Weight Loss without Worry

The holidays are upon us and this conjures up many thoughts and beliefs about how we will handle the abundance of food.

No matter where you turn these days you are constantly reminded of the temptations of the season.  But you can move through this holiday season with peace and confidence around food.  This healthy holiday series is a gift to you to help you gain a different perspective on holiday eating.

We start the series today with Part 1: Does It Have To Be This Way?

This recording is 5:35 in length and the transcript of the recording is below.

Enjoy and may this be the happiest of holidays for you!

Dr. Becky

Click on this link to hear the recording happyhealthyholiday1

Transcript of Recording

Hi everyone, this is Dr. Becky Gillaspy and welcome to my Happy HEALTHY Holiday Series.  Today we officially kick off the holiday season and it seems no matter where you turn these days there are reminders of food. 

I have heard it estimated that we see on average 1,500 advertisements for food in the U.S each day and you can only imagine how many times that number is multiplied as we move into the holidays.

It is very easy to get overwhelmed and fall into that holiday trance where you almost mechanically put food in your mouth and mindlessly eat everything that passes in front of you.  And it is also easy to take on that familiar holiday mindset that sounds something like, “I’ll just get through the holiday and worry about weight loss later.”

But let me ask you a question?

Does it have to be that way?

Is it a forgone conclusion that you will gain weight over the next month?

Let me ask you this? Does everyone gain weight during the holidays?  Do some people move through the holidays without gaining weight and without being focused on food?

Certainly, there are many who manage there eating just fine and without stress and worry this time of year and you can to – it is an option open to you…but you have to allow this to be a possibility.

Can you do that?  Can you just entertain the thought that you could calmly pass through the holiday without gaining weight?  Or dare I say, actually lose weight during the month of December? 

Weight gain is not a forgone conclusion for you

Your holiday season can be different this year and it will if you allow it to be.

Would you like to know how to allow this possibility into your life?  Great, because I would like to share it with you; all you have to do is imagine the scene playing out the way you want it to go.

Take a few minutes right now, maybe even close your eyes and see yourself sitting down at your holiday meal, see yourself pulling out your chair and having a seat, and as you notice all the foods and aromas imagine that you feel a calm and tranquil peace inside, see yourself putting appropriate portion on your plate and eating each bite slowly and mindfully, watch yourself as you put your fork down between bites and feel you stomach filling as you eat - and notice yourself stopping when your stomach signals to you that it is pleasantly full, even if that means leaving some food on your plate. 

Now see dessert being served and imagine how you would like to handle it, do you take a small piece and savor it?  Do you only try a bite? Whatever decision you make see yourself being fully at peace about that decision and now carry this image through out the remainder of the day and see yourself enjoying the people and conversations, your mind not even turning to the food because your focus simply isn’t there and as you day ends feel the deep satisfaction that comes from knowing that you made such good choices, feel how good that feels throughout your body.

Allow this ideal story to play through your head like a movie as often as you can and create new stories as new parties and social gatherings draw near.  You might not always follow this ideal image to a tee but what you have done is now given yourself a choice.  You have put yourself in control of your behaviors and you are no longer a victim of the holidays.

I want to thank you for listening and I hope this helps you see that you do have the ability to make this the happiest and healthiest of holidays – I wish you nothing but the best this holiday season, enjoy yourself and make it a memorable one.

So many people in our society struggle with their weight that we can easily start to think that those who live a healthy lifestyle and maintain their ideal weight are simply lucky or have some hidden advantage available only to them. Yet the truth of the matter is that every one of us possess exactly what we need, right now, to lose any extra weight we are carrying around and live a healthy and fulfilling life.

In fact, everything you need to change from unhealthy habits to healthy ones is already inside you. You don’t need a different body, a new job, a better schedule, more money or a personal trainer. All you need to do is tap into this incredible resource by using the most valuable tool you have for losing weight - your brain.

There is so much dieting information and so many tips and recommendation on how to lose weight that we have forgotten how to use our own brain when making eating decisions. By learning how to harness this incredible power you can create a mindset that will release you from the continual cycle of weight loss/weight gain and allow you to lose the weight once and for all.

The thing to remember is that your brain is always active and it is constantly searching for information that is in line with the beliefs you hold on to. In other words, whatever you focus your attention on your brain will attract more of. Therefore, if you are always focused on how hard it is to lose weight or how much you hate dieting then your brain will seek evidence from your day that supports these beliefs. Negative thoughts about losing weight make it nearly impossible to reach your goal.

The good news is that you are not born with your beliefs, they develop as a result of your observations and interpretations of the things going on around you. Since beliefs are learned, they can be unlearned and replaced with new beliefs.

So what do you believe? What thoughts fill your head? How do you really feel about the body you were given? Do you deserve a great-looking body? Do you believe in your ability to lose weight?

If you find you have developed negative thoughts and beliefs about losing weight then you will need to actively reprogram your brain by embedding empowering and supportive thoughts and beliefs.

There are two great ways to do this. The first is visualization. Visualizing is using your imagination to pull you toward your goal. Think of a vision as a mini-movie that you create that shows you what your life will be like when you reach your goal. The vision needs to be vivid so use all of your senses when you create your vision, see the events unfolding, smell the crispness of the air, feel the excitement, hear the sounds surrounding you. It is vitally important to put yourself in this movie as if you are experiencing it in real time.

An example might be, “I am walking barefoot on the beach, I feel the sun warm my shoulders and feel the cool water as I walk along the water’s edge. I look great in my bathing suit and I am so proud of accomplishing my weight loss goal that I could burst with excitement.”

Another way you can train your brain for weight loss success is to use affirmations. These are short distinct statements you say to yourself in order to create new, empowering beliefs. It will take time and repetition to implant these new beliefs in your head but the results will be remarkable.

A few examples might be, “I love the way my body feels when I feed it fruits and vegetables.” “I feel great in my size 8 jeans.” “I lose weight with ease.”
Repeat these statements over and over everyday for a minimum of 3 times each day and never let yourself doubt them. With repetition you will start to see these things become true in your life.

Your brain is the greatest tool you have for reaching your goal. Start working intensely on building positive thoughts and beliefs in your ability to change.

I have been getting questions about how to maintain weight loss lately so I wanted to write a bit about the simple truth of weight loss maintenance.

First of all if you have lost the weight and are ready for maintenance congratulations on reaching your weight loss goal, you have accomplished something that many people desire but few work hard and long enough to realize. This is a time to celebrate, but as you know you must continue to be vigilant to avoid putting the weight back on.

During your dieting phase you most likely developed a structure to your eating. You developed a pattern of eating that worked for you and allowed you to lose weight on a consistent basis. This doesn’t mean it was easy, but it was structured and predictable.

Your maintenance phase must also be structured and designed in such a way that it gives you the guidance needed to manage your weight for the rest of your life. Look at your maintenance phase as an opportunity to solidify the healthy eating habits you have established.

Maintaining your weight loss allows for more flexibility than you had in your dieting phase, you can increase your calorie intake, provided your physical activity level does not change. However, this increase may only be a few hundred calories a day. You will need to test different calorie amounts and monitor your weight on a weekly basis to be sure you are not gaining.

Most people will be able to maintain their weight with an increase of 300 to 600 calories per day. So it is important for you to understand what this calorie increase looks like. If, for instance, you increase your breakfast by a half bowl of cereal (100 calories), add an extra piece of bread to your lunch (100 calories) and have a chocolate chip cookie for dessert after dinner (150 calories) then you have added approximately 350 calories to your day. Adding any more food could result in weight gain.

So you will notice that while no food is “off-limits”, you must continue to exhibit a degree of self-control over your eating.

The longer you maintain your weight loss the less likely you are to regain the weight. Believe you can keep this weight off for the rest of your life and focus on all the wonderful things this weight loss has brought into your life and you will achieve the success you deserve.

Why do you turn to food when you are upset with your spouse, frustrated by bills or anxious about an upcoming event? Food and emotions seem to be two unrelated things but as most people discover food has the ability to calm a bad mood and dampen an unpleasant emotion; it is similar to a drug only it is cheap, readily available and legal and therefore easily abused.

Foods, especially carbohydrates, cause your brain chemistry to change. Food triggers a release of certain neurotransmitters in the brain which ease tension and leave you feeling more peaceful. When you eat you get a temporary reprieve from feeling the uncomfortable feeling.
If you eat ice cream you don’t have to feel as sad about not having a date on Friday night.
If you eat a bag of chips you don’t have to feel as bored.
If you eat the bag of cookies you don’t have to feel so frustrated about the traffic that made you late.

If you have ever used food as a coping mechanism to alleviate an uncomfortable emotion then your brain remembers that it was effective and you will turn to it again unless you have created a plan ahead of time that allows you to handle the emotion without food.

Here are four ways you can put an end to eating for emotional reasons:

1. Override the Emotions

If you have created a big enough goal or motivator for weight loss then you can override your desire to turn to food for comfort. For instance if you have a goal to look good in your swimsuit for your vacation at the beach, you might be able to override your desire to eat pizza on Friday night and have a salad instead. This strategy, when used alone, has two major drawbacks, first it relies on the need for willpower and second once your vacation is over the motivation is gone and you tend to return to your emotional eating habits.

2. Replace Food with a Different Coping Mechanism

This is a strategy that you hear kicked around a lot, find other hobbies or activities that help you deal with your emotion without having the side-effect of weight gain that food has. Common examples are read a book, go for a walk, take a bath and so on. This can be effective but the drawback is that a craving to eat for emotional reasons usually comes on very fast and unless your substitute coping mechanism is immediately available, food can still win out.

3. Shift Your Focus

This is a very effective strategy for dealing with emotional eating and allows you to stop it before it starts. Shifting your focus means that you find a positive desire or thought to focus on that makes you feel good and inspires you to move toward your goal. This can be as simple as creating a wellness vision which is a simple 2 or 3 sentence statement that describes what life will look like, be like, and feel like when you reach your ideal weight. An example would be, “I am walking on the beach with the bright sun warming my shoulders, I feel the water lap at my ankles as I stroll along beside my husband. I feel great in my bathing suit and I am so proud of myself that I could burst with excitement.” The more you focus on this vision the more your desire builds and the more likely you are to make it come true. The slight drawback of this strategy is that you must program the positive vision into your mind, this requires repetition, you must focus on it a minimum of 3 times a day for 30 days before it will begin to run through your head on autopilot and positively influence your actions.

4. Release the Negative Emotions

This strategy leads to life-long results when practiced regularly and can end your need for emotional eating. Negative emotions are not attached to you even though that is how you sometimes describe them, “I’m so angry” “I’m sad”. Since they are not a physical part of you then you can simply release them or let them go. There are many techniques that can be learned that allow you to let go of unhelpful or negative emotions, a short list of effective methods are The Sedona Method, The Work or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). All of these can be found on the web. The slight drawback to these techniques is that you must learn them and discipline yourself to use them regularly. This, however, is a small price to pay to rid your life of the discomfort and pain of emotional eating and the unwanted weight gain that comes from it.

You can put an end to emotional eating but you must be willing to learn and apply these strategies. Set aside time right now to develop your plan of action, the short time you invest today will pay you dividends for the rest of your life.  I invite you to share your comments about this article or any of these strategies you currently use in your life.

It would be hard to find a dieter who hasn’t felt that pang of guilt after overindulging on something that was not on their diet but guilt is not a dieter’s friend; in fact it often leads to even more eating because you feel so bad about your lack of discipline. So how do you break the destructive cycle of overeat / guilt /overeat? By simply reframing how you look at this problem you can throw guilt out the window and avoid this cycle all together.

First it is good to establish that it is never appropriate to feel guilty about wanting to eat. Food is necessary for your survival and your body knows it, so your body always wants you to eat to assure your survival. It doesn’t care if you are carrying an extra 10, 40 or 100 pounds on your frame; it wants you to get some energizing food today. And, to ensure you do eat it releases hormones and chemicals inside you that make you want food. Therefore you should never feel guilty for wanting to eat, it is natural, and equally as important you should never be mad at your body for feeling hungry, it is just trying to help you survive.

Emotional eating has taken a lot of blame for the skyrocketing obesity epidemic, and rightfully so, but you shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting to eat in reaction to an unpleasant emotion. Why? Because food does sedate your emotions, millions of people use food to dampen stress, anxiety and worry because it works. I am not saying it is a good solution, but it does produce temporary relief. Therefore, it is not appropriate to feel guilty about wanting to use food for emotional reasons.

Another reason you should not feel guilty about wanting to overeat is because most of you reading this live in an area where food is abundant, convenient and cheap. You are constantly reminded of food throughout your day. Food surrounds you so it makes sense that food would be on your mind often; you shouldn’t feel guilty for thinking about food or even entertaining the thought of overeating.

With all of these factors surrounding you it is not unheard of for you to give in from time to time and overeat, your diet can certainly overcome these occasions but if you add guilt to the mix your diet may not survive. You will have moments during a diet when you don’t eat as planned, accept these times and drop the guilt and in turn you will break the overeat / guilt / overeat cycle.

Understand that it is only human to enjoy a treat now and then and it is equally human to have an occasional slip when you are dieting. Accept and expect these times and not only will you find getting back on track a lot easier but you will also multiply your chances of success.

By the time we are 8 years old we have heard “No, you can’t” fifty thousand times. Contrast that with the fact that by the same age we have only heard “Yes, you can” eight thousand times and it becomes easy to see why we feel inclined toward negative thought.

To your brain a thought is a thing and the more often a thought is entertained the stronger your brain connects that thought to your reality, Therefore, if you continually entertain negative thoughts about dieting and controlling your weight then you are creating a pattern of thought that will make losing weight very difficult.

When this negative pattern of thought has been processed by your brain often enough it moves from being a conscious thought pattern to a subconscious thought loop. And the reason this is significant is because 96% of your habits and behaviors are driven by your subconscious mind. In other words the subconscious thoughts that you have programmed yourself to belief are directly influencing the actions you take on a daily basis, even if those actions are leading to unwanted results such as keeping you fat.

If you take a look at traditional weight loss efforts you will notice that they focus mainly on diet and exercise strategies, these are obviously important and necessary components of weight loss but if the whole time you are dieting you are entertaining negative thoughts such as, “I hate diet foods.” or “I can’t wait till this diet is over.” then how much long term success do you expect? I am not saying that in order for you to be successful at weight loss that you have to love “diet” foods or tell yourself happy thoughts about the dieting process. But what you must do is shift your focus away from what you don’t like about losing weight to what you do like.

Successful weight loss requires that you develop a mindset that supports your diet and exercise strategies. Fortunately your weight mindset is a choice, you can choose to focus on what you hate about losing weight or choose to focus on all the benefits you will get from reaching your goal. The choice is yours.

You can make this shift easier if you take a few moments to become very clear on what you would like to achieve. I call this creating a wellness vision. It is simple 2 or 3 sentence statement that describes what life will be like, look like and feel like once you reach your weight loss goal. This vision should be very vivid and produce a positive emotion every time you read it. Your job then becomes to focus on this wellness vision often enough that it becomes your new pattern of thought.

Losing weight is not about just eating different foods and moving your body differently, it is about changing the negative patterns of thought that keep you locked in your destructive habits. Make the choice to create positive associations to weight loss by creating a wellness vision and focus your thoughts on it several times a day. With time and repetition you will create a subconscious thought loop that supports your efforts and finally lose that stubborn weight that in the past had been so difficult to shed.

If 95% of dieters return to their old habits and regain the weight they lost, maybe it is time for some new thoughts on weight loss.

Too often you find yourself “going through the motions” of weight loss: you eat less, choose better foods and exercise more. You do all the things you are “supposed” to do yet the results are minimal and require a lot of willpower. The reason this happens is because, like most dieters, you are missing a key weight loss step; sure you eat differently and move differently but do you think differently?

Your thoughts and beliefs directly influence your habits and behaviors. If you go on a 6 week diet with the goal of losing 12 pounds and you eat less and increase your amount of exercise for those 6 weeks yet every day you tell yourself how much you hate eating healthy foods and exercising, how long do you expect those 12 pounds to stay off? The truth is as soon as those 6 weeks are over you will jump back into your old habits and all the weight will return.

The 5% of dieters who keep the weight off after they lose it understand that they must change their mindset about eating and exercising if they want their progress to last.

Achievers of long-term weight loss have learned how to tell themselves a new story. Their new story is all about how they can lose weight and keep it off. They have a vivid vision of how great life will be 1, 5 even 10 years from now because of their new healthy lifestyle.

Achievers have no magic beans; they simply have developed a new empowering weight mindset and a clear picture of what they want. This skill is available to everyone. Simply sit down and create a vision of what life will be like, look like, feel like, sound like and even smell like when you are at your ideal weight. Then play this image through your head every day; allow this to be what you daydream about and never let yourself doubt that it can be your reality. This simple yet powerful exercise breaks up the patterns of thought and behavior that keep returning you to your old habits. You will create new habits and behaviors and after a few months you will start to see how this daydream can become a truth in your life and your actions will begin to support your vision.

You can lose weight and keep it off for a life-time by following the blueprint other weight loss achievers have followed: eat right, exercise and create a positive weight mindset.