Quantum Weight Loss

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to travel back in time? I know I’m captivated by the concept of time travel. I loved Jules Vern’s “The Time Machine,” Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” the TV series “Quantum Leap” and, especially the “Back to the Future” movies. I don’t think I’m the only person that loves to fantasize about time travel. I mean who wouldn’t give anything to go back in time and fix the spoils of a misspent youth, or simply to retract those 5 Big Macs from yesterday? I think what I like most about these fantastic stories is the notion that small changes in the past can have a huge impact on the future. Maybe the reason these stories are so captivating is they offer us the prospect of getting another chance to get it right. Imagine you had the power to change your past. How would you use it? Chances are, you would use it to change your future.

Unfortunately, until Wal-Mart starts stocking flux capacitors, we are all stuck in the present and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you are stuck in the present, you can’t change the past . . . or can you?

While we humans have not mastered the art of physically traveling through time, our minds can allow us to “travel” anywhere we want and that includes our past. The truth is we travel to the past all the time and our future depends on what we do once we arrive there. Our present feelings, behaviors and capacity to change are all affected by our impression of the past. Problems arise when we focus on the disempowering moments of that past.

Generally, people are not stupid. We find it easier to do things we believe will bring us results and we don’t want to waste energy on doing things that appear useless. Our beliefs about our potential help us to set odds on whether or not a specific action will actually lead to success. We then use those odds to subconsciously decide if we really want to expend energy on the activity or not. Faith in your ability to succeed is especially important when the task at hand is particularly difficult or does not return an immediate result. In fact, according to Stamford psychologist and Author of Mindset the New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, PhD, developing a belief in one’s ability to succeed (she calls it a growth mindset) “allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”

Since weight loss success involves a lot of seeming small, decidedly difficult actions that do not always appear to return immediate results, you really need to believe in yourself. Since one’s impression of the past plays a key role in the belief in oneself and since believing in oneself is essential to completing difficult tasks, if you could improve your impression of the past, you could improve your future. Thus, allowing you to achieve the dream of every time traveler without the need for a nuclear powered DeLorean.

I specifically use the phrase “impression of the past” because that is exactly what it is, an impression. Your memory is not like a computer hard drive. It does not blindly record every bit of data that it receives. That’s actually a good thing because at any given moment, your body receives millions and millions of data bytes from all of your sense organs. That not only includes your eyes and ears, it also includes information from your skin, internal organs and a host of other bodily systems too numerous to list. All-in-all a lot of data. In fact, your brain probably receives enough data in just one day to fill all of Google’s servers. If our memory had to store all that data, it would likely be all filled before we reach our third week of life. Not only that, but if we were asked to remember last week and our brain had actually stored all the data from “last week” it would take all of “next week” to replay it. 

Instead, our brain is designed to break down the totality of life’s experience into fragmented bits of critical information and store only those that are most important. When we need to travel to our past, these bits or “impressions” are re-collected from the brain and used as some of the building blocks of what we perceive as memory. That recollection, however, is incomplete. So what does the brain use to fill in the details? It uses a building material called the present. Research by Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert, PhD, shows that the way we feel right now has a huge influence on how we remember the past.  In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Dr. Gilbert calls this phenomenon “presentism.”

What that means is that you can control your past by controlling your attitudes in the present. One reason this is so powerful is that by arming yourself with a better past, you will automatically have more faith in your abilities and as a result your actions will likely manifest a better future.

One of the easiest ways to start improving your past is to go back with the intention of finding something worth going back for. I always ask my clients to specifically remember something positive about the previous week. The challenge is we are conditioned to find fault with ourselves. So when the client travels back in time, all they see are their failures. What I try to do is to help them to see what went right.

In a recent conversation with a client, she said, “I ate all the wrong things last week.” If that were true, it would be pretty discouraging and for that client at that moment it was true and she was discouraged. After just a few more minutes of coaxing though, we were both pleased to discover that, while her food choices were not perfect, she did “stop eating when she felt full.” As a result she admitted that she ate a lot less food than she normally would have. This was actually pretty exciting. Once she realized that, she was able to recall all sorts of positive reflections of the past week.

By creating just one positive moment of confidence in the present she was able to “re-collect” an awesome past which lead an explosion of confidence about her future potential. Please don’t misunderstand, revamping your past to be more positive does not mean ignoring your failures, it means that you change the way see them. To create that moment of confidence, I didn’t simply change the subject to sweet smelling rose pedals and soft squishy puppy dog kisses. I used a technique I call the MAGIC WAND. First, I introduce the notion that Mistakes Accomplish Growth If Changed (MAGIC) and then I ask, “What About Now Differs? (WAND)”

It is possible make something quite positive out of what you perceive as a failure by simply recognizing it as a learning experience. Think about it: Failure, or simply not getting something right the first time, is the way everybody learns. True growth actually comes from a mastery of failure. What I ask is that people simply re-frame the way they remember failure. Honestly, the whole concept of failure just clouds your perspective and is completely unproductive. Whenever you catch yourself thinking something you did was a “failure,” substitute the word “mistake.”

Once you can be free from the mental bondage of failure, you are free to ask “What about now differs?” When I asked this question to my client, it gave her a chance to refocus her mental reconstruction of the previous week on the specific accomplishments she felt broke her old destructive patterns. By comparing a mistake of last week (eating a Twinkie) with a mistake you might have made 2 weeks ago (eating a box of Twinkies), it is easy to see that progress has been made. The comparison elicited by the question serves to literally transform the perception of the mistake. Now that same event is not seen as the total disaster it was thought to be. Focusing on how your mistakes are getting better will free your mind of guilt. Without guilt, you will be able to step back, learn and move ahead. All mistakes teach valuable lessons. If you take a little time to search for the betterness in your mistakes you are likely find them. Actually, just the fact that you are positively reflecting and analyzing your past is an improvement in itself. Most people don’t do that.

Once you see you have in fact improved, you can move forward by asking another WAND question, “What Accomplishes New Directions?” While this works best before or while you are in the process of making a mistake, it can also work a week later as you analyze it. By asking this WAND question, you get to decide on a new direction for your life and limit current and future damage. For instance, if you are halfway through a sleeve of cookies when you ask this question, you might just throw the rest away. If you ask the question a week after eating the whole sleeve, you might resolve to slam the door on the next troop of cookie hawking girl scouts that come banging at your door. Really, either way you should emerge from the incident with the proud recollection that you have grown instead of feeling shameful.

If you are still longing for the day when you can actually go back in time and have yourself an old-fashioned playground style “do-over” on life, try to remember that  that TODAY is your tomorrow’s past! In a very real sense, from the perspective of the future you, you are already in the past. Why don’t you impress that future you by starting your do-over today? In fact, to make it a bit less daunting, forget about doing your life over and concentrate on doing your better. When you think about it, if you begin your “do-better” right now you WILL change your tomorrow.

What do you gain by losing weight?

When you think about it, the term "lose weight" is kinda silly. When you lose your keys, you go looking for them - right? When you lose your glasses, your kitty, your car in a large parking lot, the only thing you really want is to get it back.

Besides, making a real effort to LOSE anything seems kinda weird. Could you imagine putting this much effort into losing a basketball game or even a game of cards? No matter how you look at it, losing is defeating and most of the time we avoid it like the plague.

Maybe that is one small reason that losing weight is so darned difficult! Our mind is trying to avoid losing! While that may sound silly, it's not. Experts in the field of psychology are now finding that the way we think about difficult tasks has an effect on the outcome. It might just be likely that thinking about losing all the time may not be helping you.

Try this. When you think about losing weight, try focusing on what you GAIN.

HERE IS THE MISSION:

Write down as many things as you can that you will GAIN by losing weight.
Post the list where you can see it every day. Use pictures to illustrate your gains if you want!
Read the list everyday for a week, AND

Try to remember at least one thing from the list when you are faced with a difficult eating situation.
Email me with any insights that you gain from this exercise.

Remember, your excess weight is not at all like your keys, glasses, kitty or car. When you finally do exile (not lose) it, you NEVER want it back! I am sure you want to Lose Weight for Good! and I am here to help you do just that.


Sincerely,


Dr. Russ L'HommeDieu
Lose Weight for Good!

I had a nurse friend of mine make a very interesting observation about chronic illness. She said that "chronic illness is something insidious that consumes bits and pieces of a person's self-esteem, independence, quality of life and quality of relationships. And most people are not even aware of it."

I see this a lot in my work with people who are trapped in a body that is too big for the life they want to lead. Unfortunately, being overweight is basically a chronic disease and most people are not aware of it until . . . the light goes on.

The light, however, is different for everyone. Most of the time it arises from some kind of discomfort. An extreme uneasiness about where you are. For me, it took an actual diagnosis of per-diabetes. Since my vision of myself included that I was NOT chronically ill, this new (reversible) diagnosis was my light bulb. I don't mind telling you, I was really uncomfortable with the idea of being sick, blind and legless depending on the help of others for many of my basic needs.

The key to making this discomfort bearable is to recall the words of M. Scott Peck- “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Often this discomfort is created from getting in touch with where you want to go. Visioning what you want so vividly that you can feel it in your bones. Wanting it so bad, you can't help but to be committed. I mean all-in committed.

Once you have that vision, it becomes like your true NORTH. It is the ONLY magnetic pull strong enough to keep your motivational compass pointed toward your goal. Your vision is what keeps you going in the right direction.

from: http://www.fastcompany.com/video/why-change-is-so-hard-self-control-is-exhaustible



[transcript of video]

You hear something a lot about change: People won’t change because they’re too lazy. Well, I’m here to stick up for the lazy people. In fact, I want to argue that what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. The proof comes from a psychology study that is absolutely fascinating.

So picture this: Students come into a lab. It smells amazing—someone has just baked chocolate-chip cookies. On a table in front of them, there are two bowls. One has the fresh-baked cookies. The other has a bunch of radishes. Some of the students are asked to eat some cookies but no radishes. Others are told to eat radishes but no cookies, and while they sit there, nibbling on rabbit food, the researchers leave the room – which is intended to tempt them and is frankly kind of sadistic. But in the study none of the radish-eaters slipped – they showed admirable self-control. And meanwhile, it probably goes without saying that the people gorging on cookies didn’t experience much temptation.

Then, the two groups are asked to do a second, seemingly unrelated task—basically a kind of logic puzzle where they have to trace out a complicated geometric pattern without raising their pencil. Unbeknownst to them, the puzzle can’t be solved. The scientists are curious how long they’ll persist at a difficult task. So the cookie-eaters try again and again, for an average of 19 minutes, before they give up. But the radish-eaters—they only last an average of 8 minutes. What gives?

The answer may surprise you: They ran out of self-control. Psychologists have discovered that self-control is an exhaustible resource. And I don’t mean self-control only in the sense of turning down cookies or alcohol, I mean a broader sense of self-supervision—any time you’re paying close attention to your actions, like when you’re having a tough conversation or trying to stay focused on a paper you’re writing. This helps to explain why, after a long hard day at the office, we’re more likely to snap at our spouses or have one drink too many—we’ve depleted our self-control.

And here’s why this matters for change: In almost all change situations, you’re substituting new, unfamiliar behaviors for old, comfortable ones, and that burns self-control. Let’s say I present a new morning routine to you that specifies how you’ll shower and brush your teeth. You’ll understand it and you might even agree with my process. But to pull it off, you’ll have to supervise yourself very carefully. Every fiber of your being will want to go back to the old way of doing things. Inevitably, you’ll slip. And if I were uncharitable, I’d see you going back to the old way and I’d say, You’re so lazy. Why can’t you just change?

This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.

When Given Low-Sugar Cereals, Children Will Eat More Fresh Fruit

When Given Low-Sugar Cereals, Children Will Eat More Fresh Fruit

NEAT means "Non-exercise activity thermogenesis"

NEAT means "Non-exercise activity thermogenesis" - which is the calories you burn from the simple physical activities in your daily life - It is amazing how they can add up and research shows it can make a huge difference when it comes to weight management over the long term. So, my challenge this week is got you to do more NEAT stuff. 

1. If you must sit and work at a computer, take a five-minute "stand and stretch" break every thirty minutes. 
2. Walk rather than drive whenever possible. If you drive, choose a parking spot at the far end of the lot.
3. If you take a cab or a bus, don't get dropped off right in front of where you want to be. Instead, get off a block or two early and walk.
   
4. Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator.
5. Chew gum (This will also keep you from snacking)  
6. Take a walk at lunch
7. Make your next meeting a walking meeting.
   I have a client that actually is considering replacing his desk chair with a treadmill!
   (If you want to learn more about these special desks, email me)
   
8. Go out and play!
   
9. Get a pedometer and record your movements for an entire day. Then try to add 100 steps per day.

This is REALLY NEAT!

Do you ever wonder how many calories you burn playing with the kids? Or how many steps you take on the way to work? GoWear fit is a clinically proven system that turns your body's everyday information into a tool to help you manage a healthy lifestyle. The GoWear fit armband measures how many calories you burn, how many steps you take, how physically active you are, and how much sleep you're getting

Don’t throw away those squash seeds!

Did you know that all squash seeds are edible and delicious to eat?

Your butternut squash seeds are not trash! They are a great healthy snack and a delicious addition to salads, granola or trail mix.

Parboil:
Separate as much of the stringy squash membrane from the seeds as you can. Then take the remaining fibers and seeds and place them in a pot of water that has been seasoned with salt and spices (You can use Adobo, Cayenne Pepper, Old Bay or any seasoning blend that strikes your fancy).

Next, bring water to a boil, reduce heat and allow it to simmer for five minutes.

Once boiled, carefully place whisk into the pot and spin the whisk between the palms of your hands and spin whisk. Be extra careful not to spray yourself with boiling saltwater. Then remove the entire mess to a colander, and continue to use the whisk and a little water to free the seeds from the membrane matter. It is OK if some membrane remains because once they are dried out in the oven, the seeds separate very easily.

To roast or toast: Place on a lightly greased (or sprayed with cooking spray) cookie sheet and bake in a 400 degree F. oven for about 30 minutes, checking every 10 minutes. They are done when they are light brown in color and will have a puffed appearance. If you are short on time, they roast just as well in a microwave for about five minutes.

Additional seasoning ideas:
Try additional seasonings on your squash seeds: Cajun seasoning, Worcestershire sauce, Tobasco®, soy sauce, and garlic salt are some of the many possibilities. If you want an even more intense flavor, add additional seasoning after boiling and before roasting.

Storing: Store baked squash seeds in an airtight container.

Substitute them in for your usual nut or seed topping or grind them into a fine powder as a garnish. It is important to note though, that at about 126Cal/ounce or 2023Cal/pound, your squash seeds pack a high calorie punch.