Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

When it comes to losing your excess weight, do you have as a priority short-term mood regulation while putting off your long-term goal achievement? Are you biased towards the present and away from the future? Do you do what is immediately more rewarding? Do you get lost in the moment? What about giving in to feeling good? Do you give in to feeling good? Are you easily distracted by less challenging, more pleasurable pursuits? Do you favor effortless activities? If the answer to any or all of these questions is yes, you will definitely be at a disadvantage for shedding your extra pounds.

by Maria's Last Diet

A major obstacle in trying to lose some weight is putting off what you should do. Avoidance and procrastination are common methods for dealing with weight issues.

If you think about it, your weight gaining behavior was filled with avoiding, procrastinating, and putting off. So when you go to reduce your weight, guess what? You’re going to be faced with a lot of experience in putting matters off or avoiding them entirely. This is a weight-maintaining pattern you will have to address if you are to have successful weight loss.

How in the world can you get rid of behaviors that may have become second nature to you? One way is to identify the issue(s) you are trying to deal with by procrastinating and avoiding. For example, do you think you will feel too deprived if you take the next weight loss step? Perhaps you aren’t ready to make such an all-out commitment, and it would be a lot easier to just dip your toe in the water. Or could it be that it just isn’t the right time in your life to do something about your weight because there is too much else of importance going on?

Rather than push through procrastinating, see if you can understand the reason for your procrastination and tackle the reason and not the procrastination.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you put if off in order to feel good now? Do you think to yourself it will be different tomorrow or next week? If you are delaying something you intend to do even though you realize you will probably be the worse for it, you are procrastinating. Interestingly you do not experience the consequences of procrastinating in the here-and-now. Instead, you encounter the consequences of procrastinating and have to deal with these consequences sometime in the near or distant future.  

Weight loss efforts are delayed and weight loss routines are left by the wayside, all because someone procrastinated. Now you might think procrastination is a bad thing, especially when it vitiates your intention to reduce your weight. Try, though, to think of procrastination as something you are doing for yourself that is positive. If you take a closer look at your reason for procrastinating, even with matters as important to you as weight loss, you might just catch a glimpse of the fact that by procrastinating you are trying to repair your mood.

Knowing that procrastination is a mood-fixer might just help you look for another way to repair your mood other than with weight-gaining and weight-maintaining eating.

by Maria's Last Diet

You can’t get yourself to do it, no matter what. You want to, yet you don’t. You get frustrated with yourself. You call yourself names, like lazy and stupid. You let go of the frustration and turn it into apathy; or you turn it into a plan for doing it next time; or you mete out your time by doing something else. You rationalize. What I’m doing is important too. Only, you never get to what you “really want” to do or what you should be doing. We all know what to call you when you’re like this, don’t we? A procrastinator, with the biggest “P” imaginable.

Too bad! Get over it! You cannot lose excess weight if you procrastinate. Whoa. Hold on there. At least one research study shows that if you want to do something, you can, even if you procrastinate. What’s the secret? It’s forgiveness. The study shows clearly that people procrastinate less the next time, and so on, if they forgive themselves for procrastinating. Not being forgiving makes it worse.

That said. If you’re a procrastinator, a real honest-to-goodness, hard-nosed, tough-it-out, chronic procrastinator when it comes to losing unwanted weight, you can “get over it”. Just forgive yourself, drop the hate, and guess what? It will be much easier to drop your additional weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Christmas is over, there is snow everywhere, I am stuck inside with the wind howling out there, Christmas cakes and cookies covered and put away— but still dancing around like sugarplums in my mind.

I promised myself that after Christmas I’d start a diet regimen, but now I feel it is impossible until the New Year celebration is oven. Then I can really get to it.

Can’t I? As I sit here with pecan-pie thoughts in my head, I begin to realize it isn’t Christmas that gets in my way. I can think of a hundred different times during the year when I feel stuck like this, wanting to stop eating so much, feeling unable to, putting it off and off until Christmas comes around again and I can blame it on that.

So, let me think about this. I know Christmas doesn’t help a person stick to a diet, but what about the rest of the time? What is it that prevents me from changing my eating then?

I think I need to look for a new answer, one that befits the big question: Why do I continue to overeat? Why do I keep myself overweight, angry with myself, uncomfortable, when I really want to be thinner, to feel and look better?

The answer to this question is somewhere inside of me, and I have a sneaking suspicion it has very little to do with Christmas, or New Year’s eve, or the 4^th of July. 

Come on, time to get serious about this.

by Maria's Last Diet

Dear Maria...

The stock market is crashing
The economy is falling down
My house value is tumbling
Consumer confidence is down, down, down
It's so depressing
Of course, there is one thing going up: MY WEIGHT

by Maria's Last Diet

What's this, a new diet? Wow, I like this! Hmm. All you can eat just not this, and none of that. Sounds good. Recipes too! And look at the picture of those women. Boy, I want to look like that. I certainly look like crap now. Maybe this is the answer. I think it really is. Lose all the weight you want to lose and eat all you want - what's not to like about that?

I guess I'll start on Monday. No, maybe Tuesday is better.

Well, it's Labor Day weekend soon. Maybe I better start after that. Or, better yet, give myself a break until school starts and the kids are settled in.

So maybe I'll start in a month. That will still give me plenty of time before Christmas. I should be skinny by then.