2012 is drawing to a close! It’s time for my annual contest where YOU guess how many exercise sessions I completed this year. The winner will receive a set of Catalyst products, including workbooks and CD audio classes worth more than $500, to illuminate your permanent weight loss journey!
For anyone who’s new to this blog, I’m a proponent of non-diet, permanent weight loss through true lifestyle change.
Diets are temporary ways to eat with endless mind games and emphasize willpower. True lifestyle change addresses the deeper need for food and lasts forever. My twenty-year struggle taught me to deal with the deeper needs in life, so those deeper needs don’t sabotage healthy efforts.
My Approach to Exercise or Activity
I don’t use fancy apps to track my exercise and I’ve lost over 90 pounds without counting a calorie. I know a calorie is not a calorie when it comes to fuel for the body. If you don’t understand the calorie game, get my audio class called “The Hard Cold Truth About Permanent Weight Loss” NOW!)
Here’s my “foolproof” recording method:
Yep, that’s 12 sheets of paper, calendar style, for 2013! It works because the physical act of recording, with a pen, is magical in terms of claiming your work. And you never have to worry about losing it via a computer problem. I have years of these calendars. It’s an instant reference when I need to remember how far I’ve come, or what I was doing that year I lost 20 lbs., or whatever.
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The holiday season is in full swing! Even if I never saw a house filled with lights, or the Christmas Tree in front of the mall, I would know it was December because my clients’ anxiety levels are rising! For anyone trying to lose weight, holidays pose more challenges than navigating the line at the Apple store when the latest iPhone is released.
But there’s one way to make holidays easier. And it doesn’t have anything to do with those silly tips you read in fitness magazines that teach you to CONTROL YOURSELF and CONTROL FOOD. Like that worked, right?
Holiday weight gain doesn’t have to happen. The easiest way to have a fabulous holiday season and, incidentally, perhaps change your life, is to examine and STOP making up stories about the holidays and notice how encourages changing habits and behavior with food.
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In an effort to clear my office of clutter, I recently began a scrounge-and-purge operation. I don’t consider myself a hoarder in any way. I’ve learned to let go of old stuff, old fat, and, most importantly, old beliefs. You might say I love releasing things that don’t serve me.
But, it’s amazing what can hide in bookshelves, beneath a stack of reading material, or in office cubbies.
Recently, as I was knee-deep in the recycle bin, I came across a series of old notebooks. I always keep a notebook with me. It might serve as a place to journal, make a to-do list, or plan the year 2035. I long-ago realized I can’t keep all the parts of my life separate, so everything goes in the one notebook I have nearby.
The day before Thanksgiving, I found myself going through a notebook from early in my final weight loss journey. I have no idea what cued the list I found… but I was actively losing weight and must have realized, or read somewhere, that I should hook into the rewards of the task I was planning.
So, here’s my list – the reasons why I wanted to lose weight permanently:
1. I’ll feel connected to my body, no static in between it and me.
2. I’ll be the essence of me, no excess anywhere.
3. I’ll look better in clothes and find it easy to shop.
4. It will show I walk my talk. I say I want to be a healthy weight and embody health, and that will be apparent.
5. Food will cease to be a focal point in my life.
6. I’ll show love without food.
7. I’ll love myself and others more deeply and purely. My expression of this love will be clean and simple and authentic.
8. I’ll honor my body.
9. I’ll be as I was meant to be. I won’t carry my inadequacies and disappointments on my hips.
And here’s what’s important about this ten-year-old list:
Today, it’s all true. Every word of it.
It’s the season of thanksgiving, and I’m very grateful for all the wonder in my life. I’m even more inspired to look back and see what I have created. I always had doubt, but my intention from those words somehow carried me through the doubt, the hard times, the heartbreak and meandering roads that make up life.
What do you want to create? In ten years, what will be on the list you find? The list you write today?
One of the most painful aspects of weight loss is weight regain. Has this scenario happened to you? You’ve struggled and deprived yourself for months, losing weight. And, then, one day you “wake up fat” again.
Watch this video where actor Kevin James explains it perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnC9BzXso90
What were his key words?
“I’m going to give myself a little time to have fun….”
Yep, that’s what started it all!
Another key thing he said? “I’m going to make a turnaround.”
Have you heard yourself saying either of these things?
They are called denial.
Now, my point is not to ridicule Kevin James. In fact, since I have coached clients in the film business and worked in it too, I can tell you the methods used to get in shape for a film are often gruesome, even more restrictive and debilitating than most of us mortals, who aren’t being paid hundreds of thousands (or millions!) of dollars, could endure.
And, if our mortal efforts results in regain 99% of the time, Hollywood weight loss is almost guaranteed to return. You see this over and over, as actors regularly bulk up, then lose weight, invariably winding up in midlife as overweight, metabolisms shot, bodies energetically depleted. It happened to Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in the old days. It happened to Russell Crowe and Christina Aguilera more recently.
And even though it’s a legitimate point how differently media treat male and female regainers (media and tabloids follow female regainers around ruthlessly – see this recent article where Christina Aguilera talks about how she was “forced” to be toothpick thin early in her career, with producers telling her an entire tour would fail if she was anything but tiny), they didn’t seem to talk too much about Kevin James’ regain.
He wasn’t ridiculed or plastered on the cover of People magazine.
He didn’t find a “plus sized” label in front of his name, like comedienne Aidy Bryant, a new regular cast member of Saturday Night Live, discovered in front of her name in the articles about her new job. (See this article calling her “morbidly obese” and suggesting thin women run for the ho-hos.)
No, the point is Kevin’s regain. Despite his sense of humor (haven’t we all developed good senses of humor about our weight?), you can see behind his apology.
As I recently told a client who got to goal weight and began to slip: there is only one way to eat.
Period.
No “I’ll just give myself a break…”
No “I’ll get back on the wagon….” Remember Oprah’s wagon? There is no wagon.
There is only now. And how we feed and treat ourselves right now will show up tomorrow. There is only one way to eat. And that is in the healthiest way possible, especially given the crap that’s hawked in our faces every day, screaming from every billboard, sign and screen.
Let’s eat in a way that makes us proud of ourselves today, and makes tomorrow great.
We all know how to do this, if we stop and pay attention. We know how to treat ourselves with dignity.
Coaching and training thousands of people towards permanent weight loss has taught me valuable lessons. After several years, I began to notice distinct differences in the way my male and female clients approached weight loss and found success.
I realized my male clients often followed a less complicated, linear pattern towards weight loss.
My female clients got stuck in circles of complicated emotions and layers of confusing responsibilities.
My male clients understood diets and controlling food. They thrived on structure and command. Food rarely has emotional connection or implication for most men.
My female clients yearned for true nourishment and were fulfilled by the experience of caring deeply for themselves.
My male clients wanted to earn something.
My female clients needed to grow into a new attitude before they could lose weight and keep it off.
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Permanent weight loss is what we want, even if we’re heavily invested in temporary weight loss via diets. We all think a diet will get us there – despite study after study indicating 99 percent of dieters regain their weight and every diet adds a few extra pounds too.
Why do we live in such DENIAL (read: Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying)? Because, if we believe the diet will fix the weight, we don’t have to take responsibility and fix US (or the underlying behaviors).
In my last two posts, we explored twenty things to STOP in order to achieve permanent weight loss. Now, here are 10 more very important steps to further your progress towards permanent weight loss. These are challenges that commonly show up for my weight loss clients and I hope revealing these challenges will make your weight loss easier and more direct. It’s a virtual blueprint to permanent weight loss!
This is Part 3 of a 5-Part Series – So, check back for subsequent posts! Or subscribe! You can now sign up at the right of this post to receive new posts via email notification too!
21. Stop making excuses – Excuses link us to victim status and there are a million and one excuses for everything. But the old saying “You can’t have reasons and results” is absolutely true. It doesn’t matter if grandma Mabel made your favorite cookies or your BFF (“friend” – really?) decided to surprise you with a mojito and shots happy hour, the moment we start excusing destructive behavior with well-thought-out and perfectly reasonable reasons, we lose the power of owning every choice. Weight is lost permanently when we step up and truly own every choice.
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Oh, if only a great big stop sign showed up BEFORE we committed some of the actions that destroy our progress towards permanent weight loss!
In my last post, we explored ten things to STOP in order to achieve permanent weight loss. Now, here are 10 more very important steps to further your progress towards permanent weight loss. These are challenges that commonly show up for my weight loss clients and I hope revealing these challenges will make your weight loss easier and more direct. It’s a virtual blueprint to permanent weight loss!
This is Part 2 of a 5-Part Series – So, check back for subsequent posts! Or subscribe! You can now sign up at the right of this post to receive new posts via email notification too!
11. Stop ignoring energy – The need for food is a need for energy. Food is fuel which creates energy. Notice, I did not say “the desire for food” – I said “need” – that is different! We need food for energy and hunger is the cue. So, in order to be in touch with the actual need for food, and fuel our bodies well, we’ve got to be in the business of noticing energy needs. Learning your body’s unique cues and messages is key to long-term success at managing weight.
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Excess weight is created by over-reliance on food – we often use food as caretaker, parent, therapist, mood-elevator, motivator, punisher, etc. Losing weight permanently requires changing our negative behaviors with food as well as our relationship with food.
Since 2001, I’ve worked with thousands of amazing folks to help them achieve permanent weight loss, and I’ve noticed many similarities in the challenges they confronted in order to make change. It’s no surprise, these challenges parallel the changes I made as I lost over 90 pounds permanently.
I believe revealing these challenges will make your weight loss easier and more direct. It’s a virtual blueprint to permanent weight loss!
This is Part 1 of a 5-Part Series – So, check back for subsequent posts! Or subscribe! You can now sign up at the right of this post to receive new posts via email notification too!
- Stop dieting – Dieting is a false imposition of a food plan; it’s deprivation on every level. It is long proven that 99% of dieters regain and, when they regain, they regain 107% of the weight that was lost. Clearly, there are better ways to get the change you want.
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