Do You Really Need the Diet Industry Between You & Food?

My first day of 7th grade was NOT a pleasant one. A boy that I knew from Little League Baseball, Eddie Steele, picked on me repeatedly throughout the entire school day. I remember not responding and wanting Eddie to just leave me alone, but he wouldn’t. He picked and picked until we agreed to meet after school to "settle" things. Eddie showed up at the appointed time with three friends. I made the mistake of showing up alone. We squared off. I immediately went for Eddie, tackled him, sat up and started punching him. I was quickly finishing the deal. His friends, however, had a different idea. They pulled me off of him saying that we weren’t "fighting the right way".

The ultimate outcome was less in my favor

That fight is like the current weight loss, diet and weight control terrain today. I was doing fine until his friends got between us. My clients do Incredibly well, but only after they stop "dieting" only after we get the diet industry out of the space between them and food.

Let me explain what I mean by "get the diet industry out of the space between them and food". Diets have rules. While you are on a diet, your job is to follow the rules of that diet. Someone created the rules to that diet. At that point, that "someone" is "between" you and food. You are abdicating your freedom to choose in favor of what the diet "expert" is teaching. In effect, the diet expert is now between you and food. Every food-related decision you make is run through the diet filter - affected by what you are "supposed to be doing". Typical weight loss counseling or diet counseling is built in this manner – with a set of do’s and don’ts. The diet has become you go-between with food.

Further, most overweight individuals take multiple "whacks" at the diet counseling thing. The individual becomes more and more reliant on diet advice and more disconnected from food. The dieter eats a food or does not eat a food because it is "on the diet" or "not on the diet" not because it works or does not work for "me as an individual" right now.

I ask you this. What is a more reliable guide with regard to what you eat?

· Diet advice that comes down from an ivory tower?
· Foods that work or don’t work based on how your body responds and what works for you in the grand context of your life?

Who is more qualified to make this judgment, you or someone sitting behind a desk at the diet center? The point is this. In almost twenty years of specialty experience as a psychotherapist with individuals wanting to lose weight, (and all of the issues that can be involved psychologically, nutritionally, and physiologically), I have found this "clearing of the "space between you and food" to be of critical importance.

Perhaps what is most astonishing is how responsible, capable and competent individuals are once they are empowered with the right information and trusted to make the choices that work best for them. you have to go one on one with food. You have to ascertain what works and what does not work for you. You are capable of doing this (perhaps more than you know). You are competent. No one is in a better position to know what work and what does not work for you. Like my little run-in with Eddie Steele on that fateful first day of seventh grade, your quest for lasting weight control will be infinitely easier if you remove whoever is between you and food. Go one on one with food. You can do this!

That's the way it looks from here at The Castle

Gary Avignon, a nationally recognized psychotherapist known as "The Weight Wizard", specializes with the psychology of nutrition, compulsive eating and weight loss. He is the author of a revolutionary new book, Weight Wizardry 101: Introduction to The Psychology of Successful Weight Control. YOU can nab Chapter One, "The Single Biggest Secret That Causes Diet Failure", for FREE* for a limited time at http://www.theweightwizard.com.