How many diets have you been on?
Did any of them work permanently? If so, I congratulation
you! For most people, however, diets DON'T work!
Why? One reason is because we may not be emotionally ready to
be slender. Many of us use excess weight as a shield to protect ourselves from
attention. Or we may simply use food as a comfort device. Either way, we are
misusing food and harming our bodies!
The major reason diets don't work is because of early childhood
programming. How many of us were programmed as children to eat
everything on our plates? Oh, yeah, I see you nodding in agreement!
Most of us were programmed with guilt - the starving
children elsewhere in the world. Some of us were programmed with fear - if we
didn't eat everything in front of us, we were punished. And a handful of us were
programmed with codependent love - "if you eat everything on your plate, mommy
will love you." So, if we didn't eat everything on our plate, we would:
- Feel guilty about the starving
children elsewhere
- Feel fear about being punished
- Feel lacking in love
The difficult issue here is that the programming is
subconscious. We know it's there by looking at our automatic behaviors. Take a
moment to reflect on your automatic behaviors. What are they? When do they
occur? What do you do automatically?
Eating to feel a feeling or to avoid a feeling is emotional
eating. There are other ways to deal with the feelings. Eating for emotional
reasons never works! If it did, we wouldn't continue to do it over and over
again to the detriment of our waistline and our health!
If you are committed to achieving your ideal weight and you
have been unable to do so, I have to ask this question: Who in your life is
sabotaging your efforts? The family system works best when there is no
change to the structure. For a family member to lose weight, especially a
significant amount, this change will create instability in the structure. In
order to lose weight, we need to make adjustments to our daily routines, and
these adjustments usually affect the family. For this reason, it is very
important to have your family 100% behind your goal, OR you must have a loving
strategy in place to deal with the conflict.
Weight Loss: A Quick Reference Guide provides guidance on the
subject of family resistance (as well as many other areas connected with weight
loss issues). Although the dynamics in each family is different, the technique
is the same: set healthy boundaries. And there are many ways to do this.
Achieving your ideal weight really is as simple setting a goal
and following your customized strategy for achieving that goal. What's been
missing for you in the past? Most likely the strategy! Not having a well planned
strategy behind every goal is like not having gas in your car. You can sit in
all day long, wishing for it to take you to your destination, but without gas,
it just can't.
This book is available in paperback through
Xlibris, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon.com.
Click here for a free excerpt!
