Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

When you are trying to lose weight, do you find yourself doing a lot of thinking? Do you think and think and think about all the ups and downs and ins and outs of what you’re doing? Is your thinking productive? In other words, does all your hardnosed thinking have an effect on the weight you’re trying to lose?

Burning the midnight oil by thinking about losing weight may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Do you think Marie Curie only made her scientific discoveries when she was intensely focused on understanding radioactivity? Or did she still make progress on those occasions when she was leisurely reading a book or looking at the sunset or just sitting around staring off into space?

It’s a good idea if you’re serious about losing weight to take some of the burden off thinking too much and too hard about the shoulds and shouldn’ts and the whys and wherefores of weight loss. Take a page from many of the women like Madam Curie, who were serious about what they were doing and kept their serious investigative curiosity going at times when they weren’t even aware they were doing it.

Try not to burn the midnight oil and think yourself to death. Use the kind of unconscious thinking that comes from sincerely wanting to lose weight; the kind of unconscious thinking that might very well occur when you’re leisurely reading a book or looking at a sunset or just sitting around staring off into space.

by Maria's Last Diet

When you are trying to lose weight, you’ll have lots of thoughts. Some will be helpful to you and others will be hurtful. Of course, you want to promote thoughts that will give you help losing weight. And you’ll have to do something about thoughts that interfere with your losing weight motivation.

Keep in mind, if you can, that thoughts are just thoughts. You think them but you don’t have to act on them. If your thought persists and it is pushing you into acting on it, remember it is only a thought and you still have a good chance of taking the wind out of its sails before the thought compels you to act.

To preserve the thought as a thought, you might try saying the thought over and over in your mind for some extended period of time until the coercive nature of the thought is no longer a problem. You might also say to yourself that it’s just a thought, thereby reminding yourself (and the thought) that thoughts can stay just as they are without requiring you to take action. There still other ways of defusing the impulse to turn your thoughts into outright actions. See if you can come up with some that work well for you.

by Maria's Last Diet

Those first changes to your mindset when you are trying to lose weight are the ones that you can most easily disrupt. One thing you can do to avoid sabotaging your mindset is to overlearn the skills necessary to sustain your new mindset.

Let’s say your new thinking encompasses new ways of getting yourself to comply with a different eating regimen. The new way of eating is not to indulge in fattening snacks like you have been doing. So what do you have to work on to support this change in your mindset? If you go for the fattening snack because you don’t take good care of yourself in general, then taking better care of yourself will be a skill you’ll have to work on and develop. You could also turn to a fattening snack when you suffer a loss of confidence. Under these circumstances is there a way you can face your lack of confidence or fix it without resorting to such snacking?

Can you see what could disrupt your new weight loss thinking and then figure out what you might do to prevent this from happening?   

by Maria's Last Diet

What is it after all? It’s just a donut. Why shouldn’t I have it? I love my pasta. There’s nothing wrong with a snack at bedtime if I’m hungry. So what if I splurge, it’s Saturday night.

It is not only your pattern of eating you have to change. You can readily see you have to change your thinking as well. Which is more difficult to change? If you said your thinking, you’re probably right.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you know one of the worst things for you and your diet? It's all-or-none thinking.

     Totally on a diet or totally off a diet

     Being totally good or being totally bad

     Totally good foods or totally bad foods

     Being totally perfect or being a total cheater

     Totally starving or totally stuffing

     Total success or total failure

The world isn't black and white, and neither are you.  

Each of these opposites has gradations. For example, you can be on your diet but go off it from time to time. Still, you can consider yourself on a diet. Remember that change is often two steps forward one step back. You can think of a few weight gains as acceptable while dieting. Also, weight loss success doesn’t come all at once at the end.. You can count up the smaller successes and be triumphant even before you reach your ultimate goal.

All-or-none thinking is most definitely a dieter's enemy.  

    excerpt from  Psych Your Diet: A Daily Dose. Volume 2. Psych Yourself to Stick to It. by Kenneth Schwarz PhD and Julie North Schwarz. Symmetry Press.

by Maria's Last Diet

If nothing else, the weight loss process is a constantly changing and challenging set of circumstances, which means the person who wants to lose her unwanted weight has to be on her toes. Relying on a diet or exercise routine to guide you is much too passive an approach to weight loss. For successful weight loss, you have to be ready to take a more active hand in things. For instance, there are important learning decisions like choosing or discovering weight loss strategies that fit the occasion and figuring the best ways to monitor and judge progress. There is no sitting back, mentally speaking. There is an unending need to determine the principles and strategies that will give you the effective weight loss experience you are looking for.

by Maria's Last Diet

It may be surprising to you that thinking more abstractly will keep you on your weight loss diet plan when you are being tempted by some calorie-rich food . Concrete thinking emphasizes the specifics and makes the temptation seem singular and not connected to all your other thoughts and feelings about wanting to reduce your weight. For instance, in seeing a box of chocolate candy, if you are thinking concretely, you will think of the taste, the smell, the texture, the way it will feel when you put it in your mouth. These are concrete features. A more abstract way of thinking would be to think of what eating the candy would do to your sense of self and to your goal to lose unwanted weight.

Now it may sound altogether too silly to you to practice thinking more abstractly when it comes to not being tempted and staying motivated to lose weight. But try it and see how it works for you.

by Maria's Last Diet

Molly and Sondra were both going along on their weight loss routines. Their weight loss progress was slow at first, but then both picked up. They had been friends for years, and as was their custom, they dieted together. They always chose the same diet to be on together. Throughout their friendship they went on many different diets together, and they lost some and gained some together. What they didn’t do together was think the same way about their weight loss difficulties.

Molly always, that’s always with a capital “A”, thought to herself when she was unable to lose weight for one reason or another, “I could have done better.” Sondra, on the other hand, when she was in the exact same predicament as Molly—cannot lose weight, thought to herself, “It could have been worse.” Sondra, at these times, was not at all like her friend. She was a lot happier.

Isn’t it incongruous how different two people who are so alike can be?

by Maria's Last Diet

Losing your unwanted weight is a thinking woman’s enterprise. You have to think your way out of all types of situations in order to maintain your weight loss momentum. So it’s important to keep your thinking as crisp and as sharp as you can.

You will, however, run up against a different kind of thinking when you are working your heart out to shed those extra pounds. This will be the kind of thinking that puts you in a bad situation rather than gets you out of such a situation.

Negative thinking, for example, especially if you believe your own negative thoughts, can get you to feeling quite down about yourself and your weight loss efforts. How many times during the process of weight loss have you thought negatively about what you were doing or what kind of person you were?

Being unable to let go of upsetting thoughts is another potential destroyer of your weight loss motivation and confidence. You might worry yourself through the day or think how little you stuck to your weight loss plan.

The weight loss process is also famous for putting you in the position of getting upset with yourself for having certain thoughts. Just thinking you would like to eat something you aren’t supposed to can make you feel guilty or self-critical, even if you don’t go ahead and eat it.

Beware! When you are hot and heavy into the process of weight loss, don’t always believe what you think. Save your thinking to help you out of a jam or to avoid jams rather than putting you in a jam.