Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you think you know yourself? In some ways you certainly do. In other ways, though, you may not know yourself at all. Surprisingly, what prompts you to go to food when you’re not hungry is so often outside your awareness. When you are trying to improve your eating so you can lose weight, these food prompts of which you are unaware become the cornerstone for personal change.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you go to food when you’re not really hungry. You’re probably well aware of having the desire for food. You’re most likely equally aware of your intention to find the food you want and aware too of the steps you will take to get to the food. It is usually the case, however, that you won’t be aware of what prompted you to start this chain of events?

If you said you just felt like having a large snack or a bit of a binge, that would be true? But what made you feel like eating excess food? You could say too that you always go for a junk food snack of some kind at this time of day. But giving time-of-day as a reason would be hedging your bet. There may be some truth to the fact that your eating was due to time of day. Nevertheless, time of day is most likely a habit formed for the reason you wanted fattening food in the first place, a reason that shall remain nameless. Unless…

by Maria's Last Diet

How many things can you do when you are trying to lose some weight? If you do too much, will you have enough oomph left for the weight-loss process? What’s been your experience?

“Too much to do.” “Too busy.” “Lots to keep up with.” “Can’t do it all.” “No time for myself.” How often have you felt like this? And how often has feeling like this interfered with all your good intentions when it came to losing your unwanted weight?

Well, get this. You can counteract this tendency for everything else in your life to deplete your energy for losing a lot of weight. One way to do this is to read an inspiring story about someone who persisted despite all odds. This is what a group of research subjects did without knowing the purpose, and they were able to restore their depleted energy and succeed where research subjects who were not given an inspirational story could not.

by Maria's Last Diet

Believing that it will actually happen—that you will start dieting, stay on your diet, lose a lot of weight, and then maintain permanent weight loss—may be what gets you there.

Try it. Try believing by picturing yourself there. Picture the benefits. Picture the new, thinner woman you’ll be.

This kind of visualizing can get you ready, readier than you’ve ever been. There’s lots to visualize. You can mentally simulate your goal; you can mentally simulate the ways you’ll get to your goal.

Besides helping you believe more, mentally simulating and rehearsing the ways you’ll get there will produce plans. Imagining how, when, and what will occur provides lots of information about what lies ahead. You’ll not only get factual information but emotional information as well. You’ll learn how taking that weight-loss step will feel emotionally, and you won’t have to wait and be taken by surprise. As you mentally simulate and produce all this information about where you are headed and how you will get there, you can’t help but problem solve and plan.

Believing that the outcome will be just what you’d like it to be is too much of a pie-in-the-sky belief. By itself, it won’t get you to your goal of permanent weight loss. There's not enough work involved. It's too wishful. But couple this outcome belief with belief in the weight-loss steps and weight-loss strategies that you’ve imagined taking and worked over through rehearsal, visualization, and mental simulation, and you’ve got something going for yourself.

by Maria's Last Diet

When you set out to lose unwanted weight, you are making a conscious decision to do this. Then as you go on, lots of what you do when it comes to the actual process of weight loss requires your conscious attention as well. For example, you decide to go on a particular diet. You choose where, when, and how much you eat. You regulate your daily life so you aren’t distracted from your weight-loss goals by outside events or internal states.

Having to be especially conscious of what you are doing to lose unwanted weight often turns out to require too much conscious effort. To lighten this load, you can turn to the psychological process of priming. An example of priming is being in a “place” literally or psychologically that you associate with trying harder and doing better. You could be in a classroom or sports arena, and just being there gets you to feel like achieving or winning. Or, you might get the same effect by seeing a movie, or reading a story, or even reading certain words (achieve, strive, accomplish, win), and then without realizing it, you take this influence with you and are likely to act on it.

You can look for what will prime you, and make the weight-loss process much easier and less effortful. It could be getting some extra achievement motivation from somewhere. This is where your exercise routine could be of help—psychological help, that is. Sticking to your exercise routine is a big achievement. Increasing your exercise routine as you master the earlier steps is yet another achievement. The endurance you build for exercising may be something you carry with you into dieting.

If you are not the exercise type, you can prime yourself in a thousand different ways. You could, for instance, develop a more loving relationship with your spouse or partner. The elements of that relationship may be just what the doctor ordered for successful weight loss: feeling worth it, getting love from a person (not from food), feeling special, feeling deserving, feeling satisfied. You get the idea.

There may be primes already in your life that you don’t have to work hard at, that you don’t have to develop; they may just be there. Take a look around and see what influences are available to you that would help you not have to work so hard at the tasks involved in reducing your weight. Anything you can do to lighten your load so you don’t have to resort to such tight conscious control will make your end goal that much more achievable.