Overcoming All-Or-Nothing Thinking to Achieve Your Weight Loss Goals

If you feel stuck achieving your weight loss goals, you may be experiencing a thinking error known as all-or-nothing thinking. In this article you'll learn about how this type of thinking interferes with your goals and gain specific strategies to counteract this thinking.

While you may have the perfect plan for how to reach your ideal weight, what really makes the difference between success and failure in weight loss is how you respond when you steer off the plan. Maybe you overate, maybe you skipped a day of exercise, maybe you indulged in a little late night snack. Whatever the case, these are the critical moments when you will decide whether to get back on track, or throw in the towel and give up hope.

It's amazing how quickly hope turns to despair and all your plans, no matter how much progress you've made, become like distant dreams. You may have lost many pounds or gone down several sizes, but even so, it's a single slip up that seems to contradict all your past successes.

When you take a single piece of negative evidence and judge yourself on it, you are experiencing all-or-nothing thinking. No matter how much success you've had in the past, a single failure weighs more heavily on your internal scales of justice. As a result, you see yourself as a failure and your plans impossible to achieve. You find yourself with negative thoughts such as the following:

"I'll never lose weight."
"I'll always be overweight."
"There's no hope for losing weight."
"If I don't lose weight I will never be happy."

Once you notice that you are thinking in this way, what can you do to counteract this kind of thinking? One of the most straight-forward ways is to examine the evidence that supports your negative thinking. Fold a piece of paper in half. In one column, list the evidence in favor of your negative thought. In the other column, list evidence that does not support your negative thought. Once you've done so, decide whether your negative thought is completely true.

Another strategy to help counteract all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine what you would say to a friend who made a similar action. What would you say to him or her? Would you condemn him or her, or would you offer kind words of support?

A third strategy for overcoming all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine you are in a court of law, presenting evidence to a judge. Once you've presented all of the evidence (it's helpful to make a list of positive and negative evidence), what do you think a judge would say? Would the judge tell you that you will NEVER lose weight? Or would you receive a more balanced judgment?

All-or-nothing thinking can prove a major obstacle to weight loss. Overcoming it just may be the key to your staying firmly in control of your plan and not losing sight of the overall goal.

Paul Monson is a health consultant and former clinical psychology PhD student. If you'd like to discover more ways to support your weight loss goals, visit: http://organicjiaogulantea.com/

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Is Healthy Eating For Weight Loss The Standard American Diet?

The standard American (or Australian or English) diet, or SAD for short, really is sad. There is no concept of health, nutrition, toxicity, weight gain or the diet best suited to the way you evolved. It seems the only aspect of concern is speed and taste. Of course these are important considerations, but so too are the others.

Let's examine these in more detail.

Healthy food is full of nutrients. It supplies your body with all its needs to prevent every conceivable illness, or to heal them. Yet not only is your food lacking in nutrients by the way it is farmed, the processing of de-naturing, emulsifying, colouring, flavouring, extending the shelf life and many more procedures are harmful.

Heat is used extensively and kills off many of the essential nutrients. Chemicals are used to flavour, colour, preserve or as catalysts, which increase the toxin levels in your body. De-naturing natural foods make them hard to digest and assimilate as well as creating mischief in your body.

An example of de-natured food is sugar. Sugarcane is a healthy food. As is the blackstrap molasses, the first by-product in the sugar processing. But sugar is very unhealthy. So are all the chemical sugar alternatives. On its own, sugar cannot be digested. So to digest it, minerals are pulled from your body. Minerals that are essential to a healthy body.

Don't consider for one minute that government agencies protect your food properly. They may prevent some of the really dangerous methods of food production, but not the less harmful ones. You have to look no further than the GM issue to realise that. Even that is considered by many to be one of the most harmful foods there are.

Chemicals which increase the toxicity in your body can come from the air you breathe or the cigarettes you smoke. But they also come from your food. In an effort to try to limit the damage to your body, they are stored in fat, in the organ systems, in the connective tissue, wreaking havoc, creating disease.

The SAD completes ignores the diet humans have evolved on and operate best on, which is the healthiest diet. This diet gives you more energy, more resistance to disease, greater peace, an optimum weight, greater ability to cope with stress and a longer, healthier life.

Aim for healthy eating to bring your weight down and increase your health.

Madeleine Innocent is a full time natural health consultant specialising in diet-for-health and homeopathy. She treats both people and animals within these two disciplines. She also coaches people both on- and off-line, on these subjects. For more information, visit: Healthy Eating For Weight Loss

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Essential Things You Should Know When You're Diabetic and Want to Lose Weight

It would be better to call type 2 diabetes a special disease than a serious disease. Diabetes develops stealthily. At the pre-diabetic stage you won't feel symptoms. You might feel fatigued now and then especially when you've eaten too much of those fine processed carbohydrate foods. Gradually, you'll feel chronically tired; feel pain in your chest; your hands get numb; your vision gets blurred or minor wounds heal so slowly. When you experience these symptoms, you suspect diabetes.

So, it won't come as a surprise when your doctor gives the diagnosis. You know it might be diabetes as you think of those wonderful delicious sweet and fatty foods you've been used to and the doubling of your weight in such a short time.

You're told that it can't be cured with a dose of pills. Your doctor explains that lifestyle changes can benefit you - lose weight, eat a sensible diet, portion control, exercise and daily blood glucose tests. First things first, your doctor referred you to a dietitian so you can be counseled on the right diet. This is tough you tell yourself.

Here are things you should know when you're diabetic and want to lose weight.

1. Take this seriously. Some diabetic patients don't care. They think diabetes can be cured with pills but unfortunately they may not work well if their diet is made of finely processed carbohydrates and fatty food.

2. Know the right foods to eat. Your dietitian can help you here. Get a list of food you can eat. Print it. Post it in your kitchen, workplace and bedroom. Keep a list in your bag.

3. Refer to this list every time you buy food or eat out. You can memorize this list too. Stick to it.

4. Know how many calories you should consume daily. Your dietitian will talk about servings. How many servings of veggies and fruits, carbohydrates, fats and protein should you eat in day? Your dietitian will introduce you to the food pyramid. If you aren't familiar with this, grab a copy and study it well.

5. Learn to use common objects and compare it with servings.

6. Learn to cook with a minimum of fat. Instead of frying, it would be better to grill or boil. Cook with oils low in unsaturated fats such as olive or canola oil.

7. If everything else is confusing, use portion control plates, glasses, cups and bowls. Portion control dinnerware can greatly help you measure your servings.

8. Develop a healthy eating habit. Social experts say that creating a healthy eating habit will assist you to develop a pattern that will last a lifetime. Initially, creating this habit will be tough. However, once you've mastered this, you'll do it automatically. This will help you reach your goals of losing weight and controlling your blood sugar.

You've got to realize that a diabetic's diet doesn't differ much from the normal diet. You can still have that dessert but in small servings, you can still eat meat but in moderation as prescribed by your dietitian. And yes, start to develop a habit of portion control and healthy eating.

A B Stephens is a chemical engineer by profession. Her passion to help diabetics stems from the fact that members of her family and her husband's are diabetics. They launched http://www.typefreediabetes.com in 2007. A portion control dinnerware is one of their top selling products. http://www.typefreediabetes.com/FOCUS-Extended-Portion-Control-Dinnerware-Plus-p/fps1x.htm

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