Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

What happens when you run up against one of your issues while trying to lose weight? Do you engage in self-exploration? Do you take a good long look at yourself and try to discover why you couldn’t do what you wanted to do or why you did what you did when you shouldn’t have?

For instance, what does it mean to explore yourself when you run out of diet motivation? Do you go beyond the simple explanation that you were tired and cranky that day? Maybe you were tired and cranky, but is that a deep enough self-exploration? If you dug deeper, perhaps you would discover a more durable characteristic like the inability to tolerate negative feeling states like tired and cranky. Then with further self-exploration, you might set this particular characteristic in its rightful context. The context could be a lifelong requirement that you should always be in a good mood. Further self-exploration could reveal the origin of such a requirement and what made you maintain such a requirement for all these years.

Yes, self-exploration is an essential ingredient if you want to lose weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

A neglected topic in regard to losing excess weight is self-understanding. Being able to perceive, express, and reflect on your experience as you go through the weight loss process will help you make the personal changes leading to weight loss. Self-observation is definitely a key factor in this undertaking. Some ways to accomplish the self-observation needed to better understand yourself are by questioning, clarifying, and confronting.

Questioning why you did something or are about to do something can put you more in touch with what is making it difficult for you to lose weight, or to start a diet, or to keep lost weight off. Questioning can also stir up your curiosity, which what might get you to look at some aspect of your behavior you hadn’t noticed before.

Clarifying is a way to sharpen your understanding of yourself and why you did what you did or didn’t do what you should have done. You can clarify by simply restating an idea to make it more comprehensible. Or perhaps you can emphasize the emotional aspect of the issue so you can feel more clearly what it is really like for you.

Confronting yourself and the way you are going about something may be what prevents you from spoiling your good weight loss effort.  There may be more to what you’re about to do or not do than you thought, and strong confrontation will bring this to your attention. Confronting yourself like this gives you the opportunity to more usefully reflect on your behavior, or your thinking, or feelings rather than letting yourself slide over these matters.

Self-understanding is not usually listed as a weight loss activity. Yet you won’t be able to get rid of your unwanted weight unless you include it.

by Maria's Last Diet

Did you ever hear someone say that being overweight for her was because of genetics or the result of a chemical imbalance in her brain? While this could be true in some instances, there are too many women who think this and say this in order to avoid examining more likely personal truths about their motivations and their behavior.

What about you? Is this the way you think about being overweight? If this is you, please consider the possibility that you don’t want to look up close and personal for the reasons you’re overweight.

by Maria's Last Diet

One person sees the weight loss process as an uphill climb, getting harder each day she is on her diet. Another person perceives things very differently. For her, the process of weight loss gets easier and easier with every day she is on her diet. The weight loss process in the second case is like a downhill slope where the woman feels no drag and she has to make less and less of an effort.

As you can see, your perception of the process of weight loss is heavily influenced by factors other than the actual weight loss process itself. Take runners who are fatigued, for example. Runners who are out of energy see an upcoming hill as much steeper than runners who still have a lot of energy. Perception is not only in the eye of the beholder, it is also in the mind of the beholder.

What’s your perception of the weight loss process and what is influencing you to perceive it this way?

by Maria's Last Diet

When you are actively trying to improve yourself you are more observant of yourself than you usually are. Rather than simply being in yourself like always, you step away from yourself psychologically and see yourself in more illuminating ways. This process of looking more closely at yourself is what will help you make the personal changes you need for all kinds of self-improvement, including losing your unwanted weight.

Perseverance during the weight loss process does not only mean sticking to a diet or to some type of weight loss regimen, it also means continuing to observe yourself so you can see why and when and how and what you need to change about yourself.

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you curious about your weight problem or do you just take it for granted that you are overweight and that’s that.

Knowing what’s under the lid of your weight problem can enable you to see beyond the usual exercise and dieting solutions.

Let’s say that you lift the lid and you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. Try then to let your curiosity guide you, take you wherever it is inclined to go. An exercise like this can open up a range of possible places, times, and relationships to explore. If you go ahead and explore, what you discover could be something you’ve always known but now see in connection to your weight problem. Or what your curiosity uncovers could be something you’ve never in your life thought of before.

Being curious and looking under the lid of your weight problem to see where your weight problem came from, what’s been driving it, who is implicated in it, and what’s it made of is an important weight loss step. It is the kind of weight loss step that can inform your weight loss efforts, and make the process of weight loss a better fit for you.

by Maria's Last Diet

Weight is not something you can be truthful about. How true is this?

In a 2003 review of 1970-2002 research studies, 57,172 women underestimated their weight. Is this so surprising? Everyone, women included, wants to put her best foot forward. Do you think this is stil true 10 years later?

Guess what happened when it came to estimating height. The best-foot-forward hypothesis struck again, women, 39,244 of them, overestimated their heights.

Now, for those of you who want to put your best foot forward for real when it comes to weighing less, you know what you really have to do.

Let us help. Losing unwanted weight is not only a dieting and exercise matter; it is also a psychological matter. You’ve got to get yourself to do what you’ve got to do all the way along the line, from start, to sticking to it, to keeping it off.

For help in using psychology to lose weight, 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

How aware are you of what contributed to your weight gain? Of course, it was eating too much food or too many calorie-rich foods. We all know that. What, though, besides your pattern of eating caused you to gain all that weight?

Was it your husband? Your children? Your mother? Your father? Was it your lifestyle? What was it?

One way to find out is to write your story. Tell it like it is. Start with when you started to gain weight. Or better still, if you remember things that might have led up to you starting to gain unwanted weight, start there. Include situations, events, your feelings, your thoughts, your relationships.

Whatever contributed to your weight gain is probably still there, firmly fixed or lurking just out of sight but still a part of you that you will definitely have to contend with if you want to achieve successful weight loss, and if you want to realize permanent weight loss as well.