I Can't Look in the Mirror: A fictional short-short story

Baby Steps to Losing Weight and Keeping it Off

Bachelor Hatchings, Episode 3: Weight

Lesson #2: On Weight Loss and Writing

Three Minutes on Losing Weight and Keeping it Off

My Diet Secrets

What if Extra-Large Clothes Were Banned? A thought experiment

StuporHeroes Parables, Episode 5: Wider Woman

Your Extra Pounds: A secular sermonette

How I Lost 20 Pounds and Kept it Off: a short-short story

Fighting Death: A short-short story

Food Torture: A short-short story

Finding and Maintaining Diet Discipline

The previous installments in The Quests series are “Finding a Good Job,” “Finding and Deepening a Relationship,” and “Finding a Good Place to Live.”

My Psychology Today article today turns to finding and keeping diet discipline: consistently not consuming more calories than we think wise.

"I Want to Lose 10 Pounds"

How to lose weight: Advice from experts who aren't trying to sell you anything. That's my PsychologyToday.com article today. 

The Daily Eating Plan; A good tool for weight loss?

I have tried so many things to try to lose those 20 pounds, and yes it’s harder when sheltering in place. Even though I’ve purged my home of my danger foods (well, most of them), sufficient calories remain in my house and my restraint is inconsistent enough that I'm still wearing those 20 pounds.

Well, I got an idea today amid my daily morning reverie between sleep and getting up: What if I made a list of what I plan to eat that day? I’m decent at completing my to-do list, so might it help me lose weight?

I put the list plus some motivators on the kitchen counter where I do my food preparation. I share what I wrote and how I did on Day One in my Psychology Today article today.

Tough Problems: Wants to lose weight, wants to gain weight.

This is the latest in the Tough Problems series. In each installment, I present two composite questions that my clients face and my response to each.

The first is a person wanting to lose weight, the second about a person who wants to gain.

Losing Weight: Tiny tweaks may be the best approach

It’s well established that diets don’t work. Fellow Psychology Today blogger, Meg Selig reviews the literature.  Nor will exercise work—Whatever calories expended are at least as compensated by increased hunger and entitlement

If you’re obese (BMI of 30+), medically supervised diet and/or surgery may be indicated but for the more typical overweight person (BMI-25-29), tiny tweaks may be the wisest approach. You’re more likely to stay with tweaks, avoiding the dangerous yo-yoing. Plus, tweaks are less likely to trigger your set point: your body resisting effort to losing weight.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers ideas on how to make it work 

The Dieter: 7 tips embedded in a story

I’ve written previously on managing your weight, for example, Better than a Diet. But those articles were in standard form: an annotated list. 

Some people learn better when advice is embedded in a context, hence I offer a story as my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Better than a Diet: Mini Tweaks work better

As you may know, Mensa is the organization for high IQ people. Recently I gave a talk at a Mensa convention and noticed that many attendees were overweight. Clearly, they know that broccoli good, Quadruple Bypass Burger bad. And if they’re like me, they have a full bag of tips and tricks for weight control: don’t use food as a reward, picture the benefits of losing weight,

use small plates, eat slowly, stay conscious so you only eat until you’re not hungry, at restaurants put a fraction of your food in a doggie bag as soon as it’s served, blah-blah-blah. Yet they stay fat.

Why? Because such efforts, let alone diets, don’t work well enough. After all, it’s well established that most people who lose weight gain it all back and more. And we all know that yo-yoing is bad for our health. 


So what to do?  I offer simple advice that distills the consensus of authoritative sources in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Do You Know How to Control Your Weight?

So many people, including me, struggle to control our weight.

I don't often enough follow these tips or I wouldn't be 20 pounds overweight. But as someone who has spent a lifetime battling the problem including vigorous daily exercise, and know I could easily be 50 pounds overweight if I didn't use the following tactics, I thought I'd list them in my PsychologyToday.com article today, so you can do a self-assessment inventory to see if there's anything you want to change.