Tag Archive | Overweight

Walking Works! Start Today!

Feb16

This is just a quick comment to say once again that walking works. This isn’t about food addiction, but it is about being overweight and losing weight.

I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day. We taught in the same classroom a few years ago and we still meet for lunch from time to time, less often than we did when we taught in the same school.

Debby is retiring from teaching this year, along with her husband who is also a teacher. After more than thirty years in the school system, they will be moving into their retirement home in North Carolina is just a few months.

I was thrilled to see her, as usual. She looked fabulous. As we looked at pictures of their new home in progress, she told me she had lost more than forty pounds.

She said that she and her husband walk together every day and that he had lost over thirty pounds himself . Obviously, the walking is working. I envied her having a constant walking buddy.

I see retirees out walking all the time. I used to think about how they have all the time in the world to walk, but it’s really about making the commitment and sticking to it.

Even though the semi-retired and working folks have other things to do, getting out there and moving is very important. The discipline of taking thirty or forty-five minutes out of your busy day to go for a walk will be greatly rewarded.

As we age, we gain weight. Our bodies shift and respond differently to our lifestyles. We have to be more diligent in the way we take care of ourselves.

Things get harder to do when we get older. Walking is something most everyone can do, but you have to make time for it.

Regular people–short and tall, thin and thick, old and young–benefit from daily walks. The sooner you start, the stronger you will be when age tries to slow you down.

Add walking to your to-do list every day, and start working on your own success story.

It’s Never Too Late to Be Great!

Be Bigger Than Your Food Addiction

Dec3

You know that expression, “You have too much on your plate”? Well, did you ever notice that when you have too much on your plate, you tend to put too much on your plate?

This is one of the big challenges for people with food addictions. Overwhelming stress, or the illusion of overwhelming stress, makes us eat for no other reason than we don’t know what else to do.

Stress has a way of making us think things are worse than they actually are. When we react by overeating, the stress gets worse because first, it doesn’t solve the problem and second it adds a second problem of becoming overweight.

Oddly enough, it seems like the larger your body gets the more invisible we become. People don’t notice us in positive ways and the fat is easy to hide behind. The truth is that we are only hiding from ourselves.

Things that happened in the past are in the past. They can’t be changed. Now is different. Anything can happen in the present moment, which is the only moment we have control over anyway.

If something in the past made you feel small and insignificant, then why not change things? We are responsible for making our own changes, no matter what, so why not be bigger than our food addiction?

I was thinking about this after I had been to a Seal concert. Seal is a great performer but I noticed something in this particular concert that I’d not noticed before. Throughout every song, his arms were outstretched most of the time.

As he sang with his arms wide, it gave me a sense of freedom, of being larger than life. As we left the concert, my friend and I serenaded each other with our favorite songs, none of when even vaguely resembled Seal’s performance.

As we sang and laughed, we stretched out our arms wide and spun around like children. It was a fabulous moment. In that moment, we were as big as the world with no worries, no troubles, no thought of food.

It was like being in a different world, one in which we were noticed and admired. Some people even applauded.

It didn’t matter what we did, or how we were dressed or whether or not we could sing worth a hoot. We were being our true selves in the best of ways. What a blast!

You are bigger than anything that will ever happen to you. Stretch out your arms as wide as the sky and spin around. Just for a moment, be your own true self. It’s positively addictive.

New Book for Food Addicts and Overeaters

Nov8

A new book by David Kessler, M.D. is being touted as one that will change forever the way we look at food.

Rodale Books publishes some of the finest books you will read in the field of health and well-being. I should know; I’ve read most of them.

Dr. Kessler’s new book, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite is certainly worth taking the time to read.

Besides having some great information for emotional eaters, overeaters, people with food addictions, and those whose eating has led to obesity, there are insights in Dr. Kessler’s book that you may not have found elsewhere.

Being heavy, overweight, or obese is very uncomfortable at a number of levels. It isn’t the goal of people with food addictions or problems with emotional eating to be as skinny as a stick, nor should it be.

Learning to manage the discomfort or just making peace with your size at the present moment can make life more livable.  The information in this book can help.

One chapter in the book, Chapter 11  in Part One, particularly caught my attention. It is titled “Emotions Make Food Memorable”.  The title alone speaks volumes.

I got a kick out of its being Chapter 11, a concept and term most often associated with bankruptcy and reorganization. How appropriate to think of a food addiction as bankrupting your health and reorganization as a rescue remedy.

I encourage you to buy the book or get it at the Library. It’s just under $14 on Amazon and only about 250 pages without the acknowledgments, index, etc.

Like food, don’t try to digest it all at once. Read a little each day, or at night before you go to bed. Then write about what you learned in your journal.

As with any other resource, keep an open mind. Don’t accept or reject the ideas. Just use what you can and let the rest go, no judgments.  Maybe it will be meaningful to you later, maybe not. Who cares?

Find something–a phrase, a line, a paragraph–that will inspire you to action today. One action each day to take you in the direction of your goal. That’s 365 actions a year. One day at a time.

Let me know how it goes.