Choose to Lose Weight: Your Guide to Permanent Weight Loss

By Larry Barkan

Anyone can lose weight. You've done it many times. The trick is to keep the weight off permanently, and for that you have to think differently not about food but about yourself.
This book is a guide to thinking not eating. You don't need to transform your relationship with food. You need to transform your relationship with yourself. After all, you know exactly what you must do to lose weight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Barkan
• Release date: Jan 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9780979791130

Larry Barkan

I retired in 2014 after a 30 year career as a management consultant helping teams and individuals resolve conflicts that were preventing them from creating happy and productive lives. I can help you, too, IF you want to resolve the issues that come between you and the people in your life. I capitalized IF because resolving conflicts requires that the person who is the most difficult often doesn't truly want to arrive at a resolution. You may be surprised to learn that the person who is the most difficult is you. The reason conflicts don't get resolved is because you aren't aware of just how difficult you are. That is good news because it suggests that conflict resolution rests in your hands. That is bad news because you'll have to take responsibility for the conflict if you want to resolve it. Notice that I wrote "responsibility," not blame. There is no blame; there is only responsibility. In any case, my writings can help. I can be contacted at [e-mail].

Book preview

CHOOSE TO LOSE WEIGHT:

Your Guide To Permanent Weight Loss

Copyright 2010 by Lawrence Barkan

ISBN 13: 978-0-9797911-3-0

Smashwords Edition

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Cover photos provided by Yamix & Dana Bartekoske Heinemann, www.Dreamstime.com

Cover design by Joleene Naylor

E-book design by OPA Author Services, Scottsdale, AZ

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One — The Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss Revealed!

Chapter Two — Blind Spots That Keep You From Choosing

Chapter Three — The Choose To Lose Weight Action Plan

Conclusion

About the Author

Contact Larry

Introduction

Anyone can lose weight. You’ve done it many times. The trick is to keep the weight off permanently, and for that you have to think differently not about food but about yourself.

This book is a guide to thinking, not eating. You don’t need to transform your relationship with food. You need to transform your relationship with yourself. After all, you know exactly what you must do to lose weight. So why haven’t you kept the weight off?

This book will answer that question and show you exactly what you must do to choose to lose weight permanently.

You won’t find any recipes here and I’m not going to recommend the diet program you should follow. Simply choose the diet that works for you, stick to it and it will work.

Ah, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet notes, there’s the rub. Few people I interviewed were able to stick to a diet for very long. They could do it for a while, but then that dessert beckoned. They remembered how good their favorite snack tasted. They thought they could cheat just a little bit. After all, they rationalized, I’ve lost the weight. I can afford to reward myself just this once.

Unfortunately, just this once became twice then three times, then…well, you know the end to that story.

My wife was the initial impetus for this book. For at least the past ten years of our 37-year marriage, Carol has watched her weight increase even as she has vowed each year to lose the added pounds. This year, she did it. She lost 20 pounds on her way to losing 45 pounds.

I was talking to her about why she finally chose to take action and how she was able to stick to that choice when it hit me: The choice Carol had made and the actions she was taking were very similar to what I did 25 years ago when I finally and irrevocably stopped smoking.

Further, I’ve exercised vigorously every day since I was in my 20s (I’m currently 63) with occasional time outs for illness, so I’m very familiar with the commitment required to maintain an exercise regimen day after day after day.

Moreover, for almost 30 years as a business training and development consultant, I’ve counseled individuals, teams and entire organizations on how to implement and sustain behavior change.

It became obvious to me that the change process is remarkably similar whether the context is smoking, exercise, weight loss, leadership or writing a book (I’ve written two).

Simply put, people who change their behavior and sustain it over time invariably take two actions:

They have a clearly defined goal, and

They do what is required to achieve that goal no matter how they feel about it, no matter how inconvenient it may be and no matter how much they resist doing what’s required.

Of course, there’s no surprise in what I’ve written. I’d be surprised if you were surprised. You know that, if you are to lose weight and keep it off, you must do what you say you are committed to doing and you must do it without cheating. However, if you were doing that, you wouldn’t be reading this, would you?

Once I saw that my wife’s actions were familiar to me in my personal life and in my work, I wanted to learn more, so I interviewed people who had been on diets, were currently on diets or were contemplating going on a diet. In other words, I started interviewing the entire human race.

Or at least that’s how it seemed. Everyone I asked, from those who were rail thin to those who were clearly overweight, responded affirmatively when I asked, Have you ever been on a diet? I’ll share what I learned as you proceed through this book.

In Chapter 1, I’ll reveal the secrets to permanent weight loss as well as the dilemma that choosing to lose weight can seem to be. In Chapter 2, I’ll discuss the beliefs that keep you from sustaining your choice to lose