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Weight Loss Building Blocks: Start with Your Health
I hope you’ll think twice about blaming yourself if you’ve ever started a diet and not kept it up. The truth is that almost everyone who goes on a diet fails. The fault lies less with personal weakness and more with the narrowness of the “diet-only” approach. It’s unrealistic. A diet alone is simply not enough to walk you through the weight loss process.
I’ve been fine-tuning my own weight management for more than 30 years, and for over 15 years I’ve been a consultant to others who want help in dealing with their battles with food and their struggles with weight, big or small. I have a sense from the inside out and from the outside in what weight loss is really about – looking at dieting as essentially a cosmetic endeavor does not do the impulse to lose weight justice – and I’ve seen what works. The diet-only approach only rarely does, but if you put a comprehensive set of what could be called, “weight loss building blocks” into place, you’re much more likely to be successful. These “building blocks” address those elements that directly influence your eating. Holistic in nature, they take into account all of you – your body – that is, your diet and your health – your emotions, your mind and your spirit. This whole-life approach provides sturdy support to help you carry out the heart-felt intention set when you make the decision to lose weight.
The state of your health is a crucial factor when it comes to weight loss. It’s overlooked and underestimated, yet trying to diet without having a “foundation of health” in place actually sets the stage for another failure. Paradoxically, dieting itself can aggravate the problem. Here’s how: Many diets cut out entire food groups and so from the start your nutrient intake is incomplete. Few of us can muster the extraordinary “willpower” you’d have to exert in order to override and actually ignore a voluntary dietary imbalance for long. The effect is that sooner or later, you will inevitably end up going off that diet. Then what comes next for many of us? The pendulum swings and we follow up by overeating favorite “forbidden” foods in lieu of a complete menu, skewing that imbalance even further.
Long-term dieters cycle on and off diets and eat according to this pattern for years and years, creating long-standing nutritional gaps. While you may not be obviously sick as a result, those nutritional gaps play absolute havoc when it comes to eating and food; you become susceptible to cravings, are more likely to go on binges, and experience yourself compulsively overeating more often - all of which should be rightly viewed in part as your body’s attempt to make up for those missing nutrients.
While I’ve long been comfortable with my weight, I’ve nevertheless still had to deal with exactly all of that; cravings for specific foods, binges I couldn’t talk myself out of, along with the sometimes irresistible desire to substantially overeat. But recently something has changed, and that change has been dramatic. Here’s my story: About six months ago, I began using Super Blue Green Algae products. Before that time, I’d been sick for over three months, couldn’t seem to get better and fervently hoped the algae would help me. It did, as within ten days, not only was I clearly better, I then proceeded to go through the flu season without even getting a cold – unusual for me.
There were also some other, unexpected effects: Beginning at about six weeks, I thought I noticed some subtle differences in my eating, such as being more picky about food. By six months, the changes were obvious. For instance, I no longer craved chocolate. (To this day, bars upon bars of it from my son’s fund-raiser are still sitting on a kitchen shelf, staring me in the face on a daily basis; yet even after many months that candy has not seriously called to me once). I no longer even had much of a taste for rich, sweet chocolate. My binges also simply ceased, and no temptation seemed to bring them back - not the bread sticks at Oscars, not my mother’s homemade cookies, not popcorn at the movies. And I no longer felt those compulsive urges to overeat. Somehow, bulk eating wasn’t tolerable any longer and I found myself surprisingly unwilling to ignore signals of fullness.
I’m comfortable in a new way when it comes to food and eating. The only variable in my diet this past six months has been the algae. I believe this special food has created nutrient balance in my body, in turn creating a foundation of health, which has spontaneously led to truly positive changes in my dealings with food.
Weight loss is not the clear-cut process it’s commonly made out to be. There is simply more to it than merely applying a mathematical equation and restricting the number of calories or carbohydrates you eat. When you decide to go on a diet, you want to set the stage first, you want to make sure you’ve got all the necessary elements in place. You want to prepare. Here’s an analogy: You, like me, probably think throwing a child who doesn’t know how to swim alone into a pool, is a horrible way to force them to learn. Even if they manage to desperately thrash their way back to the side, it’s doubtful that experience will help them become particularly successful at swimming. How different it would be if that child first was securely held in the water, learned how to blow bubbles and was shown simple strokes in a playful way. Well, there’s some similarity here to going on a diet with neither real preparation nor any support in the ways that count when it comes to weight management.
Along with the rest of the holistic package, if you create and maintain a foundation of health with an adequate spectrum of nutrients, your ability to manage your weight will dramatically increase. Put your weight loss building blocks into place, and start with your health.
Ellen Lavin, Ph.D. is the creator of the Whole-Life Weight Loss Program. Super Blue Green Algae is an essential part of this holistic weight loss program. Dr. Lavin can be reached at 858-548-4840. Toll-free: 888-426-8749 or email elavin@mothercounsel.com
