In many respects, I’m a fairly average American girl.  I’m a working mom and wife from a middle-class household.  My life isn’t glamorous or luxurious, but it is, well, comfortable.  I go to work at my desk job and sit in my cozy, high-backed chair all day.  I come home to a house with a controlled temperature, set exactly to my liking.  And when I go to sleep at night, I crawl into the bed that is perfectly molded to my body, and fall asleep in the arms of the man I love.

Is it any wonder I feel like I’m entitled to comfort?

The problem is, comfort is not a dieter’s friend.

When I first started counting calories, I had to get used to the “half-empty” feeling that I had in my belly as I got used to the kind of portions I was supposed to be eating.  Please don’t get me wrong–you shouldn’t go hours upon hours without eating.  Starving yourself is NOT the way to lose weight healthfully and keep it off.  But when you start a diet, you don’t feel full for awhile at the beginning.  Your body needs to adjust to the new way you’re eating.

After spending the bulk of my life as a couch potato, I had convinced myself that exercise wasn’t healthy for me.  Why?  Because every time I tried it, I was so uncomfortable.  I’d get on a treadmill or lift a few weights, and as soon as I started to “feel the burn”, I’d stop.  Or I’d get finished with a workout dvd, and when I woke up to sore muscles the next morning, I’d decide the dvd was all wrong for me.  The feeling that I was entitled to comfort was so  ingrained in me that I couldn’t comprehend how helpful, how necessary the discomfort was for my success.

And of course, the most challenging part of weight loss is finding the source of your weight gain.  If you have 20 or fewer pounds to lose, you may be able to attribute the extra weight to a busy lifestyle, a year or two of poor choices, etc.  But if you have a great deal of weight to lose, you must know that there are emotional issues behind the gain.  All of the dieting and working out in the world cannot equal true and permanent weight loss if you don’t figure out the root of your problem and deal with it.  A large amount of extra weight is almost always a symptom of an emotional matter, and eating lots of high-fat foods is a means of coping with that matter.

Facing the demons that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle is about as far away from the comfort zone as you can get.  It takes a long time to work through emotional issues, probably much longer than it will take for you to lose the weight.  But the further away you step from comfort, the closer you will come to freedom.  Freedom, not just from excess pounds, but from the unhealthy lifestyle that makes those pounds pile on.

These are the images that pop into my head, so many years later, when I think of myself in a gym.  Anyone who’s been a fat kid knows that gym is the worst place to be.  So last year when my diet buddy suggested that we join the gym that’s housed in our building at work, I literally laughed in her face.  “No way!”  I said, without even thinking about it.  When asked for an explanation I told her that it would devastate my weight loss efforts.  “The moment I go in there and get laughed at, I will feel like a failure.  I can’t take that kind of pressure right now.  I need to keep things positive.”

She let it go, and I thought–hoped–that would be the end of it.  But for those of you who know Kimmy, you know that she’s nothing if not persistent.  Every month or two she would find a new tactic to try to convince me to go to the gym.  At first she was touting how inexpensive our gym is (it’s only $100 for the whole year), and that I’d never find a better deal anywhere else.

“I don’t want to find a better deal.  I’m never going to the gym.”

Then she tried to convince me that it wasn’t that kind of gym.  “There are people of all sizes and skill levels at this gym.  Everybody does their own thing, and nobody pays attention to anyone else.”  But how could a girl like me believe that?  I knew that as soon as I walked in the door, the big, athletic guys and the tiny, perfect girls would instantly see who I was: a fat fourth-grader whose only goal at the gym was to get through it without a “piggy” or “fatso” joke.

One day, during the holiday season, I was foolish enough to complain about how little time I had to work out.  I tried to do it when I got my son to bed at night, but by that time I’m usually wiped out.  And I had just had an extremely unsuccessful two weeks of attempting to get up at 5:00am to workout before my family woke up.  But since I am nearly unable to function before 8:00am, I was a zombie during my workouts and was quite literally going through the motions with almost no benefit to my body.

“You know, there’s a really easy solution to your problem,” Kimmy replied.  As I came up with one excuse after another from my impressive arsenal, she sat silently and listened to all the words she’d heard before.  She was very quiet when she said, “Nancy, it doesn’t have to be this complicated.  You’re not a kid anymore, and this doesn’t have to own you.”

And I knew she was right.  As much progress as I’ve made in my weight loss, I know I’ll never be able to reach my goal weight, let alone keep it off, without conquering all the old demons that still haunt me.  I need to step out of my comfort zone, and get as far away from it as possible.  It’s the comfort zone that traps me now and makes me feel like I can’t succeed.

Four weeks ago I started at the gym, and I have to be honest with you: I was scared to death.  People were lifting weights, running on the treadmills, and cycling imaginary miles on the stationary bikes.  A man on the elliptical was shouting to his friend about how hard it is to do “two eighteens” in a row.  A woman jumped off the treadmill with her first two fingers poked into her neck.  And I started to panic.  What if somebody wants to talk to me about “two eighteens”?  I don’t even know what that means!  Should I poke my neck too?  Am I checking to see if it’s still fat?

Kimmy and I put our dvd into the player and started our workout.  It was surprisingly fun to workout with a buddy, much more entertaining than doing the dvd by myself.  Between the music from our dvd, the sounds of all the machines and people talking, it got pretty loud at the gym and the scary thoughts in my mind began to get quieter.

Four weeks later, I don’t hear those thoughts much anymore.  The big guys that intimidated me on my first day give me a warm wave when I arrive now; and the super-skinny girl that kills the elliptical has told me she’s never been confident doing workout dvds at the gym.  I told her she can join us any time.  Fourth grade was a long time ago for everybody I see at the gym.  As far as I can tell, no one is thinking about dividing into teams or deciding who the weakest link is.  At this stage, everyone is really there to work on their own goals–health, weight loss, empowerment and strength.

And though I will always remember the little girl who was picked last, I can now look at myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors at the gym and see just how far I’ve come.

I think weight loss is a lot like those Adventure books.  As well-intentioned and dedicated to losing weight as you are, it is easy to make the wrong decisions.  Dieting is such a huge money-making industry, and a lot of companies take advantage of that.  The problem is that a lot of foods are presented as diet-friendly that really are much higher in fat and calories than most dieters think.

Buzz words on packages like “reduced fat”, “multi-grain”, or “sugar-free” give you the idea that these are diet foods.  And when you go out to eat, there are almost always salads and other dishes on the menu that give the illusion that they are made for dieters.  And while that illusion may be misleading, I’m a firm believer that any food or restaurant can be diet-friendly if you have the tools to manage your calories and servings.  And the great thing is, with the wonderful hubbub of the internet, you can get those tools (for which people have been paying big bucks for decades) for free.

There are two major resources that I use on a daily basis, and they have made all the difference in my weight loss.  The first is a website that doctors recommend for patients that are diagnosed with diabetes, who can get on and type in the name of an individual food or a meal and get calorie, fat, sugar and sodium information.  It is www.calorieking.com, and it’s such a useful tool.  The database is huge, with new foods and restaurants constantly added, and is quite accurate.  And one of the best parts of it is that it takes the worry out of trying new foods, both at home and restaurants.  When I know I’m meeting friends for dinner, I go to Calorie King and type the restaurant into the database.  For most food chains, it brings up a list of meals and their nutritional information.  So, no more guesswork for dieters.  You can enjoy your meal with the freedom that comes with knowing you’re treating yourself while staying in control.

The other site has some similarities to Calorie King with some tweaks here and there.  www.thedailyplate.com is a great resource that, like Calorie King, has nutritional information.  While the database is not quite as large, it is sufficient for many basic foods.  The great part of the Daily Plate is that it is a food diary.  You input all of the foods you eat throughout the day, and track your calories for the day.  Having a written account of your food is one of the single best things you can do for weight loss.

Food diaries and books with calorie info can be cumbersome and expensive.  With these two useful websites, you can be empowered in a way that is both cost-efficient and convenient.

Yes, weight loss is an adventure, and sometimes it is difficult to know what choice is the right one.  Adding Calorie King and the Daily Plate to your diet plan will make for fewer mistakes and wrong turns.  Losing weight does involve discipline and finding the inner strength it takes to make the right choices for your body.  Having tools that enable you to plan ahead and keep track of your food intake make it easier to find that strength and discipline, and to make your diet story a successful one.  Good luck!

First of all, diet pills–like any over-the-counter substance you use–are not taken without risks.  Think about Tylenol, which is one of the most common medicines used in the United States.  Most people take it as needed without any negative impact.  But if you were to take a dose of it every four hours for a period of a year or more, there could be serious consequences.

Diet pills can be a very useful tool if you are trying to lose weight.  One of the most common struggles dieters have is learning to work through the hunger that comes from reduced portion sizes.  There is a wide variety of diet supplements on the market that can help to curb that hunger.  But it is important to know the risks and limitations involved before adding a bottle of appetite suppressants to your grocery list.

First of all, it is important to know that if you have a significant amount of weight to lose, you will probably be dieting for longer than it is safe to take diet pills on a daily basis.   The period of time to take the pills should be limited to between three and six months.  When I started dieting, I used an appetite suppressant for the first three months.  Since that time, I have a bottle on hand for times when I need it.  An example of that time would be after a “big eating day” like Thanksgiving.  We stretch our stomachs a bit on these days and fill our bodies with high-fat foods.  For many dieters having a high-fat day can easily turn into a string of high-fat days without careful planning.  So I follow a day like that with one dose of diet pills to help myself get back on track.  This amounts to a couple doses of diet pills every other month or so.

Something else to be mindful of is that most diet supplements contain caffeine and/or other stimulants.  For that reason, they have the potential to raise your blood pressure and increase your heart rate.  Again, when diet pills are used as directed and within the time-frame I have discussed, this risk seems as though it should be a small one for the general public.  The problem is that many people who are carrying extra weight are already at risk for heart problems and have a much higher potential to have a high blood pressure prior to ingesting the pills.  For this reason, it is important to talk to your doctor before taking any diet pills.  If you are clinically overweight, your doctor may even want to prescribe an appetite suppressant for you and monitor your progress.   If the caffeine in the pills is the only concern, you may want to mention to your doctor that many companies are now releasing two versions of their appetite suppressants–one with caffeine and one without.

Finally, an important thing to remember is that a diet pill is just a tool that is to be used while you are learning healthy eating and exercise habits.  It can help curb your appetite while your body is adjusting to your new lifestyle.   But no pill can be a substitute for a moderate diet filled with foods from all of the food groups.  And especially, a pill cannot keep you from eating out of stress, loneliness or boredom.  If you are an emotional eater, then a diet pill is nothing more than a bandage on a wound that needs much deeper exploration in order to heal.  Appetite suppressants are only that.  They contain no secrets and no magic.  They can be helpful, as long as you approach them realistically.

*The views and methods discussed here were approved for me, by my physician.  Please note that everyone is different.  What has been safe for me may not be safe for you.  It is extremely important to discuss appetite suppressants, dieting and exercise with your doctor before you begin a new plan.*

I can’t go to work in the months of November and December without facing a plate of cookies in the kitchen, a tin of chocolates on the counter, and a candy cane in my Christmas cards.  And these items do not account for the countless potlucks and holiday parties, let alone the actual days of celebration.

So it is no coincidence that the average American woman gains seven pounds between Halloween and New Year’s Day.  We all know the reasons for the extra poundage.  The question is, what can we do about it?

There are many methods out there from weight-loss and fitness gurus about how to get through the holidays and stay on track with your weight.  And really, when it comes down to dieting, as long as you are perpetuating habits that aren’t damaging to your health, there’s no right or wrong.  Right is simply what works for you.  I have a simple method that worked really well for me, and I am pulling it out with the tinsel and tree-topper and dusting it off for the holiday season.  Last year, between Halloween and New Year’s, I actually lost eight pounds.  It’s a tradition I am eager to repeat this year!

Here’s my (re)gift to you:

When it comes to eating during this time of year, I use one of my most valuable dieting tools: my calendar.  I get out my big desk calendar and mark off all of the events where there will yummy food that is totally indulgence-worthy.  There’s my office Christmas party (this year we’re having City Barbecue…mmmmm).  There’s Thanksgiving day, Christmas eve and Christmas day, New Year’s party and New Year’s day.  These are the days I mark with stickers and crayons and highlighters.  These are the days I look forward to, for the love, the fellowship, and yes–the food.  Having that visual reminder gives me something to look toward. I know that, on these days I will be enjoying myself and treating myself.  I don’t put any restrictions on myself for these days.  I eat what I want.

I don’t believe that being a dieter means that we should miss out on the special occasions that come along.  I think that–for me at least–doing that would make me fail in the long run.  If I felt like I was missing out on the pleasurable eating that the holidays bring, I would feel like giving up.  Dieting is a valuable tool for weight-loss.  But on these special days, I put the tool in its box and frolic in the wondrous world of sweet potato pie, glazed ham and my hubby’s special garlic potatoes.

All right, you may be asking yourself how eating whatever you want will help you lose weight.  That, my little crickets, is where the calendar comes in.  When people tempt me with their homemade treats during this time of year, I look at my calendar.  I know that I will be eating my favorite foods on those days.  And while I like peanut brittle, I don’t love peanut brittle.  I enjoy chocolate.  But I can eat chocolate any time.  I try, during this time of year to stay focused on my freebie days.  Knowing that I have those days coming makes it much easier to turn down the random goodies that pass under my nose at every turn.

Realistically, we probably won’t say no to every temptation we face over the next few months.  When you do indulge, try to be moderate.  If it’s candy, take one piece and pass the plate away from you.  If it’s cookies, take the smallest one in the batch, enjoy it, and continue with your planned food for the day.

The key is to try not to let these “extras” extend into two months of non-stop eating.  Enjoy yourself.  Eat all the turkey and stuffing you want on Thanksgiving day, with the knowledge that when you wake up the next morning, it is back to the diet, as usual.  If you can do that throughout the next month or two, you will make it to New Year’s un-deprived.  And smaller.

Cheers!  Nan

I had taken a month-long break from the plan that has served me so well.  It is something I do every few months to rejuvenate and renew myself for another round of going hard-core on the diet scene.  I had just begun to get back into the groove and was feeling really strong.  I was pushing myself physically further than I’ve ever been able to go before.  And then I got sick.

Not just sick with a cold or flu bug, but sick with pleurisy, which is infection and inflammation of the outer lung lining.  In short, for over a week I felt like I was dying from the longest heart attack in history.

And instead of accepting the physical limitations of my body for what they were, I let the guilt and fear slip into my psyche.  The same old guilt and fear that kept me paralyzed for years, in terms of weight loss.

I felt guilty that I wasn’t up to counting calories and just wanted some good, old-fashioned comfort food.  I felt guilty that I wasn’t walking, jogging, lifting weights and climbing stairs.  And I was gripped with an insane fear and absolute certainty that THIS would be the event that would knock me down and keep me from reaching my goal, forever.

It was completely irrational, yet it all seemed very real and very true to me.

This is a very common phenomenon with people who have been overweight for a long time and then have some success with weight loss; particularly, I’ve found, with people who have been overweight since childhood.  We have so much negative emotional association with food in general.  We convince ourselves of crazy things because of desperation from feeling powerless for so long.

But guilt and fear are the enemy of reaching your goals, in weight loss and in pretty much all of life’s ventures.  Nothing good ever came of being immobilized with fear.  Strength is not born of guilt.

It is the difficult task of those who struggle against these emotions to fight them, every day.  We must try to separate ourselves from these self-destructive emotions.  Throughout this time of creating new habits for myself, this has been the most difficult aspect of my transformation.  Why?  Because it is the very heart of my problem.  Just as overeating and not being physical were mere symptoms of my dysfunction, changing my eating and exercise habits has been just a facet of the real changes.  Even the 65-pound weight loss is just a symptom of the true, life-altering transition.

Years of feeling guilty and hopeless take their toll.  It is a daily battle to replace these negative feelings with self-acceptance and forgiveness.  You can see, based on my recent experience, how easy it is to slip back into the old ways of thinking.  My illness brought on the same old feelings I used to live with every moment of every day.  That I am unable to achieve my goals because I’m not worth it.  That I’ll never be good enough.  That I’ll always fail.

The true victory in all of this has been that I’ve been able to go for weeks, sometimes months at a time without having a thought like that creep into my mind.  The weight loss is a side-effect of my new-found ability to accept myself.  To accept that, at any weight I am worth working toward a goal.  To know that I am worth taking some extra time for myself to exercise and plan my eating.

This knowledge is what I’ve been building on over the last year-and-a-half.  And even though those spidery old feelings creep in now and again, I am able to chase them away with the new truths in my life.  And I keep going.

As you can see, being a mom doesn’t mean giving up on fitness.  The most difficult aspect of becoming a physically active mom is establishing a routine.  Experiment for awhile and find what works best for you.  You can do it!

Now, I absolutely despise grapefruit.  I have, on occasion eaten a bite or two out of polite obligation to someone who was serving it to me.  However, the inventor of this diet promised that at the end of 30 days, anyone who followed the instructions faithfully would lose at least 30 pounds.

So I dutifully bought a bunch of grapefruit and a juicer, and proceeded to make eight ounces of liquid death.  On the first morning, it took me 15 minutes to gag the juice down; the second morning my time actually increased to 20 minutes.  By day three I was done.  I threw away all of the grapefruit.  I even destroyed my juicer for good measure.  It had been fraternizing with the enemy fruit for two days, after all.

Although I now understand that no fad diet is truly capable of providing true and permanent weight loss, I’m glad for the lesson that the grapefruit juice diet taught me: diets are not “one size fits all”.  This is a truth that extends to the more reputable diets out there.

It is often unpleasant to live in a society in which thin equals beauty.  The expectations to be skinny, particularly for women, are completely unreasonable.  But there is a bright side: there is a diet out there for virtually every personality.  And that is great news for anyone looking to lose weight.  Finding the right plan is one of the single most important aspects of successful weight loss.  Just as every person learns differently, every person requires an individual diet style.

I am a person who needs a great deal of freedom within my diet.  I tend to be rebellious; if you tell me not to do something, that is the thing I want to do most.  And I won’t be able to get it out of my mind until I do.  So a diet with a lot of rules, and a lot of “off-limits” foods would never work for me.  If, for example, you told me that I could reach my goal weight in two months, and the only thing I could not eat is oatmeal cookies, I would be totally on board…for probably about three days.  And then I would spend day four eating nothing but oatmeal cookies–a food that is not that tempting to me normally.

People who like to carve out their own path, as I do, tend to do well on Weight Watcher’s.  WW’s has a point system, and you can eat anything you like as long as you don’t go above your allotted calories for the day.  If you were having a day where you were craving nothing but Hershey kisses and Doritos, you could have them all day, until your points were all gone.

If, on the other hand you are a person who likes a lot of structure in your daily life, you might want to try something like L.A. Weight Loss.  They will give you a list of foods that are on your plan, and at each meal you pick a food from each group on your list.  It takes a lot of the guess work and planning out of dieting that many people find intimidating.

For an even more structured plan, look into Jenny Craig or Nutrisystem.  You will purchase all of your meals and snacks for the week with the assistance of a dietary consultant.  This is definitely a “no-fuss” way to go.  These plans are great for people to whom organization and planning ahead is very important.  Although the meals seem expensive, often if you calculate what you are currently spending on food, the prices are pretty comparable.

If your goal is to completely cut processed foods out of your life, something like South Beach or a macrobiotic diet may be for you.  South Beach cuts all but a limited group of foods out of your diet in order to sever cravings for processed sugars and high fat foods.  You will gradually add more variety back into your diet.  Macrobiotics is an ancient Asian way of eating that focuses on vegetables and whole grains, with a small amount of  natural sugars, healthy fats and proteins.  People who adopt this style find that after a month or two, they lose their desire for sweets and fats.

If you are looking into these plans and find, as I did, that you like certain aspects of several of them, but none of them seem like quite the right fit, don’t be afraid to mix and match, or even to create your own plan.  I liked a lot of the tools used by Weight Watcher’s, but I wasn’t crazy about trying to convert all the food I ate into points.  I also wasn’t that interested in going to the weekly meetings.  I liked the idea of having my portion automatically controlled with Jenny Craig.  But I didn’t want to be limited to their food for every meal of every day.

As I did my research, I found something very interesting: most diets I have listed here are having the dieters consume approximately 1200-1600 calories daily.  Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, Weight Watcher’s and L.A. Weight Loss are all using this formula.  So I became a calorie-counter who uses many of the principles from each of these plans.

Instead of purchasing Jenny Craig meals, I bought a bunch of Lean Cuisine and similar meals.  The most difficult time for me to stay on track is at dinner, so I will often make one of my prepared meals to avoid over-eating.  I know that when the little box is empty, I am done.  I keep track of all my calories throughout the day.  If I want a bag of Doritos from the vending machine at work, I will get one and include it in my calories for the day.  For me, it takes a lot of the pressure away.  I don’t have to worry about having a food I’m not allowed to eat, because I can eat whatever I want.

It is so easy to get discouraged while dieting–a topic I will talk about a lot in the future.  And when we feel we have a failed day, many of us give up entirely.  Finding the right diet for your personal style is key in taking away some of that pressure.  If you find a plan that makes you feel comfortable from the beginning, you will set yourself up for successful weight loss.  Consequently, you will be learning positive eating habits that work well for you.  And these habits will solidify the longer you use them, and enable you to maintain your weight after you reach your goal.