Day One Hundred and Eleven!!!!

Weight Loss Strategies


I have heard of so many people taking on different diets like; participating in weight watchers, Bernstein diet, 52 diet, kept diet, vegetarian diet, vegan diet, juicing, cayenne pepper tea diet, grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet, etc. etc. etc. And then there is the other side which consists of gym memberships, personal trainers, coaches, and work out DVD’s etc. etc. etc.


The difficulty with all of these diets is that they are based on restriction, every one can restrict for a period of time. The difficulty with all of these ‘training regimes’ is that the motivation only lasts as long as you are motivated, (or you run out of money). However, the trouble is that once the goal is attained, 95-97% of participants on these diets and work out routines, want to get back to their usual lifestyle. In order to effect weight change you have to reduce calorie intake and increase energy expenditure daily, forever. The challenge for anyone is how they are going to maintain focus on how it is they are going to manage remaining at their goal weight.


The Extreme Weight Loss Boot Camp with Chris Powell, is a good example of this. Chris sets weight loss goals for every 90 days, he follows the person for a year, and tries to intervene as the person goes slowly back to their usual life style. There was one episode where a man had lost something of around 200 pounds, and at the end of the weight loss show they were celebrating and rejoicing how well he had done. Then after the credits they showed the successful participant a month after, stepping on a scale at home and he had gained 20 pounds. He stated “I guess you have to keep it up.”


The actual real goal is to develop a lifestyle for successful weight management. It is actually the healthy lifestyle behaviour patterns once developed, that have a better chance of taking hold. This means that you have to learn how to cope with stress, deal with emotional dis-regulation, and change the mental image you have of your body (body image). Dr. Laurie talks about how the real topic is about eating habits and the behaviours of food. We all develop a practiced pattern of how we live with food, so we have to reframe the way we think about ourselves in conjunction with ourselves and food in order to improve our food behaviour. 


When people take on one of these diets and/or personal trainer regimes, motivation has a tendency to last as long as the effort is rewarded. However, if the pain of restriction is greater than the reward of the pound loss or if there is no reward for effort or work put in then motivation quickly wains. Such as when there is a plateau of weight loss the resulting negativity will overpower motivation, and life as usual will resume, old behaviour patterns will return.


The Emotionally Focussed Eating Program combines two key components, one is understanding of the food that you eat, the other is dealing with the emotional component. The difference between the smoking sensation program (which can be attained within as little as one session) and the Emotionally Focussed Eating Program is that we need to be able to understand our food, reframe behaviour as well as remove our emotional attachments, managing food is a completely different arena than removing a bad habit such as smoking. You don’t need to understand your cigarette, you do need to understand your food. 

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