Dr K 101 - Doctor K Weight Loss: Weight Loss Clinic for ... · The answer to the question “do you have to starve yourself to be slim?” is therefore a resounding “No!” (And

Dr K

5 Lessons on the Dr K Weight Loss Philosophy

Dr Khandee Ahnaimugan

For more resources visit: www.doctorkweightloss.com/resources

101

Could it possibly be easier for a woman to lose weight and keep it off after 40? On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. Even some of my most successful clients talk about how much easier it was to lose weight in their 20s.

“When I was 25, I could go on any diet and lose 15 pounds in a week or two”

So how can it possibly be easier to lose weight and keep it off in your 40s? In my experience, women in their 20s are usually more preoccupied with quick results. They are often concerned about a particular event (like a holiday or a wedding) and want to lose weight for that. They are willing to go to extreme lengths as long as they get the results quickly. And in your 20s, you can “starve” yourself down to a lower weight (if you can tolerate the deprivation) very quickly. Last week, a woman in her late 20s told me how she was trying a “slower” approach to weight loss. She then said she had lost 4 pounds in a week.

Lesson #1: Why It’s Easier To Maintain Weight Loss When You’re Over 40

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This is the kind of weight loss a woman in her 50s can only dream about. But the problem with this approach is that it is a recipe for yoyo dieting. You can do what it takes to get down to a lower weight, but as soon as you stop the diet, then what? These young women who lose weight quickly often put it back just as quickly. In contrast, women over 40 have a much better approach to weight loss. In my experience: 1. They are more concerned with lasting results than the

speed of their weight loss.

2. They are willing to embrace the idea that weight loss doesn’t have to be painful. That you don’t need to starve yourself and be miserable to make progress.

3. They understand that small, gradual changes are more ef-fective than “showy” drastic ones.

This makes them the ideal clients, because they have the most important prerequisite to losing weight and keeping it off: they have the right attitude. You might think that attitude is a minor factor in weight loss. But in my experience, a woman who wants quick results no matter what, will generally make the wrong decisions when losing weight.


They will go for short term strategies that may get them fast results, but they are so unpleasant that no one in their right mind would ever be able to live that way. The best example of this is the young woman in her 20s or 30s trying to lose weight for their wedding day. They stop eat-ing all the foods they love, starve themselves and go through hell for the sake of looking good in a wedding dress. Of course, this approach to losing weight is guaranteed to be short term only, because once the wedding is over, they no longer have such strong motivation to tolerate such depriva-tion so they stop dieting and the weight comes back on. Contrast this, with someone who makes small changes every week, that they know they can live with for the rest of their life. Over several weeks, they add more small changes. The beauty of this approach, if you have the patience, is that you can lose weight much easier, and it is much easier to main-tain. The ironic result is that while women in their 20s might be able to lose weight easier, it is women in their 40s who are best equipped to lose weight and keep it off.



Lesson #2: 6 Big Weight Loss Mistakes

If you want to lose weight, there are so many different ways to do it. But why then, do so many people struggle to lose weight? In my experience, most people go about losing weight in the wrong way. This is less about the specific diet they choose, but more about how they apply the weight loss method to their life.

The “diet” approach (temporarily restricting what you eat so that you can lose weight) is the default option for peo-ple choosing to lose weight in our society. And yet it is the diet approach that actually undermines genuine sustain-able long term weight loss.

Most people will say to me “I know dieting is the wrong way to lose weight”, but from what I have seen, even peo-ple who think they are trying a “non-dieting” approach actually make some of the same mistakes as people who go on fad diets.

So here are 6 common mistakes that could be sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

1. Trying a Short Term Solution Diets are by nature short term and people who use them often give no thought as to what they will do afterwards. You might be able to withstand that brutal diet that helps you shed lots of pounds overnight, but then what?

This is the fundamental flaw of a fad diet. It might work to help you lose weight, but what are you going to do for after that?

Most people will revert to their old habits and start gaining the weight back (yoyo dieting). As I tell my clients, no matter what methods you use to lose weight, be sure it is something you feel comfortable do-ing for the rest of your life. 2. Wanting a Quick Fix It is natural to desire things as soon as possible, but want-ing immediate results in losing weight sets you up for fail-ure. When you chase quick results, you make the wrong deci-sions. Rather than making sustainable changes, you opt for deprivation and starvation to get to your goal as soon as possible. This makes weight loss so unbearable that it is difficult to sustain it for a brief time let alone for the rest of your life. Instead of aiming for a quick fix (which some people end up doing every few months) why not take the long-term perspective and solve your weight problem permanently?

The longer the timeframe you give yourself, the less pres-sure you will feel to make bad decisions about how to lose weight.


3. Making Big Changes If you currently do no exercise and then suddenly decide to start running 8 miles each day, chances are that you would find it difficult to maintain.

Similarly, if you have a regular diet that includes generous portions of chocolate, cakes and ice cream, then to cut it all out at once is a cruel thing to do to yourself and also very difficult to maintain. The changes are too big and difficult to assimilate at once. And more often than not, they lead to feelings of depriva-tion and cravings for the forbidden food. Remember, drastic changes are the ones that are easily dis-carded when “life gets in the way”. 4. Doing Things That Are Unpleasant You increase your chances of success significantly when you make your weight loss pleasant. Put another way, the more unpleasant your method of weight loss, the more likely you will struggle to maintain it for the long term. Always ask yourself, “Do I really think I will still be doing this in 5 years time?” If the answer is no, then try a differ-ent approach.


5. Using a Weight Loss Method that is Completely Inflexible or Impractical Many diets are so structured and strict that they make eat-ing out, travelling or even cooking a normal meal impossi-ble. While some people find that the structure of a diet plan helps them to keep on track, you must always ask yourself if this is a long term solution. The ideal weight loss plan should be able to cope with dif-ferent life situations and events, including holidays, getting busy at work, or dealing with illness.

Otherwise, the moment something unusual appears on your schedule, your weight loss goes out the window. 6. Using a Weight Loss Method that is Pass / Fail. Most diets are pass/fail. You either stick religiously to the prescribed menu or you don’t. If you don’t stick to it, then you are “cheating”. This pass/fail attitude is dangerous, because it sets people up to think that if they aren’t sticking to the diet perfectly (which is really hard to do) then they are a failure. This makes them more likely to give up. Weight loss should instead be viewed as a process. You need to accept “bad days” and learn from them, rather than think of them as a sign of failure.


The Heart of the Problem If you think about any previous “failed” attempts at losing weight you or anyone else may have had, you will usually find at least one of these 6 mistakes at the heart of the problem.



Lesson #3: Do You Have to Starve

Yourself to be Slim?

Our society, to its detriment, is obsessed with the diet as a solution to being overweight. But even people who accept that dieting is not the way to lose weight are still affected by the underlying prin-ciple behind a diet:

“No pain, no gain”

Diets are based on limitation and self-denial. You are supposed to severely restrict your intake for a short pe-riod of time with the end result that you (hopefully) lose weight. When I speak to women who are 20 or 30 pounds overweight, they tell me that what has put them off try-ing to lose weight in the past, is that they couldn’t bear the thought of going on a diet. Of course they said this because they associated losing weight with suffering and deprivation. The deprivation delusion – that you need to severely deny yourself food in order to lose weight – drives many people’s weight loss efforts. And this is a dangerous belief. If you believe that losing weight requires suffering, you will necessarily look at short term methods to accomplish your goal.

This is why the default option for someone looking to lose weight in our society is to go on a diet. But to last on a deprivation diet for even a short time re-quires immense self-control and determination. You might be able to knuckle down and tolerate a few weeks on a par-ticularly brutal diet, but then what? What will you do once you’re off the diet? Will you go back to your old ways? If so, you are going to gain your weight back pretty soon. Losing weight and then gaining it back is of course yoyo dieting. The answer to the question “do you have to starve yourself to be slim?” is therefore a resounding “No!” (And when I talk about slim, I mean being your ideal healthy weight.) This should be good news to you. You don’t have to suffer to lose weight. The fact is, if you don’t like your diet, you won’t stick to it. Put another way, the more pleasant your method of losing weight is, the more likely you will stick with it. So how do you make weight loss pleasant? The main thing is you don’t make any drastic changes to what you eat. Switching suddenly to a fruit, lettuce and boiled vegetables diet might make you feel like you are doing something pro-active, but most people will not be able to last on it for very long. Leave the drastic changes for others who are less enlight-ened. You are better off planning for the long term, making small changes to what you eat each week.


This way, instead of trying too much and failing, you can have small successes that you build on. You can learn from your mistakes and get better and better. And really, there is no other way to lose weight. For long term change, you need to be making changes that you are sure you can stick with for the rest of your life. Most of us can’t starve ourselves for the rest of our lives but we can make small changes each week that eventually lead us to our ideal weight.



Lesson #4: You Can’t Fail at Losing Weight

Have you ever tried to lose weight on a particular diet and failed? If you answered yes to that question, all it means is that you are approaching weight loss in an unhelpful way. Weight loss is not a pass/fail situation. Indeed it is this attitude that leads so many people to give up on their dreams of losing weight. How many times have you heard people say “I tried to lose weight on that diet, but couldn’t stick to it” “I didn’t have the willpower to stay on that diet, so I gave up” Why do people talk like this? It’s part of the “diet” cul-ture. The way that most diets are promoted is by treat-ing dieting like an exam. You either lose weight or you don’t. If you succeed, well done. If you fail, sorry, bad luck. And people who don’t stick perfectly to the diet are “cheating”. But just like we wouldn’t brush our teeth once and think that our teeth were clean for the rest of our lives, we shouldn’t view losing weight as a one-off event that we either pass or fail.

Managing your weight is a process. It’s something you need to learn, much like a child learns to ride a bike. When a child learns to ride a bike, we don’t tell them they’ve failed when they’ve fallen off. We encourage them to get up and try again. It would be a rare child indeed that started riding a bike the first time they got on. Similarly, if you want to change the way you manage your weight, you are going to make a few mistakes before you get it right. Therefore it isn’t failure when you make a mistake on a diet. It is a necessary part of the process of discovering how to manage your weight successfully. And part of this process includes being flexible with your approach. Not all methods work for all people. We are all different. Hence the approach that is most flexible is most likely to succeed. So, you should be willing to try different strategies. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and then give up when it doesn’t work out. If something doesn’t work as well as it should, try something else. There really is no other way of finding a way to manage weight successfully. Don’t let a few setbacks put you off. You are learning a new way of doing things. You need to keep trying different things until you discover what works. And just like the child learning to ride a bike, the only way you can fail is by giving up.



Lesson #5: Want to Lose Weight?

Relax...

Does the thought of trying to lose weight make you feel stressed? You’re not alone. And in my experience, getting stressed about your weight loss is one of the biggest ob-stacles to success. People who get stressed about their weight loss are much more likely to give up. But when you think about it, it’s no surprise that peo-ple would associate a lot of stress with losing weight. After all, for many of the clients I see, they have strug-gled with their weight for decades. And with a long his-tory of failures behind them, it’s no wonder that even the thought of trying to lose weight fills them with dread. But it’s more than that. We, as a society, are in the grips of a diet mentality. We believe that weight loss and dieting are the same thing. They’re not. But what it means is that people think: 1. Weight loss = deprivation 2. No pain, no gain 3. The quicker the better

Ask most people what things they associate with losing weight, it will most likely be deprivation, missing out on good times and spending long stretches of time feeling hungry while watching other family members eat heartily. In other words, weight loss is misery. But more than the deprivation, is the overarching feeling that if you’re going to lose weight, it has to happen quickly. This sense of urgency coupled with unrealistic expecta-tions means that when things don’t go to plan, it stresses us out. So what’s the antidote to weight loss stress? Relax. But to be more specific: 1. Abandon all deadlines Don’t try and lose weight in a hurry. It will just make you do short-term things (like starving yourself) instead of long-term things that are sustainable. Don’t try and lose weight to a schedule. It can’t and wont’ happen. I often say to clients “in a year’s time, you’re not going to remember if it took your four months or five months to lose your weight”, which is another way of saying, when you take the time pressure out of it, and think long-term, then the stress is off.


2. Enjoy life Stopping all pleasurable activities like eating out or going on holiday (vacation) is a big mistake. And yet this is what many people do when they are trying to lose weight. If you can’t do all these things while losing weight, then how likely are you going to be able to do these things once you’ve reached your ideal healthy weight? If you make weight loss a fun-less experience, of course it’s going to create more tension and make you want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. 3. Think long-term Many people treat losing weight like it’s a project. But weight control is a way of life. And so whichever ways you cut back what you’re eating or whichever changes you make to your exercise or activity re-gime, always make sure that the changes are ones that you’re willing to do for the rest of your life. A Stress-free zone Life can be stressful enough as it is, without adding to it by getting stressed about losing weight. You should be more stressed when you’re doing nothing about your weight, than when you’re taking positive healthy action.


The best strategy is to remove the time pressure, abandon your expectations and always think of the long-term. Remember:

“If weight loss feels like a struggle, then you’re doing it wrong.”


Documents

Dr K 101 - Doctor K Weight Loss: Weight Loss Clinic for ... · The answer to the question “do you have to starve yourself to be slim?” is therefore a resounding “No!” (And