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.

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.

"Pig" A short-short story about struggle with weight

A man's lifetime struggle between love of food and desire to control his weight. I explore that in my PsychologyToday.com contribution 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.