivation is going to slip and your commitment to keep on keeping on is going to falter.

The antidote, of course, is to start off with realistic expectations and realistic optimism. If you are more realistic at the outset, your initation of the weight-loss process might suffer from not enough initial oomph, but because of these more realistic expectations you will be able to keep at the weight-loss process much better.

by Maria's Last Diet

Which one are you?

    “When I run up against a weight-loss challenge, I usually expect the best.”

    “If something can go wrong for me during the weight-loss process, it will.”

What we are talking about here is the difference between being optimistic and being pessimistic. Now you might think that having an optimistic outlook or a pessimistic view is just the way you are. You were born this way, or you got to be this way. In other words, you believe that being optimistic or being pessimistic is a stable personality trait. This might be so. It may be who you are in large measure, but it doesn’t have to be the whole truth. There can be variations in your expectations of outcomes depending upon different factors. For example, the threat of weight-loss failure can make the optimist in you resort to pessimistic thinking. Times of personal transition, when you are taking a break from old ways, are also times when you might more easily change your outlook.

What if you’re pessimistic, and your pessimistic outlook has been wreaking havoc with your goal to reduce your weight? Can you make yourself become optimistic? The answer is yes. There are a number of things you can do to get out from under that pessimistic umbrella.

First of all, you can work on your negative thinking. You can reduce it, even eliminate it. Cognitive psychology has invented lots of good techniques for dealing with thinking negatively. Then too, there are skills you can learn to increase your constructive thinking. One such skill is reframing. This is where you take your negative pessimistic thinking about a situation and actively try to see the situation in a new light—in a different frame of reference.

You should know that optimists fare a lot better than pessimists when it comes to dealing with weight-loss challenges. So part of making sure you do your best when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off is having an outlook that will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

by Maria's Last Diet

There are adversities galore throughout the whole weight-loss process from starting to sticking to it to keeping off the weight you’ve lost.

Optimists have a much easier time negotiating their way through these adversities than do pessimists.

Optimists do more problem solving when it comes to these adversities rather than focusing on how to soothe or escape their feelings caused by the adversity. They are guided in this by a stronger belief that they will reach their weight-loss goals and that the  outcome of their efforts will be positive and satisfying. Pessimists, on the other hand, have much greater doubt about the outcome of their efforts to lose weight and keep it off, and they focus on dealing with the negative and distressing aspects of the adversity rather than do the problem solving to overcome the adversity.

If being optimistic is so good when it comes to the weight-loss process, how do I get me some of this optimism, you might ask.

One hitch is that optimism and pessimism can become rather stable personality characteristics. But, as you probably have experienced, there are moment-to-moment variations in optimism and pessimism as well as changes in optimism and pessimism over time. So there’s still hope for you pessimists out there.

How then do you get some of this optimism about losing excess weight, especially if you are on the pessimistic side of the road too much of the time?

Here are some ways:

• Be proactive (e.g., read up on weight-loss problems and how to solve them).

• Develop the personal skills needed to solve adversities (e.g., practice problem solving).

• Have a plan ready for as many adversities as you can.

• Use social resources (e.g., connect with helpful people or programs).

• Identify and limit your negative thinking.

• Challenge your negative beliefs. Don’t just passively accept them.

• Practice reframing your thinking from negative to positive.