Hard Truth: The more we focus on losing weight, the more we gain. It’s true – dieters regain at an average rate of 108%.
Today, there are more “diets, “fixes”, “cures”, “pharmaceutical relief” and “apps” for weight loss than ever before in history. But our society weighs more and has MORE health problems associated with weight too.
It doesn’t add up, does it?
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It’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve been on the road a lot, training and teaching people about permanent weight loss. I absolutely love meeting new people and hearing about their challenges and perspectives.
On this trip, I was confronted with two very different angles on weight loss – particularly my weight loss, which is nearing the 100 lb mark. Roughly 74 of those pounds are soundly in the column labeled “permanent weight loss” (measured at 5 years), since I’ve sustained that loss for over 11 years now.
Perspective One
A doctor approached me after a training session (Before I train the coaches in an organization, I host anyone and everyone in the organization who’d like to know more about permanent weight loss. It may seem crazy, but many healthcare professionals still talk “diet” and don’t understand permanent weight loss.)
This doctor had a quizzical look on his face, and I assumed he needed clarification on something I had presented to the group.
Get a load of this!
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I’m always a little sad when the baseball season ends. Baseball has a consistency other sports do not; games fill practically every day from April to September. Baseball means summer. The World Series marks the coming of cold weather and snow.
Though my faves, the Yankees, weren’t in the World Series this year, it was a hard-fought, fantastic post-season. It even had a few weight loss lessons, if you looked close enough.
The St. Louis Cardinals were the last team standing. They came back numerous times, particularly in a do-or-die nail-biter Game 6 where they were down three times and came back anyway. It wasn’t enough to tie the game in the 6th inning, Texas came back with a wicked 7th inning and the Cardinals ran up against their very last out of the game before MVP David Freese, a little-known Cardinal playing among big stars, hit a line drive that tied the game again.
But…
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My two favorite things are change and commitment. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, I’m laughing out loud as I write those words.
Before I learned what it took to alter my weight permanently, change felt really scary and even threatening. I never committed to anything. Oh, I said it did, but I wasn’t reaching any of my goals, so now I know I wasn’t committed to anything.
In those days, I usually decided to diet in the evening, after eating too much all day, and, by 10 a.m., I’d have blown my diet. Every day began with hope and ended in regret.
I liked to gather all my willpower for the latest fad diet, then lose 10 lbs and regain 15.
I studied books, diets and nutrition advice, then wonder why they didn’t work long-term.
I used various food avoidance behaviors, sometimes going most of the day without food, then binging at night.
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Millions of people around the world are mourning the death of Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur whose ability to think outside the box pioneered a radical revolution in personal computing. Jobs’ company, Apple Inc., grew to iconic levels by inventing such devices as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
All of Apple’s groundbreaking inventions gave us new ways to connect, learn, grow and relate.
A number of his quotes have been circulating. I like this one:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by
dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise
of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you
truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
This sentence, in particular, stands out:
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During an interview this week, I was asked a question that stopped me in my tracks.
“What derails you?”
It took me a couple minutes of thought before I could even get my head around this. It felt a little familiar – like maybe I once knew what it was like, but it was a dim memory.
I’ve been losing weight a long time. Like, if there’s an award for long-term change, I’m in line for it. But what happens when you keep going is that some things that seemed like BIG CONCEPTS and HUGE AH-HAs become…
well…
just life.
So I told the interviewer:
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A number of new sources are talking about the addiction paradigm this week. For almost 100 years, alcoholism has been defined as a disease. It took quite a while to get the condition out of the realm of a “moral failure” and into the realm of “medically defined disease.”
But is medicine doing anything to help cure addiction? Or are they treating it as they treat most conditions: by over-medicating?
I’ve long maintained that addiction is multi-faceted. It really can’t be defined as simply a disease or any sort or moral issue. It’s emotional. And it’s deeply spiritual.
Medicine cannot touch that.
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This week has seen a lot of discussion about a new diet book which targets girls ages 6-12. After the initial outbreak of criticism, the author appeared on several talk shows defending his book as “empowering.” I spoke on the news about it Thursday.
I have to admit I’ve been wrestling with conflicting feelings about this. On one hand, I want to have the guy banned from Amazon and every other bookseller. His complete ignorance of the damaging and diminishing effect of diets on young women is simply deplorable.
On the other hand, we live in a country where we enjoy freedom of speech.
And yet, we have laws and policies that protect children from harm. And this is harmful.
To complicate matters further, as a blogger, do I speak up and risk giving him more exposure, or do I remain silent?
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- Confused? Most people are. All this is diet advice from the perspective of what I call Diet Mentality. Based in fea… https://t.co/oLbdhU6utw
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- I've always said exercise is more important than food control. What do you think? https://t.co/nRyJeKMZ9y
- Before and after pictures are usually complete fakes, and give us the misconception that the "after" picture is the… https://t.co/QUdTrITjeG
- Take a look! Wisdom! https://t.co/zjh6DbmIh9
