Losing Weight?

I've belonged to a paid weightloss group for just over a year now. Have I lost any weight? Well, maybe net 5-6 pounds down over the whole year (the Washington diet: don't actually reduce, just slow the rate of growth). And, a couple of pounds up from where I was in October. It sure beats gaining weight, but it doesn't appear on the surface to be a ringing endorsement for this weight-loss approach. Never-the-less, I think this is the right approach for me, and I have no plans to end my membership any time soon. Why?

First the background: This program is called "No BS" and it is the creation of a foul-mouthed southern woman named Corinne Crabtree. There is a free podcast, which is not only a marketing recruitment effort but also useful in and of itself, covering the basics of her approach. She has a free, short, on-line course. Once you complete that, you get on an invite list for the 2-3 times a year she opens to new members. Once you are in, there is a lengthy video course, emails, live zoom coaching sessions, pdf planner and worksheets to download (or buy to be shipped), a huge Facebook group with additional subgroups, spontaneous Facebook live events, and specialty short focus courses. Frankly, much more than I need.  

There are four basics to this: Sleep well, drink lots of water, make and assess afterwards a daily plan of what you will eat, and eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Sounds so simple, yes? There are no other food rules.

I went through the video course last year when I joined, and I've been doing the daily worksheets more often than not for the past year. She updated the video course for this year, and it's much improved and I'm going through it slowly. The focus is of course on that last basic: eat only when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Any other eating is termed an "overeat". How do you quell overeating? Much of the course is on this - full of practical guidance and step-by-step approaches.

This program makes use of how we live and how our brains work. So maybe it isn't surprising that fundamentally, the key to eating mindfully has a lot in common with what I've learned about how to mindfully quell chronic pain. She says, in the video course, we are fat because we overeat, and there are three reasons we overeat: 

• Lack of body awareness
• Failure to feel our feelings
• Allowing our habit brain to take over

In dealing with chronic pain, these are also the three areas we work on. Much time is spent in mindfully focusing on our body and our feelings. And pain, like eating, can be a habit. Sometimes, it works for us, as a way of avoiding dealing with life. Sometimes we think, "I'm hungry", when we are tired or frightened. And sometimes, we think, "my leg hurts so very much" when we are scared or avoiding something. Body awareness - putting the lens of our attention to very specifically how "hunger" or "pain" is manifesting in our body, is part of the process. Journaling and meditating to bring our thoughts and feelings to consciousness is part of the process. And observing what we do - making unconscious actions conscious - helps us find habits that don't serve us and create habits that help us make the life we want. 

And, as part of both processes, we bring self-talk into our conscious mind, and change it deliberately. 

So with both processes I've done a great deal of work over the past year. I've had a hard time - and still am - with leg pains and migraines. But with the work I've done, I feel like I'm on the right track to leave them behind me. Just like I feel like I'm on the right approach to deal with my eating, in order to get to a better weight.