by patbarone
What the world calls “weight loss” is a temporary condition based on a diet, not on real life. As I discovered, we pay for temporary weight loss with deprivation, excessive exercise, and, most importantly, we pay with the body’s precious metabolism. Then, we’re forced to give back the “weight loss” when we can’t support the payments anymore.
I call this “renting weight loss.” It’s prevalent in our society, and heartbreaking.
As I lost over 70 lbs. (and sustained that loss for 10 years), I learned a few things. Speaking at my 10th year celebration forced me to think about all my lessons from an overview perspective. It looked like this:
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by patbarone
As I travel, spreading the word about permanent weight loss, I often speak to middle and high school girls about health, body image, and the negative impact of dieting on weight. It’s always very touching for me to look out over the classroom and see the young women as I speak. Many of them (according to some statistics, about 50%) are already dieting and associating being thin with deprivation.
Thin = Deprivation
Wrong!
Most of them can’t look ahead to see how their current behavior and stringent dieting will lead to frustration, anger and excess weight in their twenties and thirties. It takes many years to see the real equation:
Dieting and Food Avoidance = More Fat
If I could do one thing for these girls, who deserve a healthy future free from disordered eating, it would be to freeze them right where they are.
Why?
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by patbarone
This blog post is inspired by my fabulous twitter buddy, Shannon. She asked for input on a particular diet on twitter. Since I wanted to say more than my initial “under 140 characters” reply (“DON’T DO IT!”), I decided to share it here.
The diet program that caught Shannon’s eye was first popular about 12-14 years ago, right in the middle of my 4-year weight loss period.
I had lost about 65 lbs when I entered a 9 month training program. At that point, I didn’t think of my weight loss as tenuous and I was committed to the idea of permanence, but I still experienced lots of anxiety about it.
During our training, we had a lunchtime speaker come in and talk about fitness. “Oh, this will be interesting,” I thought. The man brought the book “Body for Life” by Bill Phillips and talked about how great it was. I rolled my eyes (kinda like this):
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by patbarone
I love the debate over diets I see on Twitter every day. Do weight watchers. Buy Jenny Craig. Follow Biggest Loser. Shred with PX-90. Beach body fads. Invest in a body bugg.
In a way, it’s all a smokescreen, isn’t it? None of these programs is going to bring the permanent change on the scale we all want. Only WE can do that.
Research shows people who achieve permanent weight loss, even if they start out on a diet, leave it behind pretty quickly in order to create a unique, personal lifestyle change. They begin to change their own individual behaviors that impact their weight, instead of focusing on food.
A lifestyle change goes a lot deeper than a diet. It takes a little longer. It’s not quite so simple. But you get to keep it!!! That’s why I invested the time and effort to make permanent change back in 1996. My objective from the beginning was permanent weight loss. I wanted all along to be here, in 2010, celebrating 10 years of sustained weight loss.
Here are 5 behavior changes that have huge impact on weight loss:
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by patbarone
It’s the middle of January and, in one form or another, many of us are fighting with our food.
As New Year’s Resolutions fade and sputter and maybe even get thrown to the wind, it’s easy to fall into a real struggle with food. Most diets set us up for struggle. They make some foods “good” (which doesn’t line up with what our mind says is “good”), and some “bad.”
But even an old pro like me has a momentary brain fart around food.
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