Real Weight Loss Tips from Cliff Kuhn, M.D. | People who suffer from obesity are desperately searching for the reason why almost all of weight loss techniques they have tried just don’t work.
P.T. Barnum, who dedicated his life to entertaining the masses, often relied on size-related adjectives to sell his attractions. His posters and announcements were peppered with words like mammoth, extraordinary, colossal, and gargantuan.
Unfortunately, if you're like most of us those words might be used to describe you as well. Americans have an obsession with weight loss and with good reason; the percentage of overweight people in the United States is doubling every ten years - from 1 in 200 in 1986, to 1 in 50 in 2000. Without some weight loss, pretty soon there won't be enough room for us all on this continent!
We've identified a curious paradox: Americans are obsessed with weight loss and spend billions on it each year, yet 140 million of us are overweight or obese - and that number grows (pun intended) each year. With all that energy and money thrown at it, why can't we experience more weight loss and why do we pack it on in the first place?
Why Do We Gain Weight...and Where is the Weight Loss We Crave?
Let's quickly move beyond simple, though true, solutions. We intellectually "know" that there are only three things necessary for weight loss (outside of a medical condition): eating the correct foods, eating less, and getting more exercise. We "know" these things are true, yet why don't we do them?
The answer is simple and, luckily for you, so is the solution. As you learn the following diet you will realize that with a little willingness and discipline you need never worry about weight loss again. You will come to believe, in short order, that you will have as much weight loss as you desire and you will never gain it back because you will understand how logical and powerful my diet is!
Let's just be honest about it - we love food! Eating is an enjoyable ritual and we commonly use food to reward ourselves because it feels good to eat. Whenever we feel unfulfilled or frustrated (when we need affirmation or esteem) we are naturally drawn to fill that void with food. When we're lacking pleasure in our lives we rely on the eating ritual to make up the difference.
And this formula works; overfilling ourselves with food does fill our emptiness. It works so well that, just like any addict, we become gluttons - regularly overstuffing ourselves and/or eating too much "comfort" food to fill our emotional void. The end result, despite our best intentions, is a constant, steady weight gain because we're using food for a purpose it is not intended - support.
The Solution to Your Weight Loss Problems
The healthful solution I've created to fill your emptiness exists already inside you because you were born with it. Unlike food, this solution fills your void while also fostering lasting and sustainable health, vitality, energy, and fitness. Instead of food, what you need is the natural medicine of humor because humor and fun are the most accessible and constant sources of energy and support known.
Because it is an energy, fun is readily and abundantly in you and around you. Once you learn to find more fun in your relationships, your work, and your home life I guarantee you will quickly do away with those excess pounds - and they'll never return. And the best news is...I will teach you exactly how to do this using my Fun Factor Diet.
My Fun Factor Diet is based upon my unique prescription, The Fun Factor, because The Fun Factor delivers you to new heights of health, wellness, and success. Years ago a terminally ill patient, Lisa, taught me about the incredibly powerful natural medicine of humor. I used Lisa's lessons to create my Fun Commandments, eventually molding them into my unique prescription, The Fun Factor, capable of producing health, energy, and vitality that others will envy.
My Fun Factor Diet works because it is based on my Fun Commandments and, thus, enables you to unleash your powerful humor nature on every aspect of your life. As you learn to have more fun in your relationships, your work, and your home life, you will rely less and less on food to meet your emotional needs. With the Fun Factor Diet the urge to overeat melts away, along with the excess pounds because you will be using food for its natural purpose - sustenance.
And, as a bonus, since my Fun Factor Diet is based on fun, you will laugh more frequently. Laughter is an excellent form of aerobic exercise; a hearty, belly laugh produces the same physical response as thirty minutes on the Stairmaster. When you laugh it gives your heart and lungs a good work out so...you are burning additional calories just by practicing my unique diet!
The Fun Factor Diet
Step One: Go the Extra Smile
The first strategy of my Fun Factor Diet is to Always Go the Extra Smile. Smiling is a deliberate and controllable behavior that almost always calms inner stress and attracts outward fun. Smiling unleashes the natural medicine of humor anytime and anywhere because it has a profound physical and emotional impact.
The key is to increase your conscious effort to smile constantly, especially when there is nothing in particular to smile about. Before you begin an activity, you remind yourself to smile first; before each conversation, you remind yourself to smile. You'll soon be wearing a genuine smile on your face everywhere you go because the good results you experience will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And here is the beautifully powerful weight loss secret behind the first Fun Factor Diet strategy: your internal physiology is fooled by your smile. Whether spontaneous or forced, your body thinks you're having fun when you smile, whether you are or not, because smiling activates the pleasure centers of your brain. By smiling you literally become more physically relaxed and enjoy a greater sense of fulfillment and enjoyment.
The amazing benefit of this Fun Factor Diet tactic is that the lessening of your internal agitation decreases your cravings to eat when you're not really hungry. And, as a bonus, your smile attracts more social attention - leaving you less time to stuff yourself because people are mysteriously attracted to you without quite knowing why. By Going the Extra Smile you're well on your way to weight loss by filling your emotional void with fun rather than food!
Step Two: Be Willing to Laugh with Yourself
Step two in my Fun Factor Diet is to Be Willing to Laugh with Yourself. This is not a step of humiliation or self-denigration because those things are definitely not fun; it is a strategy of being willing to take yourself lightly. Easing your harsh expectations you impose on yourself, relaxing some of your self-administered pressure, sets the stage for astounding personal gains (or in your case personal "losses")
At this stage of my Fun Factor Diet, you will make a deliberate effort to take yourself and your expectations less seriously. You will adopt a kindlier stance toward your fears and inconsistencies because you have been much too hard on yourself. The results will be a dramatic lightness (both figuratively and literally) of mind, body, and spirit.
Freed from the tyranny of your unrealistic expectations, you will be able to relax and have more fun. Things you have dreaded doing in the past will become enjoyable activities because you won't have expectations of perfection. Combined with your commitment to Go the Extra Smile, you will find your use of food to calm and comfort yourself almost extinguished because taking yourself lightly helps you see yourself as, literally, less "heavy."
Step Three: Stay Focused, yet Flexible
The third step in my Fun Factor Diet makes the most dramatic difference in your actual eating habits and provides the mechanics of your weight loss. The employment of my Fun Commandment, Stay Focused, yet Flexible, keeps you grounded in the moment, the here and now, because it challenges you to give 100% attention to what you are doing right now. Staying Focused, yet Flexible provides the dramatic weight loss breakthrough you've been waiting for because your entire paradigm of eating is about to change!
On the Fun Factor Diet you Stay Focused, yet Flexible by not engaging in any other activity while you are eating. Activities that have commonly accompanied your eating are to be shunned while putting food in your mouth - including reading, watching television, or socializing at get-together. With the exception of reasonable table conversation, eating becomes a focused activity for you, not connected with any other behavior because you are about to halt the underlying cause of your weight gain.
Once you begin disciplining yourself to separate eating from all the pleasurable and stressful activities with which you have associated it, you will discover a disturbing fact: you will be shocked by how much you've been using food as both a stress reliever and a pleasure enhancer. Your weight loss can be dramatic when you change your use of food from pleasure enhancement and stress relief to simple nourishment. You're ready for this change because, with the first two steps in my diet, you've already begun to fill your emotional and spiritual void with fun rather than food.
This step of my Fun Factor Diet has two primary benefits: you become more acutely aware of your opportunities for fun away from food, which allows you to become even more effective at satisfying your emotional needs with fun, and by eating with full focus you increase the enjoyment and appreciation for your food, which allows you to use food as nourishment rather than pleasure. When you combine having fun apart from food with getting greater enjoyment from the food you are eating, you experience weight loss because you are no longer using it in a contrived and artificial fashion!
Step Four: Practice Wanting What You Have, Rather than Getting What You Want
The final step in my Fun Factor Diet will make your weight loss permanent because it centers you in the unique paradigm of lasting success. My Fun Commandment, Practice Wanting What You Have, Rather Then Getting What You Want, increases your awareness of gratitude because it stops the merry-go-round of always needing "more" to feel satisfied. Ongoing gratitude for what you have has the amazing benefit of making it possible to get and keep more of what you want.
We all make the mistake of taking for granted the things we truly value and focus, instead, on all the things we want that we do not yet possess. This focus makes us desperate and puts conditions on our happiness, because our success never satisfies us and we only wind up needing more. If you ever want to have more fun in your life (as you're going to be doing on my Fun Factor Diet), you begin by counting the blessings you already have because that will make your weight loss, and other achievements, lasting and real.
Becoming adept at this portion of my Fun Factor Diet does two things: it continually reminds you of the many gifts you've already been given and it decreases your appetite for those things you think you want will. Realizing that you have everything you need to be happy today eases the stress of not having everything you want because all the pressure is gone - you're already a success! The end result of this strategy is that you will not feel as empty, resulting in greater weight loss from a lowered desire to fill your void with food.
Filling yourself up with gratitude is not a platitude, so to speak, because it works in real practice. You eat in excess to fill an emotional and/or spiritual void, not because you are hungry; you eat too much to provide yourself with emotional comfort, fulfillment, and reassurance. The strategy of Practicing Wanting What you Have, Rather than Getting What you Want, actually fills this emptiness in a meaningful, lasting manner because your emotional appetite is satisfied by the things that really sustain it!
Smiling fools your body and attracts socially fun attention, Taking Yourself Lightly releases you from the tyranny of your unrealistic expectations, Staying Focused, yet Flexible teaches you to use food for nourishment rather than fun, and Wanting What you Have allows you to fill your emotional void with fun and gratitude rather than food. There you have it... weight loss from the natural medicine of humor and my Fun Factor Diet!
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