Category: lifestyle change

In the Grip of Obesity Fear

Many believe the answer to the obesity pandemic is education—Educate people about nutrition, physical activity, and health matters. But many of the messages being broadcast the most loudly are not just distorted and misleading, for some of us, they add to our increasing stress and worry. I believe that profit-driven changes in food processing and …

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Is Walmart’s “Great For You” Product Line About Health or Profit?

When his son questions why the overweight cop in the conspicuously tight uniform is eating a certain “healthy” breakfast cereal, Dad replies in a weary, hopelessly resigned voice, “Gotta do something.” I don’t remember the cereal this commercial was advertising. It ran so long ago, it pre-dated the deluge of “healthy food” products and marketing …

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The Toll the Weight Loss Struggle Can Take on Your Life

Can you put a price on your life? Yes. Everything you want in life has a price. Resources, effort, time, money, sacrifice. We pay in many ways. We don’t always want to see the price. In all things, we want a bargain. Even if we don’t acknowledge or recognize the full price of something, we …

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Reaching the Point of Change: Working Toward Fitness & Weight Loss

I watched a webinar featuring a trainer who has an association with a supplements company that specializes in products for people who’ve had weight loss surgery. The trainer is young, handsome, and totally RIPPED. His website includes such workout “tips” as investing in gymnastic rings for “easy and inexpensive exercise” and doing decline push ups. …

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When Talking About Weight Loss Keeps You From Accomplishing It

As we near the end of the year, I have been looking back at some Ladies in Weighting. In my book, I write about the women who start blogs to document their weight loss attempts. The blogs go on, often for years and years, but the weight loss does not. Oh there are plenty of …

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Weight Loss Motivation: Shadow & Substance

When I set out to write my book, I wanted it to be set apart by two facts: I had actually lived what I write about and the book is not a memoir. The overwhelming majority of weight loss books are written by people who work in fitness, nutrition, psychology, or some medical field. If …

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The Powerful Hunger Weight Advocacy Elevator Pitch

In marketing you learn about the elevator pitch—condensing your message down to something you could communicate in the brief amount of time you might have with someone in an elevator. People who have struggled with a significant weight problem for all or most of their lives are not out of control addicts, they are not …

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Pursuing Physical Challenge When You’ve Been Obese

My quest to challenge myself physically goes on! I awoke this morning to a rare and much-sought-after experience. I am sore in places that are difficult to make sore–My biceps and my abs just below my sternum. A few months ago I discovered a new piece of equipment that I’m really putting to good use …

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Taking Control of Your Weight with Mindful Focus

You have a very stealthy adversary working against you when you try to take control of your weight. Passivity. Working at losing weight can feel like a long, slow, PASSIVE ordeal. The focus is put on what you’re eating–or not eating–and waiting it out until the next time you get to find out if the …

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How Have Experiences Shaped the Way You Feel about Your Weight?

Last night I attended a film screening in a space with vintage theater seats that must have come from one of Chicago’s former movie palaces. Seats from that era are smaller than the seats we’re used to today, even the plain flip down stadium-style chairs you might find in some older movie theaters. A very large woman …

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