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| Stages of Dieting (a 'Calorie-Count.com Diet' supplement) |  hkellick |
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| #1 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:35 |
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Stage 1: Before you Diet This section is probably sort of optional for many of you, as... well, you're here on Calorie-Count.com because you've already embarked on a weight loss/health gain journey. I suggest you read this anyways. :) At least this section where I discuss long term plans, setting process-oriented goals, and rewarding yourself. 1.1: Questions to Ask Yourself First of all, before beginning a diet, let me ask you a very simple question: Do you need to lose weight? Here on Calorie-Count.com, we do not condone unhealthy weight loss. This guide is really meant for those of you who, like the majority of our users, started out overweight or obese and need to lose pounds to get to a healthy weight. No offense meant to those looking to lose those last few pounds, but your journey is usually a very different one. If you aren't certain where you stand, I put together some information on how to determine if you're overweight, based on Body Mass Index (BMI) and body-fat percentages in Chapter 0 of the Calorie-Count.com Diet. Let me ask you another question while we're at it. Please take a minute (or more!) to seriously think this out. Why are you losing weight? Are you losing weight because you need to lose weight? Are you losing weight because someone else says you need to lose weight? Studies show that huge lifestyle changes, such as the one you're about to embark on, really only succeed if the person who's changing WANTS to change. So, be honest with yourself: is this change something you really want to do? Change is hard work, and often a little scary, so just be sure :) |
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| #2 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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1.2: Goal Setting and Rewards Alright. Let's get to the heart of what you want to do before you start losing weight. You listening? You reading? This is IMPORTANT! :) Good! :) Whether you've already lost 50 lbs., or are just beginning, it's important to have goals. Goals tell us what we're aiming to do. For most of us, the biggest goal is obvious: I need to lose XXX pounds, so I can be a healthy weight. That *IS* a very important goals, but is there anything else you want to do? I suggest you take a moment and think about this. Why are you looking to lose weight? Do you have dreams of looking great in a stylish outfit? Would you like to be fit enough to be able to keep up with your kids? Do you want to be fit and lithe enough to play a mean game of B-Ball or muscular enough to impress the ladies? Would you like to have a healthy lifestyle figured out so that, as they grow up, your family learns to love good-for-you food and exercise, so they never have to go through what you have? Those are all GREAT goals! But... how do you achieve them? I'm going to quote St. Francis of Assisi, "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible". What St. Francis is basically saying, and what I want you to be able to do is, to start making small changes as you can, until you find that your small changes have added up to some rather HUGE change. The most important part to do, before you begin, and as you continue through this lifestyle change, is to have some goals in mind, as big or small as you like. With the big goals, start breaking them down into smaller, more manageable goal. I especially want to point you towards process-oriented goals, goals that don't just tell you where you want to go, but how you are going to get there. Let me give you an example: I want to lose 40 pounds. How do I do that? Well, I exercise. So, some process-oriented goals could include: jogging for 5 kilometers (3.13 miles) on a treadmill, exercising for 1,000 minutes this month, biking 10 mph for 30 minutes, etc. Also, I want to eat better. Some process-oriented goals could include: eating 5 vegetables and 2 fruits a day, cutting out soda from my diet, eating 2450 calories a day, etc. These are process-oriented goals, specifically spelling out the PROCESS by which I will reach my main goal of losing 40 pounds. This type of thinking will help you be able to break down your main goal (losing XXX lbs, being fit, etc.) into smaller, more manageable goals YOU can accomplish! Goal setting is really important. Achieving goals helps you feel good and stay on track. Celebrating each goal met will also help you stay motivated, and on track. Which brings us to the idea of rewards. When we're young children, our parents gave us rewards for doing something right. Take out the trash and clean your dishes, and maybe you get a prize from the goodie bag. Reward yourself for your hard work. It sets up a mental connection, in your brain, between hard work and expecting something good. So, as some examples, perhaps after losing ten pounds, you go out and buy a book. Go to the gym for a month, and buy yourself a massage. Or my personal favorite reward from someone on this board, silly pink shoes. Make the reward something you actually want for yourself, and plan when and how you'll reward yourself. Whether it's a sticker every time you exercise or a tattoo when you finally lose 50 lbs, plan on giving yourself rewards for meeting your goals :) |
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| #3 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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1.3: Getting Support Together Another thing that you want to get together before you start rockin' the scale is getting some support together. Having a support system, someone to cheer you on as you go really makes this process easier. On some days, it's that support system and only that support system that stops you from quitting altogether. So let's review your options for support. The easiest suggestion is to talk to friends and family, tell them that you're about to embark on something really challenging and you need their support, perhaps even their help. Don't be afraid to look around for a gym buddy or just a bragging partner. Another great person to get on your side is your doctor! Your doctor knows all about what it means to be healthy and can offer good advice on how to lose weight. Remember, unlike us internet folks, your doctor knows you and your body personally and can help illuminate any issues that may come up in the future (hypothyroidism, PCOS, etc.). Bring him or her in to your circle of support! The other obvious place to find support is to use this wonderful site, Calorie-Count.com. Get to know some of the other board members. There are so many wonderful, friendly members on this site. Go ahead and hand out on the boards, or in the journals, and get to know some of them. Also, if you're comfortable with the idea, start looking locally. There are probably CC users somewhere near you. Erik and Igor, the site founders, are currently working on a tool to help you locate CC users near you! Until then, use the boards! Keep an eye out for local gettogethers and don't be afraid to post "Hi, are there are members near me?" Keep a list together, listing whom your support system is. Keep them updated. These people are going to be your lifeline through stormy seas. :) |
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| #4 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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1.4: You are HERE Before beginning to figure out how to get from here to there, you first need to get some idea where here is. Do you know how much food you take in daily? Do you know when you're likely to eat more, and when you're likely to eat less? My strong suggestion, before you begin cutting calories, is to get a feel for what you actually eat and why. When we first begin, most people don't really have a clue how much they eat and tend to vastly underestimate how many calories they take in. Try logging your calories for a week or two, making sure to actually measure cups and ounces. This will help you to become familiar with Calorie-Count.com's Food Log and/or Recipe Analysis Tool. While you're here, get familiar with how the site works. There are alot of great useful tools for people looking to lose and maintain weight! Make sure to log how you eat during the work week as well as the weekend, as we tend to eat differently during the weekend. Also, I suggest you keep an emotional journal. When you're eating, write down how you feel. Are you tired? Cranky? Depressed? Bored? Happy? Write it down. The imporance of keeping an emotional journal is that often we eat for other reasons besides actual hunger. This is called emotional eating and is very common. Sometimes being able to define the relationship between your emotions and your food helps you learn to deal with the problem. Mostly, it's just another tool to help you learn where you are now, so you can figure out how to get from there to a healthy weight and lifestyle. Now is the time to start thinking about your relationship with food. Now is the time to really try to figure out the hows, whys, whens and wheres of eating, or overeating. In order to formulate a healthy working relationship with food, it helps first to understand why you overeat, or eat badly, and address that. |
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| #5 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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Stage 2: Right Out Of The Gate So, you've committed to a healthy lifestyle! Good for you! You should be proud! I bet you're very enthusiastic. That's good! Keep that enthusiam going! Meanwhile, let's get you started on the road to success! So, where to start? Where to start? There's alot of big, scary things to try to start doing. Cutting your calories, exercising. What to do? At the beginning of many of our journeys, we know we're overeating, we're probably not exercising, and we maybe only know a few things about losing weight, whatever we've heard from our friends or mass media. So, let's go back to our list of goals. Is there anything you can do right now? I suggest you pick a couple of small changes you can do RIGHT now. Some people are blessed to be capable of being able to jump right into a healthy lifestyle and be able to maintain that. And if you think you can do that, please feel free to jump to Stage 3. For most of us, though, that's just not possible, for a number of reasons. That's OK, because the secret of healthy lifestyle changes is: small, manageable changes add up to big, seemingly impossible changes. Like St. Francis said, start with the necessary and the possible and you'll soon find you're doing the impossible. Assuming you're like most dieters who overeat and don't exercise much, here's a few suggestions to get you on the right track: Walk 10 minutes every day, Drink 2 glasses (32 oz. of water), Only go out to dinner once a week, Begin cooking at home, Start eating more fruits and vegetables, Start cutting down your intake of soda, Start eating less sugary foods. And educate yourself! There are so many ways to educate yourself, you can buy a good book, talk with your doctor, talk to a nutritionist or personal trainer. But since you're here, on this site, let me point you to a few great links on Calorie-Count.com to help you understand what direction you want to go
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| #6 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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Stage 3: Moving Right Along So, by the time you enter this stage, you've begun to make changes to your lifestyle. You're eating better or exercising, or perhaps some combination. Now, it's time to take some less tentative steps and REALLY get down to business. Take a look at those goals you wrote down back in Stage 1, before you dieted. How do they look? Have you hit some of them? Hopefully you've hit at least some of the smaller goals by the time you've entered Stage 3. Reevaluate them, occasionally. Were they realistic? Are you capable of more than you thought you were then? Is there something that looks interesting now that maybe didn't look so interesting then? There's nothing wrong, whatsoever, in finding yourself interested in trying new things. It's your body and you should use it every way you can, so long as it's healthy! :) Once again, I point you to the Calorie-Count.com Diet. This sort of plan, based on healthy eating and reasonable calorie deficits, has helped many of us on this site not only lose, but keep it off. Keep it in mind as you go through your daily and monthly process-oriented goals. Work towards eating better, getting active and experiment with different activities. Don't be afraid to try out resistance training or flexibility training. It's all good for an all-around healthier you! Please, make sure, as the weeks and months go by, to shake your routine up occasionally. Even if you're doing everything right, your body begins to get used to you doing the same acitivities, or eating the same food, and becomes adept at processing it, resulting in a smaller calorie deficit than you may be expecting. If you're feeling comfortable doing an activity, step it up, or try something totally new! Keep challenging yourself, especially with activities! It's worth it and will lead to a more fit, flexible and muscular you, and you'll thank yourself for it! Do not be afraid of trying new things. You, too, can experiment with jogging, yoga, organic food, a macrobiotic diet, or any of the other things that someone on the board thinks was great (so long, again, as it's actually healthy) Give yourself permission to make a mistake. We all make mistakes. Sometimes that double cheese pizza with pepperoni really *IS* too good to not have a piece or two of. Try not to beat yourself up over the mistakes. Changing your entire lifestyle is NOT an all-or-nothing deal. One mistake does NOT spell the end of weeks or months of change. You WILL have days when you don't eat as well as you could, or exercise like you could, whether purposely or accidentally. That is OK. Be patient with yourself too. It takes time to lose weight and even more time to change your entire lifestyle. Psychologists suggests it takes about 21 days for a single new habit to become a habit, though the first three or four are most critical. After that, you're "over the hump". Help others! At this stage, you've begun to really get into your groove, but not so long ago, you were probably a clueless newbie yourself. Remember, at one point, you didn't know you were doing. Hopefully this post, or others like it, helped you, or someone took the time to answer your questions. Take some time to answer questions, or write posts like this to help out people who are, now, where you were not so long ago. Remember, part of what drives this site is it's wonderful community. |
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| #7 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:36 |
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Stage 4: Falling Off The Wagon and Recommitment Sadly, it's nearly inevitable. Most of us end up in a situation where we just can't do the diet, at least for a little while. Whether it's due to life stress, overtraining, an injury, or the holiday season, we want to do it, but just keep hitting the brick wall. Perhaps we start exhibiting old behaviors such as going back to Mickey D's, or not exercising again. That's OK. This is another natural stage of lifestyle change. Don't punish yourself too badly over it. Sometimes other things take precidence over your diet. Yes, I DID just say that! Sometimes you need to deal with your reality, as it is, before you can hop back on the diet bandwagon. When you finally are ready to begin again, just remind yourself why you started this journey. Look at your goals again. Probably, you started this journey to be thinner and healthier, and you CAN still do that! You've suffered a temporary setback, but that does not spell the end of the road! The next stage is called recommitment. It's when, after you take a break, you agree that, really, this is what you want to be. Typically, once you've recommitted, you are more likely to go the distance and achieve your goals! Once you can sit back and tell yourself, "Really, this is what I want/need to do", you WILL do it! It is possible that you'll find yourself knocked off the bandwagon again. Once again, that's OK and you shouldn't beat yourself over it, even if you just got back on the wagon. Sometimes that's just how life is. Recommit, once you can and get back to business. If you can do it, start using the road map you were using in Stage 3. If you can't, that's OK too, restart with Stage 2 or Stage 1. There is no shame in a fresh start, so long as you're willing to recommit to yourself! |
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| #8 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:37 |
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Stage 5: Maintenance At this stage, congratulations, you've lost the weight you aimed to lose, and hopefully got healthier along the way! But, this is not the end, my friends, nuh uh. Now is not the time to be complacent or "stop" losing weight :) See, where most fad diets fail is that they tell you how to lose weight quickly, but they don't teach you how to maintain that weight loss. If you've done what I've suggested, and began changing your lifestyle, you've got the tools, already, to keep the weight off, but if you took a short cut and lost weight without changing your lifestyle, than you're going to just stop losing weight, go back to old habits, and probably gain that weight back. For most people, maintenance requires continuing to use the strategies and tools you developed in Stage 3, with the added benefit of being able to eat a little more. :) Maintenance is about maintaining your lost weight and your lifestyle. You'll want to continue to be active and to improve your health, if not actively losing weight. Though, do be sure to weight in, occasionally, to make sure that you're eating properly and are neither losing or gaining too much weight :) I believe that you should continue to challenge yourself. You've achieved one goal, weight loss, but there's always new goals to achieve in the health gain track. There's always a new level of fitness you can try to achieve. Keep pushing the bar! Perhaps you can try to be a marathon runner, or a weight lifter, or work towards playing baseball or soccer with the boys after work! However, if that's not your thing and, at the end of the day, you're comfortable being someone who can run a 5K, that's OK too. Whatever it is you want to do to keep active, do it! Remember, stories show that you're more likely to age gracefully, all around, if your health is good. :) Finally, this is the time to give back to your support system who saw you through the long and difficult change you went through. Get your significant other something special. Thank your friends. Continue to be a part of this Calorie-Count.com community, that helped see you through, and answer questions from people longing to be where you are now. |
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| #9 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:37 |
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Summary and Final Words And that's the five stages of losing weight in a nutshell. First, you start by asking yourself if you need to lose weight and why, setting up some goals, and rewards and getting a support system. Then, slowly but surely, you start to meet goals. You continue to meet more goals, as you push the bar a little at a time, until one day you look at yourself and realize you're doing things you'd never believe you could do. One day, you'll fall off the wagon, and that's OK and no reason to punish yourself. Just recommit when you can and get back into the swing of things as you can. Continue to meet goals, and push the bar, until you've lost that weight, and then, I suggest, you continue to push the bar, at least for maximum fitness. I hope you learned something about how lifestyle changes should work and that it helps you on your own personal voyage. Stay Tuned for future supplements to The Calorie-Count.com Diet! :D |
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| #10 |  lollipopfairy |
Feb 13 2007 11:45 |
| NIICCEE!!! Awesome HK!! Good job!! I love the way how you write!! It makes sense and is easy to understand!! This is a fantastic addition to your original post from August!! =) | ||
| #11 |  shannon-nev |
Feb 13 2007 11:46 |
| like I said in your journal, I think you ought to publish this stuff. You're the best :) | ||
| #12 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 11:53 |
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*chuckle* I'd probably need a rewrite. Partly because of the consistent use of the CC name and tools throughout, but also because I've published all this on a free web server, which is not a good way to handle intellectual property :) Also, I'm not a Dr. or Nutritionist, so why would anyone buy *MY* book :) I just like giving back to the community :) |
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| #13 | shannon-nev |
Feb 13 2007 12:00 |
| Cause you're smart, good at compiling useful data, and can come up with a catchy name to get people to buy your book ;) | ||
| #14 | shannon-nev |
Feb 13 2007 12:00 |
| also wonder if erik/igor would have a problem with you directing people to the site ? I'd think not :) | ||
| #15 | salome190 |
Feb 13 2007 12:10 |
| You did a fantastic job HK!! Thank you for taking the time to put this together. :) | ||
| #16 | nyadoio |
Feb 13 2007 12:31 |
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This rocks nine ways to Sunday! After the holidays and a winter hibernation, the chapter on recommitment was just the thing I needed. I love how you write too. Clear, easy to understand, with a nice warm voice. :) |
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| #17 | lisette831 |
Feb 13 2007 12:57 |
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wow! you did a really great job with this! thank you :) |
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| #18 | hkellick |
Feb 13 2007 13:52 |
| Oh, look, a BUMP! ;D | ||
| #19 | distracted |
Feb 13 2007 13:54 |
| You put together some awesome articles, HK. Many accolades! | ||
| #20 | nomoreexcuses |
Feb 13 2007 13:54 |
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tagged :)
this is wonderful... very useful... thanks so much! |
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