Diet does not mean a diet plan…
…a brief term alteration of regular eating habits.

Diet means the everyday, day after day,
...for all the days of your life...WAY that you eat.

For a few lucky people losing and maintaining weight
is a easy matter of cutting down portion sizes
to move from “bad” eating to “good” eating.
However, this is not true for most of us.

An important key to sustaining an effective diet is planning,
and one of the biggest barriers to weight-loss and maintenance
is lack of planning.

 The best benefit of planning is control over our future eating environment.
Our weight loss efforts will succeed or fail based largely on our food environment.
We set ourselves up for success by taking charge of that food environment
which is:

when you eat,
how much you eat, and
what foods are available.

For some people the planning will involve specific advance menu planning,
and some people find a more general plan to be workable.
No matter whether our planning is specific or general, planning our future
food intake involves our shopping process, and what foods we choose to buy.

  When we cook meals at home,
we have the control over exactly what goes into the recipe
and therefore into our bodies.
However without a meal plan,... for some people ...
the longing for inspiration on what to cook may prove to be too much.
This results in take-out or eating-out again, and when doing this
someone else decides what goes in the meal,
and our control becomes far more limited.

There are plenty of small but powerful, changes we can make
that add up to lasting weight loss success.
The key is to create a plan that we can individually live with.
Part of planning is understanding that occasionally the plan will fail.
We must not let a failure discourage us.
Cheating with one snack or at one meal does not mean
that the whole diet plan has failed.
Keep in mind we have an every-day-forever diet plan,
not just a few-days diet plan.
For me,   planning involves the use of tools that help me track my progress.
I keep a food journal and weigh myself regularly.
Tracking my food-take, along with my weight loss efforts,
shows me the results in black and white, which helps me stay motivated.

                          

"The body stubbornly clings to what it knows."

I found this phrase in a June 8, 2011 New York Times article about barefoot running.
I am not a runner,
however, I have friends who are runners,
and this makes me interested in the subject.

The article said:

"Most of us grew up wearing shoes. Shoes alter how we move. An interesting review article published this year in The Journal of Foot and Ankle Research found that if you put young children in shoes, their steps become longer than when they are barefoot, and they land with more force on their heels.

Similarly, when Dr. Lieberman traveled recently to Kenya for a study published last year in Nature, he found that Kenyan schoolchildren who lived in the city and habitually wore shoes ran differently from those who lived in the country and were almost always barefoot. Asked to run over a force platform that measured how their feet struck the ground, a majority of the urban youngsters landed on their heels and generated significant ground reaction forces or, in layman’s terms, pounding. The barefoot runners typically landed closer to the front of their feet and lightly, without generating as much apparent force."

Going barefoot is only one behavior involving the body,
there are many others. 

I find the barefoot running example to be a good illustration of the way
the body adapts to what has always been its normal lifestyle pattern,
and how it "stubbornly" attempts to keep that as the status quo.

This is one of the biggest difficulties which must be dealt with
when working toward weight-loss and maintenance of weight-loss.

 It's natural to evaluate our activities in life.  But when that capacity for self-evaluation turns harsh and we begin to label ourselves with generalizations such as, "I'm stupid," "I'm a failure," I'm fat and ugly," that's judging yourself, and

"When you judge yourself, you break your own heart."

I work to defuse negative judgments and avoid putting myself in a mental box.

To avoid this mind litter, I say to myself:

"That's not me."

The harsh voice itself isn't really me. That voice is just an echo of past insults,
maybe from a parent, a sibling, etc. that I wound up mentally adopting. Just a bunch of mental toxic refuse
that has nothing to do with the true essence of who I am.

What the voice is saying also isn't accurate. We can't sum up one person, especially ourselves, with a single word or label. People are much more complex than a harsh judgment, or even for those reverse generalizations such as,
"I'm great." "I'm the best." "I'm better than..." Those can give needless pressure to live up to them,
disappointment when we fail to do so, or arrogance when we do.

We can get out of the mental box by refusing to label ourselves, and refusing to adopt labels others try to apply to us. We can just do what we need and want to do with our attention in the present moment. Then, see how it goes, evaluate what we did, and move on.  It will lighten your load. 

But if "That's not me," then who are you?
What is the true essence of a person?

I believe that If my mind is clear and positive, I tap into the power of something vast and awe-inspiring, something far more powerful and capable than I can otherwise consider. My capabilities and sense of well being grow.

But if my mind is full of static and commotion, caused by negative self-talk, I’m out of the frequency of that power, which makes me more likely to experience misery, negative emotions  and a view of myself as small and limited.