Tag Archives: william

How to Stay Focused on Your Weight Loss Goals in 2017

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.

Why Now is the Perfect Time to Lose Weight

 

Here is my latest article on the Huffington Post:

I think spring 2013 is absolutely the best time in history for you to permanently solve your weight problem. Here are the top five reasons why:

5) Summer is coming!

If you start now, you can lose 25 to 50 pounds or more by the time your summer vacation starts. Whether you usemy 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. Make a list of what to do to get started and make this the best year of your life. Put it off and you’ll miss a great opportunity.

4) 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………………………………

Click Here to Read the Entire Article

3 Prerequisites for Successful Weight Loss

 

Can weight loss be fun, pleasurable, natural and even easy? Yes. Many clients, patients and readers using my methods have said so. But there’s a catch. I screen my clients, and I make sure they meet the prerequisites before I’ll work with them. In my book, I make sure readers know about them.

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

How Weight Loss Improves Sex – How Sex can Interfere

 

Fat is not sexy.

That’s the common belief in Western culture, one of those things “they say.” However, we now have scientific verification of this. Research published in the scientific journal Obesity says:

“Obesity is associated with lack of enjoyment of sexual activity, lack of sexual desire, difficulties with sexual performance, and avoidance of sexual encounters. Sexual quality of life is most impaired for women.”

Duke University study shows that obese people seeking to lose weight have these complaints 25 times the rate of normal-weight people. For men, the primary complaint is erectile dysfunction. For women it is the lack of sexual partners, the infrequency of sexual activity and the shame and low self-esteem associated with their obesity.

The good news is that studies show weight loss can resolve these problems! Studies published in Obesityreport “strong and consistent evidence of the positive effects of weight loss on sexual functioning for men and evidence for the benefits of weight loss on sexual……………

Click here to read my entire article, on The Huffington Post.

William Anderson a ChooseHelp.com Expert in their “Ask the Expert” Q&A’s

In it’s infancy, before it became a national clearinghouse for mental health and addiction treatment information, ChooseHelp.com asked me to write for their Q&A “Ask the Expert” column.

Martin Schoel, founder of ChooseHelp.com, envisioned a website that would provide resource information for people looking for help with mental health and addiction problems.  I had been working and publishing in the field since the mid-1980’s and he liked what I had been doing. He asked me if I would consider being a featured expert in their Q&A “Ask the Expert” columns. Here is the result:  http://www.choosehelp.com/profile/TheAndersonMethod . This is my “Expert Page” on their website. My latest Q&A’s are at the bottom of the page. Explore the whole site to see what is there.

I’m glad I said, “Yes”. His website has proved to be a very professionally done work, attracting many professional helpers and many people seeking help so that they can meet on common ground to find each other and accomplish important work. I know that even in it’s early life, ChooseHelp.com has helped many people, mitigated a lot of suffering and promoted a lot of healing. 

I am listed as an expert in depression, anxiety disorders, mental illness, addictions, alcoholism, eating disorders and,  of course, weight loss.  Martin has kept me busy, too busy sometimes, answering the growing avalanche of questions coming in from people needing help and not knowing what to do. He laughed when I said I liked being the “Dear Abby” in this realm. I know what’s it’s like to be sitting by yourself, needing help, and being stuck. To be able to provide the right words, at the right time, to people sitting at their computers and otherwise stuck,  is a blessing. I know that sometimes, sending a text is all people have the energy to do.  In this age, like no other, even that little act can actually get people going in the right direction because of what ChooseHelp.com is doing. It’s a miracle, compared to the days I began working in the field.

Please take a look at what Martin has created: http://www.choosehelp.com/