Banded Together

Healthy Eating and Diet: Thoughts from Dr. Phil’s Ultimate Weight Solution, Taken from book review posted on WebMD
Dr. Phil outlines seven key points to understanding and facing your “personal truth” - how you view yourself and your weight. Then you must replace these toxic messages with positive thoughts, says Dr. Phil.
“It’s about changing yourself from the inside out, so that being fit and healthy for you is as natural and as normal as breathing,” he writes. “By changing yourself from the inside out, you will be able to attain and permanently maintain what I call your get-real weight—- the weight that is healthy and realistic for your age and your physical and genetic makeup, a weight at which you are happy and truly at peace with your size, and a weight that is stable because you have taken control of every factor in your life that keeps it there.”
Programming yourself for success is the key. “Programming involves making small, deliberate modifications in the way you live your life, and it has everything to do with developing a lifestyle that creates healthier behavior,” he explains.
The seven steps to weight loss freedom:
1. Right Thinking: Get rid of self-defeating thought patterns, believe that you will succeed, and you will have mastered the first key necessary to overcoming your struggles with your weight.
2. Healing Feelings: Make choices that stop the cycle of emotional eating that has perpetuated your weight problem. Don’t let stress, anxiety, or depression lead you to self-medicate with food. Change your emotional response to life’s problems, and the unwanted eating behaviors that flow from it, and you can change. He instructs readers in how to identify the “payoff” you get from overeating and addressing those negative feelings—getting emotional closure, so you stop self-defeating habits, says Dr. Phil.
3. A No-Fail Environment: You must program your environment in every possible way to avoid binge foods and reminders to eat.
4. Mastery Over Food and Impulse Eating: “Did you binge or overeat for one reason, such as a betrayal, a job loss, an illness, some personal tragedy, and you’ve kept on doing it as a matter of habit? Your pounds came on quickly, but the trouble is, they stayed because you are overeating habitually, whether you are hungry or not,” writes Dr. Phil.
5. High-Response Cost, High-Yield Foods: This is Dr. Phil’s way of saying, “eat high-fiber and other nutritious and filling foods - whole grains, lean protein, fresh fruits and vegetables, dried beans.” It also implies eating foods that take time and effort to fix, require lots of chewing, and aren’t fast food or other convenience foods.
6. Intentional Exercise: “Regular, intentional exercise is a big deal, a huge deal,” writes Dr. Phil. “It unlocks the door to body control - a state of fitness in which your body is metabolically geared for losing weight and keeping it off, and is flowing with energy and vitality People who successfully manage their weight and stay fit exercise as a matter of habit.”
7. Your Circle of Support: “Weight loss is not a do-it-yourself deal,” he writes. “If you expect to lose weight and keep it off, you must build and nurture relationships that affirm and uplift you in life-changing ways. There is strength and power in support.”