Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

You need to lose weight. No kidding.

So go on a diet. That’s the answer. Is it?

What if food and eating are serving a special purpose for you? Then what?

Well, you are probably one of the ones for whom diets haven’t worked. Probably exercise hasn’t worked either. In fact, maybe you only halfheartedly worked the diet and didn’t keep up the exercise. Or you could have worked really hard at diet and exercise only to find in the end that you gained back the weight you lost.

So what’s next?

What about a solution that asks why?

Why do you eat too much food?

Why do you eat such fattening foods?

Why did you gain so much weight?

Does your eating and weight gain have its origins in your childhood, in your adolescence, in your adult life? Where is the why located?

See if for you weight loss success comes from discovering why and then doing something about the why.

by Maria's Last Diet

How much did you eat yesterday? Did you eat too much or too little or just the right amount?

How much will you eat today? Too much or too little or just the right amount? And what will you have in the way of fattening food today? Too much, too little, or just the right amount?

If you were answering these questions for yourself, how would you answer? If you were answering these questions for a family member or friend, how would you answer? If you were answering these questions for a group of people, how would you answer?

Do you know that in all likelihood you would underreport how much you ate to yourself as well as others? If this is the case, how are you gonna get real about this eating and weight thing of yours?

by Maria's Last Diet

Is there a common denominator between being unable to lose weight and other things that are wrong in your life?

Do you think this is a silly association, being overweight and other things being wrong?

I hope you don’t think it’s silly.

If you can see the truth in this, ask yourself what is the common denominator? For example, what are you doing or how are you being that is upsetting your life and at the same time making it so you are unable to lose weight?  

by Maria's Last Diet

How can there be no past influence on current behavior? This doesn’t stand to reason. The past, if it’s just a minute or two before the present, certainly can influence the present. It doesn’t have to have much of an impact on what is occurring now, but on the other hand, we wouldn’t be surprised if what happened one or two minutes ago had a big effect on what is happening now. Can the same be said of a day or two ago, a month or a year ago, and even a childhood ago? While the amount of time passed since childhood and adolescence may dull our memories of what the past was really like for us, we can't say that what occurred then has no bearing on what is occurring for us today.

Unfortunately in cases where women can’t lose weight, you find yourself staying on the outside looking in, making educated guesses as to what happened to them in their past to make them unable to lose weight. Every woman has a story to tell about herself, about her past, and the connection of her past with her current weight problem. She may have broken apart her story into such a patchwork of pieces that it seems impossible to put together the pieces to make a coherent whole? But it’s worth a try.

by Maria's Last Diet

Women who are overweight are adroit at not losing weight. They find a way to distance themselves from contemporary and past causes and focus only on the instrumental behaviors directly involved in weight gain and the sabotage of weight loss. The behaviors themselves, like eating out of hand and blowing diets become self-perpetuating, motive no longer visible. Habits are formed, become established and persist almost automatically. Wanting to find a motive for not losing weight is met with resolute focus on weight and weight gain without there being any apparent connection to motivating events and lifelong, tightly fitting psychological causes.

Exceptions to the I-just-got fat, no connection with anything else in my life, are women who fully acknowledge they eat when they experience disturbing emotions. These women attribute their downfall to emotional eating. But even these women, for the most part, don’t look beyond the immediate mood or emotion that sent them to food. They are satisfied with the connection they made between their weight gain and unpleasant emotions. Further understanding, digging deeper is out of the question.

Women who can’t lose weight limit their thinking and insight and don’t try to discover the things in their lives that are at the heart of their difficulty losing weight. It is often the case, even when their weight and something like a disturbing marriage stand side-by-side, so close that there is no room to doubt their relationship, they are seen as two separate parts of their lives, one not affecting the other.

by Maria's Last Diet

There is such a thing as settling. You settle for less than you want. You settle for relationships that are hurtful, demeaning, and definitely unfulfilling. You settle for not getting yourself to do this or that. You settle for weighing too much and for the toll being overweight is having on your life.

Settling is only one part of it. The other equally prominent feature of settling is that in the midst of settling, you don’t know you’re settling. At least you don’t know like you will come to know when you get a wake up call. How many times have you heard of a woman losing weight when she got divorced? There’s a wake up call. While in the unfulfilling marriage, fat is an okay enough way to look. Hopelessness and futility are in. Wake up call comes (realization life can be different). Hope and worthwhile are in. Settling is out.

by Maria's Last Diet

You’ll be surprised at what the active ingredients are for weight loss success. They are not diet and exercise. Diet and exercise are the acted on ingredients. Are you getting warmer? Hint: Who acts on matters like exercise and diet? You, of course.

What active ingredients do you need for the weight loss challenge? The ingredients can be bundled together under the heading of the psychology of weight loss. There’s your motivation, your commitment, your ingenuity, your planning, your intentions, your goals, your facility with developing sub-goals (small steps) to reach your larger goals (bigger steps), your ability to problem solve and remove obstacles that stand in your way. You probably can think of other ingredients that you actively use in the pursuit of weight loss. Why don’t you list them so you can remind yourself of their importance.

by Maria's Last Diet

The traditional—Diet and Exercise

This is where you concentrate your efforts on following a food plan and getting a sufficient amount of exercise. Your food plan may be a formal diet or it could be a way of eating you devised yourself. Eating less, eating fewer calories, restricting the carbohydrates or the fat, cutting out certain foods, eating only at mealtimes, each of these methods constitutes your food plan. Exercise, of course, may be any form of physical activity that you engage in on a regular basis.

Using Psychology

What does it mean to use psychology to lose weight? It means that you shift your focus from the traditional diet and exercise to the psychology involved in weight loss.

Weight loss psychology involves your intentions and how you plan to implement your intentions. You can’t just leave your intention as a wish or a desire or even an intention. Good weight loss psychology entails planning and practicing what you plan in order to fulfill your intentions.

Your motivation is another element that you pay special attention to in the psychology of weight loss. How motivated are you to start? If you don’t have all the motivation you need at the start, can you pick up motivation as you go along?

Goal setting is yet another center of attention in weight loss psychology. Setting realistic goals, establishing sub-goals, and creating small enough goals to garner lots of successes are all vital constituents of a successful psychology for weight loss.

Becoming aware of what obstacles may derail your weight loss effort is yet another piece of the weight loss psychology puzzle. Using the old standby of pro’s and con’s, you can list the pro’s and con’s for losing weight and the pro’s and con’s for not losing weight. Pay careful attention to the pro’s for not losing weight and the con’s for losing weight. They will tell you what obstacles in your psychology are most likely to thwart your weight loss effort.

If you'd like to know more about what's involved in weight loss psychology, 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.