You are not weak, you are strong!

But you've been given some bum advice in the past!

 

For centuries being overweight has been considered a problem of weak character and lack of self discipline. It has been approached simplistically by the health professional as an inconsequential matter that could be simply remedied by handing a person a 1000 calorie diet sheet and sending them on their way.

When these methods did not work, doctors found it easier to blame the overweight person that to assume something was wrong with their methods and theories. Doctors are people and people have prejudices against overweight individuals. Furthermore as a group, doctors tend to be highly compulsive. In order to get through all of their years of training they were required to delay gratification of their needs...to put off giving into their urges and satisfying many of their desires. Thus they seem to have little empathy for people they perceive are acting impulsively to satisfy their appetite....even if this perception is wrong.

Doctors like the feeling that comes with knowing they have helped someone. When a person with a strep throat appears at the doctor's office they have an easily identifiable problem. The patient can be given an antibiotic and their symptoms improve rapidly. This is much different from the person who is over-weight. Solving this illness can take days, weeks or months.

Until the past decade obesity research was minimal and most physician when approached by an overweight patient for help would simply hand them a one thousand calorie diet sheet and say "here follow this!" This has led to a great amount of frustration on both sides of the diet sheet. Obesity is much more complex than counting calories for many people. Hopefully medical research will provide us with new answers and effective medications for treating this problem in the future.

In this program, we are bringing the best and latest information on nutrition and health to you. But of equal importance....we are going to discover why you over eat, and give you some real help in ending the problem once and for all.

No one is better at helping you lose weight and keep it off than a Bariatric physician, and I highly recommend that you get a complete physical before starting this or any other weight loss program.

This program is different! Why because the standard fare hasn't and doesn't work. You know the statistics...if you watch television or read the newspapers you do....almost 96% of all dieter's that have lost significant amounts of weight...gain it back within five years. Isn't that terrible? You bet it is...and one of the biggest reasons, is that too many people are treating the symptoms and not the cause. That's where my program is different. We attack the causes. Any one can tell you to eat a 1000 calories a day and you'll lose weight. Most can even tell you what foods promote weight loss and which do not. But that really doesn't help for very long. Because they haven't told you what to do when your family is sitting down to a huge thanksgiving dinner at grandma's and there just isn't any salad on the table. It's all turkey or ham, and dressing and bread with melted butter and grandma is watching every bite you eat to see if you like it. Are you going to tell grandma you don't want her dinner? And worse yet, uncle Harry is sitting right next to you, eating like a horse and in 30 years....he's never put on a pound.

Believe it or not....I understand...and I am here to help. That is just exactly the situation we are going to talk about in this program....and many more. I think your going to like it. In my opinion, overweight can best be conquered by using an effective combination of...low-fat eating...mild to moderate exercise....mental restructuring and behavior modification.

Well take each of these in turn as we come upon the subject in the course of this program, but we're going to start with the second one.....you can't lose weight and keep it off by not being active. One of the reason's ol' Uncle Harry can eat like a horse at grandma's and never seems to gain weight is because he's active. And you need to be active also. Now don't jump to conclusions...you didn't hear me say aerobics or going to a gym, I said active. Formal exercise classes are very good for you, but I know that not everyone can exercise in the traditional sense, and you don't necessarily have to do aerobics to be active. But you do have to be active and when your active you naturally get exercise. It's not a dirty word. Exercise, simply mean to `be active'.

Exercise helps counteract some of the negative effects of high fat eating but not all of them. Assuming our fat intake remains constant, exercise will tend to improve our cardiovascular functioning and protect us from some of the evils of high-fat. But that's like saying that taking a poison and antidote at the same time is better than taking the poison by itself. Wouldn't it be better avoid the poison entirely? Of course it would, but, right now, you have some weight to lose, and being active, or getting exercise is one of the major keys to that weight loss.

There are only two reasons that we ever get motivated to do anything....one is to seek pleasure the other is to avoid pain. Unfortunately exercise isn't pleasurable for most of us and in fact may seem unpleasant or produce pain, especially if we overdo it. There are rewards though! Many of the rewards do not appear immediately and not even be detectable by the individual. Being more active and exercising makes us more fit. This allows us to be more efficient on the jobs and to get more work done with less time spent and more energy left at the end of the day, to spend doing things we truly enjoy.

Exercise boosts the immune system and may reduce our incidence of colds, sore throats, etc. Exercise prevents osteoporosis, lowers total cholesterol and raises h-d-l cholesterol, which is the good kind of cholesterol. It relieves stress and studies have shown that people who exercise regularly have more satisfying sex lives. Have I got your attention now?!

In a landmark book called Biomarkers, Doctors Evans and Roseberg point out that exercise not only extends the length of our life but also improves the quality of our life and that this is reflected in various biological markers for aging such as pulse rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. In fact this book points out that exercise is the fountain of youth.

Now...how to get motivated to exercise when these rewards are so far in the future. Here are two things to keep in mind that will be helpful. First, don't focus on the exercise itself, but rather on the long term result. People who get their income taxes paid by January 2 don't do this because they enjoy filling out their tax returns and writing the check to Uncle Sam. They do it because they know how much better they feel once they have this task out of the way and can focus on more pleasurable activities.

Likewise, many people who exercise regularly do so not because they enjoy it so much, but because they like the way it makes them feel.....both physically and in terms of self-esteem.

Second...you might consider setting up a reward system for exercise so that you can reap benefits from exercise in a shorter term sense. In an immediate sense you can establish a contingency contract with yourself that involves exercise. A contingency contract is an agreement that will link exercise with some other activity that you enjoy doing. For example...you contract might be...if I exercise today, then I can watch my favorite TV show tonight...or read from my novel...or work on my hobby. That's a pretty simple concept, isn't it. You may not need to do a contract with yourself, if you are disciplined enough to exercise without it. And once you start and exercise on a regular basis, you going to find you really like it, and the contracts won't be necessary any more.

 

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