Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

The power of shopping for beautiful things is so strong for some women that even though she felt weak in the knees from that look in a full-length, rear view mirror, Maria managed to buy the purple shawl. She also bought the sweater in size M. Ten months later she would wear it to a party buttoned over a rib-knit tank topping a pair of jeans she’d borrow from Zoey, size four.

What happened to Maria in the boutique fitting room that day shattered all illusions she had about how she looked. She saw clearly how much weight she had gained. Without conscious effort, acknowledging this piece of reality began to change the direction of her actions.

     excerpt from  Breaking Up With Food: Maria’s Last Diet. By Julie North Schwarz and Kenneth Schwarz PhD — a novel of passionate weight loss

by Maria's Last Diet

What sends you right to food? Is it hunger? Really? Is it a craving? Is it the time of day whether you’re hungry or not? Is it a mood? Or is it a mystery?

Yes, there’s a lot that will send you right to food. For now, though, let’s concentrate on “it’s a mystery.”

Usually people don’t ask what sent them right to food. But if you are trying to lose weight, you probably stop and think why you just did what you shouldn’t have done? As it so often happens, though, you will find yourself in the dark about why you gobbled down something you shouldn’t have? The usual result is that you come up with some ideas but are not at all sure that any of your ideas is right. And so what caused you to go against your weight loss plan remains a mystery.

To solve such a mystery what do you have to do? Should you give yourself the third degree? Sweat it out of you? Or can you go on a stake out and set up surveillance? It’s definitely best with any of these methods to know what you’re looking for. When something is a mystery, it most likely means that something is hidden and you have to find what’s hidden.

Food makes you feel better. So what’s hidden obviously is something that is disturbing you. Could you find out what this mysterious disturbance is? What if you didn’t commit the crime of going right to food. That’s right. Hold up on going right to food, despite the fact that the pull to food is hard to resist. Taking food out of the mix like this should leave you feeling disturbed, disturbed that you can’t have your food, but also disturbed by that mysterious something or other, which you want to identify.

Once you solve the mystery of what’s disturbing you, you can do what any good detective would do in the situation. You can arrest the guilty culprit and lock it away so it can’t do its dirty work.   

by Maria's Last Diet

What’s going on here? Even when you know what you should eat to lose weight, you go ahead and eat something weight gaining. What do you say to yourself when you do this? You probably say something like, “I have to make better decisions.”

Okay, better decisions sounds good on paper. But if you were involved in poor decision-making in the first place, how are you going to turn things around and make better decisions now and in the future?

What if you took the position that you are not aware of and don’t control most of your thoughts and behaviors, and not even your decision-making? Is this too radical a viewpoint for you? Take the example of knowing what you should eat, but ending up eating the very opposite. What’s at work here? It’s probably a well-worn pattern of intent that is not governed by decision-making. To change such a pattern you will have to deal with what is controlling it.

If you’d like to pursue this idea further, please read the blogposts on the unconscious mind in The Reading Room which is in the left-hand column of this blog, MariasLastDiet.com.  

If you need more specific help, email us at and we’ll point you in the right direction.

by Maria's Last Diet

What causes you to eat too much food and eat too many fattening foods so that you are overweight? If someone asked you this question, what would be your answer?

Would you say it was a bad habit and leave it at that? Or might you say something like, “I’m so stressed?’ Then again, your overeating and forays into fattening food could be because your angry or anxious or depressed or any of a number of emotional states. As you can see, there are probably a million and one things you could say about why you are overweight. But what counts when you’re trying to lose weight is whether you picked the right thing to say. Did you put your finger on the real cause?

It’s helpful when looking for the cause to check on three psychological influences: goal, motivation, and emotion. What’s your goal in eating so much? What’s your motivation? What emotion are you trying to squelch or promote? Make sure you don’t only look for goals, motivations, and emotions you’re conscious of. See if you can identify the goal, motivation, and emotion that is out of your awareness. You are always being influenced by what you are not aware of, and this is the case too when you’ve made yourself be overweight.

by Maria's Last Diet

When it comes to choosing a diet, dieting and exercise, weight-loss strategies, setting weight-loss goals, and taking weight off, do you know your own mind?

What makes you choose one diet over another? What keeps you on the straight and narrow as far as exercise and dieting are concerned? With what in mind do you pick your weight-loss strategies? How do you go about setting your weight-loss goals?

If you answered all of these questions by saying you thought hard and long, deliberated carefully, and made informed decisions, you might be mistaken. In fact, you probably are mistaken. The truth is you may not be aware of what prompted you to decide, select, act upon, and otherwise do what you did. You might think you made a conscious decision or acted that way because that’s what you decided would be best, when in fact your behavior was guided by a previously held belief, a goal of which you were unaware, a set of pleasant or unpleasant memories, or an old habit.

One of the most frustrating responsibilities you have when you are trying to lose some weight is to see what is causing you not to be able to consciously do what you set out to do, and then do something about it.

by Maria's Last Diet

You make a conscious decision, and then you do it.

How many times have you heard something like this when it came to losing your excess weight? Decide and start: start your diet, start the weight-loss program. Decide and stick to it: stick to your weight-loss regimen, stay on your diet.

You make a conscious decision, and then you do it.

No, that’s not true. That’s not the way it happens.

An experiment in 1983 on conscious intention and brain activity proved otherwise. In this experiment people were asked to choose when to move their index fingers. That’s it, just move their index finger. The researchers measured when each person moved her finger. They measured when she made a conscious decision to start the movement and they measured when the onset of the brain’s readiness potentials that prepared the movement occurred.

The results: The conscious decision preceded the act by about a quarter of a second. The brain’s readiness potentials occurred up to a full second before each person actually moved her finger.

Conclusion: The brain prepared for the finger movement before people made a conscious decision.

What does this mean for the weight-loss process? It definitely means that there is something going on in your brain that sets the stage for your conscious decisions? It’s far from the truth to say, “I decided and did it.” That’s not even true about moving your index finger.

by Maria's Last Diet

Overeating and the use of food for non-food purposes over time become part of a person’s everyday repertoire, part of who the person is. Reaching for extras, seconds, chips, cookies, eating so much, so that you make your stomach feel a certain way, all become second nature. These ‘moves’ like the ‘moves’ of any behavior that has become habit have been well rehearsed, and they become automatic. But it’s not only the ‘moves’ that become automatic. It’s also the “I can’t help it” reactions to various cues that become automatic as well. Some well-known external cues are social events and stressful situations. Some well-known internal cues are anxieties and negative feelings.

On the positive side, operating automatically is essential to success in our lives. We need to do things with ease and certainty, not expend a lot of mental energy, and not be too taxed by what we do. We have mental energy then for more important things. This is how it should be. Automatic is ‘not having’ to be aware of each of the moves we make.

On the negative side, ‘not having’ to be conscious of our actions and our thoughts is what we’ve done to ourselves when we’ve become overweight. We established automatic patterns, habits that ‘control’ our ‘moves’ and keep us overeating, eating those fattening foods, and keep us overweight. They keep us from successfully dieting and losing weight, even when we consciously want to shed those extra pounds.   

by Maria's Last Diet

Saying you’re going to lose that unwanted weight doesn’t always mean that you are going to lose that unwanted weight.

Vowing with all your heart and soul that you are now all about reducing your weight, and it’s going to happen this time, is no assurance that you will actually reduce your weight.

If saying it and vowing to do it aren’t a guarantee that you will do what you have to do to drop your weight, what is?

Funnily enough, it’s not saying what your goal is and it’s not making an avowal about your goal that can get you right where you want to be—to losing some weight.

How is this possible?

It’s your underlying attitude that counts more than what you say or even how hard you vow to do something difficult like losing excess weight.

So rather than believe what you say, no matter how strongly you say it, check out what’s inside of you about your goal to lose weight, and your desire to stop being heavy and become a thinner woman.

by Maria's Last Diet

Most of what you’ve probably read about losing that extra weight of yours has convinced you that you have to make a conscious effort; otherwise, successful weight loss won’t be yours to savor.

What if you found out that you could still hold this goal in mind, have it work for you, and exercise all the self-control you needed, and you don’t have to be aware that you’re doing it.

Poppycock, you say. Well, you’re wrong. It can be done, and it has been done. In fact, you’ve done it…in lots of situations.

Take for example situations in which you knew you were going to be anxious—a special social occasion, some kind of competition, a tough work situation, facing up to something you did wrong; you name it. And let’s say you saw a TV program or read a book in which the lead character was someone who was successful because she was able to just be herself. If you held on to the take-away message—just be yourself, then you might have used it later on at some critical time to ease your anxiousness.

See, if you have what it takes already inside you, or find what it takes for you to lose weight without having to make such a conscious effort, this will cut down on the need to consciously struggle with the perils of reducing your weight.