Weight Loss: A Quick Reference Guide book
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Here is the introduction to my book Weight Loss: A Quick Reference Guide.
Here is the introduction to my book Weight Loss: A Quick Reference Guide.
WOW! I just typed in “diet books” in the Yahoo search engine and it came up with 41,800,000 hits, and a search on Amazon.com came up with almost 6000 books on dieting! The shelves of bookstores are filled with every diet imaginable, and the magazines on the racks at grocery stores have at least one article each on weight loss. With all this information available to us in this country, why is it we are still among the most obese? And why are we getting fatter every year? There is only one answer to this question: DIETS DON’T WORK! The more we diet, the more weight we ultimately gain back, assuming we ever lost the weight to begin with!It is available through XLibris, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. Enjoy!
Our country is riddled with heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. We are spending billions on the search for cures, but practically nothing on prevention. However, there is one cure that is most often overlooked! Weight loss! Weight loss is probably the number one greatest cure, the number one miracle cure, for much of what ails us in this country, but few folks want that prescription! Why? Because overeating is very often related to our emotional issues, those issues that are far too painful for us to explore. It’s so much easier to remains victims to our habits even if it means a miserable life and early death.
For me, I would rather spend a few weeks or months, or whatever it takes, exploring the painful emotional issues surrounding my use of food for emotional comfort than spend the remainder of my life, albeit much shorter and most likely disease ridden, stuffing my pain with excessive amounts of food. And exploring my painful issues is exactly what I did! Now I can deal with those issues differently rather than unconsciously reaching for comfort food. That’s not to say that I don’t still love my French fries, but the time spent mindlessly eating them is over!
Thinking back during the time when I believed that magazine articles and diet books would be my salvation, and ruminating over how much money I spent on them, I now see that it was the headlines and book titles that grabbed my attention. Who wouldn’t be emotionally affected by the following?
• Are you tired of settling for a body that doesn't reflect who you are inside?
• Are you frustrated that you are unable to fit into clothes that you love?
• Are you fed up with not having the energy you desire to be able to do all of the things that you want to do?
• Do you want to attract the love of your life with your new sexy body?
Do you ever get tired of reading statements like these? I know I did. I got tired of feeling bad about myself. These emotionally charged statements are in practically every magazine, as well as in ads on TV every day, and yet we continue to wonder why we stay so overweight in this country in spite of all the attention paid to being overweight. Something just isn’t working! For most of us, diets don’t work, diet pills don’t work, diet centers don’t work, and they don’t work because food is NOT the culprit. Virtually every weight loss program on the market has a dismal failure rate. Only those folks that stick with it are successful. The drop out rate is very high, but I doubt those statistics are kept. Would you subscribe to a weight loss program with a success rate of 10%?
The culprit is our programming, our core beliefs about food, and the underlying emotional pain we carry with us.
Those headlines are meant for one purpose and one purpose only: to stir up our emotions and our shame surrounding our weight issue. That is, to get our attention, so that we will buy the magazine or book. It’s about marketing, but it’s not the marketing that will help us shed those pounds: it’s a commitment to ourselves and to our future. It’s not as complicated as we seem to think, but to think of losing weight as a complicated and difficult issue is merely one way to excuse ourselves from doing so. It’s a way of avoiding what it is we really need to address: our emotional pain and how we’ve chosen to deal with it.
If you've tried dieting, bought gym memberships, read weight loss books and even attended weekly meetings with a popular weight loss program, and you were still unable or unmotivated to stick with your eating and exercise plan, it may not be your body that is holding you back. The best diet in the world won't work until you have the right mindset.
The bottom line is this: You must be fully 100% responsible for your weight loss. To depend on someone else to motivate you or to encourage you is setting yourself up for failure! The minute you feel that that person is not supportive, what do you think you’re going to do? EAT! That’s what. But if you take 100% responsibility for your emotional issues and for what you eat, you will never be held hostage to another person’s actions or inactions.
This book doesn’t provide diets or recipes. It does provide condensed and thought provoking statements to help you break free from your denial as to why you overeat. As you read this material, pay attention to what offends you, as that may provide the clue to your particular issues surrounding food. On the pages within this book, I show YOU how to be self-motivating, self-encouraging and self-supportive.
This book is your quick reference guide, something that you can read every day as a reminder that your health is a top priority! It is your reminder mechanism. It is your pocket weight loss coach!
Amino Acids: Could They be a Miracle Cure for Food Addictions?
I attended the Pediatric Obesity Symposium here in New Braunfels a few weeks ago, and one of the speakers, Dr. Mark Statler, talked about people who can’t stop eating certain foods once they start. For example, most of us can eat a half cup of ice cream or a handful of M&Ms and stop. Some people, once they have that first bite, will continued to eat until the whole container of ice cream or the whole bag of M&Ms is gone. He indicated that the culprit may be the nucleus accumbens, that part of the brain that has a great deal to do with addictive behaviors, like alcoholics have. Alcoholics can’t stop with one or two drinks; many of them drink until they pass out, which may also be an issue with this same part of the brain. Dr. Statler went on to say that there are two neurotransmitters at play in this area of the brain: dopamine and glutamate. When either of these is out of balance, which is often the case with addictions, the body attempts to re-balance by craving those particular ingestibles that will affect this area. However, it is a catch-22 situation, in that by ingesting the foods that “calm” this area, the calmness is short lived, just like alcohol, and the cravings return as soon as the surge in the neurotransmitter begins to fade.
A number of years ago, I experienced alcohol cravings, so I decided to do a little research. I found a website that purported the use of L-glutamine and L-phenylalanine, two common amino acids, to curb the cravings. These amino acids are safe, over-the-counter, inexpensive supplements, so I thought I give them a try. Yes, they worked very well. Not only did the alcohol cravings disappear, but so did my other favorite craving: tortilla chips.
I stopped Dr. Statler on his way out the door, and asked him if he knew of any research on the use of these two amino acids to help obese patients to curb their out of control cravings and subsequently help to balance the nucleus accumbens. He said no, and he seemed surprised by the question. I didn’t tell him about my experience with these supplements, as he was in a hurry, but I hope he gives my question some thought.
How much did I take? I took a total of 3000mgs of L-glutamine and 1500 mgs of L-phenylalanine per day, along with vitamin B-6, but I broke the amino acids into three servings per day. I never realized that my nucleus accumbens was most likely out of balance and that simple and inexpensive amino acids could stop the cravings long enough for me to re-program my beliefs and behaviors around alcohol and certain foods. Periodically, I will resume my regime of these amino acids, especially when I am experiencing stress. High stress will sometimes cause me to revert to old coping mechanisms, like using food for comfort rather than nutrition. It seems too easy, taking inexpensive amino acids, and it really is, but I strongly suspect that very little will be said about these supplements to help with the obesity problem, mostly because, you guessed it, there’s no big money to be made. And that makes me sad.
A number of years ago, I experienced alcohol cravings, so I decided to do a little research. I found a website that purported the use of L-glutamine and L-phenylalanine, two common amino acids, to curb the cravings. These amino acids are safe, over-the-counter, inexpensive supplements, so I thought I give them a try. Yes, they worked very well. Not only did the alcohol cravings disappear, but so did my other favorite craving: tortilla chips.
I stopped Dr. Statler on his way out the door, and asked him if he knew of any research on the use of these two amino acids to help obese patients to curb their out of control cravings and subsequently help to balance the nucleus accumbens. He said no, and he seemed surprised by the question. I didn’t tell him about my experience with these supplements, as he was in a hurry, but I hope he gives my question some thought.
How much did I take? I took a total of 3000mgs of L-glutamine and 1500 mgs of L-phenylalanine per day, along with vitamin B-6, but I broke the amino acids into three servings per day. I never realized that my nucleus accumbens was most likely out of balance and that simple and inexpensive amino acids could stop the cravings long enough for me to re-program my beliefs and behaviors around alcohol and certain foods. Periodically, I will resume my regime of these amino acids, especially when I am experiencing stress. High stress will sometimes cause me to revert to old coping mechanisms, like using food for comfort rather than nutrition. It seems too easy, taking inexpensive amino acids, and it really is, but I strongly suspect that very little will be said about these supplements to help with the obesity problem, mostly because, you guessed it, there’s no big money to be made. And that makes me sad.
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