Bachelor Hatchings, Episode 3: Weight

We Say We'll …

A Word With Marty: "DIET"

My Diet Secrets

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

Your Extra Pounds: A secular sermonette

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

Tough Problems: Living with Coronavirus Restrictions: Avoiding weight-gain while home, talking with your kids about COVID-19

This is the latest in the Tough Problems series. In each, I offer a response to two composite client questions.

In the first, the person is worried about gaining weight because she's forced to be home most of the time. 

The second letter asks how to talk with a child about coronavirus. 

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.

The Dieter’s Moment of Truth

If you’d like to lose weight, you’re about to face the year’s biggest challenge: a gauntlet of pigging-out opportunities: Thanksgiving, the day-after-Thanksgiving leftovers, office holiday parties, personal holiday parties, Christmas dinner, day-after-Christmas leftovers, capped off by New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. 

As someone who, despite having written on how to lose weight, can’t seem to lose my 15 extra pounds, perhaps I have no right to offer any more dieting advice but I sense that being aware of the dieter's moment of truth may have some value both to you and to me. That's my PsychologyToday.com article today. 

Should I Eat That?: An internal debate on whether it’s worth the calories

Core to losing weight is how we resolve the internal debate: It is it worth the calories? 

My PsychologyToday.com article offers the internal dialogue I’d have with myself as I was deciding whether to go out for an Indian buffet or stay home and have a prudent dinner. HERE is the link.