1) Summer is coming!
If you start now, you can lose 25 to 50 pounds or more by the time your summer vacation starts. Whether you use my method or some other science-based approach, count on a much happier summer, feeling slim with a new outfit or two, a spring in your step and vacation photos you feel good about. Don’t put it off. Make a list of what to do to get started and make this the best year of your life. Put it off and you’ll miss a great opportunity.
2) There are more low-calorie, great-tasting foods available than ever before. The marketplace is exploding with new products to make weight loss easier.
The food industry has stepped up to the plate (no pun intended) and done a great job answering our demand for food and services to help us lose weight, maximizing enjoyment and convenience and eliminating the sense of deprivation.
Today we have Lean Cuisine, Smart Ones and Healthy Choice frozen dinners, all around 300 calories — easy, tasty and low calorie meals when we are too tired or rushed to fix something. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’s spray makes vegetables taste great with almost no calories. Walden Farms makes dressings without calories so we can have a scrumptious salad and save our calories for meat and potatoes. Egg Beaters makes it so we can have twice the scrambled eggs for the same calories and Hellman’s makes it so we can have sandwiches with mayo without breaking the budget. Splenda helps us have rich coffee in the morning without wasting lots of calories on sugar, and diet soda lets us have something besides water with lunch and during the day without worrying about how many calories we’re getting.
Restaurants are putting the caloric values on their menus, making it much easier to eat out. They are also offering more and more items to fit the caloric requirements to lose weight. I used to avoid eating out because it was such a pain to try to figure out the calories at restaurants — it was so much easier to eat at home. Now I can enjoy eating out without the stress and without gaining weight.
3) No festive holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s to throw you off track.
No explanation necessary.
4) We live in a time of easy access to all the qualified information and assistance you need.
Because of the recent intense focus on the obesity epidemic, we are seeing more legitimate research on weight loss than any time in history. And there is a new awareness of the solution being behavior therapy rather than simply trying to use will power, diets and exercise binges. There has never been a better time to lose weight.
Not only can the Internet lead you to great resources if you are careful about their validity, but technology itself can be a tremendous help. Many of my clients are now using their smartphones to track their calories. They love it. There are hundreds of apps available to download and many are free.
5) And finally the number one reason this is the perfect time to lose weight and keep it off permanently is you, smarter, more knowledgeable, more mature, stronger, more determined and better equipped than ever before.
The “you” that exists today knows a lot more than the old you, not just in facts, which is true, but in wisdom and maturity too. You’ve tried and failed in the past, and learned things that cannot be learned any other way. When I finally solved my weight problem, losing over 100 pounds for good, my success was due largely to what I had learned from all my failed attempts.
With what you know today, and what you can learn this spring, this is the perfect time to lose weight. That day has come.
William Anderson is a psychotherapist who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He is the creator of “Therapeutic Psychogenics”, which helped him lose 140 pounds permanently thirty years ago after years of obesity and dieting failure. He has written a book about it, The Anderson Method, now also in ebook and audiobook, and he is teaching these techniques to individuals and therapists all over the country.
The Anderson Method — The Secret to Permanent Weight Loss
Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com on May 20, 2013.
Originally published at medium.com