Tag Archives: Dieting

One Appetizer Will Make You Lose Weight. One Will Make You Gain. Which One For You?

bloomin-onion

This is Outback’s Bloomin’ Onion. It’s a nuclear 1946 calories! That’s 500 calories if you eat 1/4 of it when you’re out with 4 friends. Of course, we overeaters usually ate more than our share.

shrimp cocktail

This is Red Lobster’s Classic Jumbo Shrimp Cocktail. It’s only 100 calories, sans sauce. And the sauce is only  45 calories (if you use it all).

Want to solve your weight problem? You can, by learning to eat what you like and enjoy it even more than you do now.

I’ve helped thousands of people lose weight and live a healthier happier life for the rest of their lives, taking my program, reading my book, or both. Read my book or listen to my audiobook, and then take action to make your life better! This can be the year you solve your weight problem.

Jumping Jacks? Are You Nuts?

A serious teacher

Every year at this time, I publish columns to help people get control of their weight, and I also peruse what others are writing on the issue. This year, I read a few columns telling overweight people to exercise with jumping jacks. One said to “start with something easy, like jumping jacks”. Jumping jacks??!! I almost blew my coffee out my nose. Jumping jacks? Is this guy crazy? He has probably never been obese and probably has never had an obese person he has said this to.

As a formerly obese person, I can tell you that jumping jacks are a very bad idea for an obese person. Not only will it hurt, but you are liable to do damage. In fact, the number one rule for obese people and exercise is to take it easy, go slowly, and don’t overdo it. Use the old show-business principle. Only do so much, and leave ’em wanting more. If you get to the point where you think you’ve done enough, you’ve probably done too much. The most intense thing you should do at first is walking. Jumping jacks are the worst idea I’ve ever heard of.

I’m a behavior therapist who discovered how to succeed with permanent weight loss. After 25 years of diet and exercise failure, I finally “got it”, lost 140 pounds and I’ve kept it off for 30 years. I went on to teach others, and I wrote a successful book about it, now an audiobook. I can teach you.

In my behavioral approach, we focus on our behavior rather than our weight or our body. Instead of just trying to use “will power”, we use behavioral science, finding what we can live with, and we “program” in the behavior and habits that will create the results we want and we program out (extinguish) the behavior that made us overweight. Our goal is to make it so what we do to maintain our goal weight is more pleasurable and rewarding than what we did that made us fat.

So, forget jumping jacks and the people who tell you to start with them. Read or listen to my book to learn more about my behavioral approach for permanent weight loss. This could be the year you solve your weight problem.

How to Have Happy Holiday Season Without Gaining Weight

holiday season without gaining weight

You may think this is a terrible time of year to be concerned about your weight, but it’s not. In fact, with the right approach, you can eat everything you like, enjoy it more than ever, have no guilt or remorse, and keep from gaining any weight at all! In fact, my clients do all that and lose weight at this time of year!

However, this time of year is just too chaotic and stressful for many people. They just want to survive it. For most people, just avoiding a weight gain this holiday season will be a fantastic success. This is entirely possible, without a lot of anguish, self-denial or guilt, if you follow my list of Holiday Dos and Don’ts. And if you want all the details on how to succeed with permanent weight loss, read my book or listen to my audiobook shown at the right. You can make 2017-2018 the year you solve your weight problem for good!

For everyone, here are my do’s and don’ts for the next few weeks:

Don’t try to diet, discover that you can’t keep to it, and then decide “It’s impossible. I might as well forget about weight control and enjoy everything until after the first.” Giving yourself permission to binge for a month will create a weight gain that will take all of next year to get rid of.

Do pick out six to ten days that you will go to parties, go out to dinner, have Christmas dinner, New Year’s Eve and Day get-togethers, and plan on reasonable indulgences those days. Determine to eat like a health nut all the other days. You will be able to, when you have those other days to indulge in. Don’t deny yourself gratification —delay it a bit.

Don’t try to avoid the “bad foods” at parties and dinners. You’ll only feel cheated and want to eat them later, when you’re alone. Plan on the kind of things you’ll want and find out ahead of time what kind of calories are in those things. Remember, there are no bad foods or bad calories in my world.  Also remember, women usually have a “calorie budget” of 1400-2200 a day to maintain an ideal weight, and with a little advance planning, you can fit in just about anything on that.

Do eat light early in the day save your day’s calories for the parties on your party days. If you eat a lot during the day, and then eat a lot at the parties, you’ll feel awful. If you plan ahead and have the bulk of your calories at the event, they will taste better, you’ll have a great time, and you’ll feel great. And, no guilt! You’ll have had just what you loved, enjoyed it, and accomplished your health goal.

Don’t leave it up to the time you are challenged with an offer of a lunch or a pastry, to decide what to do. Have your answer ready before you face the tempter. “No thanks, I’m saving my calories for the parties, so I don’t gain weight this year.”

Don’t beat yourself up and feel guilty when you’re not perfect. Eating too much or giving in to an urge is not a capital crime or a mortal sin. It’s just a mark of humanity. You can get better at self-control as time goes by if you give yourself a break and keep learning about effective methods for change. Be forgiving of your human qualities rather than critical of them.

Do decide that you care about your health, no matter what, even if your behavior isn’t always the best all the time. Never say “I don’t care” even when you slip up. That would be a lie. You do care. Don’t lie to yourself.

Don’t decide to stay home or punish yourself by wearing clothes that are too tight all season.

Do go out and get a couple of nice outfits that are comfortable and have a wonderful happy holiday season. Be reasonable this holiday season and then really get to work, with no distractions, after the holidays.

Don’t punish yourself this holiday season trying to stick to some crazy diet, or feeling guilty about eating good things. Follow these tips, and get a copy of the book The Anderson Method, paperback, Kindle or audiobook, to learn how to solve your weight problem for good in 2018!

Why Now Is the Perfect Time to Lose Weight

best time to lose weight

February 2017 is absolutely the best time in history for you to permanently solve your weight problem. Here’s why:

1) Summer is coming!

If you start now, you can lose 30 to 70 pounds or more by the time your summer vacation starts. Whether you use my method or some other science-based approach, count on a much happier summer, feeling slim with a new outfit or two, a spring in your step and vacation photos you feel good about. Don’t put it off. Read some of my clients’ and readers’ comments about my method and my book and audiobook to see what I’m talking about.

2) There are more low-calorie, great-tasting foods available than ever before. The marketplace is exploding with new products to make weight loss easier.

The food industry has stepped up to the plate (no pun intended) and done a great job answering our demand for food and services to help us lose weight, maximizing enjoyment and convenience and eliminating the sense of deprivation.

Today we have Lean Cuisine, Smart Ones and Healthy Choice frozen dinners, all around 300 calories — easy, tasty and low calorie meals when we are too tired or rushed to fix something. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’s spray makes vegetables taste great with almost no calories. Walden Farms makes dressings without calories so we can have a scrumptious salad and save our calories for meat and potatoes. Egg Beaters makes it so we can have twice the scrambled eggs for the same calories and Hellman’s makes it so we can have sandwiches with mayo without breaking the budget. Splenda helps us have rich coffee in the morning without wasting lots of calories on sugar, and diet soda lets us have something besides water with lunch and during the day without worrying about how many calories we’re getting.

Restaurants are putting the caloric values on their menus, making it much easier to eat out. They are also offering more and more items to fit the caloric requirements to lose weight. I used to avoid eating out because it was such a pain to try to figure out the calories at restaurants –it was so much easier to eat at home. Now I can enjoy eating out without the stress and without gaining weight. There has never been a time like this before. It’s the perfect time to lose weight.

3) No festive holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s to throw you off track.

No explanation necessary.

4) We live in a time of easy access to all the qualified information and assistance you need.

Because of the recent intense focus on the obesity epidemic, we are seeing more legitimate research on weight loss than any time in history. There has never been a better time to lose weight. Good scientific information is as close as your laptop or smartphone, as long as you are careful about the validity of the information.

Technology itself can be a tremendous help. Many of my clients are now using their smartphones to track their calories. They love it. There are hundreds of apps available to download and many are free. This terrific help probably did not even exist the last time you seriously tried to solve your weight problem.

5) You are smarter, more knowledgeable, more mature, stronger, more determined and better equipped than the last time you tried to lose weight.

The “you” that exists today knows a lot more than the old you, not just in facts, which is true, but in wisdom and maturity too. You’ve tried and failed in the past, and learned things that cannot be learned any other way. When I finally solved my weight problem, losing over 100 pounds for good, my success was due largely to what I had learned from all my failed attempts.

When we were childish, we wanted someone else to solve our weight problem for us, but no one else can. We wanted to lose the weight without doing the work and giving up what stands in the way. You know differently now. With what you know today, and what you can learn this spring, this is the perfect time to lose weight. That day has come.

Order my book The Anderson Method, or call one of my therapists for one-on-one training, and get started now.

The Two Best Weight Loss Ideas, From Weight Loss Successes

best weight loss ideas

Clients and readers from all over the world losing weight cite two specific techniques as having almost mystical power for them, both techniques from the field of cognitive psychology. They engage both the power of “cognitive restructuring” and the hypnotic power of suggestion and imaging.

Fasting

In my method, “fasting” refers to abstaining from anything with calories between planned meals. Planning ahead is an essential technique. We don’t do spontaneous no-rules eating. Having a plan engages imaging and suggestion, triggering hypnotic-grade power to help you actualize what you have imagined you’ll be doing, rather than being open to other suggestion and hyper-vulnerable to urges.

We structure our lives in a very black and white fashion. Several times a day, we have our planned meals, the time and content entirely our choice, and the rest of the time we are fasting. Several time a day, the eating switch is on, and we have our meal, and the rest of the time, it’s off, and nothing goes into our body except non-caloric beverages.

Thinking of it as fasting is a form of cognitive restructuring called reframing, changing the meaning and experience of what we are doing. Rather than experiencing a woe-is-me deprivation of doing without, a period devoid of anything good or meaningful, we are actively engaged in the very important devotion of fasting, burning calories and fat, and accomplishing something very important to us.

We’ve borrowed fasting from the spiritual traditions, casting our activity not as a “nothing” period without something satisfying, but as a sacred activity, full of meaning. It’s a devotion of ourselves to something greater than ourselves, our health, in a holistic sense.

Clients rave about the power they derive from this, their new ability to abstain, and the exhilaration, thinking they actually feel their body burning off calories and fat. It’s a mental experience that must be experienced to be understood, something I and my clients talk about and contemplate with wonder. It is one of the two ideas clients consistently remark as being an almost magical help to them.

Hunger means you’re burning fat.

This is another cognitive restructuring, reframing technique. We change the way we experience hunger, the meaning of it and the actual experience of it.

Feeling hunger is a normal human experience, nothing to fear or avoid. I didn’t always think this way. I remember when I saw it as a reason to eat something right now! It was an excuse, too. The dietician told me to listen to my body, and my body said to eat! The problem was, it said it far too often, and it told me to eat a lot, so that I became fat.

I used to say I was starving. I’d say I was dying of hunger! What I was telling myself caused me to experience something awful, to feel awful. Something in me heard this and responded accordingly. It always rescued me from this terrible suffering in the nick of time! Unfortunately, it made me fat.

What we tell ourselves has power, almost like a hypnotist whispering in our ear. When we change the script, the suggestions, our experience changes.

When we undereat, eating less than we burn so that we start burning our stored fat, it’s normal to feel hunger. We don’t have to be afraid of it or work frantically to avoid it. We need to experience it in a new way, not as a terrible torture, but as a sign of success, as evidence that we are burning fat off our body, losing weight. If we ate something to stop it, we’d stop the burning. We don’t want to stop the fat burning! We want to keep up the fat burning! Burn, baby, burn! Hunger means you’re burning fat!

We can drink a glass of water to quiet the hunger. In fact, what we experience in our brain (where we actually experience everything) as hunger is often actually a need for water. Have a drink of water and continue to fast until that next meal you have planned. Then give yourself a pat on the back for abstaining, for your strength! You’ll make a habit of it.

Successful weight loss is more about what you think than what you eat.

These two techniques are the ideas most often cited by my clients as being surprisingly helpful. They give them power that they hadn’t had before, and developing this power is more about learning how to operate your mind than simply dieting or “making up your mind”. Therapeutic Psychogenics is a term I coined to identify what really gives a person the ability to successfully lose weight and control their weight. It’s about using behavioral technique to change the way we think, feel and act, rather than just using “will power”, which never worked for me. There are a lot more in this bag of tricks, but these might get you started.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He was an obese heavy smoker and workaholic until his early thirties, and burned out, but survived and changed direction. He changed in many ways, among them, losing 140 pounds permanently. Health, in a holistic way, is now his mission. He’s trained a network of therapists in his methods and he is the author of The Anderson Method of Permanent Weight Loss.