by patbarone
One of the many lessons I learned while losing over 70 lbs. is that my body isn’t (and never has) worked against my greater good.
Oh, it’s worked against the crazy fad diets I adopted. And it’s lowered my metabolism in response to each and every stringent eating plan I tried.
But it was trying to save me from myself and my destructive eating patterns.
Though I had 3 academic degrees and had completed countless other courses of study, I realized my body had greater wisdom than I did and, if it wasn’t so smart, I’d probably be dead from excessive dieting and yo-yo weight gains.
Our bodies love us and want us to be healthy.
The body isn’t fighting against us when it refuses to drop the pounds quickly. It’s protecting us.
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by patbarone
Here in Madison, WI, we’re experiencing the winter’s first big snow. Imagine my surprise when I was driving through the near white-out conditions and noticed a woman standing outside an office building, without a coat, casually smoking a cigarette.
“Wow!” I thought. She must really need that cigarette!” It was so interesting to see her complete lack of embarrassment as she demonstrated her addiction in spite of the frozen conditions.
My addiction was always food. I thought, “Would I stand in the snow to eat a brownie if you couldn’t eat them indoors?”
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by patbarone
Diets may be intended to trim our bodies but they actually diminish us as people.
Harsh restrictions give the body the message that it is something to be “whipped” into shape, changed, altered, melted — instead of teaching us to listen to our bodies for the wealth of information inside them.
Diets instill the idea of control. The message is:
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by patbarone
I want to share a Thanksgiving story with you as we approach turkey day in the U.S.
I started losing weight in March of 1996. By the time November rolled around, I was feeling great about the changes I had made in my life. The prospect of Thanksgiving, however, loomed. My memories of that particular holiday weren’t fond. Even though I would tell you that I “loved” the food we traditionally had on the Thanksgiving table, the day always ended in pain.
Giving thanks = pain….
Mmmmm, no. Something was wrong with that equation!
So, I knew my next Thanksgiving had to be different.
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by patbarone
Over 13 years ago, when I decided to lose weight permanently, the word was out: Diets don’t work.
In 1996, there was a kind of confusion as to why that was true. I set out to understand permanent weight loss because I knew that gave me the ONLY opportunity to achieve it.
It’s not surprising, when I give a workshop or teach a class, that my clients don’t understand how the body loses weight. It’s no guarded secret. But we simply don’t teach it here in America. It’s not fast. It’s not sexy. But I say the hell with that, you can be fast and sexy later, once you’ve taken the time to make real change in your life.
So, here we go. Here’s the first reason diets almost never lead to permanent weight loss:
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