Endless Summer Creations

 Today is the day to choose 2 diets - one is your first choice, and the second is the backup in case you're finding that the first one doesn't work for you.  There are all kinds of eating plans - and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another.  Beck advises that you choose a healthy plan because extreme diets are firstly, bad for you and secondly, not sustainable.  Beck also notes that most reasonable diet plans call for about 1400-1500 calories daily, and that most plans fall under two categories: 1) counting calories or 2) avoiding certain foods/beverages altogether. I have learned from experience that I don't deal well with diets that cut out entire food groups - like Atkins or the Fast Metabolism Diet.  Eating high amounts of fatty meat and cheeses, with very few carbs leaves me feeling awful and very irritable.  The Fast Metabolism Diet is very restrictive also - it may allow more "good" carbs but disallows coffee, dairy, soy, s...

On July 2, 2012 I made one of the best decisions of my life.  These three pictures say it all: In May I blogged about defying those betting on you to regain the weight.  Well, the struggle is real.  I have slipped back into old habits lately.  But it's time to go back to what works: The Beck Diet Solution. I made the mistake of kidding myself that I didn't always have to stay vigilant.  If you manage to lose weight, keeping that weight off is to be a lifelong job.  As author Judith Beck says, that's not fair, but you have to learn to say "oh well."  We're conditioned to demand fairness and justice in this country especially.  But one of the genius points that cognitive behavioral therapy makes is that fairness is a myth.  Expecting things to always be fair in life is to set ourselves up for failure.  And what may be justice to one person may be an injustice to another - like when your Aunt Ida beats my Aunt Betty Sue in the coun...

Last year I read an article by the New York Times  about former Biggest Loser contestants who gained back most, if not all of the weight they had lost on the popular show.  The article paints a pretty dismal picture for those of us who want to lose weight and keep it off.  To me, the upshot of the article is that overweight people will always gain it back on account of their defective metabolisms. That conclusion is unacceptable to me, however.  And I have my work cut out for me as a result.  At my heaviest I ballooned to 212 pounds.  I had gone through some very traumatic times and I dealt with it by eating.  I didn't think I deserved the good things I used to have.  Not even running.  I didn't even think I deserved to run another marathon. It wasn't until I began the process of truly forgiving myself that I was able to believe I deserved those good things again, and in turn begin to lose weight.  Losing weight was ...