Successful Weight Managers Instinctively do This...

We’ve lost track of a structure around eating that had existed for generations. Your grandparents will confirm that until recently a simple structure to our eating activities was followed—and no one questioned or thought about it much.

We ate breakfast and dinner at home, and a lunch was packed to take to work. Meals were large enough that they provided the calories needed to fuel us until the next meal, without needing a snack. Snacking wasn’t the norm, and the vast majority of body weights were in the healthy range. An overweight child was unusual.

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Are you Programming Yourself for Success or Failure?

It’s easy to want to lose weight. It’s another matter to actually want to embark on a new—healthy—lifestyle that requires eating better and exercising. After all it’s just human nature to want the prize without having to do the work.

The biggest obstacle between you and success with weight management however, probably isn’t eating better or even exercising—it’s very likely negative thinking and sabotaging self talk. It may never have occurred to you that long term success with weight management ultimately hinges on fixing your thinking.

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“I’ll get back on my diet tomorrow…” but at what cost?

The most fascinating—and destructive—behavior pattern associated with dieting occurs when you break the “rules” of whatever diet you’re attempting to follow. Odds are if you have any history of dieting you’ll recognize this behavior pattern immediately. 

There are a host of cognitive distortions (irrational thoughts) that come into play—basically setting you up for a big fall over the slightest perceived transgression.

First a few definitions:

• All-or-nothing thinking: thinking in absolute terms like “always”, “never”, and “every”, which sets up both unrealistic expectations and a false situation that allows for only two alternatives (no shades of gray).
• Disqualifying the positive: ignorring everything you are doing right.
• Catastrophizing: blowing things out of proportion regarding anticipated ramifications of a perceived transgression (in this case regarding one’s diet).
• Emotional reasoning: resistance to shifting from emotional self-judgments, or emotional situational assessments, to analytical evaluation of factual details.

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The Game of Weight Loss has Rules

What are your odds of winning a challenging game that you don’t know the rules to? Not so great. Likewise, if you're trying to lose weight but don't understand how your body works, your odds of success aren't good.

You need accurate information about how your body works:

• How many calories do I need to eat?
• How many calories should I burn in activity each week?
• What changes can I expect during weight loss (in my energy needs)?
• How do I stabilize at my goal weight?

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What might you learn from a successful loser?

The topic of weight management has been my passion since my personal struggle with weight gain in my late teens. When I was 17, after gaining 30-pounds over three or four months, I went to Physicians’ Weight Loss Centers for help getting that weight off.

Looking back, family stress due to my mother being ill, plus freedom (my drivers’ license, and my parents’ gift of a used Datsun 1200 for wheels) led me to making way too many regular stops at Seven-Eleven type places for a “snack!” These snacks were mostly brownies and different bags of various salty-crunchy things.

When I finally came up from the long binge—feeling like crap, and way past fitting in most of my clothes—I was ready to turn things around. Somehow I ended up at a Physicians’ Weight Loss Center “clinic” which may have been about the only choice in a small town (1977)!

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