Wolf Chiropractic & Massage

Weight Management

It All Adds Up
For some of you, this is a topic that won’t apply. We’re going to talk about the dreaded issue of Weight Management. For you select few that are naturally thin and can eat whatever you want without gaining an ounce, we all hate you. (just kidding)… For the rest of us that are not so fortunate, we know that this is a battle that we wage on a daily basis. (No, we’re not kidding, we really hate you). Weight management is all about the math, which we will discuss in future weeks, but for now, we need to lick our wounds and talk about past failures, so we can leave them behind once and for all.

We Know What Doesn’t Work
Any of us that are all too familiar with trying to lose weight could probably teach a class on what NOT to do. We can list the things that have not worked. Many times, what ever weight we lost, somehow finds us again. And sometimes it comes back with a little extra that we didn’t have in the first place.

If we think about all that has gone wrong in the past, we can narrow it down to one problem: We are not patient people and we want the weight gone, now. It just doesn’t work that way. There are ways to try to cut corners, but we know they don’t work. The promises of fast and easy weight loss don’t work. The gimmicks and fad diets, no matter how much money we spend on them, don’t work.

What Is the Secret?
It’s no secret. It’s just not fun. Nor is it easy. To really take control of your weight, you need to change two things: your mindset and your behavior.

Process vs. Event
This is the shift in mindset. We talked about it on week one. We may think that we gained those extra 10 pounds all at once, but we didn’t. We gained them one pound at a time. A process. So why do we treat weight loss like an event? It took months and years to accumulate the extra weight, why do we keep telling ourselves that we can reverse the process in a matter of days or weeks? We’ve lost our common sense about weight loss, and in doing so, we’ve spent billions of dollars on the latest, greatest diet revolution. And the only thing that’s thinner is our wallets.

There’s nothing confusing about weight gain. We know exactly how it happened. We can make excuses and kid ourselves about our genetics, our stress, our ‘whatevers’. But pretty much the only way to gain weight is to eat more energy than your body needs. The rest is stored for future use. How we gain weight is a simple, predicatable process. So, why do make weight loss so confusing, complex and frustrating? We didn’t buy a kit or a program to make ourselves gain weight, why then do we think we need those things to lose weight? We’ll talk more about this next week, but in the meantime, I want you to take a few minutes and write a list of what behaviors that made you heavier than you’d like to be. Be honest with yourself. Next to each behavior, give yourself a VERB to correct it. A “go do it” statement to yourself to correct it or make better, Here’s an example of how to start a list. Everyone’s list will look a little different:

Behavior “Go Do It”
I eat fast food every day at lunch I will pack a nutritious lunch from home
I never drink water I will sip water throughout the day.

Go ahead, make your own list and get started! We’ll have more information for you next week.