DietMans Weight Loss and dieting

Diet, Excersise and Determination - diet.web-angels.co.uk

2007-09-29T01:16:00.000+01:00

Nicole Ransom is the very image of a California girl: long, bronzed legs, sun-kissed hair, curves in all the right places. But it wasn’t always that way.

The advertising-sales rep is a mere wisp of the woman she was back in 1999, when her weight peaked at 231.6 pounds (she remembers the number exactly). Over four years, she lost 100 pounds through a combination of diet and exercise—and a heavy dose of determination.

Food was a constant focus when she was growing up. “When we would go out to eat, I couldn’t pay attention to the conversation until I ordered and my meal came. That’s how focused I was on food,” Ransom says.

Her outgoing personality and take-me-as-I-am attitude won her tons of friends—but few dates. “I was the guys’ girl,” she says. “There were guys who liked me for my personality, but then they would want to keep our relationship a secret. That’s what really hurt.”

Over the years, Ransom tried a litany of diets, but nothing stuck. “It was always a short-term goal: to fit into a dress, get a guy,” she says.

Then, she signed up for Weight Watchers … again.

But this time, something was different. “I decided to do it for me,” she says. And the pounds started coming off. Ransom lost 50 pounds over six months, and dropped another 20 when she started running.

“I was so jazzed that I could actually do it!” she says. Ransom lost the last 30 pounds by eating fewer packaged foods and more fresh fruits and vegetables.

Now, the girl who was recruited to anchor her grade school tug-of-war team three years in a row is standing tall at 130 pounds.

“It’s still a struggle,” she says, particularly because her job on Health’s sales team involves a lot of entertaining. “I have to deal with people urging me, ‘Just one bite.’”

But when Ransom does indulge, it’s not because someone else wants her to. “Now, I decide when I cave.”

Emotional Eating - http://diet.web-angels.co.uk/articles.htm

2007-09-10T23:30:00.000+01:00

Occasional emotional eating is normal. Everyone has celebrated with food before, that's what birthday parties, Christmas lunch and BBQ's on SuperBowl day and the Forth of July are all about. But emotional eating can become a serious problem when it leads to negative emotional and physical imbalances in our lives.

Frequent emotional eating can easily become a destructive cycle. Emotional eating becomes entrenched in the lives of its sufferers when they use food to regulate their mood, cope with stress or overcome feelings of anxiety or boredom.

This type of behaviour can easily lead emotional eaters to become overweight or obese because many of them feel hungry most of the time.

"Satisfying" this insatiable hunger with food, many emotional eaters consume far more calories than their body needs and they gain a lot of weight which becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible to lose.

Common signs of Emotional Eating

Here are some common signs of emotional eating:

Eating when not physically hungry.

Eating during times of strong emotions, like anger or depression.

Eating when bored.

Rapid eating.

Eating immediately after arriving home from work.

Eating alone out of embarrassment at the quantity or type of food being eaten.

Eating until uncomfortably full.

Feelings of disgust, depression, or guilt after overeating.

Recognizing emotional hunger

Recognizing emotional hunger (as apposed to real physical hunger) is one of the keys to overcoming or staving off frequent emotional eating.

Some of the characteristics of emotional hunger include:

Emotional hunger comes on suddenly.

One minute you're not hungry at all and the next minute you're starving.

Emotional hunger often craves specific food, like pizza, candy or a cheeseburger.

Emotional hunger begins in the mouth and the mind, not the stomach.

Emotional hunger often accompanies an unpleasant emotion.

Emotional hunger involves automatic or absent-minded eating.

Emotional hunger isn't satisfied when you're full.

Emotional hunger makes you feel guilty.

Are you an emotional eater?

To find out if you might be an emotional eater, rate yourself on the following statements about your current lifestyle (adapted from the book Fattitudes: Beat Self-Defeat and Win Your War with Weight, by Jeffrey R., Ph.D. Wilbert, Norean K. Wilbert, St Martin's Press, NY, 2000.) using the scale:

0 = Never

1 = Rarely

2 = Sometimes

3 = Often

4 = Almost Always

1. I've try to lose weight, but always fail.

2. I don't feel in control of my eating.

3. I often eat when I'm not hungry.

4. I eat food when I'm stressed or upset.

5. I eat food for pleasure or as a reward.

6. I think about food a lot.

7. I can't stay on track when dieting.

8. I binge eat.

9. I feel ashamed of myself and my eating habits.

10. Food helps me deal with feelings.

Add up your TOTAL SCORE

Interpretation:

0 – 10. It is very unlikely that you are an emotional eater.

11 – 20. You engage in some emotional eating but it's unlikely that it is harmful.

21 – 30. You are a moderate emotional eater and should consider professional assistance.

31 - 40 You are a heavy emotional eater. Professional assistance is highly recommended.

What to do if emotional eating is a problem

Here are some suggestions that may help you overcome problematic emotional eating:

Become aware of your motivations for wanting to eat.

When you feel like eating, ask yourself if you could possibly be upset instead of hungry.

Keep believing in yourself. You are in control and have the power to make changes in your life.

Develop new mood regulation strategies. For example, share your problems when anxious and exercise when you're bored.

Remember support is available. If you need to, find a weight loss class, hire a lifestyle coach or engage a licensed therapist.

Focus on the things that matter. Like taking care of yourself, improving your emotional well-being, eating well and exercising.

Be wary of using diets. Dieting can lead to more emotional eating and won't help you to address the underlying reasons for being overweight.

Love yourself for who you are and forget about trying to be perfect.

Don't swallow your emotions for the sake of sparing others from getting upset. If they've upset you, let them know about it and tell them that you won't tolerate that kind of behavior in the future.

Make yourself - not a diet - responsible for what you eat.

Focus on the cause and solution rather than the affect. Constantly focusing on the negative symptoms of the problem won't help you solve them. Focus on what you're going to do about your current circumstances rather than the circumstances themselves.

Take responsibility for your life, stop thinking about food and LIVE!

Conclusion

Remember, we're all emotional eaters to some extent. It's nearly impossible not to be in America, where eating is an integral part of our celebration rituals and a fundamental aspect of our family and social life. But when emotional eating interferes with your health and happiness you know it's time to do something about it and the sooner the better.

Unrealistic Expectations Can Cause Failure

2007-08-30T20:08:00.001+01:00

Weight gain is an evolutionary process. Some people call it creeping weight. The scale turtles inexorably upward – a tight skirt, a belt notch, a can’t-zip-up-my-pants inch at a time. Yet you expect the scale to go down as rapidly as a high-speed elevator. This erroneous thought pattern – practiced and perfected as with any bad habit – is an unrealistic expectation. Dangerous to be sure with any endeavor, but deadly when it comes to weight reduction.

I could have, I should have, I didn’t, I wanted to, are the loud laments of the perfectionist. Perfectionism is an illusion, however. Since you’ll never be perfect, in your mind you don’t ever succeed. Then you think: I failed, I blew it, I’m weak, or bad, or whatever you say to beat yourself up, and you stop trying altogether.

Why not acknowledge small incremental improvements, times when you did better at one meal, one day, or one event than you might have? Focus only on what you did, not on what you thought you should have done. The inclination to focus on the negative is part of the all or nothing addict mind. You think that if you can’t do it perfectly for an entire week – even though it is unrealistic to think you can – you won’t do it at all. It would be more pleasurable to look for the positive and see that list grow.

All-or-nothing thinking is far more destructive to your weight loss goal than a friend baking brownies and leaving them on your desk. Even if you eat one brownie but manage to give the rest to co-workers and friends, you think you’ve blown it. A better way of thinking would be to realize you only ate one, when in the past you probably would have eaten several, if not all.

Unrealistic expectations give substance, heft, and power to an unrealized goal. They quash the budding crocus of success as it pushes through the thick asphalt of failure. Unrealistic expectations kill the flowering of dreams, because you become so disappointed that you give up hope.

Thomas Edison never stopped trying. “I have not failed 10,000 times,” he said. “I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

The only reality is where you are today – perhaps 150 pounds and where you were a week ago – perhaps 155 pounds. And even if your weight remains the same, there are other questions to ask: Did you keep a food log? Did you drink the requisite amount of water? Did you do better at an industry function than you might have? Did you eat less than usual at your mother’s? Yes? Then you’re ahead of the game.

Marcia S, an unrealistic thinker, lost seven pounds in two weeks. The third week she lost one pound. When I asked for a positive story, she said: “Nothing good happened.” She was miserable.

“But you lost eight pounds,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but,” she continued, “I was so good all week and the scale didn’t move.”

“You lost one pound this week,” I reminded her, “and you didn’t gain back the previous seven.”

“Yeah but . . .” she repeated. “I lost that pound at the beginning of the week and didn’t lose anything the rest of the week.”

She was unable to acknowledge anything positive. So great were her unrealistic expectations, it was impossible for her to feel joy or satisfaction in what she had accomplished.

By ignoring these fragile buds, by not watering, nurturing, and turning them to sunlight, they turn to dust. You’re used to seeking out the imperfect and because you’re not yet in the habit of recognizing the fruits of your labor, they dwindle on the vine. What remains are the weeds of destructive, negative, unrealistic thinking. These thoughts can and do take over your mind and your heart. Unrealistic expectations make you believe you’ll never succeed, every effort is for naught, you are forever destined to fail.

If you give too much credence to your real or imagined failures and not enough to your attempts, your interim successes, and your accomplishments, you will become the failure you think you are.

Were your parents critical and judgmental? Are you too hard on yourself? You may have internalized their voice.

Create your own positive voice. Think of the reasons you want to reach your weight loss goal (or any goal), not the reasons you don’t want to remain at your present weight.

Tell friends how good you feel, rather than reliving your less-than perfect efforts. Give importance to the good stuff. Let everything else go.

Try to monitor your negative, unrealistic thinking. See how many times you give yourself credit for doing something positive – I only ate when I was hungry the entire week” – only to take it away by adding, “. . . except for Thursday night when I worked late and had three slices of pizza.” It is not a good habit of thought to give one evening of pizza the same weight as six days of staying on your program.

Thinking realistically and positively may be tricky at the beginning because you’ve been thinking unrealistically and negatively for a long time. It takes practice and perseverance to change your attitude, but you will succeed. Perhaps not immediately. Perhaps one baby-step at a time. Perhaps 10,000 attempts later. But, as Georgia O’Keefe said, “You musn’t even think you won’t succeed.”

regards

Diet Man - http://diet.web-angels.co.uk

Unrealistic Expectations Can Cause Failure

2007-08-30T20:08:00.000+01:00