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How About a Cup of Instant Weight Loss?

If you are a coffee lover like me, then you will find instant coffee unpalatable. It’s not a patch on the real thing. It’s just the same with weight loss. When I get a cup of good coffee I like to drink it slowly and savour every mouthful. That way the pleasure stays with me long after the coffee is finished. So much so that one really good cup of coffee a day is more than enough to satisfy me. Any more than that and it just becomes normal and all the pleasure is lost.

Now the speed of weight loss is a big issue and one of the reasons why many people make the wrong choices.

I mean, when summer is approaching, or that special event like a wedding, and you really need to look good it’s no use talking about taking one or two years to lose that excess weight permanently. You want it gone and you want it gone now.

But we live in a society of instant gratification. If you have a weight problem then your kitchen is likely filled with instant snacks where all you have to do is open the packet and your need is satisfied. Entertainment is available at the touch of a button in most living rooms – whether that be tv music magazine, internet, or book.

Walk down any high street and you won’t go far before you are tempted by the aroma of that fresh coffee I mentioned earlier. Delicious coffee that you can be enjoying in moments – along with the sugar, the cream and maybe even a cake. Hungry? Then nip into a fast food outlet and again within moments you are sitting down and satisfying that desire.

No waiting. No delay. Instant.

The weight is piled on like this so why shouldn’t it come off the same way?

Well it can.

At the end of the day if you don’t eat you’ll lose weight. The bigger the difference between the calories you eat and the calories you use in exercise the faster the weight loss. Live on nothing but water for a week and you’ll lose a bit of weight (I’m not recommending this, by the way). Unfortunately those who are overweight tend to be those who don’t exercise much. The greater the excess weight the fewer calories burned through exercise so that’s a bit of a vicious circle. The one thing you need to do – exercise – that would allow you to eat more without adding weight, is the one thing you don’t want to do.

But excess weight is a bit like smoking. Smokers think that this cigarette (the one they are about to light up) won’t kill me and so they smoke that one. They think that with every cigarette, until one day they are lying in hospital with a smoking related disease wondering how they could have been so stupid. Eating is just the same. This little cream cake won’t make much difference. I’ll make up for it tomorrow. These three spoons of sugar won’t matter. I’ll have less tomorrow. But it all adds up. At the end of each day you are either heavier because you ate more fuel than you used; or you are lighter because you used more fuel than you ate.

Of course food isn’t just fuel. It’s pleasure too… and distraction… and emotional support… and a love substitute… and a boredom buster… and social oil… and that’s why it’s such a problem. And there are so many lies about food – like you are somehow a bad person if you don’t clean your plate. Waste is evil and so are you. Better to be fat than waste food. We use food to make ourselves feel good. It doesn’t work because the ill-feeling is born from beliefs about self and no amount of eating has any impact on your thinking style. It takes a different approach to make the change where it needs to be made. If you want to find out more about this check out my weight loss video.

So we are conflicted. Eating just the right amount of fuel for the energy we use up in a day feels like we are being denied something we deserve. And when we are denied something we want it all the more and this is the vicious circle that makes rapid weight loss so difficult to do, and if you are one of the few who succeed in rapidly arriving at your ideal weight – you will not maintain it. Rapid weight loss – because of what it does to the body, is almost impossible to maintain without engaging in a lifetime of struggle with food and who wants that.

If you want to find out more about what rapid weight loss does to your body and why it is so difficult to maintain that lost weight then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily – and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

Don’t forget to leave a comment and share this with your friends.

Michael

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Now in paperback on this side of the Atlantic

Great news… I’m now able to make How to Lose Weight Easily – and Free Yourself from Diets Forever available in a paperback edition on Amazon’s European sites.

So now you can take advantage of Amazon’s free delivery to get hold of a physical copy at an almost give-away price. This book is choc full of useful hints and tips about how to lose weight easily without having to endure diets and all the suffering and struggle they entail.

So why not end the suffering and find out not only how you can do it differently, but also why it works, and be the shape and size you know you are on the inside.

So just click on the image below and check it out.

Michael

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The Truth About Weight Loss and How to Succeed Anyway

It Has to be More Complicated than This!

With a goal in mind, there are only ever two choices – something that works, or something that doesn’t. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Obviously you are going to choose what works, aren’t you? Yet what a lot of people don’t know is that when it comes to losing weight, what they choose, what they think is going to work – actually won’t. What most people actually choose is to inflict upon themselves months of suffering, agonising, disappointment, and, eventually, failure.

This failure then has the knock on effect of lowering self-esteem, which triggers emotional eating and further weight gain.

Here are your real choices:
The Old Way: find a diet; join a weight club; weekly weighing and hoping; thinking about food all the time; constant battle with temptation; frequent failures; leading to feelings of guilt; then trying even harder; and 12 months later repeating the whole cycle.

Or,
The New Way: no diets; no public weighing; eat what you want; eat when you want; no rules, so no failure; no failure so no guilt; lose fat rather than muscle (muscle is what you lose when you go on a diet); enjoy, possibly for the first time, a healthy relationship with food; and eat less because you want to eat less – not because you have to eat less.

It Can’t be this Easy

Now I know the New Way seems too easy. There’s no suffering, no struggle, and no pain.

I know you like all that fighting against your desires and then giving in and feeling bad and deciding, since you’ve already fallen off the wagon today, you might as well just binge for the rest of the evening and start all over again tomorrow. If you didn’t like it, you simply wouldn’t keep on doing it, would you?

If that’s you then you might not like the new way because there’s no way to fail, and so no way to break any rules, and so no excuse, ever, for bingeing. You get to eat what you want when you want, and you’ll find, most of the time, because there’s nothing to push against, you just eat what you need when you need it; and eat what you enjoy when you fancy it.

The Old Way is a myth. It ignores how body & mind interact. It consistently fails to sustain weight loss, while teaching you to ignore important sensations like hunger which are actually the key to escaping from this nightmarish merry-go-round. But the biggest problem of all is that the Old Way focuses on food.

The New Way is kinder, easier and works long term because it works with your body and not against it.

Do What You Do, Don’t Do What You Don’t Do

Once you throw off the shackles of the Old and embrace the New you will realise that it isn’t about being Good or being Bad. You aren’t bad when you overeat and you aren’t good when you follow your diet, or eat healthily. You are just doing what you do when you do it.

And there’s no way round that.

You are always just doing what you do when you are doing it and so it’s totally pointless beating yourself up. Just think about that for a moment. How can you ever be doing what you are not doing. If you find that you don’t like what you are doing when you are doing it, then just stop – even if that’s mid-mouthful, or part way through a big bite. Just stop as soon as you realise you don’t like what you are actually doing, because each moment of awareness is a choice point where you can continue to do what you are doing, or just stop. There is no rule that says just because you’ve started you have to finish.

Choice Points

Each moment is a choice point when you can free yourself from the chains that bind you to your excess weight.

But if you choose to carry on with whatever you are doing – even if what you are doing is over-eating – then carry on with a light heart and enjoy every mouthful.

With the New Way you can forget about: diets; calories/Syns/Points; eating what you don’t like; the struggle; social isolation because eating out with friends just reminds you of all the good stuff you can’t have; and thinking about food all the time.

Life is here to enjoy, not to fight against. The same is true of your body. It’s here to enjoy, not to fight. It’s your personal transport system that takes you everywhere you want to go and lets you enjoy all of those places you visit and all of the experiences you encounter.

So doesn’t it make at least a little sense to take care of it?

Focus on Enjoyment & Pleasure

When you focus more on enjoying your life, you’ll find that your subconscious mind starts to work with you, because your subconscious draws to you more of what you think about. If you think about being fat, or overweight, or obese, your subconscious figures that’s what you want more of and it helps you to get it with cravings and urges and guilt and a whole load of other emotional baggage that drives you towards the cookie jar.

When you push against something it pushes back. As soon as you finish reading this go to the nearest wall and push against it with all of your strength. It might not seem like it but that wall is pushing back with exactly the same force that you are using against it. If it didn’t it would fall over.

So when you push against your fat, it pushes back, just like the wall. And just like the wall it stays just where it is.

What you resist persists.

Whatever you push against just pushes right back at you. That’s what causes it to remain in your life.

Do What Works, not What Doesn’t

The New Way is based around how your bodymind works. Its focus is on what you want to have not what you want to get rid of. When you focus on slimness, when you picture yourself doing all the wonderful thinks the slimmer you will be able to enjoy so much more, your subconscious says “aha! This must be what she wants, better get to work on reducing urges to eat; increasing motivation towards enjoyment of exercise; feeling full sooner, increased enjoyment & pleasure with healthy eating, and more and more dissatisfaction with sweet, sticky, over-fatty foods”

The New Way shows you how to eat less and still feel completely satisfied by maximising the pleasure you get from eating. This is about discovering how easy it is to develop a healthy relationship with food that allows you to enjoy what you want, while reducing your weight naturally and easily.

More on How to Succeed with the New Way

If you would like to find out why the Old Way is a myth; if you want to know why you have been lied to; if you would like to discover the truth about metabolism and how you can make it work for you; then check out how to lose weight without dieting, for a free video. Or if you prefer a good read then have a look at my book that not only explains all of this in much greater detail, but also shows you how you can win at the Weight Loss Game How to Lose Weight Easily – and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

If you’ve found this interesting, then your friends probably will too. Be sure to let them know by leaving a comment below. Any questions for me can also be posted below.

Michael

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Two Approaches to Weight Loss – Which One do You Use?

There are two approaches to weight loss. The way that works, and the way that doesn’t. The vast majority of people use the way that doesn’t work. After all if what you did worked you’d only ever have to lose weight once. The vast majority of people who ‘battle’ with their weight are on a treadmill they can’t find the way off. The new diet,or maybe the old diet, is ‘tried again’ ever year, with the same results. Short term weight loss and a feelings of longing for what you are being denied. Longings that get so strong because of the implied injustice of being unable to eat what everyone else is eating – so strong that you eventually give in. Then comes the guilt and more eating to drive away the guilt feelings.

To put it simply – you deserve better than this.

If you want to get of the treadmill the video below is your first step. The rest is just as easy.

Hope you enjoy it.




The next video in the series is here How to Lose Weight Easily”

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Calories are not Created Equal

Got a news update from WDDTY, earlier today (which I’ll get on to shortly) that intrigued me because it suggested evidence for what I’ve suspected for a very long time – that it’s what you eat that matters, not how much of it. But as I was tracking down more details I came across something quite amazing – there is a place (I’m tempted to call it a restaurant, but I think that might be a little extravagant) in Las Vegas called the Heart Attack Grill. Now I know this shouldn’t surprise me, but I’m English, so it does.

I know it’s fun, but obesity is also Life & Death and this place seems to be taking over-eating to ridiculous heights. Mind you there are two hospitals just a short distance away!

If you weigh over 350lbs you get to eat free here.

They sell a 2lb, 8000 calorie Quadruple byPass Burger (4 burgers & Cheese on a bun with an optional extra 20 slices of bacon).


The 8,000 Calorie Quadruple byPass Burger

Their menu makes a sales point of the fact that the ‘flatliner fries’ are ‘deep fried in Pure Lard’ and their commercial tells you the side affects from eating there. These ‘may include sudden weight gain, repeated increase of wardrobe size, back pain, male breast growth, loss of sexual partners, lung cancer, tooth decay and liver sclerosis stroke. In some cases mild death may occur.’

But what got this place into the news was that a man had a heart attack while eating a 6000 calorie Triple byPass Burger. Mind you it got them a ton of free publicity and that’s never bad for business.

Anyway, that was a little digression – back to the calories that are different sizes.

What I started exploring was the research into the obesity states of Americanised Mexicans. It seems that the University of South Carolina has been looking at Mexicans in America. Apparently first generation Mexicans living in the US tend to stick to their traditional diet which consists of corn, beans, pork, fish, and a variety of fruits & vegetables such as pineapple, papaya, squash and avocado. Their children, however, consume diets high in saturated fats and sodium as well as large quantities of sweetened beverages.

It seems that second generation Mexican-Americans are two and a half times more likely to become obese than first generation Mexican-American relatives. There is no suggestion that more food is being consumed – just that what the diet consists of is fat and salt loaded fast food, rather than fresh meat, fruit and vegetables.

I can certainly confirm from my own experiences of losing weight that I don’t really eat less. I just eat different and the weight slowly and steadily drops away for as long as I maintain a healthy diet. So if you are struggling to lose weight, try making some changes in the quality of what you eat and forget about the quantities.

If you found this interesting then please comment below.

Michael

Ref: http://jn.nutrition.org/content/142/2/298

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How Failing to Keep Weight Off Makes You a Weight-Loss Expert

I was checking out how my book was doing on Amazon the other day. While I was there I had a browse through the competition. There’s a lot of junk out there – and there’s a lot of good stuff too. The cover of one book caught my eye – the pose of the author on the cover seemed a little contrived. I do a little photography when I’m not writing or hypnotising people, so I’m always looking for ideas about what looks good and what doesn’t. This particular pose looked like it might have been designed to make the author look slimmer than she actually was. I don’t want to mention the author’s name or the book title, because I’m not attacking either of them. It’s just that this caught my eye. I’m guessing the author is some sort of celebrity, because despite her attractiveness, she doesn’t have model looks – and you only get on the cover as a model or author.

I had to put a picture of a sexy model on the cover of my book because no one knows me.

Anyway, I’ve got a bit of a thing about celebrity weight-loss ‘experts’. They really do irritate me. Just because you lose a few pounds doesn’t make you an expert. But I guess having your picture on a book cover keeps you in the public eye and even if you are spouting weight loss nonsense, you are quite likely to end up with a popular book on your hands.

So, dodgy pose, ‘celebrity’ diet book, and Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ around the picture. I couldn’t resist.

By the way, the author’s claim to her right to write a book about losing weight – “But I AM an expert dieter” (her capitals).

You only become an ‘expert dieter’ by trying lots of different diets. You only need to try lots of different diets if you keep putting the weight back on. By claiming to be an expert dieter what you are really saying is I haven’t found a way to keep the weight off, but every time I get fat I’m a dab hand at getting rid of it quickly.

Even that didn’t trouble me too much.

But then I got to chapter one.

Chapter one is called The Rules. This interested me, because I hate rules, so I just had to scroll down to find out what The Rules are. After all my weight loss book is all about how to lose weight without any rules.

The author’s Rules are:
1. No Wheat
2. No Dairy
3. No Sugar
4. No Carbs (after 6pm)
5. No Alcohol
(6) If you can’t manage this for just 14 days then you’re NOT ready to diet.

The aim of this ‘diet’ is to drop a dress size in two weeks.

Rule number 6 is just patronising twaddle.

I was half-expecting Rule 7 to say No Food.

I must admit that I smiled when I read it. And not because it isn’t good advice for a healthy diet (except it doesn’t mention fat and there’s lots of non-dairy fat in what most overweight people eat).

I’m not saying it won’t work, either.

If you starve yourself you will undoubtedly lose weight. Nor is this personal. This book is beautifully and sensitively written, it’s well laid out with loads of high quality colour pictures. The reviews imply it’s full of tasty recipes too and I guess you’d need that when you follow the Rules.

In a contest of visual appeal it beats my weight loss book hands down.

But the problem with advice like this is that it doesn’t deal with the psychological aspects of over-eating. For someone who, on a daily basis, consumes far more calories than their body needs, this diet would be a huge shock to the system. A huge shock because that list covers most of what is being consumed.

Its selling point is that you only need to do this for a fortnight. The trouble is that fortnight will, most likely, be spent craving the end of the two weeks when you can return to eating all of that unhealthy stuff. Because that’s what a deadline implies – a return to normal eating. And that’s another one of the big reasons that diets don’t work.

Diets are not designed for forever.

Diets are designed to get the weight off fast and screw you and what it does to your body.

I can’t say it any more gently – this is really bad advice.

What works is small changes that are sustainable.

What works is getting back in touch with your body and listening to its needs.

What works is realising that food does not cure emotional problems. All it does is distract you while you eat it and distract you when you feel bloated afterwards and you are beating yourself up (again) for giving in to temptation.

What works is coming at this whole weight problem from a different direction.

The real problem is that we’ve been trained to focus on calories and to treat our bodies like a machine. Like if, every day, you filled your car’s petrol tank to the brim. Then every evening whatever fuel was left congealed and was pumped into all the hollow spaces in the car to make space for the next day’s fill-up. If you are someone who empties the tank every day, no problem. But if you only drive to the shops and back your bodywork is soon going to be bulging as that excess fuel is pumped into the hollow doors and anywhere else there’s space.

So we are told in order to reduce the bulging we need to either put less fuel in the tank, or use the car more.

And the interesting thing is that if you cut down enough you do lose weight. Eat less, weigh less. It seems to work so everyone says here’s how to eat less and you will lose weight. And that’s exactly what this book is saying with all its attractive and tasty recipes.

But it’s still missing the point.

All of these calorie reduction systems work from the outside in. They externalise the problem. They turn food into the bad guy – the enemy. When you have an enemy who is threatening your well-being you think about him all the time. This causes stress and anxiety. Stress and anxiety cause the body to want to consume calories.

The problem needs to be solved on the inside.

Yes, eating less is required.

Yes exercising more is required.

But you can make it so easy by looking into the drives to eat and recognising that an awful lot of it is just habit. An awful lot of it is the mistaken belief that food magically changes your unpleasant emotional experiences.

Food is never more than a temporary distraction from the pain of life. There are much better ways of dealing with emotional problems than eating.

When you make food your enemy, you have to keep thinking about it. People who are at their ideal body weight are not people who think constantly about food.

When you make your body your enemy you have to eat in order to maintain your hatred of the way it is. Love and appreciate your body just the way it is. After all it’s where you live. From this place of appreciation of the things you do like about yourself you will find that you can cut down on calories naturally and gently and lose weight the same way.

If you enjoyed this article or have any questions about weight loss then please comment below.

Michael

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weight control

Lose Weight Respectfully – and Regain Control of Your Life

It’s all over now, so roll out the diet plans. I hope you enjoyed your mid-winter festival of feasting and gift giving. Whatever reason you have for doing it, its origins lie in the celebration of the return of light, lengthening days, and a new season of growth, fresh food, and a new harvest. But, whatever its causes, I’ve already noticed on the social media the comments beginning about losing weight and dieting. It’s almost as if people want to punish themselves for having fun and enjoyment. ‘I’ve over-indulged, so now I have to pay for it by going on a diet’ – seems to be the rationale behind this.

But New Year is traditionally a time of renewal and a time for recognising that life isn’t quite working out the way you planned and it’s time to do something about it. Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions rarely make it to February – so why bother?

We bother because we want to feel like we are taking control of our lives. We bother because we hate feeling helpless and in the power of others. In the current climate, with this financial meltdown and Governments making ridiculous decision after ridiculous decision just to desperately maintain the status quo of the power brokers – we feel more powerless than ever, so we look round at this time for pretty much the only thing we still appear to have control over – our bodies. And then we take all our frustrations out on them.

A diet is a horrible thing to do to a body. There is no need to suffer because you had fun over the holiday. Yes you are carrying too much weight – so what. Yes you probably did add several pounds in the space of a week – so what. You were probably already overweight. The problem is not what you did over the Holiday, it’s what you’ve been doing for the past decade or two. So given that this is not a new problem that suddenly needs fixing, allow yourself a little time to solve it.

The minute you give yourself a little time to solve your weight problem, you can be gentle and loving with your body and allow the weight to disappear gently and slowly. You do this not by starving yourself, but by being gentle with you and exploring the small changes you can make that are sustainable.

Did you know that 20% of dieters barely last two months and about half never make it to the end of the year. Almost all of them end up heavier than they were before they started the diet. There’s loads more information about why diets are seriously bad for your health, and how you can lose weight permanently by following just 10 simple steps in my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever – available from Amazon.

So before you go rushing out to look for the latest fad diet, or hand over your sign-up fee to Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slimming World or any other weight loss organisation,check out my book – it’ll cost you a lot less than one week’s attendance fee and has the power to free you from diets… …forever.

You see, when you lose weight with respect for your body (which is what my book teaches you how to do), that respect overflows into other areas of your life. When you are gentler with you, you are effortlessly gentler with everyone else. Because you are gentler with everyone else, people treat you with greater kindness and appreciation. In other words, the World feeds back to you how you are with you. So by making a simple choice to lose weight naturally you regain that control you felt you had lost and as you regain control over your body shape you will find, almost magically, that you will begin to experience much greater control in other areas of your life too. Things will start to work for you, and you will begin to experience a greater happiness than you have known in a long time. You cannot be happy when you are fighting your body, any more than you can be happy when you are fighting unruly, misbehaving children.

So check out my book about diet-free weight loss and discover that new you that you were looking for.

Whatever you decide – I wish you luck, and the body you desire.

Michael

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health self-help weight control

Radio Interview

I had a phone call the other evening from Sue, a DJ at Halton FM radio, wanting to know if I’d be ok doing an interview over the phone to promote How to Lose Weight Easily. The interview was set for an hour later so I’d have time to prepare.

That’s what gave me pause for thought. I’m more of a spontaneous person. I don’t enjoy preparation I like being asked questions, having a moment or two to think and then responding. I realise that a moment or two to think doesn’t really work very well on the radio because it comes across as silence. Still, the last time I visited Sue at the studio, when I was helping my friend Janette Fleming to promote our Paranormal Week event at the local library, the spontaneous thing worked quite well until we had a phone in question about UFOs, when I gave an answer that wasn’t really what the questioner wanted to hear – largely because I’m not a real believer in an alien presence in the sky. But I quite like that thinking on my feet, and it’s so much easier than doing homework when you have someone like Sue asking intelligent and thoughtful questions.

But this time I wanted to promote my book How to Lose Weight Easily and that left me with a problem.

You see I put all the good stuff in the book and I didn’t really know how to generate interest without sharing all of the content. I only had about a ten minute slot, so I opened up the Word file and looked at my chapter headings and made some notes and tried to get a sense of what the book was about. Now the book is about weight loss – I know that much. But there are a gazillion other books out there about weight loss so what makes this one special?

I looked and wondered and came to the conclusion my book had three main points of focus that might interest the listener. The first is how we get into this state of overweightness in the first place. That’s largely down to the training we received as youngsters that helped us to develop not only an unhealthy relationship with food, but also mistaken beliefs about the power that food has to make us feel better.

Next was the massive revenues of the weight loss industry and the misinformation they provide. I only found out about this after publication, but it reinforces the message in the book that the weight loss industry is not to be trusted. I read a story about Jessica Simpson being paid $3,000,000 to promote Weight Watchers. So prospective customers see a high profile celebrity being highly successful at losing weight because they follow the Weight Watching rules. What the article then went on to mention was what the customers don’t see. They don’t see the personal trainers, or the dieticians, or the rest of the staff provided to the celebrity totally free of charge because failure is not an option. I mean if someone was paying you $3,000,000 wouldn’t you succeed at whatever amount of weight you had to lose? It’s false and creates unreasonable and unrealistic expectations. But this is typical of the way that the diet industry manipulates the expectations of prospective customers. And that’s where we get to the point I did mention in the book – if you fail it’s your fault, not ours. My book busts that myth and others – wide open.

The final area of focus is looking at your body and how it responds to food shortage. This is important because my method is to focus on losing weight in a natural and healthy way because understanding your body’s responses is essential to being clear about why diets don’t work.

Anyway I made my notes on one side of a piece of A5 paper. Made myself nice and comfy and waited for the phone to ring.

…and that’s when all of that stuff went right out of my head and I just talked about whatever I found myself talking about. I think it went ok but I actually found it much harder doing this over the phone than when I’ve been in radio studios before (I’ve also been a guest on Roy Basnett’s Zone Unknown at City Talk FM a couple of times). I like to watch the presenter for cues and clues about when to start and when to stop. An interesting experience and one I enjoyed the challenge of. Hopefully I’ll be able to get hold of a copy of the interview and post it on here some time soon so you can have a listen and let me know if you like it.

Michael

Categories
health weight control

New Weight Loss Book Out Today


Well after weeks of writing and proof-reading and making minor changes, my book is finally on Amazon’s electronic shelves. Despite the fact I must have read it a dozen times at least – it still engages me, so I reckon there’s an excellent chance you’ll like it too.

It’s only available as a Kindle Edition at the moment so you’ll need a Kindle, or an iDevice, or Android thingy, with the Kindle app on it in order to enjoy it. I’m hoping to get it on to iBooks, but that won’t be for a while yet and the Kindle app is one that I use so there’s no need to wait. The price is almost a giveaway.

Here’s the Description I posted on Amazon:
If you’d like to know how to lose weight easily, naturally, and in a way that works with your body rather than against it, then this is the book for you. It’s about a healthy way to lose weight that is so much simpler than all of those complicated charts and calculations that you have to do when you engage in dieting. The author explores the ways in which diets not only make you fat but are also seriously bad for your health. This book exposes the myths that the Diet Industry perpetuates in order to keep people hooked on dieting. Simple solutions are offered so that attitudes towards food and eating can be easily changed. The focus is on an easy step by step approach, for which the author offers a simple 10-step action plan. This leaves the reader in control of their eating and losing weight in a way that is sustainable without the need to ban any specific foods.

And that’s pretty much it. If you follow my guidance, and read it now and again, this book could change your life, your relationship with food, and your weight. It could free you from your battle with food if you engage with the ideas I present within. It encapsulates a lot of what I’ve discovered over the last 14 years helping people to lose weight and it’s life-changing potential makes it incredibly valuable.

And if you’d like to have a preview then you can search within the book and get an excerpt. Just type your search string in the box below.



Search the full text of this book

All this for about the price of a cup of Coffee. What have you got to lose?

If you buy it and you like it be sure to leave a comment below. I’d really appreciate your feedback – and if there’s any aspect of weight loss you’d like me to address then please use the opportunity to let me know.

Michael

Categories
Alternative health self-help weight control

How a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), or a Sky Box, Can Help you Lose Weight

So why is losing weight so difficult?

I was sitting in front of the tv last night doing what I rarely do and watching a film ‘live’. I usually record films before watching so I can fast forward through the adverts. And I was actually recording this one to watch later anyway, but it was Sunday and although I usually end up working when there’s nothing on tv I’d not been giving myself much time off lately so I thought I’d sit and enjoy Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places.

I’d eaten 4 hours earlier – a satisfying & filling meal, with some delicious home-made apple pie and a little soya-based ice ‘cream’ (my body no longer allows me to enjoy dairy products) for dessert – so hunger wasn’t an issue, but there was a nagging in my mind to go and eat some more.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing; those thoughts that keep hinting that there’s something nice in the kitchen. Usually that ‘nice thing’ is full of fat or sugar. This is exactly what I was experiencing and it was hard to resist.

I explored the problem to see if I could find out what was going on. Part of the problem was those interminable commercial breaks every few minutes. They break up the flow of the story and make it much more difficult to be entertained and engrossed. This piecemeal presentation of snippets of story is, I believe, a significant factor in the explosion of overweight and obesity problems.

I do have a solution to this problem that I consistently recommend to my clients – not because I imagine it’s a good idea but because I use it myself. I tell them to keep a book handy, or a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku puzzle, or a piece of knitting or embroidery – something that it’s easy to pick up and put down when the commercial break ends. More and more I tend to find myself using IMDB on my iPad to check out the goofs in the film I’m watching so I can keep an eye out for them or just reading a little about the history of the movie and seeing if I can correctly identify some of the faces that seem familiar.

I can do that from my armchair, but sometimes I even get up and go sit at my desktop for five minutes checking if my friends have been up to something on facebook, or just checking something out that’s occurred to me while watching the movie.

Last night though, none of this seemed to be working. When I looked at what was going on I found that the book I was reading wasn’t fully engaging me. I’d noticed a new Wayne Dyer (Stop The Excuses: How To Change Lifelong Thoughts) last time I visited the library, so I picked it up. Now when I first started on my self-development journey I was a huge fan of Wayne Dyer and bought many of his books. Then I bought Getting In The Gap. That was about meditation, something I’ve been doing for a long time and it just didn’t work for me. I picked up copies of his new books after that but he seemed to be going off in a direction that was of no benefit to me.

But, it wasn’t going to cost me anything, so I picked it up, took it downstairs and checked it out. It certainly isn’t grabbing me the way his books used to, and a significant part of his guidance is to use affirmations. I’ve done affirmations and, in my opinion, they are a waste of time. But these are so long-winded that you’d need to write them down, carry them round with you, and read them when you needed them. But there’s other stuff that is interesting me and I fully expect to get some value from Wayne Dyer’s words. They just aren’t grabbing me like they used to. I think I’ve moved on past the point in development where he is aiming his teaching.

But despite all that, I still wanted to eat something and my thoughts were encouraging me in the direction of toasted tea cakes. And you know what it’s like when you get that picture in your mind – in my case it was four halves of lightly toasted tea-cakes dripping with melted yellow fat (my dairy-free margarine). I was even imagining the way the warmed fat would drip down my fingers and the aroma of those lightly spiced buns.

You can see what’s happening. My thoughts are somehow not in tune with my greater desires and needs to follow my own advice that I give to people to help them to lose weight. There’s clearly some sort of rebellion going on here. I think we all have that rebel as part of our make-up. That part of us that wants to do just what it wants to do and enjoy instant gratification regardless of the consequences. In the same way that smokers enjoy the pleasure of a cigarette now and ignore the disease that will probably visit them in the future.

And in a way this is a real problem for me with what I teach. I encourage people to focus on the present moment. I tell them the future is only imagined. The past is a memory that has only the power that you give to it. Live NOW, because Now is the only moment when you are ever alive.

So I’ve got a bit of a problem here.

But I’ve also got an apple tree in the garden with about 80lbs of apples hanging from it. This is a dessert apple called Jupiter, which cooks very nicely too. My apple pie was made from a few of them.

Now, apples have a wonderfully high fibre content and contain a carbohydrate called pectin which is really good at satisfying hunger. They are free of sodium and even have some Vitamin C. An average-sized apple contains only about 60 calories.

So I recognised a couple of things. I wasn’t really in the mood to engage with some of my distraction techniques, but there was no way I was going to eat any more wheat-based products today. I wanted something sweet. You can see where this is going. Apples were the solution. I selected two, one medium, one small, peeled cored and cut into segments (This is not because there’s anything wrong with just biting into the apple) but it used up some of the ‘unsettled’ energy that was creating the ‘eat’ thoughts in the first place. A task is always a good thing to engage in as a distraction and it filled the commercial break space.

I enjoyed the apple slowly while watching the next segment of the movie and felt satisfied.

Yes I did consume some unnecessary calories, but so what. The apples were about 100 calories, but the tea cakes would have rated at least 400. I didn’t give myself a hard time about it. I didn’t beat up on myself because I gave in when I should be following my own example. You see the key to what I teach about weight loss is gentleness with self. You have to be gentle with you always. It is the harshness that leads to habitual over-eating.

Every day is a new day.

In part you see what I did is freeing. Because it left no guilt or bad-feelings, or any sense that I failed or did something wrong – which is what you tend to get when you follow a diet. These ill-feelings create a low mood state which tends to cause more over-eating and more ill-feelings. It’s a self destructive cycle.

But what I did is more than that. I used my knowledge and experience to look at what was really going on and then find a solution that was satisfying but did not violate my greater intention to be what I teach.

Look for solutions that require no calorie intake first of all; if that doesn’t work then look for solutions that satisfy, but require minimal calorie intake.

So my present moment Now experience became one of recognising that I have a challenge right now that needs a solution and that solution needs to honour my long-term commitment and intention.

Oh! …and the title of this post. Clearly the whole problem started because I didn’t wait and watch the recorded version. Obviously if I’d been fast forwarding the commercials and concentrating on catching the re-start of the movie, then I’d have had no time to think about food.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my thoughts and can take some valuable insights from them. If you haven’t seen my videos and you’d like to explore more of my ideas about how to lose weight easily without dieting then have a look at the first of my free weight loss videos and be sure to leave me your email address so I can send you the details of how to access the other free videos.