Five Really Tough Dieting Tips

If you are losing, trying to lose, or think you need to lose,
weight, you are probably as sick as I am of those “easy” and
“quick” diet tips that NEVER work!

The following tips are neither quick nor easy. They are tough,
uncomfortable, and demanding (but they work).

1. Don’t Eat.

On a permanent basis, that obviously doesn’t make sense unless
you have a secret death wish. On a temporary basis, it is worth
considering. Just like the recovering alcoholic who takes it one
day at a time, not eating for “just today” becomes do-able, once
in a while. If you can convince yourself that you can have
anything you want to eat, tomorrow, not eating becomes a viable
alternative for today. On an even shorter-term basis, delaying a
planned meal for a few hours can be useful if you stick to what
you had planned to eat and don’t wolf everything in sight to
“make up” for your temporary deprivation. A decrease in the
total caloric intake for the day, the week, the month, is the
over-riding goal.

2. Get Your Body Moving.

We all know that activity is necessary to burn up our own fat.
Exercise can be tedious, boring, and interferes with getting
everything done in our time-starved lives. Those who love
exercise, spending hours at the gym or training for marathons,
don’t have a weight problem like the rest of us couch potatoes.
So how do we find the time and the motivation to incorporate
some physical movement into our lives? If we don’t have the time
or the opportunity for exercise sessions (work, commuting, kids,
chores), we can sneak activity breaks into stolen moments of
time throughout the day. Reset your alarm 15 minutes earlier and
perform calisthenics – jumping jacks, killer exercises, sit ups,
jump rope – while the coffee brews. Sneak 5 to 10 minutes every
few hours during the work day to walk around the building,
perform isometrics at your desk, or run up and down the stairs.
5 to 10 minute mini-workouts scattered throughout your usual
schedule can add up to an hour or two of activity bursts per
day, significantly boosting the equation of calories in vs.
calories out that leads to increased weight loss.

3. Eliminate “Kicking it up a notch.”

While “BAM!!” spicing up our food is pleasurable and fun, it
also increases our intake of calories because our food is so
good that our taste buds are in a constant state of excitement.
To lose weight consistently, we need to become disinterested in
food to the greatest extent possible. Let’s face the fact that
carrot and celery sticks are never going to make our mouths
water; a cup of yogurt, cottage cheese, sauerkraut, or tuna is
okay but will never lead to the pure delight of a divine bowl of
jambalaya, pasta, a dripping cheeseburger, or a sizzling pizza.
We need to limit the excitement in our lives to non-eating
activities and keep our food in the boring, tedious range so
that we can limit our involvement, enjoyment, and delight in
eating. The less we look forward to our meals, the less we will
eat which is our goal.

4. Practice positive visualization.

Use props to help you “see” yourself thin so that your weight
loss goals become a tangible, vital part of your everyday life.
Instead of the latest “Who done it?” mystery novel, read clothes
catalogs before going to bed. The airbrushed perfection of the
Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic models may be difficult
for you to emulate but they do encourage your dreaming of an
attractive physical appearance. A mental vision of yourself as
model-thin is a technique to pull up every time you are faced
with food during the day and bolsters your “won’t” power for
declining edibles you know you don’t need. This technique
doesn’t work as well for men but encourage the male in your life
to emulate their favorite sports figures. Watch movies and
television not with an eye to escaping from yourself and your
humdrum world but as a peep into a world you intend to inhabit.
Visualize yourself as the hero or heroine of your favorite
shows: can you even imagine a fat caped crusader, an overweight
vamp, or an obese romantic lead? Maintain a clear vision of
yourself as slender, sexy, and fit and you have something to
help you through the tempting, alluring,
almost-impossible-to-resist times in your daily life. It is that
mental image of your future self that can encourage you to “just
say no” to the immediate delights surrounding you.

5. Eliminate snacking.

The traditional “three squares a day” eating pattern was based
on breakfast, lunch, and dinner as the primary meals of the day.
Today, it is not just our meals that have led to our national
overweight, it is our between-meal snacking that has fostered
the epidemic of obesity. Have you noticed that there always
seems to be food available? Everywhere we turn, there is
something to eat: potato chips, nuts, cake, ice cream,
tortillas, chicken wings, Doritos (Saddam’s favorite) and a
myriad of salty, spicy, salivation-inducing snacks that have
nothing to do with our need to eat to survive and everything to
do with our overweight. If we can eliminate these between meal
boosts and concentrate on three (two is better) meals a day, we
can start to bring our weight in line with our goals. Our
tendency is to nibble throughout the day – a sprinkling of this,
a handful of that, and an eye-hand-mouth combination that
results in our 24/7 intake of something. Its allure is
incontrovertible: the salty, spicy, or sweet aftermath of their
ingestion lingers long on the tongue and the memory (and even
longer on the hips).

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