HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS

Why Do You Want to Lose Weight?

You may have many reasons for wanting to lose weight.

• To be healthier
• To have more energy
• To look better
• To deal with a health challenge/issue (i.e. blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol)
• To feel better, both physically and emotionally
• They’re going to be in an upcoming wedding
• They want to be more active
• To look better in a bathing suit on their next tropical vacation
• To attract a mate

There are no wrong reasons for wanting to lose weight (unless course you have an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia)

What Do You Wish To Change By Losing Weight?
This is an important question because it will definitely affect how you approach the strategies to change your lifestyle behaviors. For example if your goal is simply to weigh less, then the type of exercise regimen you incorporate into your life may be different than if you want to work on toning your legs or tightening your buttocks, etc. Your list of what you want to change by losing weight is similar but may differ from the list above.

What Do You Think About Being Overweight?
Do you think the reason you’re overweight is because of some family trait or inherited genetic cause? Obesity increased 61% between 1990 and 2006 – could that possibly be genetic? Absolutely not! So step one is to let go of any misperceptions you may have about the reasons why you’re overweight.

Step two: Can you identify any of your lifestyle behaviors that have been the cause of you being overweight? It’s okay if you can’t – you’re not alone. It’s okay if that question makes you upset – we’re going to break down that thinking process right now.

Most people can identify general concepts or have some ideas as to why they’re overweight but have never been shown: 1) how they think about their lifestyle behaviors; 2) how to implement or structure the specific action steps into their lives – the prioritizing and sequencing of successful strategies. I’ll help you figure that out right away. To start, ask yourself some important questions:

What Behavior Is Keeping You From Achieving Your Desired Outcome?
You may not know the answer to this yet; or, you might know but, 1) you haven’t been shown the correct implementation strategies to make those necessary changes; or, 2) you are in denial about your lifestyle choices.

• For example, eating breakfast is one of the keys to losing weight; are you skipping breakfast because you’re always in a rush to get the door in the morning?
• Maybe you do eat breakfast but it consists of a bagel, cereal, toast, or a diet soda or some other non-nutritious processed food that is triggering abnormal blood sugar imbalances which sabotage your both your metabolism and your hunger mechanisms to begin each day.
• Or do you skip breakfast simply because you’re not hungry in the morning and you’ve never been a ‘breakfast person’? For all of you ‘non-breakfast’ types, there are some great suggestions in Healthy Start Breakfast, the Free Special Report you can download instantly (see column to the right).

What new healthy habit(s) would lead directly to what you want? What bad habits do I need to stop? 

• How many meals do you prepare at home each week? It’s unrealistic to think that you can eat out for 5-10 meals (or more) each weekend eat nutritiously. Planning meals, recipes, shopping lists and then doing the shopping once or twice each week must become your regular routine if you expect to successfully lose and manage your weight.
• Do you prepare, pack and take healthy snacks with you to work or school? [TIP: Keep snacks in your car and at your desk at work.]
• How many times per week do you eat fast food? [Right Answer: None - think of it as 'die-fast' food]
• How many times per week do you eat fried food? [This includes chips of any kind . Right Answer: None - think of all fried foods as 'sick and sad' food]
• How many times per week do you drink soda pop? [You may that drinking diet soda is okay - you're terribly wrong . Soda pop is one of five things that I never put in my body - ever!]
• How many times per week to you exercise to the point of breathing hard and perspiring? The scientific evidence is irrefutable – we must exercise to the point of panting and sweating every day to be healthy.

What Will It Cost You To Change? What Fears Do You Have About Losing Weight?What Do You Risk Losing?

Are you afraid that in order for you to lose weight you’ll have to give up things that you enjoy which will lessen the quality of life for you? Do you believe that by giving up certain behaviors or choices you’ll be sacrificing too much pleasure your life? Do you think that making lifestyle changes will be too hard? 

Food is without a doubt one of life’s great pleasures – no one will dispute that. We socialize around meals. Eating is one of the highlights while travelling. The taste sensations involving food is a wonderful thing. The problem is if you are now conditioned to only enjoy the taste of processed foods instead of fresh whole foods. This discussion isn’t about depriving yourself. However, if you are deriving pleasure out of eating junk food – food that is making you unhealthy – it’s time to come to terms with that behavior pattern by asking yourself the following questions:

•   What am I gaining by continuing this behavior or belief? 

•   What value am I assigning to my current behavior? 

•   If I do not change, who stands to lose? 

•   How does my current behavior affect others? 

•   What has kept me from making this change? 

•   In past efforts, where did I get ‘off track’?

 •   If I am successful, who else stands to gain?

  
Your answers to these questions may be more important than you realize.

• For example, there are women who have been sexually assaulted who fear that by losing weight it will make them attractive to the point of inviting another assault. Therefore, their fear of assault is greater than their desire to lose weight – clearly an obstacle to achieving their desired outcome of losing weight. [This is not meant to minimize the very real fear a woman may have of being attacked again.]
  
• There are others who simply do not understand the impact their declining health will have on those around them. Recently the 37 year old mother of a girl on our daughter’s cheer squad died six weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. She was obese and fed her children a steady diet of processed foods. Had she known that her lifestyle choices during the previous five to ten years could have an impact as dramatic as leaving her children motherless at ages 8 and 14, in all likelihood she would have been motivated to take better care of herself.
  

Move Toward Being Healthy By First Adding Healthy Lifestyle Habits

This is where the rubber meets the road – your lifestyle must change. However, instead of trying to eliminate all of your bad (think negative or destructive) lifestyle habits, it’s best to begin by adding positive things first. When making any lifestyle change, whether getting started on a new dietary regimen or a new exercise program, it’s always better to start by adding good or positive things first and discontinuing or removing bad habits later. By taking the ‘add positive first’ approach, there isn’t the psychological aspect of self-deprivation slowing you down. Humans are naturally drawn toward adding things and are very reluctant to deprive themselves of things they enjoy.

For example, if your goal is to get in shape, then going to the gym (ok, you have to join the gym first) on your way home from work, or going for a walk early in the morning or before or after dinner is better than beating yourself up by saying, ‘I’m so fat and I’ve got to stop sitting on the couch watching TV so much’. If you start going to the gym, by default you will sit around watching TV less when you fill that time instead with positive actions and activities.

When it comes to making dietary changes, adding positive is just as important, and for the same reasons. Rather than beginning a new nutritional regimen by trying to stop eating all the bad foods you enjoy and feeling deprived of your morning soda or candy snack (that you may be literally addicted to), it’s better to start by adding a good breakfast, eating large salads at lunch and dinner, and bringing fresh fruit and raw nuts as snacks; you will find that your cravings for the bad junk foods (think of them as “disease foods” or “die-fast foods”) decreasing. Let’s start with the concept of whole foods.

Why Whole Foods?
Our first priority, the one thing our bodies crave and require, is whole, fresh foods. Whole foods are nutritious and health-promoting – everything else is not. It’s really that straight forward. Anything else is either denial, rationalizing, and outright not true.

Whole foods are what we are genetically designed to eat – meaning what’s found in nature, not what is created in laboratories or mass food-producing factories. Fresh whole foods are what will create health for you, enable you to lose weight, have energy, sleep better … the list goes on and on. Today so many of our supermarket and convenience foods are simply a concoction of stripped down ‘food’ devoid of nutrients combined with man-made chemicals and manufacturing processes that have no resemblance to what one would find out in nature, to what we are genetically designed to eat. For now, let’s concentrate on whole foods. What does that mean – whole foods?

A loose definition of whole foods is that the food is eaten in the form as close to the way it’s found in nature as possible, with minimal to no processing. There are obvious variances and limitations to these criteria depending on the food. For example, foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds can and should be eaten in their raw state, which provides the highest level of nutrients (i.e. fiber, phytonutrients, antioxidants, enzymes, water, etc.). When those foods are canned, baked, fried, salted, etc. and/or prepared with other processed foods (e.g. an apple that is made into a ‘turnover’ made with white flour, hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup) they are moving away from the way it is found in nature and in the process, losing the majority if not all of its nutritive value and now has disease-promoting additive chemicals. For example, in the apple turnover, the once naturally found food, the healthy apple, has now crossed the line from being simply non-nutritious to actually becoming a disease-producing food (the white flour and high fructose corn syrup are major contributors to the development of diabetes; the hydrogenated oil is a known causal agent for heart disease and cancer).

On the contrary, other foods such as olive oil, almond milk, and whole grains are eaten after a some degree of processing – if you were to eat an olive straight off an olive tree, you would quickly regret it – you won’t get the taste out of your mouth for days. Then there are differing degrees to that processing. For example, a cold-pressed virgin (first press) olive oil is a much better food than heat-processed oil; fresh made almond milk versus store bought almond milk differs greatly in their ingredients and nutritional make up.

For more complete information on healthy weight loss, download the Healthy Weight Loss – 10 Keys to Success, a 30 page Free Special Report detailing evidence-based lifestyle implementation strategies (see column to the right).

You can do it!