Choose To Lose Weight: Accept The Responsibility, Not The Blame

Why haven’t you lost weight and kept it off? I’ll bet that’s a question that has haunted your waking hours and, perhaps, your sleeping ones as well.

You’ve read the diet books. You’ve explored the psychological and physical explanations for weight gain. You know what foods to eat and which to avoid. You are more expert on the subject of dieting than any expert in the field.

An article in The Daily Beast from November 10^th, 2011 attempts to explain why you’re having so much trouble. The article entitled, “Will I Get Fat? 15 Signs You’ll Gain Weight” discusses the “myths and the realities” of why people put on weight. Specifically, the article suggests that getting married, quitting smoking, the winter holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) and job loss cause weight gain.

On hearing this, I bet you nodded your head in assent. Perhaps you’re anticipating the upcoming holidays (or remembering past ones) and imagining the difficulty you’re going to have foregoing the cakes, cookies and pies. You may even have given yourself permission to go off your diet for the holidays, intending to make a New Year’s resolution to start again.

During these tough economic times, you may have been out of work and found yourself putting on weight. Who wouldn’t? The stress of a job loss and the empty hours with nothing to do but eat would make anyone gain weight.

Or maybe you just got married (congratulations). You know that your married friends have gained weight. It is inevitable that you will as well.

And quitting smoking is, of course, a key explanation for why people put on weight. After all, they have to have something to put in their mouths to substitute for sticking a cigarette in there. Perhaps you quit smoking and this happened to you. You know it’s perfectly understandable. Happens to everyone. You had intended to go back on a diet once you got over the cravings, but that just never happened.

All of these explanations are interesting but I beg to differ. There’s only one reason why any of us gain weight: We consume more calories than we expend. Period. Believing anything else is a fallacy that keeps us stuck on the yoyo of weight gain and loss.

In fact, I suggest that all the explanations for weight gain merely allow us to not take responsibility for our weight gain. We blame our circumstances for gaining weight rather than taking responsibility for the actions we take in the face of those circumstances. And once we put responsibility outside ourselves, we lose our power to act effectively.

Some people blame themselves for their weight gain. But this is missing the point. Blame does nothing but create negative feelings that can be used to justify more eating. Responsibility, on the other hand, indicates awareness that we are more powerful than our circumstances.

Cookie, cakes and pies don’t cause weight gain. McDonald’s Happy Meals don’t cause weight gain. Liquor doesn’t contribute one iota to weight gain.

Eating cookies, cakes and pies may cause weight gain. Drinking liquor may cause weight gain…but only if you consume more calories than you expend.

We are infinitely powerful. We are certainly more powerful than our appetites. Once we accept responsibility for our actions, we are in control of those actions. Blaming circumstances outside of ourselves robs us of our power.

Choose To Lose Weight: Weigh Yourself Every Day

I was sitting across the restaurant table from a friend of mine who has been engaged in a life long battle to lose weight and keep it off. I was coaching him on what he might do and I suggested that he weigh himself every day.

I suggested he do so until his new way of eating and exercising was a habit he didn’t have to think about anymore. I told him that the surest way to succeed was to be aware daily of the number on that scale.

He resisted that suggestion. “I’m not going to do that,” he said. “All that does is cause me to beat myself up if I haven’t lost any weight.”

I know that weighing oneself every day is contrary to the advice given by many diet gurus. But that’s only because those gurus have been raised under the same system as the rest of us in which the pressure to produce numbers is intense. It’s no wonder people avoid getting on a scale daily. No one wants to feel that pressure again.

From the very youngest age, we were graded in school and those grades were used to compare us to other students. Based on grades, we were put in different “tracks.” And, while they tried to hide the meaning of the tracks by naming them “bluebird,” “robin” and “sparrow,” everyone knew if the track to which they had been assigned was the top or the bottom and there was shame in being at the bottom.

A low score on one, year-end test can prevent a student from graduating.

College entrance exam tests can make the difference between a first class education and a mediocre one.

At work, there is pressure to “make quota.” The only “reward” for making quota this year is to have the quota raised for next year.

We have learned to fear numbers because rarely are they used to make us feel better about ourselves. No matter how well we do, we’re told, overtly or subtly, that we can do better. How many of us were told we’re “not living up to your potential?” What the heck does that mean?

Is it any wonder that no one wants to get on a scale daily? Numbers have rarely been a source of satisfaction. They are almost always used as a way of affirming, “You’re not good enough.”

But we are no longer in school. And while we may be in jobs in which “making quota” is expected, there is no boss looking over our shoulders when we get on that scale. A number is just information to be used to make decisions about what we will eat or not. A number has no meaning except the one we assign to it. We are the ones beating ourselves up and we don’t have to.

But we do have to be constantly vigilant about our weight, especially at the start of a diet when we are changing our habits and trying to ingrain new ones.

If we avoid the number on that scale, we do so at our peril and we are actually making it more difficult for us to lose weight and keep it off.

Choose To Lose Weight: The 40 Billion Dollar Piece of Advice

It’s estimated that Americans spend 40 billion dollars per year on weight loss programs and products. Here’s the advice you get for that 40 billion dollars:

If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you must consume fewer calories than you expend. You do this in two ways:

1. Find a healthy diet and stick to it for the rest of your life.

2. Exercise moderately 6 days per week for one hour per day.

This advice was confirmed, for perhaps the millionth time, in a recent story on National Public Radio in which, after a discussion of hormones and their effect on the dieter’s body, the researcher being interviewed ended by noting that you have to consume fewer calories than you expend.

Why is it so hard to follow this advice? One reason, of course, is that people want to lose weight but they don’t actually want to keep it off. They want to lose weight for a daughter’s wedding or because they think they “should” or because they get angry at themselves, toss out the potato chips in the evening and buy another bag in the morning after they have cooled off.

Or there are may be psychological reasons such as: “Secretly, I don’t believe I deserve to be thin.” “If I’m thin, I’ll start attracting members of the opposite sex and I don’t know how I’ll handle that.” “My father berated me for being fat and if I get thin, he wins” (even though he has been dead for 20 years).

A provocative explanation I hadn’t heard before came from a book by Michael Lewis. Lewis is the author of “The Blind Side” and “Moneyball,” both of which have been made into movies. His newest book, called “Boomerang,” is about the financial crisis in Europe.

During his research, Lewis talked to British neuroscientist Dr. Peter Whybrow who thinks obesity is a product of our success.

Our brains, Whybrow reminds us, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment of scarcity. They were not designed for the environment of extreme abundance in which we now live. Therefore, Whybrow notes, “We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.” So when we do encounter abundance, we have trouble suppressing our desires.

Whybrow suggests that we have lost our ability to “self regulate” whether it’s the 5 million dollars paid to a Goldman Sachs trader or the offered piece of chocolate cake.

Most provocatively, Whybrow found that if you laid a map of American’s personal indebtedness on top of the Center for Disease Control’s map of the rates of obesity in the United States, the two maps would overlap.

In other words, “Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term rewards.”

So there you have it. As someone trying to lose weight and keep it off, you can take your pick of why you don’t lose weight permanently. You can have the “I’m only dieting until my daughter’s wedding” explanation. You can have your psychological explanation. And you can explain your failure by using Dr. Whybrow’s hypothesis.

But whatever explanation you choose, at the end of the day, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you will have to choose to consume fewer calories than you expend and you will have to do so through a combination of moderate exercise and healthy eating for the rest of your life.

And just in case you have a reaction to that “for the rest of your life” comment, remember: Everyone is on some kind of diet for the rest of his/her life. Everyone makes daily choices as to what that diet will be. You aren’t special. Thinking you are may keep you feeling deprived and unhappy.

All you have to do, really, is choose to lose your weight and keep it off.

Choose To Lose Weight: The Commitment Prescription

According to the October 20^th, 2010 Men’s Fitness magazine, there are 35,000 medical studies published each year on weight loss.

There are 184 million potential Google searches on the words “weight loss,” 120 million potential searches on “places to go to lose weight” and 433 million potential searches on the word “diet.”

Play this game yourself. Put in whatever terms you want and you will discover no shortage of information about how to lose weight and keep it off.

Let’s face facts: None of this makes any difference. If it did, you wouldn’t be reading this, still searching for the “magic bullet” that will ensure permanent weight loss.

If “the truth shall set you free,” here’s the truth: You’re not committed to permanent weight loss. You’re committed to whatever you are doing. Actions, as we all know, speak louder than words.

If you put weight on and take it off repeatedly, that’s what you’re committed to.

If you say you will start dieting tomorrow and you don’t, you are committed to starting your diet tomorrow, not to actually dieting.

If you say you’re going to eat more fruits and vegetables and you keep eating breads and sweets, you’re committed to eating breads and sweets.

Please don’t hear this as a criticism. You’ve done that enough to yourself. Stop beating yourself up and accept what you are committed to. The fact is that if you were really committed to losing weight and keeping it off, you would have done so. You can always tell what people are committed to by what they do, not what they say.

The answer is so obvious and you know what it is: “I want everyone to know that diet, exercise, accountability and a good support system are all that’s needed to lose weight, get fit and stay healthy.” That’s a quote from Lori Yates who was interviewed in a recent issue of Anytime Fitness magazine talking about how she lost 100 pounds.

As I said, you already know this. You are in a fruitless search for the magic pill, the magic diet, the magic prescription.

So here’s the “commitment prescription:”

1.   Set a goal

2.   Share your goal with the people in your life.

3.   Ask them to ask you at least once a week how the diet is going.

4.   Don’t get angry when they ask. Give them permission to keep asking even

     if you have gone off your diet.

5.   Have them keep asking even after you’ve achieved your goal weight.

6.   Repeat steps 1-5 for the rest of your life or until the new behavior is so ingrained that you call what you do a “habit” and not “dieting.”

Your current habit is to diet and then go off your diet. Follow the “commitment prescription” to create a new, healthier, habit.

If You Build It, He Will Come

I'm sure you've seen or, certainly, know of the movie, "Field Of Dreams" with its famous tag line that I've used as the title of this article.

The film is often referred to as the cinematic version of the best selling book and DVD program, "The Secret" with its emphasis on focusing intently on what we want in our lives and the power of our beliefs.

I was reminded of the power of our beliefs in an unexpected place the other day. I was listening to the National Public Radio program "Car Talk" which, as you probably know, is a show where people call in to get car advice from the hosts, two brothers named Tom and Ray Magliozzi who often refer to themselves as "The Tappet Brothers."

A caller asked which additive, when put in the gas tank, works best at improving gas mileage. Without hesitation, Tom and Ray said that none of them actually work. But, they then added, paradoxically, that putting the additive in your gas tank usually does improve gas mileage for a time.

I thought I was in the midst of the Zen Koan, "What is the sound of one hand clapping." How can an additive both work and not work?

Tom and Ray explained that, while the additive doesn't work, we are so desirous of making it work that, without necessarily realizing it, we drive more carefully. We slow down. We make fewer jack rabbit starts. We turn the motor off instead of letting it idle. In other words, we want to believe that it works and we act to confirm our belief

The reason the additive eventually fails is because we revert to our old driving habits.

Now back to "Field Of Dreams." People who are disappointed that their dreams remain unfulfilled even though they meditated, visualized and prayed, may be focusing more attention on "He will come" than on "If you build it."

Without actually altering driving habits, the additive wouldn't reduce gas mileage at all. Without actually fighting to get up that hill, "The Little Engine That Could" never could have made it no matter how much thinking went into it. Without actually building the base ball field, the players would have no place to show up no matter how much Ray Kinsella (the protagonist played by Kevin Costner) may have wished for it.

Consider the movie: Ray devoted a considerable amount of time to plowing up an entire field of corn worth (at the time of the 1989 film), $2,200 per acre, installing lights for night games and creating the base ball infield and outfield. He researched the life of Terence Mann, a writer Ray admired in the 1960s. Ray drove from Dyersville, Iowa where the ball field is located to Boston where Ray finds Terence Mann to Chisholm, Minnesota to find Doc Graham (a character whom Ray thinks is supposed to return with him to Dyersville) and back home to Iowa. This is a distance of 3,107 miles that would have taken 52 hours in driving time alone (thank you Rand McNally mileage calculator), not including the time spent in the destination cities.

Malcolm Gladwell might have included Ray Kinisella in his book "Outliers." In that book, Gladwell writes about people who have become successful pursuing their dreams (lawyers, doctors, The Beatles and Bill Gates among others) and he notes that there was one thing they all had in common. According to Gladwell, every one of these people worked for at least 10,000 hours (about three year's worth of 10-hour days, 7 days a week) to achieve their success.

There's something to notice about "The Little Engine That Could," "The Secret" the "Car Talk" show I referenced and "Field Of Dreams." As much as we would like to "wish" our desires into existence, it takes concentrated action (not just concentrated thinking) to make them happen (according to "The Secret" website, the secret "has been passed down through the ages," so, obviously, it took untold effort to get it to us).

You may have heard the story of the man who couldn't understand why he never won the lottery. After all, he had meditated for an hour every day, visualizing what he would do with the money once he won. Then someone pointed out to him that no matter how much he visualized, he would still have to buy a ticket.

No matter how much visualizing one may do, "You can't win if you don't play."

As we all know, visualization without action is an hallucination.

Choose To Lose Weight Forever Podcast

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Choose To Lose Weight: You Are Not Deprived

I don’t know the diet you’re following, but I’m sure there are certain foods you obsess about and feel deprived because you can’t have them. These foods surely must include Giant Salamander, Chimpanzees and Gorillas, Caribou, African Forest Elephant, Green Sea Turtle, River Dolphins and Gaurs (a wild relation to the cow found in Southeast Asia).

What’s that you say? You don’t feel deprived by not eating these foods? Why not?

The answer, obviously, is that you don’t focus your energy on any of these foods (you probably never even heard of some of them). But some people would feel very deprived if they couldn’t get these “delicacies” (all these animals are on the list of endangered species that people still eat).

Let’s consider that word “deprived.” Consider first some things that have nothing to do with food. Do you feel deprived because it doesn’t snow in the summer? Do you feel deprived because you don’t live in France? Do you feel deprived because you don’t have a 55-room mansion?

You probably don’t feel deprived, but why not? It’s because you don’t obsess over these things just as you don’t obsess over the foods mentioned in the first paragraph. Maintaining an obsession requires that you focus intense energy on the object of your obsession and it’s unlikely that you focus intensely on any of the foods or items I’ve mentioned so far. If you did, you would, indeed, feel “deprived.”   

You see, the reason you feel “deprived” when you’re on a diet (or the reason you feel “deprived” by not having anything) is because you tell yourself over and over and over and over and over again that, because you’ve chosen not to eat certain foods, you are deprived.

You may read that and say, “That’s too simple.” If that sounds too simple, it’s because it is simple. Getting over feeling deprived requires that you stop telling yourself that you’re deprived.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. In fact, anything that we repeat often enough will become the truth for us. If we keep telling ourselves how deprived we are, it’s not a mystery that we believe ourselves to be deprived.

In other words, it requires work to imprint on our brains the thought of deprivation. But we’ve been doing this imprinting for so long that it now feels like the truth. We simply forgot that we were the ones doing the imprinting.

Any habit (being right handed, speaking English versus Mandarin, getting angry at a particular relative and finding some foods pleasant and some repugnant) gets hardwired into our brains through continual repetition. We’ve been doing this for so long that we’ve simply forgotten that we created that habit. This repetition creates connections in our brains that, over time, we come to call “who we are” and we feel deprived or, at the very least, uncomfortable when we try and break that habit. We call this discomfort “deprivation.”

In a very real sense, we choose to feel deprived. It doesn’t feel like a choice because we’ve been choosing in this way for so long that the thought seems like so much a part of us. We’ve simply forgotten that we created it.

You have to hypnotize yourself into believing you’re not deprived in the same way you hypnotized yourself in the first place: Through repetition. Catch yourself when you are suffering because you’re “deprived” and change that to a different mantra such as, “I love the way I feel about myself when I choose only healthy foods.”

Will you immediately feel relief? Of course not. If you suddenly decided to change from being right handed to being left-handed you wouldn’t immediately feel comfortable about the change. But if you used your left hand exclusively, eventually, left-handedness would become your new habit.  

Moving from “deprivation” to satisfaction requires repetition…the same way any habit gets created. Replace your self-talk that reminds yourself of your “deprivation” with self-talk that reminds yourself of why you’re on your diet in the first place.

And be patient. As Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “Infinite patient produces immediate results.”