Tag Archives: counseling

Will Losing Weight Make You Happy?

Posted on February 6, 2015 | 3 comments

thanks-weight-scale
I know that you’ve heard that losing weight is not the key to happiness and will not solve all your problems. But, after 30 years working with thousands of clients and readers losing weight, I can say without reservation, that they become incredibly happy. As they shed the pounds, my clients show an amazing transformation in their mood and quality of life. To describe them as ecstatic would not be an exaggeration in most cases. There is no question that losing weight makes people happy.

What is happiness? Happiness is a state of being. It’s the experience of joy that you’ve known when something terrific happened, like getting that job you were hoping for. Do you remember how great you felt when you finally got the job you wanted, or that great car you had your eye on, or when you went on the best vacation of your life? You were tremendously happy, right? That’s what I see in my clients every week. It’s what my readers write in the mail I get from my them. It’s what I feel everyday as I practice the method that helped me solve my weight problem 30 years ago, losing 140 pounds after 25 years of failing at diets. It’s what my clients feel every day they practice what I teach them. Yes, losing weight will make you happy if that’s something you’ve struggled with.

before and after #2

This is me before and after my weight loss, and believe me, I am much happier, much of which is due to my successful weight loss. (Read about my method in my book, The Anderson Method.)

This is not to say that if you are unhappy weight loss will fix everything. It is not the magic key to happiness.

While weight loss is my specialty, I am a licensed mental health counselor who has helped people with all sorts of problems, from severe and persistent mental illness to the more common problems people face, like depression, anxiety, stress disorders, and adjustments to traumatic experiences like the losses of loved ones, relationships, career, or hopes and dreams.

If you are overweight and unhappy, I’m sure losing weight will make you happy as you succeed, but shedding some weight will not result in long-term happiness if it is done the wrong way or it is the only thing you seek to change. In fact, a focus on weight loss alone can make one more unhappy if it is approached improperly.

For instance, if you don’t like yourself, if you are mad at yourself for one reason or another, you may think that losing weight will fix that. While solving your weight problem permanently would certainly help your self-esteem, fixing your relationship with yourself has got to occur as a priority above and before anything to do with weight. We need to love ourselves regardless of circumstance, fat or fit, with our successes and our failures. That’s more important than weight loss. That has more to do with long term happiness. When we adopt a habit of compassion and forgiveness of people for their human failings instead of passing a judgement of eternal damnation, healing can happen. And that goes for us as well as others. Without it, we don’t get better. Without it, we get stuck in the disorder.

If we go about losing weight the wrong way, we won’t learn how to change ourselves permanently, and we’ll gain it back. In that case, we’ll be making ourselves miserable instead of happy. I know, because I did this for 25 years before I developed the ability to succeed. We need to equip ourselves with scientific, medical and behavioral truths instead of nonsense. If we keep ourselves ignorant of the truth, our head filled with myths, we’ll have no hope of ever solving the problem. Using diets and plans that are not science-based, and plans that are not focused on making permanent changes in behavior and habit, is a prescription for misery instead of happiness.

You may have to undergo a conversion experience, replacing some of your most closely held beliefs with more worthy ones, based on whole health and science rather than diet gossip and folklore.

Here are a few examples of the belief swapping that needs to be a part of this conversion:

1) The way a person looks and how much they weigh is not the measure of them. We need to stop believing that the way a person’s body is made makes one better than another. It’s a superficial and ugly way to think. We need to value and respect all people, regardless of how they look and what they weigh.

2) We need to stop believing that self-control and other personality characteristics are a simple matter of character and “will-power.” It’s a mistake to believe that all people have the same drives to deal with. It’s foolish to believe that we really know what causes our feelings and behavior. There are unknown forces at play. It’s wrong to believe that we are in charge and we simply choose our feelings, desires and other inner experience. Multiple powerful factors cause our feelings that result in a huge appetite or no appetite, attraction to men or attraction to women, preferences in music or sports and other characteristics of our personality. We are born into a body and brain that we did not choose or create ourselves, and then we have to figure out how to live in it. However, we do not have to be helpless passengers in this journey of life, taking no responsibility ourselves. Some things, we can change. Some of us have a more difficult time changing than others, while some seem to have been born into perfect conditions. Good for them. I was not one of them. However, I do not have to be a helpless victim of my unique circumstances and neither do you. Change is possible. We may have it harder than others, but blaming ourselves or anyone else for it is as unhelpful as using our unique characteristics as excuses. The solution is to accept the hand we’ve been dealt and learn how to make our lives and ourselves better.

3) We need to stop believing that failures and a history of quitting makes us defective. I heard a coach say, “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” Hearing that made me sick. I had a history of failing and quitting just about everything that was really hard. In time, I came to realize that what the coach said was not true. Sure, people who were able to persist, who could tolerate the tough trials, did better. But I learned that persistence is not a matter of having never quit. Persistence is getting up and working at it again. Look at how a baby learns to walk. They keep falling and going at it again. Sometimes, they quit trying and go back to crawling. But they keep trying to stand and walk. After a while, they are falling less, and eventually, not at all. It’s the same with finding and doing what makes permanent weight loss. Like a baby, people who are successful fail and quit many times. But they keep getting back up, and eventually, they are doing well enough to be fit for life.

If you are overweight, I guarantee that losing weight will make you happy. I encourage you to go for it. I encourage you to relish the joy and happiness it gives you. At the same time, I guarantee that there are other things you need to change about yourself, and with that, you have a chance at lasting happiness, not just a flash in the pan.

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Say “Yes!” to Goals for 2015, Not Resolutions

Posted on January 1, 2015 | Leave a comment

before and after #2This is me, before and after I finally discovered how to succeed with permanent weight loss.

As the New Year begins every year, the subject of New Year’s resolutions comes up, and with it, comes a flurry of opinions.

Is it a good idea or a bad idea to make resolutions?

Most of us have a history of making resolutions, most having to do with diets and exercise. Then we promptly fail to keep them and we feel like defeated failures in the very first week of the new year. It’s an awful feeling I know too well from the 25 years I struggled against obesity, until I finally discovered the solution, lost 140 pounds and kept it off for 30 years now.

So, here’s my take: don’t make resolutions, which are promises to do or not do something, ever, that you’ll most likely be unable keep. Sticking perfectly to your resolution is unlikely, and with most of us, the failure causes us to say “the heck with it” and give up trying all together.

Instead, sit down and write out some hopes and goals for your life, and then for the year. What have you got to lose? You won’t be any worse off if they don’t happen.

I personally know of and teach the incredible, almost mystical power of having written goals. I talk about this in my book, The Anderson Method, and I lead counseling clients through a detailed training process in goals orientation that yields almost miraculous results.

I was pretty much an undisciplined wreck as a young person, constantly making vows in the morning to do one thing or another, then losing my motivation and belief by noon most days. I often could not follow through on just about anything that didn’t feel good, whether it was writing a letter, starting a diet, applying for a job or even doing something as simple as making a phone call. By the time I was 30, I was over 300 lbs., smoking like a chimney, in terrible health, without a college degree, a successful career or the financial means to live a nice life.

However, I was a good (though painfully pokey) student of psychology. I had become a self-trained scholar in behaviorism, the psychology that studies how we acquire and dismiss habit, experience motivation and shape the behavior that produces the results of our lives. Among the many lessons I learned is that we are naturally goal-seeking, goal-oriented creatures. This is why I want to encourage you to embrace your hopes and dreams and write down your goals. You see, it is our nature to select goals to attain and work to attain them. If we don’t do this consciously, we do it unconsciously. If we haven’t consciously chosen goals to attain, we unconsciously select from those that are suggested to us, like those that our parents, bosses, peers and the advertisers suggest, or we simply act to satisfy the call of our pleasure-seeking reward systems and do what feels good, avoiding what doesn’t. If we are not acting on attaining the goals we’ve chosen to aspire to, we end up acting on other impulses, seeking toys and treats that seem to promise the satisfaction we need in life. We end up working, watching, texting, spending and eating our lives away as if those things will fulfill us. The problem is that they don’t. The satisfaction is short-lived, and we end up needing more, overworked, overweight and poorer for it.

I had to hear the advice to write down my goals for years before I started actually doing it, but when I did (together with using other Therapeutic Psychogenic technique) my life completely changed.

I solved my lifetime obesity problem and lost 140 pounds permanently. I not only completed a college education, but I completed graduate school training in clinical counseling and psychotherapy. I obtained the Florida Medical Quality Assurance license to be a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and established a successful private practice. I wrote a successful book. I created a rewarding lifestyle of living, boating and fishing in one of the most beautiful places on earth. All of these things were only pipedreams when I first summoned up the courage to admit to myself that I would actually want those things to happen. That happened when I wrote them down.

When I first wrote them down, I actually thought they were too unrealistic to think of as goals, but I was encouraged to admit my dreams and goals. What would I like to have happen in my life, if by some miracle they could happen? There was nothing to lose in confessing my dreams.

I don’t want to suggest that this was all I did to succeed at weight loss and the other accomplishments. There are lots of other pieces of the Therapeutic Psychogenic mechanism that I used and teach. Like the parts of a car, you need them all assembled to be able to get anywhere. Leave important parts out and you go nowhere. But writing down your goals is one of the most important, the foundation and starting point that everything else grows from.

I make this point today because you will hear over and over again that you should not make resolutions, and some people will hear “don’t set goals.” That would be a tragedy. A friend’s mother thought that if you didn’t hope for too much, you wouldn’t be disappointed. However, she didn’t hope for much, didn’t get much, and she was still disappointed! I agree that making resolutions is a bad idea, but I think writing down your goals is absolutely neccessary if you want your life to get better.

I also make this point today because you’ll also hear that it’s a good idea to make resolutions. But that sets you up for an almost certain sense of failure when you break your vow, which results in a loss of hope and a reluctance to try again to make things better. Again, I agree that making resolutions is a bad idea, but I think writing down your goals is absolutely neccessary if you want your life to get better.

Take the time this week to go off by yourself with a pad of paper and make some lists.

Make a dreams list. If all things were possible, what would you like to have happen in your life? Then make a five year goals list. Five years from now, where would you like to be? Make a one year goals list. If you were on your way to the five year goals, where would you be and what would you have done at the end of this coming year? What do you want to make sure you do this year? Want to lose weight? Eat healthier? Take a vacation? Write them all down. Things that take effort and initiative don’t happen by accident. Accidents happen by accident. So be deliberate in telling your mind what you want it to do. Don’t leave it up to chance, and certainly don’t leave it up to what others want of it.

When I wrote down my goals, it’s not like they all came true overnight. I would write out what to do this month, this week and today. Most days, weeks and months I only made a little progress, sometimes none. Most years I made only a bit of progress on some. But I started getting better. And look what happened! The year I started writing out goals, things got better, and one year has been better than the last. What if that started happenning for you?

So, forget about making resolutions, especially to stick to a diet. If your goal is to be a certain weight at the end of the year or to lose a certain amount of weight, what do you think your goal for next week should be? Everybody says “I know what I need to do, I just can’t do it.” I guarantee you you don’t know.

What you need to know is not about diets and exercise routines. It’s about your mind and how to retrain it. So, if your goal for the year is to lose weight and keep it off, your goal for this coming week should be to read my book!

You can make your life better. I can teach you how . It starts with a vision of what you’d like it to be, a picture with the details described. Start using written goals. You’ll be surprised what can happen.

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Should the U.S. Sue Food Companies for the Costs of the Obesity Epidemic?

Posted on October 21, 2014 | Leave a comment

Scales of Justice

In November of 1998, the five largest tobacco companies in the U.S. agreed to pay 46 states over $200 billion to reimburse them for the Medicaid costs due to cigarette smoking. And that was just the beginning. Over the years, the tobacco companies have paid out billions more to the people they hurt, both medical expenses and punitive damages, and there’s no end in sight.

Beginning in the 1950s they started being sued for the health problems they created and in 1964, the surgeon general made it clear that tobacco was the cause of disease and death. They have been found guilty in Federal Court of racketeering, conspiring to lie to the public about the health dangers and addictive quality of their product as well as secretly working to increase the addictive power of their product and hook kids. They have not only been forced to pay for the medical problems they have caused but they have also been forced to stop trying to hook kids and lie about the health dangers of the products they make. The handwriting was on the wall. Their business was threatened with extinction. What did they do? They went into the food business. Really.

In the 1980s, R.J. Reynolds (Camels, Winstons, Salem, etc,) bought Nabisco (Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Ritz Crackers, etc. ) and Phillip Morris (Marlboro, Virginia Slims and others -the largest tobacco company in the world) bought Kraft Foods (Kraft Cheese, Maxwell House coffee, Kool-Aid, Oscar Mayer and many other products you are familiar with). Then they bought General Foods Corp.

The companies that sell you food have been taken over by the same characters that figured out how to make a fortune getting you “consumers” addicted to a substance that they knew made you sick and could eventually kill you in a horrible way. They aggressively and secretly worked in labs to make the addiction even more powerful than it naturally was. They even went after kids to sell their addictive poison. It’s not a theory. It’s proven fact. And now, they’re doing the same thing with food.

In a 2013 article in the New York Times, Michael Moss reveals that in 1999, “11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies” gathered to discuss what to do about the obesity epidemic. It was the only item on the agenda as they confronted the facts about the emerging obesity epidemic and the health dangers of the food they were selling, presented by the scientists who had been working to make their products addictive. What did they decide to do? Nothing, as far as combatting the epidemic they were creating. Instead, one of the leaders encouraged all to push onward in their efforts to hook people and sell more product. Moss writes, “The meeting was remarkable for the insider admission of guilt” and “What I found, over four years of research and reporting (revealed in Moss’s book, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us), was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked.”

In the 15 years since that meeting, we have learned a great deal about food addiction, the role that food companies have played in creating the obesity epidemic, and the costs of the epidemic to our people and nation. A lot has changed in attitudes about food addiction. When I began writing about and treating food addiction and obesity in the early 1980s, the scientific and medical community ridiculed the idea of food addiction. Now, the research is flooding in, and like climate change, only the most stubborn reality deniers are arguing.

The CDC officially identified obesity as an epidemic over ten years ago and things have gotten worse since. The CDC provides us data showing that over third of our adult population is clinically obese, and the medical costs to the nation are over $147 billion annually, more than the costs due to smoking.

Will the country and the states be able to sue the food companies and make them pay for the medical cost due to the epidemic they have created? Will we be able to force them to stop making food hyper-addictive and stop targeting kids? Will we be able to force them to fund programs to educate people and help them to solve their obesity problems? Why not? We did it with the tobacco companies. We won those suits because it was found that the tobacco companies were responsible for intentionally causing us harm and expense for profit. How is the food industry any different with what we are finding?

It will take years and hard work to get this done, as it did with tobacco. And it will take elected leaders who are working for the people instead of the corporations. But we found extraordinary leaders in the late congressman from California, Henry Waxman and the late Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, and scores more to fight this scourge in congress and states across the union. Who will step up to take on the food industry like those heroes who took on tobacco?

Click here to read the whole story on The Huffington Post.

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How to Know When Weight Loss Surgery Is The Right Thing to Do

Posted on July 31, 2014 | Leave a comment

Bariatric surgery

When I was twelve, after countless days of torment over my weight and inability to control it, I would have given anything to have the surgery that would solve the problem for me. I’m glad it didn’t happen. I went on to discover how to lose weight permanently while enjoying eating more than ever, lost over 100 pounds after years of dieting failure, and went on to teach others how, and to write the book about it, The AndersonMethod.

Some think of me as the weight loss counselor’s counselor who is against bariatric surgery, so people are surprised to learn that I’ve recommended bariatric surgery to a number of clients.

In fact, I’ve worked hard to convince some people that weight loss surgery was something they needed to be open to and look into. At times, I’ve told them I think it must be done ASAP. And while my weight loss method is a behavioral approach, teaching people how to form the habits and unconscious behavior to achieve permanent weight loss, I work with many people who have had the surgery. That’s because, even with the surgery, you still need to change your eating habits and change them for life. More on that later.

A few years ago, bariatric surgery started becoming a big business with magazine ads and billboards advertising the different competing hospitals’ surgical weight loss programs. Smiling doctors and attractive stories enticed people. Free seminars offered all your answers. Before and after pictures and stories excited anyone who has dreamed of solving their weight problem. It really bothered me because I knew that lots of people would be drawn to this and choose it, thinking it would relieve them of the need to change their eating habits. They thought that the surgery would be easier than counseling in behavioral therapy, a way to solve the problem for many without the surgery, not to mention being a small fraction of the cost. Many would ignore the risks and downsides of the surgery. They would choose not to consider that they would need to learn how to change their habits anyway and that many people who lost weight with the surgery had not kept it off. I know that weight loss surgery is not the right thing for most of these overweight people.

So, if I’m so sure it’s the wrong thing in many cases, what makes me think it’s the right thing sometimes? The main factor that leads me to advise people to have the surgery is emergency.

Sometimes, the threat from their obesity is so dangerous that life is at stake and there is no certain way to restore hope and eliminate the risk other than the surgery. Simply said, we’ve run out of time. There is no more time to depend on methods that are not absolutely guaranteed to produce immediate dramatic weight loss to prevent further deterioration we may not recover from.

The cases where I’ve prescribed surgery all involve clients who have made sincere heroic efforts, but have been unable to overcome the forces that prevent them from losing weight. They have all reached the point where they have given up hope that they will ever be able to lose weight. Now, let me be clear, it’s normal to become hopeless, even regularly, for people who try to lose weight, but in these high-risk cases, the hopelessness spirals them downward to a deterioration they might not recover from. With most of us, after a while, we are able to see things differently, learn more, and resume the work to get control of the weight and eventually succeed.

What is this deterioration that I say is so dangerous? In some cases, it is mobility. They are just not able to move around without great pain and difficulty, reducing their movement while destroying their spirit. With some, it is a profound hopelessness where nothing but misery and an early death is imaginable, driving them further down a black hole that is dangerous in itself. Some are so medically compromised with dangerous heart conditions and diabetes that they are a ticking time bomb and time is running out. Nothing has worked and they are getting worse.

In all these cases, as soon as the decision to go ahead with the surgery is made, hope is restored. They are able to believe, without doubt, that they will be able to lose weight, because it is the new physical condition, the alteration of their gut, that will cause them to lose weight. They don’t have to depend solely on their own efforts.

Another characteristic that may be present in those I’ll recommend for Bariatric surgery is an unusually powerful eating drive that I am certain is biologically based. It is a drive so strong, like that associated with the worst addictive drugs, that we are unable to overcome it, even with the best behavioral interventions we employ. With most people, we are able to answer the cravings in a way that overpowers them, and also employ methods that will reduce or eliminate them. In these worst-case scenarios, the people are unrelentingly tormented by these drives that cannot be overcome. The surgery acts as an additional tool in their toolbox that strengthens their ability to manage their eating, physically limits what they can process and absorb, and may have an important impact on the production of hormone, as we know it does related to diabetes, that influences eating drive and behavior.

How has it worked? I’m happy to say that I am hearing “I’m doing great! I have my life back, better than ever” more often than ever, more often than when I only offered behavioral therapy in my weight loss counseling work. My clients who were spiraling down are getting better, having hope. They are able to apply the behavioral techniques with increased effectiveness. Like my other successful clients, they are mobile again, with less pain and discomfort, ridding themselves of the diabetes and high blood pressure and the medicines they needed to treat them. They are happier with themselves and their lives. If you have been chronically overweight and unable to achieve the weight loss you want, rest assured that it can be done. Your habits will have to change for life, but that does not have to be by sheer force of will alone. There is a whole body of behavioral technique that I teach, that can be learned, that makes behavior change possible.

But, if you have done all that, learned all you can from me and tried your best, and things are getting worse and you are running out of time, weight loss surgery might be right for you. So says the weight loss counselor’s counselor who people think is totally against bariatric surgery.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He is the creator of “Therapeutic Psychogenics”, which helped him lose 140 pounds permanently thirty years ago after years of obesity and dieting failure. He has written a book about it, The Anderson Method, and he is teaching these techniques to individuals and therapists all over the country.

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“Health IQ With Heidi Godman” Examines The Anderson Method

Posted on April 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

 

On Monday, 4/15, I was on “Health IQ with Heidi Godman“, her new one-hour talk show, to talk about permanent WEIGHT LOSS and The Anderson Method for Permanent Weight Loss. Joining me were client Rennie Carter, who lost 50 pounds four years ago, and Rita Young, LMHC, who lost 35 pounds and went on to become trained as a provider of The Anderson Method.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A PODCAST OF THE RADIO SHOW

Heidi is a highly respected medical journalist, currently the Executive Editor of the Harvard Health Letter, former medical editor for ABC7, and a journalism fellow for the American Academy of Neurology.

Please listen to the podcast by clicking on the link at the bottom of this post, visit her website, WSRQ website, home of Health IQ with Heidi Godman, and wish her success in taking her show into national syndication. The show is broadcast every weekday, 3-4pm EST. If you are in another time zone, you need to account for that.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A PODCAST OF THE RADIO SHOW

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