Tag Archives: diet

Why Your Company Should Help Employees With Their Weight Problem

Posted on January 4, 2017 | Leave a comment
weight loss wellness programs

photo: obesity action.org

Most wellness programs approach weight control with exercise and nutrition programs, which don’t address the underlying causes of and solutions to your employees’ weight problem. Helping them with a clinically sound behavioral solution will help them lose weight and be healthier, and will also help them to be better problem-solvers and goal attainers.

Why Your Company Needs to Help Employees With Their Weight Problem:

1) Weight management is the single most important issue in an employee’s health. Excess weight and obesity is the single greatest cause of preventable disease and premature death in the American workforce. It affects every aspect of their health and well-being.

2) They don’t know what to do to solve the problem. They may think they do and you may too, but chances are, you don’t. Neither do most physical trainers and dieticians. That’s because for most people, it’s a behavioral disorder, similar to an addiction or gambling problem. Just knowing what’s got to change and even wanting to change is not enough. Intelligence, good character and “will power” are not enough. There are other powers at work, and to overcome them, you need to know how. That’s what behavioral therapy training teaches.

3) Because many health problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue and mobility impairment improve greatly with weight loss, your employees who lose weight will exhibit more energy, positive attitude and higher productivity, as well as less illness, diminished productivity and absenteeism.
A sound behavioral approach, including pyschoeducation and training in cognitive behavior techniques, will help them become better managers of their emotions and attitudes and the behavior related to them.

4) The problem-solving, time management, stress management and goal-setting skills learned will be applicable to all the problems and objectives they have, on and off the job. They will become better at handling problems and getting things done.

5) The improved health, sense of well-being, self-confidence, self-esteem and personal mastery will make them more effective and motivated on a long term basis.

6) The biggest reason to help them is that they need the help and there are few able to give it, other than your company. And it’s the right thing to do. You’ll be proud and thankful that you made it happen.

By all means, promotion of exercise, gym memberships and nutrition classes are a great benefit to the employees who take advantage of them, but the very best way to help overweight and obese employees is to give them access to comprehensive behavioral approaches to weight management.

This article first published at ThriveGlobal.com

Leave a comment

Posted in Will Losing Weight Make Me Happy?

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

How to Lose Weight and Still Eat Everything You Like.

Posted on January 1, 2017 | 7 comments

pizza-junk-food-600

Most people think you have to deny yourself your favorite foods and stick to a rigid diet to lose weight. On the contrary, the key to learning how to lose weight permanently is learning how to eat and enjoy everything you like in the right way, not making yourself go without. You even learn how to “splurge” on the weekend without gaining weight. This is not only possible, but is absolutely necessary if you want to lose weight permanently.

(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.)

I was overweight and obese my entire life, well over 300 pounds at times and a miserable failure at diets and weight loss plans. I had given up more times than you can count. Fortunately, I kept looking for an answer and at the age of thirty-three, I finally learned how to lose weight for good and lost 140 pounds at a pretty fast clip. I’ve kept the weight off pretty easily for over thirty years now, and I eat everything I like. I don’t eat diet food and I don’t exercise like a health nut. I’m a Licensed Counselor now, I’ve helped thousands to succeed like I have, and I’ve written a popular and respected book about it, The Anderson Method, available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

The truth is that there are no “bad” foods or “bad” calories. Managed healthfully, they are all good! I eat everything I like, and I’ve learned how to lose weight while going out to dinner, to parties, on vacation and how to have drinks and desserts and still lose weight pretty quickly. Here’s why and how it works:

If, over a month’s period of time, you’ve eaten fewer calories than you’ve burned in normal activities, regardless of what you’ve eaten and when you’ve eaten it, you’ll lose weight. You’ll lose weight even if you’ve eaten all your favorite foods, even if they are the things that the “diet experts” say you can’t eat.

If you’ve been listening to diet nonsense on TV, in the magazines and at lunch, you may be skeptical of this, but this is science. It’s easy to verify at any university or college. Your body doesn’t operate on a 24 hour schedule. A five foot four inch woman needs an average of approximately 1400 to 1800 calories per day, depending on the individual, and will not gain weight if she doesn’t exceed that. However, if she has habits where she averages that most of the time, and exceeds it only occasionally, which is very easy, she’ll get overweight and constantly gain weight! If you’re a normal American, this has probably been happening to you.

Instead of thinking of it as a 1800 calorie per day daily budget, think 12,600 calories per week. If you keep your weekdays at 1200, you’d have to eat more than 3800 calories per day on the weekends to gain weight! Keeping your weekdays austere gives you the ability to fit in anything without going “over budget”. A piece of cake is about 350 calories. A glass of wine is about 100. A normal serving of lasagna is about 500. If you think you can’t fit those things in on a day with a budget of 1800, we need to talk about that.

However, getting these new habits in place isn’t a matter of “will power” or “just making up your mind”. There is a scientific method in how to lose weight and keep it off, but it is not so much the science of nutrition as it is the science of psychology and behavioral medicine. Will power and self discipline were never within my grasp before I discovered the methods I teach my clients, the methods of Behavioral Medicine I call Therapeutic Psychogenics.

Reprogramming habits is the result of using these therapeutic techniques, methods of behavioral therapy. Once the habits are in place, we get a different result. We become and stay the weight we want to be. You’ve seen other people do it, those people who seem to eat just like you or worse and stay slim. You can do it too! Now, we eat only our favorite foods. We waste no calories on mediocre food. Our “diet” can include every kind of meat, potatoes, pasta, sauce, wine, drinks and even desserts that you can think of, as long as they are good enough for the calories they “cost”. We deny ourselves nothing.

There is a proven way to “reprogram” your habits so the calories come out right and it becomes automatic and habitual, even easy to maintain for many. Learning how to lose weight permanently is not impossible. It’s just work, and not hard work at that.

You don’t have to live a miserable life of diet food and torturous exercise to solve your weight problem. In fact, permanent weight loss is the result of learning a more pleasurable way of living that includes some of your most cherished foods and activities, a way that becomes habitual and normal for you. You can even become one of those infuriating people who seem to eat all the wrong things and “have no problem”. Read my book and you’ll truly find out how to lose weight.

7 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to Stay Focused on Your Weight Loss Goals in 2017

Posted on December 27, 2016 | 2 comments

I’m asked all the time, “What finally made you decide to solve your weight problem?” as if it didn’t bother me being overweight for 25 years. The truth is that I sincerely wanted to solve my problem when I was 12! But I wasn’t successful until 20 years later. It took me that long to learn what I needed in order to be successful.
Bill in 1983 and 2005

(William Anderson, author of The Anderson Method, Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss, in print and audiobook.)

Wanting, even with all your heart, to lose weight does not make it happen, as anyone with a stubborn weight problem knows.

Hopefully, it won’t take you 20 years to learn what I learned. You can learn it from me!

For my first 30 years, I was overweight and out of control, more than 300 pounds as an adult. Only in my early 30s was I finally able to succeed, losing 140 pounds and becoming my ideal body weight. I’ve maintained it handily since. Now I help other people and I wrote a book, now an eBook and an audiobook, about what I eventually learned that made me successful. Here are a few of the most important things, five key requirements to make 2017 the year you solve your weight problem for good:

1) You must make it the priority in your life.

You need to decide that being healthy in body, mind and spirit is more important than anything else and that your weight problem must be solved. Losing weight must become your No. 1 one concern. More important than your job. More important than your favorite pastimes, clubs, hobbies or comforts. You must become like a zealot who forsakes all else, a soldier in the field where losing this battle means losing everything. Nothing else can stand in the way of doing what you need in your effort to solve your weight problem.

Some may criticize this as being unreasonable and off-centered. I understand their criticism, but for most of us, this is one of those things where you will not make it unless you are totally devoted. To enjoy all of those other things you cherish, you’ve got to get this right. Nothing less than total dedication will do. It’s like wanting to make it to the top in a music, sports or business career. Nothing else can get in the way of doing what you need to do to succeed. It cannot take a back seat to anything else, cast aside when something else “comes up” as if it were more important. Controlling your weight is more important.

2) You must respect the science that tells us that we need to eat fewer calories than we burn to lose weight. We must accept the fact that we need to develop habits where we consistently eat within our caloric “budget” to keep it off.

There is no mystery to the science of weight control. It has not changed in eons. Eat too many calories and you get fat. Eat fewer than you burn and you burn it off. Accepting this reality does not by itself solve the problem, but there is no hope until you do. Hoping for a way around this fact will prevent you from ever succeeding. There is no way around this, no magic pill or surgery that will relieve you of having to limit your caloric intake. Fight this reality and you’ll never succeed. Accept it, and you’re on the path to success. In over 20 years, I have never had a client not lose weight when they eat the way I teach them.

3) You must learn how to train your mind to program yourself and master your habits, desires, impulses and feelings. The idea that your behavior and feelings are a matter of just making up your mind or wanting it badly enough is a fallacy. We are not born with well-developed “will power” and conscious control over the things that go on in our mind and body. In fact, most of what goes on is unconscious and a product of conditioning and programming that we were not even aware of. Habits and impulses were not chosen and they can seem to have a life of their own beyond your control. However, you can learn the programming and conditioning techniques discovered in behavioral and cognitive psychology as well as the ideo-dynamic phenomena that hypnotherapies use. The techniques I teach in my method are not unknown to science and behavioral medicine, but we are not born knowing them. They must be learned.

4) Make your goal the development of new permanent habits, rather than weight loss. Don’t focus so much on pounds but rather on the way you are living.

The most common approach to weight loss is doing something out of the ordinary for a while, like eating a special diet or going on an exercise crusade, and then going back to “normal” after a while. This is self-defeating. Even if we lose the weight we want, the “normal” that we have learned is what makes people fat, so we’ll just put it back on.

We are suckers for these diets and schemes because usually, we don’t want to change our habits. We are fond of doing the things we do, snacking the way we do, enjoying our favorite foods and restaurants and not having to think about it. We don’t want to give those things up. We’ve tried and we couldn’t do it or it was so miserable we gave up the idea.

However, we don’t have to give up enjoying food. In fact, one of the keys of reprogramming is that the new behavior must be satisfying. I enjoy food now more than I did when I was overweight. I eat all my favorite foods, don’t deny myself any food I really want, and enjoy it more. However, it is different than the way I used to eat. But just wanting and “willing” yourself to change habits is not the way it’s done. There are reprogramming techniques you need to use. The first step is to realize that our goal needs to be a change in our habitual behavior. When that happens, the weight comes off automatically. Focusing on weight loss instead of a change in yourself and your habits will not work.

5) You must be honest and sincere. I used to say things like “no matter what I do, I can’t lose weight.” That’s crazy of course. If I somehow got myself to eat very little, I’d lose weight. If I kept it up long enough, I’d starve to death. People who don’t have food in the Sudan are not fat. I was telling myself nonsense, lying to myself.

I used to say, “This won’t matter” if I cheated or “I just don’t care anymore” when my self-control flagged. Neither was really true. Everything counts. When I got discouraged and caved, I cried “uncle” and gave up in that moment, but I never stopped caring. I never stopped hating obesity and wanting something better. I still cared. Saying, “It doesn’t matter” was a lie.

Behavioral science teaches us that what we say to ourselves affects how we feel and how we act in an almost magical or mystical way. When we tell ourselves this nonsense, we are literally programming ourselves to overeat and become overweight, just as if we were using hypnotherapy to gain weight. When we say, “I just can’t lose weight,” we are using cognitive therapy techniques to make ourselves feel hopeless and depressed and self-hypnosis to unconsciously sabotage any efforts to succeed.

Changing the way we think and talk is essential to reversing obesity. Getting honest and serious, truly sincere about what we want, is one of the most important keys.

So, what do you think? Can you say, “yes” to these five key requirements? If you can’t, and you are a person who has been overweight and unable to fix it, you now know where you need to start to make changes. We are not going to solve this problem by accident. We need to be very intentional and meet these requirements. If you meet them now, you are on the path to success. That’s progress! Follow me.

2 Comments

Posted in Weight Loss Tips

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Say “Yes!” to Goals for 2017, Not Resolutions, Especially For Weight Loss!

Posted on December 26, 2016 | 4 comments

weight loss resolution for the new year

(This article was originally published in The Huffington Post, written by William Anderson, LMHC, author of The Anderson Method, explaining important aspects of the ground-breaking method he developed, losing 140 lbs. and keeping it off for 30 years)

*   *   *   *

As the New Year’s Holiday approaches every year, the subject of New Year’s Resolutions crops up, and there comes a flurry of opinions about it. 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 over 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 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.  I improved, but not enough. By the time I was 30, I was over 300 lbs., smoking like a chimney, in terrible health, without a college degree, my successful career in flames and having lost the financial means to live a satisfying and secure life.

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 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 (now an audiobook) that has helped tens of thousands to solve their weight problem. I created a satisfying way of living 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 and wrote them down. When I started using written goals, things changed.

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 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.

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? Then 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?

Then write down what you need to do this month to move toward that. Make a list of what you need to do next week, maybe to study and learn more about what you need to do. Finally, write a to-do list for tomorrow to make it toward what you want to accomplish this week.

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?

You can make your life better. 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.

 

4 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Is Vaping Actually the Secret to Weight Control? – No, It’s Not.

Posted on November 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

vaping and weight loss

(This article first appeared on The Huffington Post)

In a recent article published by Vice Media’s website, the headline asks, “Is Vaping Actually the Secret to Weight Control?” — It looks like a weight loss ad on Google News. Could it be true? In a word – NO!

Vaping may be better than smoking, but it is one problem swapped for another, not a solution, to cancer risk or weight loss.

Any smoker who has blown smoke through a handkerchief knows the crap you are putting into your lungs when you smoke. I hope you have seen the results, the tar build up, the eventual COPD (Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease) and possible lung cancer that comes from smoking. Certainly, it seems to me that if one could stop smoking with an alternative way to ingest nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarettes, it would be a big improvement. Logic tells me that one would be better off without all that tar in the lungs, the cause of the COPD and likely contributor to cancer. However, other means of nicotine delivery also cause cancer, so continuing the addiction without the smoke may be an improvement, but it is not the answer to good health, not to mention the freedom from addiction. Only ending the smoking addiction offers that. And only changes in yourself —your habits, thinking and feelings about food, will result in solving your weight problem.

Why would anyone think that vaping would be an answer to weight control?

It has long been thought that smoking helps with weight control. Smokers have found that quitting smoking leads to weight gain. Research points to evidence of that. But does smoking really help solve a person’t weight problem? No.

The connection between smoking and weight became evident when researchers observed that people commonly gained weight when they quit smoking. The usual weight gain is 5 to 10 pounds in the first few months after quitting, but some gain much more, as much as 50 pounds after quitting. Some of the weight gain is thought to be from a decreased metabolic rate because the stimulative effect of nicotine is no longer present. However, most of the weight gain is due to switching from grabbing a cigarette to grabbing a snack when the urge strikes. The stressors of life triggered the need to inhale something to relieve the stress, and instead of smoke, it became food.

In addition to those findings, women who had become stress or emotional eaters have found that if they substituted lighting up for grabbing a snack, they could avoid a lot of the overeating that caused their weight problems. For them, smoking seemed like the answer to their problem of gaining weight.

However, the reality is that when you develop a habit of overeating, you are going to end up overweight, even if you smoke or vape. Habits develop and strengthen over time, and overeating habits will grow, whether you vape/smoke or not, unless you learn how to master your eating addiction.

Smoking or vaping is not the answer to weight loss and weight control. Only permanent change in yourself, your habits, thinking and feelings about food will achieve that.

Quitting smoking led me to learn how to lose weight. Weight loss can be solved, but not by smoking or vaping.

I referred to an eating addiction, and while many may question that idea, those who have struggled with self-control with their eating know exactly what I’m talking about. The idea that we easily just decide to eat less, using will-power, and then succeed instantly, is a fallacy for most people. That’s why we have an obesity epidemic with over 70% of Americans overweight. And adding vaping or smoking to your eating habits will not make you less of an addict. You’ll then be addicted to both vaping or smoking and overeating!

I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor specializing in weight loss and addictions, and I got my start in the field with smoking cessation therapy. I was an obese heavy smoker who managed to become an ex-smoker with effective addiction therapy. In my training as an addictions counselor I became aware that my problem with being overweight was really a problem with overeating, similar to other addictions, like smoking. In 1984, using proven behavioral therapy, I lost 140 pounds, and have kept it off since. That led me to the program I now offer all over the world through my network of therapists and my book, The Anderson Method. Believe me, smoking or vaping is not your solution to weight control.

Weight loss and weight control is achieved via changes in yourself, not by will-power, but through “psychotherapy.”

The term “psychotherapy” today usually refers to formal clinical counseling with a psychotherapist. However, I’m using it here in original meaning of the root words, psyche (mind), and therapy (healing). To lose weight permanently, we need to make improvements in our mental processes, our automatic thoughts, habits and feelings, so that we habitually take in fewer calories than we burn. And we need to make it permanent, for the rest of our lives. That means we have to change that part of ourselves, our unconscious mind, that controls our habits, automatic thinking, urges and even feelings. Right now, your unconscious mind is probably set up to make you overeat, no matter how much you’d like to change. Deciding you want to be different and feel different is not enough. Trying to use “will-power” is not enough. Something else is in charge, something like an addiction, and the only way to change that is with the healing of your mind. “Will-power” only comes into play in deciding to learn how to accomplish that, learning the techniques.

So, realize that wanting to change yourself is certainly a big step towards self-improvement, maybe the biggest step, but it is only the first step. You need to learn how. And that’s what my book and lots of other self-help books can teach you about self-improvement and personal growth.

If you want to lose weight and solve your weight problem permanently, quit looking for miracle diets, weight loss “tricks”, gimmicks, pills and potions. Learn how to change yourself.

Leave a comment

Posted in Weight Loss Myths

Tagged , , , , , , ,