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!
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