Pick the Right Weight Loss Plan for You

Different plans address different problems.  If you’re a junk food junkie, South Beach might be great, because it forces you to cook a bunch of fresh foods.  If you’re a carb addict, Atkins would force you to let that go for a while.  If you’re too busy to prepare food, a meal replacement plan could be your friend.  If you’re any sort of an emotional/stress/compulsive/bored eater, Medifast is great because everything is limited, even celery—there is nothing whatsoever that you’re allowed to binge on.

There are countless diets available.  I got lucky when I chose Medifast.  My selection process went like this:  I’ve done South Beach and loved it, but I’m too busy to cook that much. What else is out there?  Oh, I have a friend who’s lost about a hundred pounds, ask her what she did.  Medifast?  Oh look, packets!  Neat.  Sign me up.

Handling the Weight-Loss Sabotaging Partner

Your partner (or parents, housemates, siblings, children, friends) says they love you.  Most of the time, you even believe those words when they come out of their mouth.  But then you go on a diet.  You’re working harder than you’ve ever worked on anything in your life.  You’re committed.  You are making changes happen.

They bring home donuts and fried chicken.

You come home and your favorite junk foods are laid out to tempt you.  Or they order a pizza to “celebrate your diet success.”  Really?  To celebrate my staying on my diet you want to make me walk the plank into a giant tub of full-fat ice cream?  Awww, thanks for thinking of me, I love you too!

Kill Your Taste Buds - Eating Clean

The American diet is a disaster, right?  Fast food, take-out, frozen dinners, processed processed processed.  Many people feel they’re virtuously eating healthy when they eat a microwaved frozen vegetable that comes in its own “cheese” sauce.

This is not healthy and you know it.  MSG, artificial flavors, salt, fat, sugar, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners—they’ve all done a number on your taste buds.  Your taste buds are desensitized, overwhelmed, and overstimulated.  It’s like a porn addiction—the longer you sit in your basement watching porn and avoiding human beings, the more hardcore and intense of stimulation you need, and the less attractive the kind, wholesome girl with a crush on you becomes.  Plain steamed broccoli has a crush on you, and you’re ignoring her.

Junk food is a gateway drug.  To more junk food.

Hiding is Okay in Moderation

The rest of this chapter is going to be about showing yourself off, so let’s pause a moment and talk about the opposite.  Yes, it’s okay to hide sometimes.

The process of losing weight is crazy.  It radically changes your life in many ways.  Some of the time we are simply not ready for the feeling of naked exposure that comes from getting smaller.

As we lose weight, people start commenting.  Suddenly every conversation we have seems to center around or at least start with how we’re shrinking away.  That’s a lot of focus on the body of someone who has been trying to hide the state of their body for a long time.  It’s like a cat who’s been trying to cover up their poop on the linoleum (by blousing out our shirt to hide our belly), who is suddenly given a litter box, and then everyone is constantly going “yay kitty, good for you, pooping in the box.”  Well, yes, we are now pooping in the box, but by you saying that over and over and over you’re also saying we were really damn fat before.

Weight Loss Role Models

There really are people who have done it.  They have lost 50 or 150 pounds and have kept it off.  They have radically changed their lives.  Best of all, they know how they did it.

They can tell you:

– The diet they used and why it worked for them.

– The diets they tried that didn’t work for them.

– What changed in them between being unsuccessful and successful.

– What pitfalls to watch out for.

– When you’re talking like an addict and need to have some sense beat into your head.

Having Fun—It’s Okay. Really.

For many of us, being fat is a gigantic cluster of things that are not fun.  We don’t feel good, we don’t have a lot of energy, we don’t feel sexy, we want to hide our fatness from others, we’re not comfortable standing/walking/sitting in small chairs/etc.  Our reasons for being fat are also not fun: addiction, abuse, fear, self-loathing, depression, poverty, etc.  All of this combines in our brains to convince us we’re not really that into fun.

We pretend we prefer the life we’re living.  We pretend we’re just the “stay at home and read a book” type.  We pretend that the sofa and TV is how we like to spend our evenings.  And the big bowl of ice cream or Doritos does take the edge off the pain, so it’s really not that bad.

Or so we try to convince ourselves.

Individual Chapters only through November 10

Hello darlings!  If any of you are doing the "Chapter by Chapter" method of buying Suddenly Skinny, I want to let you know I'm phasing them out.  You have until November 10th to purchase the rest of the book.  After that, I will only be selling it as one download - the full book.

I hope this doesn't inconvenience anyone too much!  Just clearing out the clutter on Amazon - it's too hard to find the book right now.  ;)

Thank you for reading!!!!