Step 00 to Step 0

How do we move ourselves from not caring about our weight through becoming concerned enough to do something into the action stage? Extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation? and the related question, how do we maintain that motivation?  

We all know that we are overweight, obese, or otherwise have weight issues. This may not apply to those who have a few pounds to loose, weight lifters who want to cut, or to who are just got a little heavy for the first time. It applies to those of us who have had a life time of diets, obesity. First we must become desperate, defeated, willing to go to any lengths, to learn anything, to try anything, to step from the tested and known path and try something different. This requires a level of desperation that is difficult to maintain once we start having success.

Admitting complete defeat in regard to something is not something physiologists ascribe to. I am not saying that we remain defeated, just that we walk away from the methods we had been employing, go take a few classes or learn something more, come back and try a new approach.  There are many of us who have had some success through education, through learning other approaches to this vexing problem, and through learning about ourselves. Persistence is the venture we need to foster here, along with endurance.

Pain is changeful, if there is such a word. Pain can push the need for change. Change is painful also. Obesity is painful in so many ways. Anyone who is obese or has been obese knows these pains. We need to accept that the advice until now that we have received has not been enough to correct the problem. Any of those of us who have partly recovered will likely attest to that. But there is hope. Suppose we took the life lessons from those recovering obese persons, and assembled a list of what caused the life alternating changes, and then we went through the list and tried them, one at a time until we found a solution. There is hope of full and complete recovery. Obesity is a chronic disease; we can regress at any time. We will need ongoing effort for the remainder of our lives; I will need to work at this the remainder of my life.

We live at a great time in human history. We have technology, the internet, surplus of foods of superb palatablity. We have people who know how to sell that food to the obese with uncanny skill that we are unable to resist. The drug of choice to addicts if you like. Once we treat it as such, as an addiction, even if it is not, the problem can be solved, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but often. We live in the information age, the shear volume of information is staggering. The issue becomes much of that information is wrong, and we must have some method of testing and verifying the information from first principals, basic science, or something. Even if it looks right it may still be wrong. Who is to ever know? But if it works for us, and helps us down our life, then it is better than what we had before.

Is this obesity problem solvable? For all time to the last 100 years, there were a few obese people,usually wealthy older people who stopped the need to do physical work. But the point is there were a great many thin or normal people who had no difficulty living thin. There are many today, but most of them are fussy eaters, who limit their intake of specific foods, or to specific foods. Either way, the effect seems to be similar. When we look at the recovered, some follow ritual eating programs, others do not. All watch the quantities of foods some or all of the time. Attitude is a major part of recovery, while we are recovering and maintaining. When we loose that suitable attitude, with respect to food, the problem comes back.

Any comments? Who would like to be part of this project?