Endless Summer Creations

And the Real Beck Dieters too! The task of the day?   Sit down to eat!   A simple enough concept, but sometimes hard to put into practice, especially if you're in the habit of standing up to eat.  Eating while standing up might be the product of such unhelpful, sabotaging thoughts as these: I don't have time to eat while sitting down. It doesn't matter if I just have a few bites on the go. I'll sit down to eat next time, cross my heart! I like the freedom to just graze - I don't want to be restricted. Food eaten while standing up contains no calories. It doesn't matter if I just ate some celery or carrots while standing up - my diet allows me to eat as much of them as I want. Using the Beck method, we contradict these Sabotaging Thoughts right back - here's a few examples, you can customize your own: I make time for doctor's visits, picking up prescriptions, taking medicines, and doing treatments, don't I?  This is no less important...

Johnny is not done yet!  He will be back for more adventures.  And putting his gigantic heart and wisdom beyond his years to work again.  But for whom this time?  Stay tuned...

Thinking about up north right now, where I came from.  The leaves are turning again.  The gardens are drying up.  A nip is in the air.  Canada geese begin to fly southward in their honking Vs.  In farm country, signs for apple cider and hay rides begin to appear along the road.  The nights become colder and colder, until the heater begins running round the clock. It's no longer my home.  But I miss it.  I miss the natural beauty.  The familiar sights.  Taking my son and husband to the Philadelphia Zoo, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Please Touch Museum, Longwood Gardens, downtown Wilmington, along the familiar country roads, going to Wawa every day...My son had his first sled rides there.  We sledded until we were all muddy.  He misses the snow now.  We were "homeless" but happy so much of the time.  I trained from Florida to the ice, snow and spring until the Delaware Marathon came, when I ran the whole 26.2 mil...

 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...

So today was all about identifying my "whys" for losing weight.  I'm pretty excited about my refreshed reasons.  Some of them are private which I won't post here, but a few of them are: I deserve to look the way I want to look. I'm not going to let the past hold me back. A core concept of Beck is to identify your Sabotaging Thoughts and to contradict them with Helpful Responses.  Here's an example: Sabotaging Thought: Well I've always been fat and it's no use trying to lose weight because I'm just going to regain it again. Helpful Response: In the past I might have regained weight because I didn't have all the tools I needed to lose weight and keep it off, or I didn't practice and sharpen those tools.  But this time is different.  I know I cannot kid myself and must face reality.  And the reality is that I must always practice what I've learned, or I will give myself permission to forget it.  And as long as I keep pract...

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...

My "Johnny" has now been published in the Kindle Store!