Just Tell Me What to Eat!
The Delicious 6-Week Weight Loss Plan for the Real World
Timothy S. Harlan, MD, FACP has counseled thousands of his patients on healthy, sustainable weight loss. Now he's compiled his best tips and recipes into a six-week plan for you to learn how to eat great food that just happens to be great for you.
Get the prescription for better health as well as healthy weight loss, including:
- What to eat
- How to cook it
- When to eat it
- What to eat at a restaurant
- What to eat if you're in a hurry
- and best of all....
- Why eating great food is the best health decision you'll ever make.
Elaine's Blog:
Following the Just Tell Me What
to Eat! Plan
Are you a maintainer, or a regainer?
How do you solve problems? Avoiding and denying, or adapting and adjusting?
The way we solve problems, our cognitive processes, may predict how well we will maintain our weight loss. I'm given to self-examination, so you can expect me to analyze why I'm unwilling to gain back even one pound of the 15 I so carefully and methodically lost two years ago. An article which my good doctor shared with me provides some insight. In a study about the similarities and differences between weight loss maintainers and regainers, focus group participants revealed cognitive characteristics which either enabled them to maintain or regain (Reyes et al., 2012).
Maintainers had better problem-solving skills than regainers. They maintained the strategies of the weight loss process: weighted themselves regularly, monitored portion sizes, and embraced new eating and exercising habits. They used positive self-talk, and seemed to have a greater degree of self-efficacy (Bandura & Walters, 1963). Their problem-solving repertoire enabled them to adjust to their new lifestyle, and adapt to the new habits and routines.
The regainers had less-productive problem-solving skills. They avoided the scale in an effort to deny their weight gain, and did not maintain routines of measuring portion sizes or exercising. Without structured accountability and support systems, they lost their motivation and it all came back (the pounds).
Are you a maintainer or regainer? If successfully maintaining weight loss is about how we solve problems, a cognitive process, then maybe we need both a plan for weight loss (books like Just Tell Me What to Eat! (Harlan, 2011)), and cognitive-behavioral therapy to fully embrace the resulting lifestyle changes required for improved health status.
References
Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Harlan, T. S. (2011). Just tell me what to eat!: The delicious 6-week weight loss plan for the real world (1 Da Capo Press ed.). Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Lifelong.
Reyes, N. R., Oliver, T. L., Klotz, A. A., Lagrotte, C. A., Vander Veur, S. S., Virus, A., . . . Foster, G. D. (2012). Similarities and differences between weight loss maintainers and regainers: A qualitative analysis. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 112(4), 499-505. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2011.11.014; 10.1016/j.jand.2011.11.014