August 18th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
How can you gain the mental energy to lose weight?
Getting into the right mindset is one of the most important things you need to do in order to become the healthy weight that you really want to be.
Following a strict diet is not the answer. However it is important to be familiar with what foods are important to be eating more off, and which you should limit to some extent.
You also need to trust your intuition, and become more aware of your natural messages of physical hunger. If you find that you eat too much in response to emotional upsets, then you will need to address these, perhaps by working with the counsellor or therapist. It’s a common experience that when people resolve their emotional issues then they lose weight very easily.
Visualise yourself as a slim healthy looking person, the way that you would like to look. See, in your mind’s eye, wearing the clothes you really would like to wear, taking part in activities that you love and feeling happy and contented.
Compose three or four positive affirmations to assist your unconscious mind make healthy decisions about food. For example, “I enjoy eating fruit every day,” or “I eat when I’m physically hungry and find other solutions when I’m upset, angry or frustrated.”
Write your affirmations on post-it notes and have these in places where you can read them regularly. Also, repeat them to yourself many times every day.
Take a moment or two every hour to close your eyes, relax through your body and say to yourself “I am safe.”
Do something every day which is fun and makes you laugh. This could be reading a few jokes, listening to an audio, or watching a few minutes of an amusing video on You Tube.
Practice yoga or tai chi regularly. Not only will your physical health improve from the postures you practice, but the concentration needed to do them, and to improve them will increase your mental energy to achieve what you want in relation to losing weight.
Set yourself realistic goals which are not necessarily related to your actual weight, but rather to your improving lifestyle, and you’re increasing fitness and your awareness of healthy nutrition.
Get rid of things in your life which irritate you, whether these are physical such as something which needs repairing, or throwing away, or emotional such as telling somebody what you will or won’t be doing any more.
July 27th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
Over many years of trying to conform to an ‘ideal weight’ I’ve learned some things about weight loss.
What I’ve learned is as follows:
Losing weight is not a matter of:
- Following a strict formula doesn’t work: There are so many so-called “new diets” that rely on either eating specific foods, eating certain foods at particular times of day or excluding certain food groups entirely from the food you eat.
- Counting calories or points is not the answer: it’s very difficult to constantly keep a record of precisely what you eat. It is possible for a short while to vigorously weigh and measure food, yet you have to live a life as well as trying to lose weight. What happens inevitably, often after about 19 days, is that you can no longer maintain either counting calories, excluding certain food groups from your diet or eating meals as prescribed by your slimming club or diet book.
- Being your ideal weight is not only about losing weight: it’s also about being able to enjoy your life more fully. That means being able to join in social events, eating meals out with friends, going to parties and having a good time.
The problem is that when you try to force restriction on to yourself, your body reacts by either craving what you are trying to stop, or going into starvation mode which means that you put on weight and more readily even though your intake has gone down.
Instead what it is about is:
- Becoming more aware of healthy foods so what you eat is good for your body and your general health and also satisfies your genuine physical hunger.
- Becoming more aware of when you turn to food for emotional reasons and learning how to deal with those feelings in other ways apart from eating.
- Bringing some exercise into your daily routine without being fanatical because exercise does you good. The more you introduce some regular exercise into your life the more likely you are to feel better about yourself and to start to eat in response to the physiological needs of your body rather than to its emotional needs.
- Accepting that there are days when you will eat more and days when you eat less, which means that so-called diet routines won’t work because they are unable in the main to acknowledge this.
- Becoming more relaxed about eating, exercise and weight loss and trust the process that happens quite naturally when you become more relaxed and change of mindset about your weight.
July 27th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
You have ever had the experience of being so-called successful at losing weight following being a member of a slimming club for a few months, only to re-gain all the weight that she lost when you stop attending regularly.
It seems as if it is almost like a plot to keep you paying to keep on going to the slimming club otherwise you find that you can’t maintain your weight loss.
So, in order to maintain the success you feel you’ve add you need to do more than just go regularly to a slimming club or follow a diet in a newspaper.
It’s about changing your mindset about your weight and realising that diets on their own won’t work. Yes, if you follow what is written, or what you’re told and you will lose some weight. However, the weight is in many and most cases regained very quickly once you decide you’re going back to a “normal” diet.
If diets don’t work, then what can you do to be the way that you would like to be, and be healthy too.
Eat regularly.
You may have tried to lose weight by skipping meals entirely. This doesn’t work because your blood sugar level drops and you begin to crave lots of sugar and other simple carbohydrates. As a result he will probably find yourself eating too much high calorie, high fat, unhealthy food and as a result find it anyway kudos goes back on very quickly.
Eat healthily.
If you think about is actually what you’re eating and try to make your diet is healthy as possible, without being fanatical, then you will have a much better chance at being able to control your weight by controlling your mindset.
Eating healthily means having a balanced diet, eating plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, low-fat protein, healthy fats such as olive oil and avocado, and plenty of complex carbohydrates. It also means cutting right down on food containing sugar and white foods such as white flour, white rice and white pasta and eating instead more wholemeal foods
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Relax frequently.
If you tend to eat more when you feel stressed take a few moments when you feel the stress building to close your eyes and take some slow breaths in as you breathe in relaxation and breathe out any tension.
Listen to your body.
Learn to listen to what your body tells you it needs at any time of the day and allow yourself to have whatever it seems to need even though at the same time being aware of the healthy guidelines mentioned above.
July 27th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
If you are fed up with diet routines and think that the easiest thing to do would be to stop all this bother with weight loss and just eat whatever takes your fancy, especially if it’s sweet and fatty.
You’ve had enough of dietary instructions and paying out so much each week to the club leader.
You throw away the diet books and the slimming club rules and regulations and have a massive binge and want to continue in this way and forget about ever getting slimmer.
You’ve made up your mind that diets are the only way and when you have a special occasion you’ll go on a crash diet and lose what has to be lost.
Here are some ways to regain any weight lost extremely quickly:
Skip meals and then overeat:
Remain convinced that the only witness to lose weight is to stop eating, so never eat anything until the evening, then it won’t matter how much food you eat or what sort of food it is.
Keep away from healthy food:
Don’t bother with anything that sounds healthy, it can’t possibly do you any good, just keep eating as much sugary, fatty and fast food as you possibly can.
Most of all don’t make any attempt at having a balanced diet, but never eat fresh fruit or vegetables. Have a fry up breakfast every day and put plenty of salt all over your food.
What have you to keep away from anything wholemeal.
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Don’t relax, ever:
Don’t find out what relaxation means. If you feel tension in your back on your shoulders or suffer from frequent headaches make sure that you take plenty of painkillers and see your GP regularly for prescription for more of the same.
Only do what others do:
If your friends all like eating junk food then follow along at and do the same. A burger and chips will fill a gap for you and you can be sure that within an hour two if not sooner you will be craving for more of the same and quite soon your weight will begin to increase too.
Of course all of the above will have the rapid effect of increasing your weight. If that’s not what you truly what you want then just reverse what is suggested and the opposite will happen. Your excess weight will gradually come off, your general health will improve and you will slowly move towards a healthy weight.
July 12th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
You know you would feel and look much better if you lost some weight. Not only that but your health and well-being would improve too. However for one reason or another you haven’t been able to get into the right mindset to achieve what you want.
What can you do to make this the time you really do become the weight you’d like to be and shed the excess fat for ever?
1. Be absolutely clear about the changes you want to make and what will be involved.
Take it step by step. Set small goals and achieve them. For example you might decide not to have so much bread or stop eating sweet biscuits.
Or you might add more fruit and vegetables to your meals and avoid putting such a big portion on your plate.
2. What will you start doing?
You could change your mindset about food and become more aware of exactly what you are putting into your mouth. The best foods to eat are those cooked or uncooked which are as near to their natural state as possible. Continue reading ‘Are you ready to shed your excess weight?’
July 9th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
There is a discrepancy in the way our society views how to lose weight. Everywhere you look there are the latest diets, the best way to stick to your diet, the diet to get you slim for summer or for Christmas or for your holidays diet.
All these diets are promoted as the only way to lose your excess weight and have your body transformed into a beautiful and probably rather unrealistic shape in just a few days.
On the other hand if you keep on reading you will find articles and books which declare that diets don’t work. So who and what can you believe?
If you weigh more than you would like to weigh it is very tempting to attempt a quick fix diet. Half starve yourself for a few weeks and you will have the body of your dreams. No problem. Or is there? I’ll tell you why diets don’t work.
- You may lose weight but it will be mainly fluid
- When you restrict certain foods or drastically reduce the amount of food you eat you will after a few days crave the foods you have stopped eating.
- It is bad for your general health to restrict what you eat to certain food groups and exclude others.
- When you cut down hugely on the amount you eat your body goes into ‘starvation mode’ and try to conserve both energy and food stores as fat. It will manage on less food so that when you reach your desired weight and increase what you eat you weight will increase rapidly again and is likely to be higher than the weight you started with.
- Life happens even when you are trying to lose weight: it is extremely difficult to have a social life and stick rigidly to any eating programme for a sustained length of time.
So instead a dieting you have to change your mind-set towards weight loss. You have to
- learn again what hunger feels like and how to satisfy it.
- Not satisfy your hunger with high dense foods such as those containing excessive sugar and fat and refined carbohydrates.
- Enjoy eating more healthy food
- Discover new flavours
- Eat a balance of protein , carbohydrates and fat
- Look at ways to cut down or remove from you food any thing with sugar and high saturated fat content.
- Stop turning to food when you are upset or depressed, instead find other ways to deal with these emotions.
July 8th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
Is it possible to lose weight wherever you are? Perhaps. But there may be better of worse places. Think about where and when you eat what you want to eat and yet lose weight compared with other places where you have a greater desire to eat the ‘wrong’ foods and your weight sours. In each of the situations listed below it is a common experience for some people to gain weight and for others to lose weight. What happens to you in each of the following situations and what could you do to bring the essence of when you lose weight to those situations when you commonly gain weight? Continue reading ‘Weight loss: importance of where you are’
July 8th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
It’s really important to keep on top of the clutter challenge.
Clutter has a habit of re-forming very frequently so that even if you have a good clear-out session form time to time, you find that after a few weeks or few months the problem might be as bad as before.
So it’s important to develop a regular clutter clearing habit.
This could be doing something such as: Continue reading ‘How clearing clutter helps you to lose weight more easily’
July 8th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
Here is a tip which will enable you to feel better in yourself, eat less and lose weight. It’s a really simple thing to do, so simple that you may not believe until you try it what a profound effect it will have on you and your life.
If you tend to overeat in relation to feeling stressed then doing what I’m about to suggest will lead to less stress and so you will no longer overeat as a reaction to stress.
What you have to do is to clear your clutter. Yes, when you get tidier and throw away what you no longer need or want then the result will be less stress and so you can say goodbye to overeating too. Continue reading ‘Clear clutter, feel better, lose weight…’
June 20th, 2010 by Susan Kersley
Would Life Coaching be useful to help you lose weight? You may wonder if there is an alternative to ‘going on a diet’ in order to reach the weight you want to be.
Instead of yet another diet there might be an option of hiring a coach to help you change your mindset about your weight and instead of concentrating on the amount of weight you lose, counting points or calories.
Since being overweight is as much about balance especially between the amount of exercise you do and the quantity and quality of your food, techniques which would help you have a better balance in your life might be useful for weight too. Continue reading ‘Can coaching help weight loss?’
How can you gain the mental energy to lose weight?
