Category Archives: Weight Loss Articles Published on The Huffington Post

How to Eat Out and Lose 50 Pounds a Year (or Gain!)

Posted on January 5, 2017 | 8 comments

(First published in The Huffington Post)

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he developed his methods, and he’s kept it off for over 30 years. Read about his method in his book at the right, or listen to his audiobook, free sample provided here.)

Consider these selections when dining out for a day:

Breakfast: Egg McMuffin and coffee at McDonald’s.
Lunch: Cheeseburger and Diet Coke at McDonald’s.
Dinner: Filet Mignon, grilled vegetables and garlic mashed at Outback.

This would add up to about 1,200 calories. If you are a woman 5’6” with average activity habits (a metabolic rate of about 2000), you’ll lose about 50 pounds a year eating like that consistently!

However, consider what would happen if you weren’t paying attention and made some slight changes:

  1. Sausage Biscuit with egg and an OJ instead of the Egg McMuffin and coffee.
  2. Quarter Pounder with cheese and a regular Coke instead of Cheeseburger and Diet Coke.
  3. New York Strip, chopped salad and loaded mashed instead of the filet, grilled veggies and garlic mashed.

They look and feel almost the same, but with the second example, you’d be at 2,700 calories and gaining 50 pounds a year instead of losing them!

For a population facing an exploding obesity epidemic, the world of fast food, restaurants and convenience food is a minefield, with caloric nuclear bombs everywhere you turn. It’s a miracle we all aren’t over 600 pounds.

Consider this: Did you know that you could gain 100 extra pounds (!!) in four years by overeating as little as one latte per day? It’s true! If you are out of balance, over your metabolic rate consistently by 250 calories per day (an average latte), you’ll gain 25 pounds a year, or 100 pounds in four!

The science is in. Our body burns calories each moment we are alive, awake or asleep. Our organs, muscles and cells metabolize fuel each second we live and breathe. There’s no mystery in knowing why we gain or lose weight. It’s a matter of the energy or calorie balance. Eat 3,500 more calories than you burn and you store them as fat and gain a pound.

Most of my clients who are obese first got that way by being only a little out of balance, creeping up on the scale 10 pounds per year. That amounts to eating only 100 calories more per day than you need, the number of calories in an apple or banana! How can you avoid eating too many calories, and way more than 100, with the way we eat in this country?

When you think about it, with the way food is pushed at us, it’s a miracle that we aren’t all morbidly obese (70 percent of us are now clinically obese). A Big Mac is 563 calories. A Cinnabon Classic Roll is 879. How hard do you think it is to go over a 2,000-calorie budget when breakfast at Denny’s can be 1,000 calories and lunch at McDonald’s can easily be 1400 or more? One of the shrimp dishes at Ruby Tuesday’s is 1,475 calories! They have a salad that’s over 1,100!

So how is that 30 percent of us are not overweight, and some don’t even have to try to stay slim?

This is a more startling observation than the obesity epidemic: Many people maintain the same weight, year-in and year-out, without even trying. I find that miraculous. Think about it. A person who burns 2,000 calories per day burns 730,000 in normal activities through the year and consumes 730,000 to fuel that activity. To gain or lose a pound it would be because they were off by no more than 3,500 calories in an entire year! That averages about 10 calories per day! How could a person match their consumption to their utilization that closely by accident, without even trying?

The answer, of course, is that there must be some sort of inner process going on, like unconscious programming, that tells them how much to eat and when to stop so that they end up eating only enough to meet their needs. Dietitians have always told me this and that I should listen to my body. I tried that, but all I ever heard was, “I need something to eat” and “more, more!” If such a self-limiting thing ever existed in me, that programming was deleted long ago, probably by a combination of conditioning, all the food nuttiness in my environment, and 25 years of yo-yo dieting, gaining it all back and more after each attempt.

How to attain and maintain a proper weight automatically even when eating out.

The secret to permanent weight loss is in creating new programming — habits you can live with and enjoy that will produce the weight control you want — habits that will become automatic. It’s like getting addicted to gratifying undereating instead of overeating. For this to happen, these conditions must be met:

The plan must allow the foods you want to eat for the rest of your life. You need to learn how to eat, not diet. It does no good to lose weight by denying yourself what you know you’ll eat in the future. All you’ll do is gain it back and then some, when you go back to what you like.

The plan must be a pattern of eating that achieves the caloric values needed for the desired weight. Believe me, there is a way to create a behavior pattern that includes the food you like and hits the right caloric targets at the same time.

There must be a method of behavioral training employed to install these habits so that they become the new preferred and unconscious behavior. One of the keys to behavior therapy is simply repetitions of meals that are sensually satisfying and hit the caloric target. Other keys, besides positive reinforcement, are mental imaging and cognitive restructuring. It’s a matter of using behavioral science instead of simple will power.

Suck it up

For years while I was overweight and obese, I kept looking for ways to lose weight that were easy. I avoided anything that sounded hard, and paying attention to the calories sounded hard. Or, I’d look for ways to get someone else to do the work and make me successful. I had lost faith in myself. Avoiding doing the work myself just made me gain more weight as the years and failed attempts dragged on.

I get clients who think learning to control their weight should not be as much work as learning to pass tests for professional jobs or getting good at a sport or music. That’s a big mistake. You’ll never be successful with weight control until you decide controlling your weight is your first priority and you’re willing to work harder to develop that ability than the effort you make to grow professionally or highly skilled in sports or the arts.

Quit being mad that it’s not easy for you like it’s easy for those people I talked about who maintain the right weight without even trying. If you are like me, you are one of the people who seem to gain weight naturally and have failed to succeed many times. You need to accept that you’ll never be like them.

However, I think it’s better to be like us. All living things have the ability to learn and change. You have within you the power to get better. There is within you an incredible mechanism that helped you learn to speak and use a vocabulary of thousands of words. That was in you even before you knew who you were. You have within you the power to heal wounds and broken bones and get better when you are sick. That’s not your will power, but another kind of power at your disposal when you don’t lose the faith that it’s there (like I did for a while). I think it’s better to be like us than those people who never had the problem. We can solve this problem and when we do, we have a strength, knowledge and wisdom that they may never know.

Get started

All restaurant chains with 20 or more units must now post the caloric values in what they serve. Most have that info on their website too. Restaurants who want our business will provide that info even if they don’t have 20 units.

We need to be like the formerly obese people, now successful in weight control, who are studied by the National Weight Control Registry. They do not put anything in their mouths without knowing the caloric value. Eating without knowing the caloric cost is like charging up stuff you like at the mall without looking at the price tags. With either practice, disaster is the result.

So, start by getting to know the amount of calories that you are putting in your body. When you recover from the initial shock, you’ll be ready for the next step, which is to plan ahead. All formerly obese people who have become successful, plan ahead. They don’t eat spontaneously or wait until they are at the table with the menu of all those tempting things. They know ahead of time what they are going to order, and with the menus on the websites these days, it’s much easier than it was years ago.

That will get you started in the right direction. You can switch from my example of eating out to gain 50 pounds a year to losing 50 pounds this year. Believe me, it’s worth it!

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Is Obesity Acceptable?

Posted on September 19, 2016 | 3 comments

obesityaction_friendsandfamily_-374-6-47-59-pm
© OBESITY ACTION COALITION.
(First published in The Huffington Post)

Last week, an article in the Washington Post announced a new program of the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) to fight obesity bias. They want the media to change from portraying obesity in a negative unflattering light, which they are known to do. They want the media to use more positive images when portraying obese people and the OAC is providing them with free stock images to use when showing obese people. The photo with this article is an example of one of these images. As OAC’s James Zervios points out, the headless bodies with plates of junk food often used in the media promote a false stereotype about overweight people that is abusive as well as untrue. Many overweight people are hard-working citizens who eat healthy foods and are attentive to their health needs. They are not fat, lazy and stupid, an image the media is used to promoting.

At the same time there is a fat-acceptance movement you may have heard of that also fights bias and discrimination against overweight people and promotes acceptance of the condition as well as the people who have it.

In the Washington Post article, Zervios maintains that “Obesity is a disease whose sufferers are no different from those afflicted with breast cancer or asthma”. This leads many to take the position that there is nothing that can be done about it, and that people who are overweight should accept it.

Is Obesity Something we should Accept?

I am a clinical member of both the Obesity Action Coalition and The Obesity Society, an association of health professionals that treat obesity and its related medical conditions. I am also a behavioral therapist who solved my own 25-year obesity problem and helps others to do the same.

While I am a staunch supporter of efforts to fight obesity bias and discrimination, I disagree completely with Zervios’s position that obesity is a disease no different from breast cancer and asthma. Obesity can be reversed. By adopting habits of eating less, obese people lose weight and lose the medical problems they have because of it. It is not a matter of “perhaps” it can change. It will change, no if’s and’s or but’s. Cancer and asthma have no similar guaranteed way to get rid of the condition.

While creating change in habitual and addictive behavior can be difficult and complex, it can be done. There is no guarantee that the person can easily change, but it can be done. Like it is with alcohol and drug abuse, when the behavior changes, the problems caused by the behavior resolve. In 30 years, I have never had a patient not lose weight when they are able to eat less.

I and thousands of my patients, clients and readers have reversed our obesity and the medical complications of it. Please don’t let people think that being overweight and sick with it is acceptable. Don’t let them think that getting better is beyond their control. They need not be ashamed or abused because of it, but they need not stay overweight either. There is a sure-fire way to reverse the condition, unlike cancer and asthma.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He solved his own long-time weight problem, losing 140 pounds 30 years ago and has kept it off since. He is the author of The Anderson Method.

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Finding the Perfect Weight Loss Lunch

Posted on May 4, 2016 | 2 comments
The Anderson Method 250-calorie BLT!

The Anderson Method 250-calorie BLT!

This scrumptious BLT is one of the lunches I had regularly when I lost 140 pounds in 18 months 30 years ago. This is only one example in a whole repertoire of great meals I’ll describe below that maintain my success.

(This article first appeared in The Huffington Post)

When clients have asked me to tell them what to eat, I haven’t, because it distracts them from what they really need to do. The secret to success in permanent weight loss is in learning how to think differently and develop your own unique set of habits and preferences, with your own favorites. That’s why diets don’t work. We eventually return to our own preferences, the ways that made us overweight. I don’t give people diets because it’s not the diet that makes you successful. It’s the reprogramming technique I teach.

However, in order to dispute those who claim it’s impossible to have great meals without gaining weight or that you need to eat special concoctions or give up everything you like, I’m going to share some of my favorite meals that are not only delectable, but also keep me thin. We’ll start with lunch. We’ll cover breakfast and dinner another time.

Lunch can be the cause of obesity for many people and the main reason they fail at attempts to lose weight. If you’ve read my work, you know that the physical science of weight control is simple. Eat more calories than you burn, and you’ll get fat. Overeat and you gain weight, undereat and you lose. Getting ourselves to do this is the tricky part, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.

The reason lunch can be such a problem is that its easy to eat thousands of calories too much if you aren’t paying attention. Some of the salads at restaurants can be 1200 calories or more all by themselves. (Some women will gain weight if they eat more than 1500 calories per day!) A Whopper, fries and a coke can be 1500. Power lunches at fancy places can be 2000 calories. Same with pizza. No wonder it’s so easy to gain weight. Living large at lunch is one of the reasons we have an obesity epidemic.

My BLT shown above is only 250 calories. I make a great ham and cheese sandwich at only 270. How can that be, you say, with all that bread, mayo and bacon or ham and cheese? Easy. I use Publix reduced calorie bread at 40 calories a slice and Hellman’s low-fat mayo at 15 calories a tablespoon. Three slices of bacon is only 105 calories and ham is only 30 calories a slice. Those sandwiches look decadent and the gossips badmouth them, but they are a great deal for lunch. A Soft Beef Taco Supreme at Taco Bell is only 210 calories and a hamburg at McDonald’s is only 250. The good old-fashioned hot dog is only 250 calories, and mustard, relish and onions adds very little to it. Losing weight and keeping it off can be enjoyed with great tasting food if you decide to keep to a reasonable budget and make it a rule to never again give yourself permission to be a glutton at lunch. Don’t give yourself permission to get fat because everyone else is, or lie to yourself, telling yourself it will do no harm “just this once”. It will. To get that excess weight off and keep it off, you need to make it a habit to keep your calories within a certain budget.

One of the most important mind control techniques in behavior therapy is the simple act of planning ahead. It’s actually a form of self-hypnosis that makes success and self-control easier if you take the trouble to think ahead of what you’ll have and prepare for it. The law of expectancy is always at work in us unconsciously, and the old maxim is true: those who fail to plan are planning to fail.

If you’re eating at home, it’s easy to have those ingredients ready, but it can be done at work too, if you have a fridge and microwave. Eating at the office rather than going out or ordering in is easy and smart. It not only saves calories, but it saves you money and time too, eliminating the time to drive somewhere. At clinics I’ve worked at, I’d stock the kitchenette with the makings for sandwiches, as well as soups and Lean Cuisines, Healthy Choices, and other low calorie frozen meals. And the planning ahead I was referring to does not have to be rigid. Once you’ve learned enough about what’s possible and you’ve practiced enough, your planning can be as simple as committing to “no more than 250 calories”, or to one of the many lunch selections you know will fit into the plan.

Eating out can be more of a challenge, but very doable if you think ahead about how to do things. If you do the research, you’ll find that some of the fast food places have at least one item that will work. Look them all up on their Internet sites, so you’ll know what to order the next time you hit one. Fast food places can be a disaster if you just walk in and start ordering things that sound good. However, if you go on with a plan, you’ll be dropping pounds and dress sizes before you know it. A sub, burger or taco and a diet soda will work just fine.

If you go to nicer restaurants at business lunches, it can be very easy to go through several thousand calories if you approach it as “living large”. You’ll be better off all around by ordering a simple salad and have your own dressing packets, like Walden Farms zero-calorie dressings, ready to go in your bag. You’ll make an impression as a better business person than those who overindulge and are seen as careless and wasteful. For me and my clients, fine dining works well for dinner but is a nuisance at lunch.

There is no need to give up eating things you enjoy to lose weight. In fact, one of the keys to success is creating ways of eating that are more enjoyable than the old ways that made you overweight. When the food tastes good and you know it’s making you successful, you feel a whole lot better than feeling stuffed and knowing you just made things worse. When these new ways become your preferred habits, you’re set for life. And just as there are strategies to turn lunchtime from a problem to a solution, there are strategies that are just as effective for breakfast, dinner, weekend parties and holidays too.

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To Lose Weight, Think Like a Savvy Shopper

Posted on April 25, 2016 | 3 comments

New One Hundred Dollar Bills Fresh Burger

(First published in The Huffington Post)

To lose weight permanently, what you think is a lot more important than what you eat. Thinking about calories as if they were dollars will help you lose weight more easily, so start thinking like a savvy shopper. We can teach you this and a whole toolbox of techniques that will make weight control much easier and much more enjoyable. We psychotherapists call these techniques cognitive therapy techniques and self-hypnosis. But you can think of them as common sense. Here are some ways of thinking that will help:

Calories are good, not bad, just like money is good!

The problem comes when we spend too much, more than our budget allows. We’ll go bankrupt if we are careless and irresponsible with money. If we’re that way with calories, we’ll get fat. Either outcome is painful and entirely avoidable. If we have habits of living within the budgets, we can avoid losing our good credit and avoid being overweight too.

When you find out what your metabolic rate is, you’ll find that you get a very nice paycheck every week. A woman 5’6” with average activity habits burns about 2000 calories per day or about 14,000 calories a week. If you develop the right habits, you’ll find that you can create a lifestyle where you can eat just about everything you like, even go out to dinner and parties on a regular basis, and not gain weight.

If you have an average American income, and you’re savvy, you can probably afford to go out to a nice restaurant every week or so and spend a weekend at a resort every once in a while. But if you start going out to 5-star restaurants every night and staying at 5-star resorts every weekend, you’ll probably go bankrupt sooner rather than later and then lose your house if you don’t change your spending habits. It’s the same with your caloric spending habits. If you get 14,000 calories every week, you’ll find that you can live quite well on that and not have to give up eating the things you like and doing the things you like to do. However, you’ll find that, like money, you’ll break the bank and get fat if you start living high off the hog every day. Instead, I train clients to have weekday habits that are austere, which allows you to have more relaxed habits on the weekends, so you are not deprived and not going over your budget.

Look at the price tags.

What would happen if you just charged up everything you liked at the mall without looking at the price tags? At the fancy mall near me, you’d go broke before you even made it out the door. Who, besides billionaires, would ever even consider buying everything they liked without looking to see the cost? Yet that’s what most people do everyday with food. They have no idea what the caloric cost is of the things they normally eat. I know, because I have my clients eat normally the first week of the training, but keep an accounting of the calories. They are shocked! I’ve had clients get a “coffee” on the way to work and then find out they were spending 600 calories of their day’s budget even before they had lunch, a 1200 calorie salad at lunch. They were thinking they were cutting back, but in reality, they had been blowing their whole paycheck by noon!

People who are successful at permanent weight loss don’t eat without thinking. We don’t put anything in our mouths without knowing the calories that are in it. It’s just too easy to say “yes” to a snack like a friend’s whole grain muffin (how bad could it be?) and then find out you just blew 500 calories. Look at the caloric price tags, be savvy, and if you don’t know what something costs, don’t eat it. Think of the calories like dollars and remember what your budget is.

Develop the “comfort range” of your spending habits.

Have you noticed that you’ve developed a “comfort range” with your spending habits that unconsciously helps you to stay within your means? Certain restaurants feel right, but in some 5-star places, you are uncomfortable. You might consider the 5-star place way too expensive, except for perhaps a special anniversary. They are just outside of your comfort range. It’s the same with cars and other purchases. Your knowledge about your budget and what things cost automatically keeps you within your comfort range. The car models, stores or brand names that would break the bank just don’t feel right for you. You don’t even seriously consider them. It’s an automatic unconscious mechanism, a natural savviness that affects your behavior and makes it easier to manage it.

You can develop this same kind of savvy mechanism for your weight control when you program in all the information about your caloric budget and the caloric costs of the foods you like. With enough time and work put into the training, you’ll have an “app” in your brain that will help you eat right. After a while, you won’t even consider some of the things you used to eat all the time because they are so obscenely expensive. They will be as outside of your comfort zone as the 5-star restaurant with the $80 entrees, for every day dining.

Find the best bang for your buck (calorie).

It doesn’t take long for us to start seeing food in a whole new light. Some of the things we used to relish now look like a real bad deal. “What a rip-off!”, clients say about an Outback Blooming’ Onion at 2000 calories. “What a great deal!”, they’ll say about a Red Lobster shrimp cocktail at 130 calories. Foods start to look good or bad, depending on the cost in calories. Full-fat mayo looks like a real bad buy at 100 calories per tablespoon. It’s not worth the calories when you can use low-fat mayo at 15 calories. Vegetables start looking better than they ever have, a real bargain at 50 calories a cup compared with rice at 200.

You’ll start to get incredibly skilled at creating great meals with the highest satisfaction value for the least amount of calories. You’ll use fat-free half & half and Splenda in your coffee, trading in two cups of coffee in the morning at 130 calories for two at 30. You’ll make egg-substitute vegetable omelettes for 100 calories that are just as tasty as the old 400-calorie omelets. You’ll find excellent low-calorie salad dressing for your salads and zero-calorie spray “butter” on your piles of vegetables, next to your 5-oz. sirloin. From the outside looking in, it won’t appear you are eating any less, but you’ll have cut your day’s spending from 2500 calories to 1200, and you’ll be losing weight instead of gaining.

Give yourself a break. Make it automatic. Make it easy.

Diets don’t work because we do them for a while, if you can stand it, and then we go back to our regular habits. Sometimes we try to change for good, but the old ways are comfortable and automatic, and they come back on their own. Sometimes, we intend to go back to “normal” when we are done with the diet. Either way, we return to the very habits that made us overweight.

The key to success with permanent weight loss is trading in the fat-producing habits for fit-producing habits. And the key to that is using behavioral therapy techniques, to program in habits that are more satisfying than the old ones. It’s kind of like brainwashing.

That means that you need to eat what you like to lose weight, not what you don’t really like. That means you have to create ways that are more rewarding than the old ways, not less. Feeling deprived and punished is not going to help. Behavioral psychology teaches us that we will automatically be irresistibly drawn, crave, what tickles our fancy, so we need to learn to eat what we like in a way that feels better than the old way. That means we need to reprogram our brain to generate new feelings about the foods and behaviors we’ve been addicted to as well as the ones we’ve been avoiding.

There are many complex and demanding things that you now do every day without even thinking about them. All your morning routines, including driving to work, were things you probably had to work and concentrate on to learn, and now you can do them without even thinking. You can probably do your job now flawlessly with your eyes closed, yet it takes a person months and many mistakes to learn how to do it. If you are a savvy shopper, I’ll bet you know exactly where to go in your supermarket for everything you always buy, and know exactly whether the price is right. Behavioral technique can help you do the same thing with acquiring habits that will make you thinner, and with calories, it’s even easier. The prices never go up!

If you want to solve your weight problem, lose weight and keep it off, believe me, you can. Thousands have been successful, and the first thing they did was to start thinking differently about themselves and the food they’ve been eating. One great way is to start thinking about calories and your habits in a new savvy way. Be savvy. And start by getting my book, in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and iBook, if you haven’t already read it!

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Does Loving Yourself Lead to Weight Loss?

Posted on April 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

love yourself

(This article first appeared in The Huffington Post)

I’ll bet that you’ve heard that you must first love yourself to lose weight. So many of us hate being overweight, even hate ourselves for it, and we think that we need to lose weight to be able to like ourselves. But we’re told that we have it backwards, that to lose weight, we need to first love ourselves the way we are. Well, how is that possible when you don’t like yourself or if you hate yourself and what you’ve made of your life? How can you just decide, “I love me!” when everything inside you says it’s a lie? It’s impossible.

I don’t remember who first told me that I had to love myself the way I was, to love my fat body, as it was, in order to get better. It seemed crazy. She told me to hug my enormous thigh and say “I love you, thigh.” How could I do that? I hated it.

Soon after we are born, we discover that we must “measure up” to be OK, to be praised and rewarded. Often, when we don’t, we are scolded and punished. Then, later, we discover that to be accepted by our peers, we have to be a certain way, act a certain way, and look a certain way. Otherwise, we are rejected, or worse, teased and tormented. If we are good at “making the grade”, we are showered with acceptance and love, and assisted in life. If we don’t, we are punished by parents and teachers, and rejected, teased and tormented by our peers. Instead of being loved, we are not only disliked, but hated -scorned. We get abused rather than showered with affection and given opportunity and assistance by those in our world.

This is the system most of us learn. It is “the way things work” that we learn to deal with, and it never occurs to us to change it. How could we? It’s reality. It’s the way the world works.

So, we adopt this system ourselves. We judge everything we encounter, and if it measures up, we accept it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. If it’s really wonderful, we love it and shower it with praise and whatever we can give it. If it’s awful, we treat it with scorn, withhold our love, and maybe even trash it, kick it to the curb. This is how we regard everyone and everything we encounter. This is the way we think and treat everything in our lives — including ourselves.

It is the unusual person who encounters something ugly and rotten and hugs it, who forgives those who have committed the sins of our society. We want to punish! Sure, there are those who preach about loving our enemies and forgiving those who have committed the worst sins, but nobody except saints takes that seriously. Those who break the rules and fail to live up to our standards deserve to be scorned and punished. That’s just the way it is. They deserve it. And in our culture that worships physical beauty and success, there is hardly anything worse than a big fat failure. And that’s what I was at age 33 at 320 pounds, a diet failure for 25 years.

The weight loss industry preys on people who hate being overweight and often hate themselves for failing to fix it. Most people believe that the way to earn their self-respect and like themselves is to correct this flaw, to lose the weight and become a weight loss success. Then they would be able to like themselves. And this idea is promoted and accepted. And the truth is that it is wonderful to become successful at it. You feel so much better about yourself. It can’t be denied. However, to maintain the belief you must succeed in order to be OK and lovable, that only success and beauty should be loved while ugliness and failure should be hated, is a trap. It’s a trap I was caught in until I changed what I believed.

The problem is, we don’t take good care of things we hate. We throw them out, or under the bus. However, we bend over backwards to take care of the things we love. If we have an adorable little puppy that we love, we give it everything it needs and more. We lavish it with love and toys. But if we are given a snarling mangy stray to take care of, we are more apt to take it to the pound and leave it. That’s the way we’ve become. It’s normal. It doesn’t make us the devil, but the truth is, we don’t help things we hate recover from whatever affliction they suffer. When we confront ourselves and our faults and failures, we tend to hate. We are more apt to beat ourselves up or let ourselves go without what we need to get better.

If we are to thrive and get better, to recover from our flaws and failures, we need to be nurtured and helped, not neglected and abused. That loving behavior has to come from a conscious decision to be loving and forgiving when confronting those things that are not beautiful and successful, instead of judging and punishing. That doesn’t mean that you let the mangy stray sleep in your bed and bite you, but that you realize there is probably a reason it’s the way it is and you start treating it right instead of abusing it, and you see that it gets what it needs to thrive. That means that you make a conscious decision to not only be loving and forgiving to others, but to yourself as well, to love yourself like the puppy, not because you earned it, but because it needs it to be OK, because you need it to be OK.

In my early thirties, I had failed so many times at permanent weight loss that I gave up on the idea. I left that dream behind. But then I bought into this way of thinking that embraced love and forgiveness instead of judging and punishing. I decided that not only others needed to be loved regardless of their conditions, but that I also was worthy of that consideration, even though a big fat failure. I decided to love that body, the poor thing, and be kind about my faults and failures instead of mad and mean. Coincidently, I started being able to make changes and get better.

It’s been 30 years now since I lost my excess 140 pounds, which is a wonderful thing. But I’ve come to know that the more important change I’ve made is the way I think and the way I am on the inside. The outside counts for something, but it’s not the end-all, be-all, and often times we can’t change those conditions we find ourselves in. What makes us better is deciding to love ourselves no matter what. We need that. And when we do that, sometimes we open the door to miracles.

Read my book and maybe a miracle will open for you!

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