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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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Weight Loss, Aviva, and Your Bank Account

A new survey conducted by Aviva (in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic) establishes a strong connection between dramatic weight gain and financial stress. The survey shows that the major cause of stress in US males is their financial situation.

Here are some of the things the survey discovered:

  • 1 in 4 men never exercise.
  • 1 in 3 claim their stress is the consequence of their financial situation.
  • 2 out of 3 stressed men would like more money.
  • The men who are most stressed are 3 times more likely to have a significant weight gain.
  • The men who are most stressed are more likely to be fatter than men who aren’t worried.
  • Men don’t go to their doctors enough.

Now let’s have another look at this.

Excess weight causes premature death through a variety of health problems. Aviva sells life insurance. The younger you die the more it costs them – because you haven’t paid your premiums for long enough. Therefore they have a vested interest in encouraging people to visit their doctors.

The Mayo Clinic sells health. The more convinced you are that you have a problem that needs medical attention – the more money the medics make. Being overweight is a health problem. It is not a medical problem. Severe obesity might be considered a medical problem. Being overweight cannot be ‘cured’ by visiting a doctor. The only ‘cure’ is to decide to do something about it and then to act on that decision – forever. If you make being overweight a medical problem then you are opening the door to more of your money being sucked into the pockets of medics, surgeons, and already bloated pharmaceutical companies. And you are already overweight because of your difficult financial circumstances (according to this report, at least).

In my reading of the report the connection they make between weight and financial stress seems a little tenuous.

A survey that I reference in my book How to Lose Weight Easily – and Free Yourself from Diets Forever suggests that 1 in 3 Americans are obese. Another 1 in 3 are overweight. So two out of every three Americans has a weight problem. That’s a lot. That’s so many it must be unusual to find someone who is a normal weight.

We are also in a recession. In a recession it is no surprise to find that a lot of people have financial problems. Because of the high numbers of overweight people and the high numbers of people with financial difficulties there are bound to be a lot of people in both categories.

To imply, therefore, that one is connected to the other, is a misuse of the statistics.

However, it was an internet based survey so the cost of the survey was presumably quite low. The number of responses was around 2000. And for that Aviva gets its name in lots of headlines.

Here are some of the other article titles based on this report that I discovered with a quick Google search:


Aviva USA Survey Finds Financial Situation is Top Stressor for Men and Links Stress Levels to Weight Gain

Aviva: finances top stressor for US men and linked to weight gain

Aviva Survey Identifies Strong Link Between High Stress Levels and Weight Gain


All of them emphasise the link to weight gain.

This means that Aviva’s name will be subconsciously registered, i.e. programmed, when people search for help with weight loss and come across internet references to this survey. That means Aviva becomes more familiar. Familiar = trusted. Trusted = I’ll buy from you.

It seems to me more of an exercise in advertising than a valuable contribution to the state of world’s knowledge regarding stress and weight gain.

If you liked this, don’t forget to share it.

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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How to Lose Weight Easily – Out in Paperback Today, and There’s Even a Way to Get it for Free

My book How to Lose Weight Easily – and Free Yourself from Diets Forever is published in paperback today and is now available on Amazon.com.

Funny thing is, although it’s been out as a Kindle edition for several months, it’s never felt like a ‘real’ book to me because I couldn’t hold a copy in my hands. Now it does. Another interesting thing is that Kindle editions don’t have a back cover, so I had to put my thinking head on again and come up with some words and a design for the back of it.

But the main reason I’m telling you this is that I noticed there’s even a way you can get a copy for free.

Here’s what Amazon says:
Special Offers and Product Promotions
This item is eligible for our 4-for-3 promotion. Eligible products include select Books and Home & Garden items. Buy any 4 eligible items and get the lowest-priced item free.

So if you want to buy a few things from Amazon then you could add a copy of my book to your shopping basket. If it’s the cheapest item (not difficult because it’s only $5.99) then you get it for free. This is Amazon’s offer not mine, so you need to check it out with them, and I don’t know how long it will be available for.




Michael

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Is Soda Pop at the Heart of the American Obesity Epidemic?

I don’t know what the attraction is. I find the ‘natural’ sugar ones too sweet, and the artificial sugar ones just unpleasant. In fact the only time I drink any of it is when I mix it with beer – which is about six times a year, and even then I only use organic lemonade sweetened with agave syrup and without any other chemical additives.

But this isn’t a plug for organic lemonade. There is an epidemic of sweetened beverage drinking that some are suggesting is seriously damaging to your health – particularly if you are an American. But that’s largely because the obesity problem seems to be worse in the US than anywhere else in the world.

10,400,000,000 gallons of sugar-filled soda pop are manufactured every year in the US.

Each can contains the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of ordinary sugar. Can you imagine putting ten spoons of sugar into every cup of tea or coffee that you drink? It would be unpalatable. The only reason you can tolerate that amount of sugar in a can of soda is that the soda is acidic and the acidity counter-acts the excessive sweetness. In fact cola drinks are about as acid as vinegar. Would you drink a can of vinegar? Would you drink a can of vinegar with 10 added teaspoons of sugar? That’s effectively what you are doing when you drink cola.

But what exactly is the problem here – apart from the damage the acid does to teeth and stomach, and the damage the sugar does to teeth and the waistline?

The body, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is an interesting thing – especially when it experiences pleasure. But one of the really handy things that the body does is to keep you alive. It does this with loads of feedback mechanisms that allow corrections to be made when the chemical/hormone balance starts to shift away from optimum.

Food is satisfying. It creates a full feeling. As digestion proceeds it allows vitamins, minerals, fats, sugars and other stuff to seep into the system. The body also knows when it’s eaten because of this feedback system. So it knows if it is still in the process of digesting. Consequently, if you eat a big meal, you probably don’t want to eat another big meal shortly afterwards. The body is satisfied.

Sweet drinks don’t have that effect and the body fails to identify the calories as food. So the calories in these drinks are added to your calorie intake without any apparent bodily awareness of them. This is one of the reasons they lead to weight gain. There is also a suspicion that these drinks may stimulate desire for sweet high-carbohydrate foods. In other words they trick you that you are feeling hungry and needing something sweet when you don’t.

“The public now firmly believes that foods containing saccharin are effective in weight control, and has been persuaded by the soft drink industry (through the Calorie Control Council) that these benefits outweigh any possible health risks.”
Samuel S. Epstein MD

You can’t get out of it by drinking Diet versions of these drinks either. Rats who were fed saccharin ended up much fatter than rats who were fed sugary foods. There is a lot of uncertainty about the impact of artificial sweeteners so although they help you cut down the calorie intake from the soda, they may well be stimulating you to eat more unhealthily later on.

That’s not the only bad news.

A study of 90,000 women who regularly drank at least one soft drink a day suggested that they were 40% more likely to develop type II diabetes than women who didn’t drink this much soda.

Colas are high in phosphate. Now the body needs phosphate for bone building and health, but it needs phosphate in balance with calcium. When this balance is upset, perhaps with daily cola intake, the possibility of severe skeletal problems developing is very real.

“It appears that increased soft drink consumption is a major factor that contributes to osteoporosis.”
Michael Murray ND and Joseph Pizzorno ND

A recent Harvard study found that daily consumption of sugary drinks increased the risk of heart disease in men. Drinking two 12oz sugary drinks correlates with a 42% increase in the risk of heart disease. That risk rockets to 69% if you drink three cans per day. The American Beverage Association, as you would expect, issued a statement in response: “Drinking sweetened beverages does not cause an increased risk of heart disease – not based on this study or any other study in the available science.”

I think denial falls more into the territory of psychology than scientific research. Mind you denial is pretty much what you’d expect as the response to any threat to a $40,000,000,000 per year industry.

So there you have it. There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that sugar-filled soda is seriously bad for your health if you drink it regularly. There is also considerable support for the idea that diet soda may well cause you to endure cravings for sweet sugary foods and so, in the long-run, make losing weight much more difficult than if you drank fruit juices, water, or coffee and tea – without sugar naturally. But if you go down the route of fruit juices as an alternative be aware of the differences. A fruit drink has added sugar and frequently artificial sweetener too. Fruit juice is just juice. If in doubt check the ingredients list.

So the next time you fancy a cola, ask yourself if you really do long for 12oz of vinegar mixed with 10 teaspoons of sugar?

Found this interesting? Please feel free to add your thoughts on this subject below.

Michael

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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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Does Losing Weight Have to be a Battle?

One phrase that springs to mind when I think about weight loss is ‘fight the flab’. This phrase was coined by DJ Terry Wogan many years ago when he used to have a slot on his Radio 2 show about Fighting the Flab. I never used to take a great deal of notice of the content because my weight was under control – but the phrase has stayed with me. It’s interesting that it does highlight one hugely important aspect of weight loss. It focuses on how many people regard their overweight bodies as some sort of enemy that needs defeating.

It’s almost as if we think that our bodies have somehow betrayed us by accumulating so much weight, especially when everyone else is so slim. That’s when the battle begins, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s a battle you can’t win. The reason it’s a battle you can’t win is quite simple and it is down to the way minds work. Anything you push against you create more of.

What you resist persists.

So the very act of deciding to push against your fat ensures that it will remain.

Now, I realise that sounds like a recipe for doing nothing, but we both know that that doesn’t work either. So how do you make some changes and reap the reward of a slimmer more attractive body without hating the way it is now? This is tricky territory, because it is the dislike of what is that is the motivational force that gets you to take action. It might be when you can no longer get into your already oversize clothes and you refuse to move up another size; it might be when you look in the mirror one day and see what’s really there; or it might be that you’ve been to the doctor and the choice is lose weight or lose life. But it is something that moves you from the place of tolerating your excess weight to not tolerating it that causes you to choose to make some changes. Without that dislike of what is, where would the motivation come from? Without that, why would you even bother? If you liked yourself the way you are, then surely you would just leave things as they are and continue to enjoy your unhealthy lifestyle?

The solution of course is to love yourself.

When you love yourself you don’t stuff your body full of fattening and unhealthy foods in the way we might stuff a turkey just before we pop it in the oven. When you love yourself you recognise that, like it or not, a body is designed to move – lots. So that means making exercise a top priority, for without exercise, weight loss is just a huge uphill struggle. When you exercise out of love for yourself and your amazing body, what you will find is that the exercise itself becomes a pleasurable, and eagerly anticipated, activity. I walk between two and three miles a day, except when the weather is unkind. Those days when I can’t get out I can feel my legs ‘complaining’ about the lack of activity.

Now exercise itself doesn’t shift a huge amount of weight, but it does shift some. For instance an hour’s walking at a reasonable pace can burn around 500 Calories. Do that every day and you’ve burned off the equivalent of 1lb of excess fat in a week. But that isn’t the only reason I encourage exercise – exercise does so much more for you than burning calories, but that’s a little off the subject here. If you want to find out more about the hidden benefits of exercise then download a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

So by making exercise a daily priority; by choosing an exercise form that you enjoy; by engaging in a daily exercise routine long enough for it to become a habit; you side-step the battleground and you totally avoid the should I/shouldn’t I debate that always ends up by turning the TV on and grabbing a snack from the kitchen – because all of that thinking about exercise has made you hungry.

But it isn’t just exercise that’s going to make a significant difference to your weight. There’s something else that I’ve discovered in my many years of working in the weight loss industry. Clients who are overweight rarely love themselves. Most of them don’t even like themselves very much.

If you like yourself, start working on changing that to loving. If you don’t like yourself, then make that your first target.

So how do you do that?

You can start by recognising a Truth. The truth is that right now you are the weight you are and right now nothing in the world is going to change that – in this instant. You can recognise in this instant that you’d like to change your weight, but it won’t change instantly. If you can recognise that Truth and recognise that you are the way you are right now, and you can do that without feeling any negative emotion, then you have moved into a state of acceptance. Acceptance is the place from which you can make changes with very little effort.

I need to stress that acceptance is very different from resignation. Resignation is a giving up; it is a sense of powerlessness over your own destiny. Acceptance is an understanding that all change starts here. Acceptance allows you to move in any direction you wish to move and make any change you wish to make.

Start to appreciate the things you do. Choose to see that every single thing you do is worthy of appreciation by you.

Just in case you think I’m sending you on an ego-trip – I’m not. I’m not suggesting that you think you are in any way different from anyone else. I’m not suggesting you brag about what you do or demand that others appreciate what you do. I’m just asking you to notice what you are failing to notice. What you are failing to notice is your loveliness. Your loveliness is expressed in everything you do and the more lovingly you do it, the more lovely it is.

Loving yourself is being kind, being generous, being supportive, being gentle. When a child makes a mistake a loving parent does not berate the child. A loving parent simply demonstrates how to do it appropriately. It is a sharing of knowledge and wisdom. When a child falls over a loving parent just helps it up and gives encouragement for success. A loving parent never encourages a child to give up. A loving parent never sees failure – just learning.

So end the battle now. Eat appropriately, exercise more and support yourself in your goal to lose weight by appreciating the love you are expressing for yourself by taking action to move in the direction of a healthy weight for you.

If you enjoyed this article, or have any questions for me about losing weight, then please comment below.

Michael