Saboteurs to Your Weight Loss Plans
Saboteurs are people and thoughts that are going to sabotage you when you are at all weak in your bid to better yourself. I can identify many internal and external forces that will try to stop me from what I want on an almost daily basis. Lets start with the outside forces first and then we can start blaming ourselves after that.
External saboteurs are family, friends and coworkers and can always be identified by their compassion for what you are doing. Lets see if you can pick out any of these terms: "Well it’s not like I make cookies every day" or "You have sure been working hard at it, why not take a day off and go shopping?" or "You must be really proud of yourself for the changes, do you even miss chocolate at all?". These are all examples of the way that people try to be nice but feel like maybe you are sacrificing too much. If you look back now on how your life was a few months ago it probably seemed a lot less exciting, you had a rhythm and schedule you were happy with and that rut was comfortable for you, think about how others around you feel. Almost all people have a rut that they get in that makes their life comfortable and when they see someone either really excel or make a lot of changes at once it makes them uncomfortable it makes them feel that their lives are inadequate and it makes them want to make sure that they are not being left behind. Other people can not be blamed completely for their feelings as you always have an out with them saying that you just felt like making changes and are happy with the way things are going and oh yes of course I miss the chocolate.
Internal Saboteurs are much more dangerous. Just as others do not want to see things around them change quickly your mind reels from this as well. Every time you give up a bad food your body and mind will ask you why things were some bad and why are you sacrificing again. Every time you try a different kind of workout your body and mind will complain that things were going well before and that you are wasting voluble energy and are still to sore from before to make this change. I always am happy when I make a change in my life as I have fluctuated in the past from being in great control of my level of fitness, my diet and my exercise and have let them slip away easily again this is some times a part of life, when you are not looking your body decides to take a vacation.
There are some really great ways to make sure that your life continues in the right direction and that is with proper goals and with reasons behind these goals. I want to cover this in depth tomorrow so today just look around and see what maybe looming on the horizons for things that are painful to you that may be trying to break the spirit of your change and try to write these things down. I have written down ideas in the past and then when I went back to them months later am shocked to see what I had thought of before. Sometimes I kick myself for not implementing those great ideas I had in the past and forgot about but you can probably see from that statement what one of my problems has always been.
Bill Nadraszky is a lifelong health and fitness junkie. You can see more about Diet, Fitness and exercise at nadraszky.com/fitness
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Were Cave Dwellers Ever Fat?
In our mind’s eye, we see our ancient ancestors as they have been depicted in paintings, stories, films, and scientific recreations. Small, wiry, hairy figures surrounding a huge beast, poised for the kill.
Do we know if that picture is really accurate?
We do know, from skeletal fragments that have survived, that they were definitely smaller than present day human beings. We can surmise that they were wiry from the lifestyle they pursued: irregular availability of food and long hours of daily hunting. We can assume that women started to gather plants, grasses, fruits, and seeds to provide an alternate source of sustenance to the men’s only intermittently successful hunting efforts.
We have only vague timelines on when tribes started to move out of caves and into shelters they made themselves. We can only guess about the invention of cooking pots, an enormous advance from simply an open fire.
As the race became more domesticated, the variety of food expanded and therefore the availability of something to eat became more assured. Eventually, civilization sparked, agriculture was born, and eating became a process of selection and choice rather than mere consumption to stay alive. It was at this juncture, we can posit, that individual’s weights started to differentiate, depending upon personal choice, the wealth or strength to obtain extras, or the physical demands of one’s occupation.
What did our cavemen forbears bequeath as their legacy?
Underfed and overactive, they willed us a body that still thinks we dwell in the primordial forest. Suddenly cut back on our intake of food and the alert is sounded through the nervous system and organs of our prehistoric physiology. “Famine coming, famine coming” our bodies shriek and immediately our metabolism slows to a crawl. The body attempts to hold onto its fat like a Paleolithic hunter grasping his animal skin against the elements.
In the very architecture of our bodies: tail remnants, vestigial organs, and a primitive metabolic system, we carry the seeds of our own weight difficulties.
To work with our bodies, rather than constantly fight them, we need to recreate the world in which our bodies developed. While we cannot participate in a primeval hunt, we can repeatedly, over a long period of time, consume only limited calories so that our bodies don’t have to worry about getting enough food, but process the little they do get rapidly and efficiently.
Our little friends, the white rats in the laboratory mazes, have proven over and over again, that consistent undereating is the pathway to good health and longevity.
For all they did for mankind in the dawn of history, the cave dwellers deserve our thanks and our respect as do the bodies they left as their testimony.
What ungrateful abuse we heap on them when we allow ourselves to grow flabby and fat, desecrating their gift and nullifying their efforts.
Virginia Bola is a licensed psychologist and an admitted diet fanatic. She specializes in therapeutic reframing and the effects of attitudes and motivation on individual goals. The author of The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a free ezine, The Worker’s Edge, she recently published a psychologically-based weight control e-workbook, “Diet with an Attitude” which develops mental skills towards the goal of permanent weight control.
She can be reached at DietWithAnAttitude.com
She provides support and guidance in use of the workbook through her regular blog, http://dietwithanattitude.blogspot.com
By: admin
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