An individual Fit is necessary
when it comes to Diets or Lifestyles.

Have you thought that if you did just what someone else does,
you would look just like them? Yet when you try to copy their
choice of foods and fitness activities, you’re miserable.

Then when you stop doing it, you feel like you failed.
You didn't fail. It was just a bad lifestyle fit.

 Each of us is an individual on our own journey, and none of us are exactly alike.
Some people need to follow a specific eating plan and have foods they never eat again.
A Plan like this makes some people feel deprived and leads to binge eating.
Some people need to eat smaller quantities of what they want at frequent times,
while taking extra care to carefully log that food into their trackers.

I don’t like any outside control on my eating behavior
I hate having well-meaning people ask: "Should you be eating that?"
Others aren’t any more right or more wrong than me.
We all want to save ourselves from obesity, and there are many options available.
The secret is to find what works for each one of us personally.
There is a lot of advice out there from the weight loss industry.
So many “medical discoveries” happening in the field,
So many magazines promoting “new miracle diets”,
So many tips and tricks.

Now Obesity is considered an epidemic
but there’s no vaccination…no one-cure-fits-all fix.
Each of us has to find our own way.
 We know some basics of calories-in and calories-out
which is one starting point of our physical problem.
However genetic, psychological, character-related,
disease-related, and other problems, are involved as well.
These are all variables which cause more than one problem
and require more than one solution.

Note that in “Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It” by Gary Taubes,
the basic belief in calories-in/calories-out is even termed the "Original Sin”.

What works for me may not work for you.
What works for you might not work for me.

Each of us wants to find a way to change our life without severely disrupting it.
That’s a tough Goal. To accomplish that, we need to gather as much information
as is possible, and make changes that work best individually.

How do you know what fits you personally, 
and  how do you push out of your comfort zone?

I’ve heard that the change should fit into your life
the way you try to fit a puzzle piece in place.
Keep turning it around and trying it at different angles
to see if that’s the right one.
If it isn’t, it will never go in place, so try another.

No Diet is one-size-fits-all.
No single answer will solve everyone’s problems with obesity.
If you’re still fat, you aren’t a failure,
you just haven’t found your own answer yet. 
Just keep searching.  
 

                         
There are many different diets, ways-of-eating, and lifestyles.
I believe that each of us has to find his or her own way.

All of the Weight-Loss/Maintenance research and theories contain flaws, and
each of us is individually conducting an Experiment of One.

I totally agree with the following quote by an online forum member.

"You see a lot of contradiction in diet books
and on diet blogs and message boards.
Some people will tell you to eat certain foods,
others tell you to stay away from them,
eat six meals, or maybe just three meals,
do aerobics, avoid aerobics,
take these pills, don't take any pills.

Nobody's right. Everyone's right.

You have to think of a diet as a trip home for Thanksgiving --
it's a personal destination
and you should know better than anybody how to get there.

If you're driving east on the highway heading home for Thanksgiving,
you'll see a lot of cars driving west.

If the person in the passenger seat said,
"There's a lot of people heading home for the holiday,"
you wouldn't turn to that person and flip out and say,
"What the hell!
What a bunch of retards!
Don't they know home is this way?"

But that is what diet writing often is --
people arguing over how to get home."

                                 

In a previous Blog, A Thousand Words AND Pictures,
I shared about my video adventures.
Those Videos are now all posted here on DietHobby.

In yesterday's Blog, When Life Takes You In A Different Direction,
I posted my Book Discussion Announcement Video.

My Cooking Videos are posted under RECIPES.
You can access them from the links at the right-side-top-of-the-main-page
or from the Recipes drop-down menu.

You can also find them under RESOURCES..... Videos.......Cooking Videos

Here's one of them.

                                
Someone who is still Fat recently told me that they didn't want Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise to "Rule their Life".

 I had no way to Help them toward that Goal of Mindlessness, because Thoughts about Weight/Food/Exercise have ALWAYS "Ruled MY Life."

I did not spend any less time Thinking about those issues when I was Fat than I do now. The difference is that when I was Fat my Thoughts were not accompanied by Action, while during my weight-loss period ...and now inside Maintenance... my Thoughts about those issues are now more positive and productive.

I frequently hear things like:
“I don’t want to THINK about my eating.”
“I don’t want to be obsessed with thoughts of food.”

Terms like Diet Mentality or Diet Head are commonly usedto denote the negative feelings people have abouttheir need to monitor their eating behavior for weight-control.
All of us tend to seek the easier, softer way. and almost all Diets promise us one.
Dieting is treated as a matter of “get in…get out”.Find the problem..fix it. ..and then “get on with your life:. which implies that once you’ve remedied the problemthat you can “leave it behind”.

Most diet book authors tell us that they have faced a weight problemeither themselves personally or as medical professionals,
…sometimes both………and that they have found a solution, and they are writing that book to tell you what it is.

Perhaps they are writing for their own personal fulfillment or perhaps for financial profit. Still, they want to tell you what to do to FIX your problem. …and in the dieting world, fixing your problem means getting rid of fat.

Do you have a physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual problem? No matter, despite the source, or the reason….
A Solution is promised.
A Solution is the answer to a problem.
A Solution resolves, finalizes, and eliminates the problem.

But Life IS continuous. The end of life is Death.
And eating will always be a major part of life, whether or not eating is a thoughtful conscious process.

The dieting promises of a “Solution” are illusory.
The Goal of getting thin and arriving at a place where eating is primarily “unconscious”.is an very ineffective goal, because for a reduced obese person,unconscious eating invariably results in fat gain.

I’ve replaced that Goal with one less impracticable.My current Goal is to continue putting forth the consistent effort that it takes to maintain my weight-loss.This means I plan to keep using my mind to control my body’s food-intake.

I choose to think Differently about the dieting process. I don’t use negative terms like Diet Mentality and Diet Head.
I’ve chosen to make all those issues part of a positive DietHobby.
 I changed my mind…from negative to positive.

I found the DietPower food journaling program in September 2004, while surfing the net.  I started using it.  I had good success, and still really like it.  

   I have logged all of my food into DietPowerevery day since 9/20/04, today, 2/21/11 makes 2346 consecutive days.

DietPower is my most essential tool for weight-loss and maintenance.……….However, like any tool, it won't be helpful unless………you make, and follow through with, a commitment to consistently use it.

Before using DietPower I tried many times to keep track of my food and calories. That was very hard to do using only paper, a pen, and a calorie dictionary, I was never able to keep doing that for more than a week or so.

Diet Power changed all that for me. As entering all my food was easy, it became an enjoyable Habit. It is now as natural to me as brushing my teeth or making my bed every day. DietPower works with every diet one might care to use,and no matter what specific diet I’m on, I still use DietPower.

Counting calories long-term used to be very time consuming and difficult, however, using a computer software program like DietPower lets one do it with ease. In fact, because of my habitual use of DietPower, counting calories is now a Habit for me.  I’m currently doing a Low-CarbExperiment and DietPower also makes it easy for me to count my carbs.

DietPower is a very small company, and it gives great personal support. There is a free 2 week trial, and the program pretty much explains itself. When I first got it, I downloaded the free 2 weeks and I liked it so much immediately, that I bought it after using it for only 3 days.

Although DietPower is a simple program, learning anything requires effort.Also, installing a habit is not energy free.  One must keep one’s commitment to consistent action for the weeks that it takes to establish the habit

of logging in one’s food. Consistent effort can result in habitual behavior.

 DietPower has a big food dictionary with thousands of foods of all types and brands. For example it has tons of generic granola bars, and if you want to input quickly, you can just pull up whatever appears to be the closest to what you're eating. However, one thing I really I like, is the ease with which I can input the exact info from the label of my favorite food (for example: a specific Atkins bar) into DietPower's food dictionary, and then from that day forward, I have that EXACT information in my program.

I use DietPower’s recipe function all the time.  Although initially DietPower’srecipe dictionary contains a number of recipes,  I must admit that I've never used any of them.  However, I’ve put all of my own recipes into DietPower, by using ingredients from the food dictionary. So I know exactly what the nutrients are in one serving of any of my favorite recipes.  When I eat that serving, or part of it,  I simply input that choice into my food log which then tells me the exact amount of calories, carbs, protein, fat etc. in my food intake.

Another good use for the recipe dictionary is that I can combine foods to makemy usual salad or sandwich; or even combine all the foods of a standard meal including a salad, a main dish, fruit etc. and then just  a few clicks puts all of that food information into my daily food log. 

 DietPower can be used just as it is, and you will want to do that at first until you learn the program well,  but the benefits of individualizing the program are fantastic.

There is a lot of information about DietPower on its online website, and I've found it all to be true.  I have no financial interest in it, and I’ve chosennot to receive any payment for people who buy the program after clicking my DietPower links.

If you buy the program, my advice is to pay the small extra charge for them to ship you a disk. I don't like that "key" process, because it can take a day or two to implement, and having the program disk has really saved me a few times from computer glitches.

Personally, I’m not fond of the metabolism function of DietPower, except as an area of interest.  I find it much more effective to set myself a "constant calorie budget" than let DietPower zigzag my calories up and down.
The program will tell you to eat far too few and then far too many calories.  Perhaps that function works well for large men, but I've found it doesn't work very well for medium size to small women.

The thing to remember is that DietPower is just a tool. 
It doesn't work unless you use it.

If you have questions, feel free to ask them.  You can easily access the DietPower website by clicking the icons located on the top and bottom of this page.

Update, January 2018: DietPower now only seems to work on an older Windows computer, and over the years, it has become relatively obsolete. Although I still choose to use it to journal my daily food, I supplement it with the use of My Fitness Pal, an online food journal which performs similar functions. As of this date, if I were just beginning to learn to use a food journal, my choice would be to use My Fitness Pal.