How to Stay Loyal to Your Weight Loss Goals on Vacation
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How to Abandon Your Closet Eating Ways
The bottom line is you implement different strategies to make closet eating less convenient, such as making a commitment to yourself only to eat with others, but the truth is as soon as you are alone and craving you will be right back speaking into the box at McDonalds unless your change your thinking!
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How to Mingle Celebrating Life and Weight Loss
The solution lies in balance, especially during the process of losing weight and becoming healthy and fit. There must be an undoing of what was done to get you overweight, or worse, obese. If your goal is weight loss, you must be 100% committed, and you must make some tough decisions about how to spend your time, including either saying no to certain events because you have made a decision to limit your eating and drinking during weight loss, or alternatively, a change in the way you experience or partake in the celebrations.
If you find it important to never miss a life celebration with friends or family, then you must make a choice about how you will show up and what you will do while celebrating. With advance planning, you can attend but not indulge in the food offerings.
Weight loss involves sacrifice and discomfort for the period of undoing what has been done to your body, but the healthy body you have at the end of the process makes the sacrifice and discomfort well worth it.
So make a choice about how you will conduct yourself during your period of losing weight. How many celebrations will you attend during the course of a week? Will you enjoy the food and drink offered, or will you just show up and be there to be part of the celebration without indulging in food and drink? And then pay attention to the result you are getting. If you find that too much celebrating is interfering with your weight loss plan, then decide to show up different for those life celebrations or take a brief reprieve from those celebrations during your period of weight loss.
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Mastering the Juggle – How to Effectively Balance Your Life
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The Sugar Seduction & How to Stay Strong
As is the case with matters of the heart, it can be very challenging to resist the delicious feelings sugar gives us, even after we experience its ill effects and understand intellectually its harm from a health and wellness perspective. Sugar (and love….and sex) have an addictive quality to them because of the large amount of dopamine that gets pumped into our systems when we are under the influence. So, understand when you are feeling this way about sugar (or love, or sex), you’re not necessarily crazy or stupid or undisciplined. It’s your biological predisposition. You and your brain (the one sending you messages that you’re going to die if you don’t have the sugar…or the love) are operating exactly as designed since both food and sex are necessary to our survival as a species. When you engage in behavior the brain perceives as necessary for survival, you experience a release of the “feel good” hormone dopamine, which causes the sensation of pleasure, happiness and satisfaction. The brain’s whole idea is to get you hooked so that you survive, and it seems to work quite nicely.
The tricky part about sugar is that it can lead to changes in dopamine receptors, meaning that a tolerance for it develops and more of the dopamine-inducing substance is needed to get the sought after feel-good feeling. In some cases, there is a decreased ability to get pleasure from other substances and experiences, so sugar can seem like your only source of pleasure and the only thing that will satisfy you.
While I would recommend a complete and immediate elimination from your life of the guy described above, I recommend a slower approach with the sugar following the steps below:
- Evaluation – Since many of us eat on auto-pilot and aren’t really sure what we have put in our body by the end of the week, it may be useful to spend a week or so evaluating when, how much and under what circumstances you are indulging in the sugar. This means you have at least an extra week during this evaluation period to carry on your love affair with the sugar, so enjoy it while you can because getting as much sugar as possible out of your diet is fundamental to weight loss and maintaining a healthy body. During the evaluation period, also notice the content of the food you are consuming. There are lots of foods that are less obvious about their sugar content. For instance, you may not feel you are consuming a lot of sugar when you have a shrimp cocktail or a plate of pasta and sauce, but you can consume your entire recommended amount of added sugar in one sitting with a generous portion of either of those options. Use the evaluation period to really understand how much sugar you consume on a weekly basis, so you can decide which sources of sugar you would prefer to cut from your diet. For instance, if you’re not ready for an abrupt break up with desserts, you may instead choose to eliminate spaghetti sauce or soda from your diet.
- Reduction Plan – Based upon the evaluation of your sugar intake, you should plan to reduce your sugar intake by 50 percent. You get to decide what sugars you will eliminate. I personally started with my coffee, and eliminated the sugar I had routinely added to each cup. I also noticed that I ate dessert far more often than I realized, so I limited myself to 2 desserts per week. Wine is another option I see with many of my weight loss clients. Cutting back on the amount wine consumed during the week is beneficial to many factors that impact weight loss, including sugar intake.
- Decide Whether to Eat in Moderation or Eliminate Completely – The more slowly you tackle the reduction of sugar from your diet, the less painful it will be. If you are in the habit of consuming large quantities of sugar, you will likely experience some withdrawal symptoms such as cravings and crankiness when you reduce sugar intake. It’s up to you whether you attempt to achieve your weight loss goals while continuing to consume a reduced portion of sugar, or whether you decide to eliminate sugar all together. I still indulge from time to time, but the truth is once I reduced my sugar intake drastically it seemed my taste buds were reset and when I do enjoy a sugary dessert now, it doesn’t taste near as good as I remembering it tasting in the past. For that reason, sugar is no longer able to seduce me into violating my commitment to myself to stay healthy and fit.
To get started on a deeper dive into permanent weight loss, click on the calendar below to schedule a FREE mini-session with me. What do you have to lose but some weight??
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The Why of Fat Shaming and How to Handle It
Five Things You Should Know About Happiness and Weight Loss
The Reality…
If you consider weight loss a prerequisite to your happiness, you may want to consider plan reorganization. You may find it a challenge to love yourself as an overweight person (that’s right, and exactly as you are right this moment), but the fact is self-love, happiness, respect for, and commitment to, oneself will ideally proceed, or be undertaken in conjunction with, weight loss.
Happiness is truly an inside job. It is never based upon what is going on “out there”, meaning what others think, say or do, or negative world events. Happiness is a choice we make internally, for ourselves. And so is unhappiness. As human beings, we have the power to decide whether we will chose thoughts that lead us to positive or negative feelings. It stands to reason that the decisions we make when we are experiencing negative feelings will lead us to very different results in life than the decisions we make when we are experiencing positive feelings and emotions. Negative thoughts and feelings can cause us to seek solace in food, or not value, in the moment, the long term goals and values we have set for ourselves. Conversely, positive thoughts and emotions can be very empowering, and lead us down a very different path. The path we go down, meaning the actions we take as a result of our thoughts and feelings, will leads us to a particular result. Not coincidentally, positive thoughts (routinely thought by happy people) will get you positive results (in weight loss, and everything else in life). And negative thoughts (routinely thought by unhappy people) will get you negative results (in weight loss, and everything else in life).
So it comes in very handy that you literally get to choose whether to be happy or unhappy. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but if you’re not quite sure yet which would be the better choice, review five things you need to know about happiness that will result in actions that will impact your weight loss. If you never lost a pound, wouldn’t this be a better way to live anyhow!?
Below are five things you need to know about how happiness and weight loss go hand-in-hand:
- Happy People Make Healthier Choices
- Happy People Produce Lower Levels of the Stress Hormone Cortisol
- Happy People Enjoy Living in the Moment
- Happy People Have a Higher Level of Respect for Themselves
- Happy People Honor Commitments to Themselves
Please leave me feedback on this blog or any questions as a comment below!
To get started on a deeper dive into permanent weight loss, click on the calendar below to schedule a FREE mini-session with me. What do you have to lose but some weight??
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Three Ways to Know if You have a Sugar Addiction and What to Do About it
Bingeing. When you consume sugary foods, are you able to enjoy a small and moderate amount at a time…just a little nibble? Or is it a full-on binge that doesn’t end until all evidence of sugar in your immediate area have been consumed? If you binge on sugar, rather than enjoy it in small and infrequent doses, there’s a good chance you are addicted to sugar.
- Cravings
- Lethargy or lack of energy
- Anxiety
- Headaches
- Irritability
Busting Through Urges for Successful Weight Loss
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