These sections will be quoted directly from the best-selling book by Yoni Freedhoff, MD, The Diet Fix. I couldn’t recommend this book enough for those who want to take control of their weight.
Whoever thinks that successful weight management is about suffering doesn’t understand human nature. We’re not built to suffer. In fact, I’d argue that we spend the entirety of our life trying to minimize our suffering. Yet dieting has always classically been about some combination of undereating or over-exercising, and both of these approaches invariably lead to suffering. Sure, we do things in our lives that we don’t enjoy, but the only way we sustain those unenjoyable behaviors is to have no recourse – they’re things we simply have to do because we have no choice.
In this environment, when it comes to eating there’s always recourse and there are always choices. Given that food is one of the basic of human pleasures and that in our modern dietary utopia we can buy whatever we want whenever we want it, the notion that we’re going to suffer our weights down by trying to avoid foods we enjoy is more than a little naive; suffering does more damage than simply making weight management difficult to sustain.
Believing oneself to be a failure as a consequence of being unable to suffer is a terrifically self-destructive and traumatic burden that in turn challenges each successive weight management effort and contemplation thereof. Truly, for weight management to last a lifetime, it can’t be difficult and going into weight management effort believing you are going to need to suffer to succeed almost certainly guarantees you won’t.
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain that in order to effect long term change, we need to improve the path we take to get to where we want to go. If the goal is long-term weight management, instead of the entrenchment of suffering – a path that is undeniably difficult – we need to focus on ways to make living with less food or fewer calories easier.
Individuals who succeed in maintaining weight loss may well be more thoughtful about food and fitness, but most importantly, they’ve found a way to be more thoughtful and that for them, no longer qualifies as suffering. They’ve improved their paths.
We believe in making healthy, lifelong changes to your daily eating and exercise patterns. Physician’s Weight Control & Wellness’s programs are different from other weight loss programs in that they are specifically constructed by bariatric specialists to meet each patient’s individual needs based on their body chemistry, lifestyle, and weight loss goals. Our individualized programs focus on providing positive alternatives to unhealthy habits and targeting foods which provide your body with the specific nutrients it needs for optimal energy and fat metabolism. Practical exercise and hydration are also implemented into our overall program.
We encourage you to become a part of our successful weight loss program. We offer 50 years of safety, experience, knowledge and expertise found nowhere else!
Contact us with any questions about Physician’s Weight Control & Wellness Center and how we can help you in your journey to better health.
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