Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet 

Would you believe that having to have self-control is one of the things that spoils your chance for weight loss success? If you stop to think about it, diets get left behind and exercise goes out the window all because you didn’t have the self-control you needed when you needed it.

Now everyone knows that self-control means stopping yourself from doing what you shouldn’t be doing. For example, not giving in to temptation. Resist temptation by applying self-control, isn’t this the usual weight loss banner?

Of course, some women are better than others at applying the brakes and not giving in to the temptation of second helpings, afternoon fattening snacks, or desserts that seriously defeat any diet. Are these women better at calling forth their self-control when they need to? Perhaps they are. But maybe, just maybe they’re not tempted at all. Somehow they got past being tempted; no self-control needed. These privileged women may not even perceive temptations as temptations.

How can this be? Consider this. Have you gotten past temptations in your life, temptations that used to tempt you but no longer do? Let’s think of some possibilities here. Perhaps you used to suck your thumb and then there came a time when you no longer needed to suck your thumb. Or perhaps you used to be boy crazy and now for the longest time you’re not. Did you party too much in your late teens and early twenties but now you’re past all that.

Get the picture? Your motives change, your goals change, and voilà, you’re not even tempted to party, go boy crazy, suck your thumb, or eat like there’s no tomorrow. So…the upshot is—change your motives and your goals and you won’t have to sweat and strain to maintain your self-control.

by Maria's Last Diet

You lost control of your eating, you say to yourself. Or you call it eating out of control. In both cases you’re wrong. While it looks like your control is gone, the unvarnished truth is that you were very much in control. A more accurate explanation of what happened when you overate or binged is that one of your goals—to fill yourself with food—superseded another of your goals—to eat within normal limits. What do you think of that?

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you definitely need good self-control? Should you be ready to break out the word “no”—and mean it. And the prescription, “enough is enough,” is it to be taken literally. Tough to do, ay?



The crux of the matter is how are you going to pull this off. What gets you to say “no,” follow the prescription, and effectively exercise your self-control? 



There is no new sheriff in town. The old standbys, use your willpower, be highly motivated, and be committed, are past their prime. They never worked, at least not to the extent that the majority of women could rely on them for eventual weight loss success. 



A new sheriff in town is badly needed. Whatever it is that is causing self-control to slip through the cracks must be sought out and dealt with.

 What if, just what if, chasing after self-control is a fool’s errand? You would certainly want the new sheriff to conscientiously piece together the evidence and go after the real guilty culprit. If there were a new sheriff, here’s what she might come up with:

          The crime that was committed was a crime of passion
         and desire. While it looked like food was the goal, food
         was only the means. The goal was something inside the
         perpetrator, as it is in all crimes. If you find out what was
         inside the perpetrator that made ditching her diet so
         all-fired important, you will have the actual convictable
         offender.

A new sheriff who could spare women the relentless effort to maintain self-control and seek justice in a different direction would certainly be worth searching for.

by Maria's Last Diet

What you expect is what you get.

If you find your self-control is slipping here, there, and everywhere, what can you do to restore your good self-control? One not so surprising thing you can do is get in a better mood. A positive mood has a restorative effect on self-control. When in a positive mood, you expect to have more energy and to be more active. In a negative mood you expect to feel more depleted and run down.

So when trying to lose weight and your self-control is down a notch or two, sharpen up your expectations for replenishing your self-control energy by finding some way of getting into a genuinely positive mood.

by Maria's Last Diet

     No matter how much I have of something, I always want more.

     One can never have enough.

     Even when I am fulfilled, I often seek more.

     The pursuit of more and better is an important goal in life for me.

What say you to these four statements? Are they you? When it comes to eating, do these statements have your name on them? Think carefully before you answer.

These are four items from the Dispositional Greed Scale.

by Maria's Last Diet

What if you had to work hard, really hard day after day and week after week at controlling your eating so you don’t resort to your more familiar weight-gaining and weight-maintaining pattern of eating? What do you think will happen? If you guessed that you couldn’t keep this arduous regimen up, you’d probably be right.

Why is it that you can’t exercise such self-control over a long period of time? There is this theory with lots of research behind it that says your self-control is like a muscle. Keep exercising it and eventually it gets tired and won’t work again until you rest it. Makes good sense, don’t you think?

Only the muscle analogy doesn’t prove out under certain conditions. We are not talking about an actual muscle here, a body tissue made up of long cells that contract when stimulated and produce movement or maintain your body’s position. The muscle that gets depleted according to the muscle theory of self-control is a mental muscle, figuratively speaking.

Think, for example, about what happens when you reach your goal weight and are at that happy place where you don’t have to lose any more weight. At this point in your weight loss career you are in the enviable position of just having to maintain your weight. Think about it. Do you need a lot of mental muscle for weight loss maintenance? Isn’t one hallmark of weight loss maintenance the ease with which you are now able to eat this or that and still stay close to your goal weight?

What if you could eliminate the need for such mental muscle and it’s consequence of mental muscle fatigue while you were losing your unwanted weight too? Would you try for this? Of course you would. So take a page from the weight maintainer’s book. What she is doing is capitalizing on habit change and not muscle energy that is stretched to the limit so it gets depleted. Once new eating behavior is habitually in place there is no need for arduous self-control.

There are lots of ways of putting such habits in place faster and more securely during the weight loss process itself. For more information on how to do this, go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com and look up such topics as habit, changing/learning, self-control/lack of control, and psychology. 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.