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Fat
Loss
It's not that we don't know
how to shed excess fat. After all, how
hard is the equation of too much in
equals too much on? Of course, current
understanding about weight loss goes well
past the simple calorie counting of
decades gone by. We know more now about
how to lose weight and be healthy than we
ever have before. So why is it so hard?
Many overweight people feel a sense of
powerlessness. It's important to throw
away anything from past approaches that
has contributed to failure. If it didn't
work before it's not likely to work now,
and that includes berating yourself for
'being weak and hopeless'. It's critical
that your approach to change is not
punitive. Dieters are often good at
punishing themselves as they stand on the
scales, which don't match their effort,
and deny themselves permission to have
anything that will taste nice.
Being overweight is not just health
threatening; it can also bring with it
alienation and considerable emotional
pain. The feelings that can accompany
that are sadness, despair, fear and
confusion, resulting in low self-esteem
and dissociation from self. To make
changes to your body you also need to
take great care with your psyche. If you
don't learn about your needs, triggers
and vulnerabilities, you risk heading for
failure, as you stumble back into the
psychological pain and discomfort that
sent you to poor eating patterns in the
first place.
Use gentle self care not
control
The daily experience while
losing the weight must be livable. If it
takes superhuman control to lose the
weight, the risk is that when you relax
you will revert to the old patterns. The
reward for all that self denial so often
includes the unconscious thought of 'now
I have lost the weight I can eat what I
like'. And the failure ricochet begins.
Forced change can be traumatic. Real
change maintains a balance that takes the
whole person into account. This is why
the mindset needs to be more like a
readiness to let the weight go, with a
willingness to care for yourself while
you do. This is the main reason I would
not go to a commercial weight loss
company that requires handing over the
care of self to someone else.
How to begin
Begin when you have a sense
of readiness to change. That's the hard
part because you can desperately want to
lose weight but at the same time not be
ready to face the change. This
immediately presents the fear of
beginning something that will be too hard
for you to maintain. Take one day at a
time, promising yourself good nutrition
and tempting meals. You are going to eat
only what you need, so make everything
you eat count. Don't waste it on
second-rate food. Being hungry waiting
for the next meal creates a constant
sense of self denial. This form of
torture-waiting goes away if it's
replaced by anticipation of the next
gourmet meal. And don't be mean with
yourself. Many overweight people spend
enormous amounts of money on sweets and
fast foods but have the false economy
that they can't afford strawberries on
their breakfast or plum sauce on their
chicken fillet.
Make food your friend
Food is not the enemy. To
succeed in changing your eating, you need
to start with some hefty changes in your
thinking. The huge yet subtle difference
in my weight loss approach that divides
it from the punitive and
doomed-to-failure diets of the past is
the nature of its main motivator: taking
pleasure in food. You may have tried
diets with strange formulas, like the
grapefruit-only diet, which promised to
give miraculous results in only weeks.
Food so often becomes the enemy on such
diets.
Many factors contribute to the difficulty
of losing weight and some people find it
almost impossible to lose it. One factor
includes the concept of comfort eating
where the prime reason for eating is
emotional. Such eating can develop a
compulsiveness that borders on addiction.
The difference with the concept of food
as addictive is that, unlike with
alcohol, cigarettes and drugs, we can't
totally give up food and survive. We have
to learn to have a new relationship with
food. The seriously obese know there is
no quick diet that will do it for them.
It's a scary place to be, facing the
thought of a year of self denial to shed
the excess. That thought can be so
daunting and create such a sense of
hopelessness that the person may never
begin.
So don't begin until you have started to
think of food as your friend; food as the
life giver; food as the energiser and
food as the contributor to physical and
mental health. Learn about food and make
a promise to your body that you will care
for it, choosing the best ingredients
with the most health benefits. Read about
nutrition, vitamins, minerals and
phytochemicals until you realise how
simple good eating really is. You don't
need to become a nutritionist; basically,
if your food is varied and fresh you're
on the right track. Eating will then give
your body the best chance to get what it
needs for good health. Some people panic,
thinking that if they cut back in
quantity they will tire and run low on
energy. This why it's so important to
make sure you give your body the best
fuel, because fatigue is the emotional
enemy of the weight loser and explains
why the good lunch can be undone by the
chocolate bar on the way home.
Make every meal a treat
You probably put on weight
from liking food too much. So don't try
to change that now. You looked forward to
food before, so make sure every meal you
have now is a treat. Become a healthy
gourmet. Instead of having a pre-dinner
snack, wait that extra half-hour for your
dinner and be hungry enough to really
enjoy it. If you're honest you'll admit
that when you let yourself eat what and
whenever you want, it doesn't mean you
necessarily enjoy everything you eat.
Constant snacking keeps the edge off
hunger and holds at bay the sense of
panic the compulsive eater feels when
they start to experience hunger. So you
may have overeaten but not necessarily
enjoyed your food; never let yourself get
hungry. Hunger is one of the first
mindsets you need to change. It's
possible that you may then start to enjoy
food more than you ever have before.
Stomach vs mouth hunger
At first it will feel
strange to eat for the quality of the
food rather than the feel in your
stomach, but this was another of the old
risk points of past diets. Your stomach
seemed to say "eat more", when
your head knew you had eaten enough for
health and energy. Susie Orbach, in Fat
is a Feminist Issue (Arrow Books, London,
1978), talks about learning the
difference between stomach and mouth
hunger: that compulsive eaters can no
longer read their hunger from their
stomach and this has to be relearned.
Still, feeling hungry can be scary when
the meal is over. We must guard against
feeling trapped in the 'I can'ts'.
Instead we need to have some permissions
there, to help us past the danger points
of panic.
First, it helps to know it can take a
while for your stomach to signal to your
brain that it's actually full. Make
yourself a promise that you will wait
half an hour before you have something
else to eat. Chances are that by then
you'll be busily doing something else and
forget to even check.
If you're used to having supper, have a
hot drink first before you decide about
the food. Finally, on those nights when
the above techniques have not been
enough, have fruit when in the past you
would have turned to cake or chocolate.
What next?
When I said you can lose
weight without stress, I didn't promise
you can eat anything you fancy and still
lose weight. By now, though, I hope you
are beginning to realise there are ways
to do this that are gentle, non-punitive
and self-caring. Processed fat in food is
what you need to reduce in your daily
meals. Remember there are good fats, like
those in avocados, olive oil and fish
oils where the fat content is far
outweighed by the health-giving benefits.
So make war on the processed fats in
food; not on food itself and not on
yourself. Natural whole foods are the
safest choices, but if you do buy from
the supermarket shelf, start to read the
ingredients, being careful that the
percentages of fats and sugars are low
and you're not getting all sorts of extra
additives you don't want. So often there
are choices. You can still have the food
you love but for some food try choosing
the low-fat option. Milk is the easy one.
Change to low-fat milk. If you're
shrinking from this, trust me, it will
only taste strange for a short time. Eat
a few brazil nuts now and again, as the
magnesium in them will help your body
absorb the calcium. So the trick is to
cut back but not totally cut out fats. We
need some fats but just not as much as we
may have become used to eating; and we
need to choose the good fats.
Soup
Soup gets its own heading
because it is a godsend. If you can make
your own soup, you can guarantee what
goes into it. Vegetable soup has lots of
great nutrients. The difference between a
burger and a bowl of soup can be the
difference of a kilogram a month. Losing
weight is much more about choosing good
foods carefully than denying yourself
nice things to eat.
Don't bully yourself
Relax. With food that is extra to what
you really need, ask, "Can I let it
go?" If your answer is that it feels
too hard, have a glass of water or a cup
of herb tea before you eat. Chances are
the fluid will fill the gap, the warmth
will be comforting and you then won't
feel the need to eat more. You find it
hard to go to cafes with delicious treats
on display? Do something else you enjoy
at the café - chat with a friend, read a
favourite newspaper, book or magazine. If
a friend is having cake, maybe you can
have a small taste. The taste may be
enough to release those 'desire' pressure
valves without doing any major physical
damage.
Build in non-food treats
Make sure to build in treats
other than food. If food was your treat
or helped you cope with life's demands,
you need to find some non-food treats to
replace that. This may be as simple as
going for a walk, having a massage or
going to a movie.
Celebrate where you are and before you
know it you will have arrived at where
you want to be! Most weight loss
approaches monitor progress. Some
stipulate you should never weigh yourself
more than once a week. Others record the
weight loss on a chart, with the goal
weight as the motivator to continue with
daily self denial. What they all have in
common is they focus on how you want to
be in the future. The risk here is that
if today starts to feel too hard, the
future might feel too far away to wait
for the reward; too long a time to
continue with the self denial. So you
reach for the forbidden food.
You need to look at what you have
achieved, not focus on what you haven't.
Success then walks with you every step of
the way, rather than failure always
waiting to trip you up. You must never
lose sight of 'eating only what your body
needs'. Holding on to this truth will
help get you through the plateau times
when the weight doesn't seem to go down.
Don't look for a one-to-one relationship
between eating carefully and losing
weight. Many a dieter has given up when
the scales don't seem to match the effort
made. But this week's good eating may not
register on the scales until next week.
Trust that good eating over time will
mean better health and weight.
Treasure any weight loss you have managed
and value each day you have managed to
eat well. Celebrate feeling better and
weighing less than you did before. If you
accept that you may reach a final plateau
and not lose more weight, you never need
to panic if the weight loss seems to have
stalled. Perhaps you have actually
reached your ideal weight, so celebrate
this.
Chart your journey
It's essential to chart your
journey. This is simply done with a rough
graph: the vertical axis is in kilograms
and the horizontal axis has a month per
page, with your weight recorded once a
week. Don't cheat. Whether it goes up or
down, record accurately, and as the weeks
roll by, you will see your progress in a
downward slope across the page. You will
also see any patterns - for example, some
women put on fluid weight with their
period. Discovering this means you don't
need to panic at this temporary rise.
Charting is an essential step. It records
your commitment and greatly reduces the
risk that you will delude yourself that
you can over-eat without harm. With the
scales and the chart as a part of your
process, look forward to celebrating your
success as well as noting small setbacks.
Finally and most importantly, always
remember this: if you have made a change
to good eating you are better off today
than you were before. That way you can
never fail.
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