You’ve Lost The Weight, Now What? | Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

You’ve Lost The Weight, Now What?
Category : Women Lifestyle, Women Health, Women Personality

After Lose Weigth pic One morning you step on the scale and find you’ve finally reached your target weight. It may have taken a month, six months, a year of dieting – with or without – exercise, to lose 10, 20, 60 pounds, more than 100 lbs, but you did it!
Some people think this is the end of the story for their weight problems, but for many it’s but a chapter in a continuing saga. In six to eight months, they’ll ragain the weight they lost and will start to diet again. Maybe they’ll keep it off, but they’ll have to get used to having a saggy stomach, droopy breasts and thunder thighs or, of they can afford it, undergo “cosmetic contouring.”

It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You
How successful you are in maintaining weight loss depends on whether or not you got to the heart of the problem. Most dieters continue to have an issue with food, unless they’ve figured out why they overeat.
The eating issue – using meal replacements or eating healthy to drop weight – is just the tip of the iceberg, explains Dr. Paul Zakrzewski (pronounced Zak-chef-ski), a family physician and director of the Harmony Weight Management Program in Edmonton, Canada. You have to come to understand what drives you to eat, and make some lifelong changes or as soon as you come off your diet, you’ll start to regain weight, joining the burgeoning ranks of yo-yo dieters, he says. With help from shows like “Oprah,” many people know there are emotional reasons behind their overeating, says Lisa Layman, a consulting psychologist. What they may not know is their own particular issues.

You have to be like a detective, Layman says. Did the behavior of your adult years? Was it something formed in childhood? Maybe your parents modeled anxious behavior and eating to cope, so you never learned that there are healthier alternatives.
If the problem doesn’t develop until you’re an adult, overeating could be a reaction to a bad marriage, problems with kids, work stress or a hectic lifestyle that doesn’t allow you to stop and think.

Sometimes people come to Layman for help as soon as they decide to lose weight, while others have lost some weight and come to her when they start to put it back on. For people who have never been to a psychologist before, the process can seem scary, Layman says. However, once they start to understand that overeating doesn’t mean they’re week, stupid, lazy, a loser or a disgusting pig, they start feeling in control, Layman says.
Overeating is the result of feeling out of control inside and reaching for an external locus-food-to make you feel better, she says. What you need is an internal locus of control.

Layman doesn’t have a weight problem now, but in her teens and 20s she gained, lost and regained 20 pounds, several times, before figuring out that anxiety caused her to eat. She had a standing date with a big bowl of popcorn every evening for years before she found other, healthier ways to manage her anxiety – such as not bringing foods that tempt you into the house and by taking a walk until a craving passes.

What’s difficult about managing food is that unlike drugs or alcohol, you still need to eat after you lose weight and until you learn to develop a healthy relationship with food it will always be the enemy, Layman says. The psychologist teaches people to stop as they reach for a bag of chips or a bag of candy, to sit down, close their eyes, breath deeply, and to think about what they’re feeling at the moment. Is it hurt, anger, frustration, boredom? Usually you can figure it out, Layman says. It could, for example, be that you’re feeling hurt because you had a rough day at work – the boss yelled at you at work in front of your colleagues – and you’re seeking comfort.

Some people self-sabotage their weight loss because of deeply embedded reasons. A rape victim will regain a protective tire or safety blanket of fat thinking it makes her unattractive so she’ll never be attacked again, Zakrzewski says. A significant number of women penalize their less-than-perfect husbands by becoming heavy and a social embarrassment to their spouses.