Why Try My Approach?
by Bob Wilson BS, DTR
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1. Why would someone consider trying my approach? Can’t they just go on a diet? Many have been on quick-fix diets or programs that are mainly short term and don’t view their eating and activity choices holistically, nor in a realistic way.
a. Other approaches generally do not teach adequate skills for maintaining weight loss or how to cope during life’s challenges and crises.
b. Diets focus on exterior rigid guidelines rather than teaching a person to listen to their own body and emotions for guidance.
c. Diets alone do not provide the self-evaluation needed to explore the root causes and reasons that led to the extra weight. Consequently, people frequently gain back the weight they lost.
d. Many have tried programs with improbable promises of quick, large, and lasting weight loss and quick changes…all with NO work involved…it’s always easy! Right?
e. Today gastric bypass surgery is very popular: What I’ve discovered is that just changing the size of someone’s stomach does NOT change the hungers they are trying to fill, nor teach lasting behavior changes.
f. Most other approaches don’t promote effective self-management skills nor teach us how to manage various environments.
g. Most lack referrals to appropriate supportive services (physical therapist, mental health, support groups, sleep evaluation, etc.) and have myopic, exclusive program focus.
h. People who are ready for my approach are…PEOPLE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF FEELING SICK AND TIRED! They’re ready. Are you ready?
2. What is my Website really about? What skills will a person learn? I have collected all the best wisdom and tools and put them together on one site.
The key message for the site for each person:
Through mindful and self-nurturing living you’ll feast on a diet of holistic self-care!
Gradually you come to know and respect yourself.
You learn to… Plant the Garden of Your Life with Seeds of Well-Being
And then gradually you…Reap Your Harvest of Health and Friskiness!
In my site, you will get to the root of your life and weight problem by identifying thoughts, feelings, and lifestyle patterns and other factors that influence your eating and activity choices that you make. You will learn 12 Essential Skills that allow you to:
WHAT SKILLS WILL YOU LEARN?
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See your life as a sacred whole and develop wisdom and discernment about your moment-to-moment choices. You will come to understand how each of your daily choices affect your body, mind, and spirit—how everything is interconnected. You will learn to see your lives as an ecosystem (like global warming or our present financial crisis has shown us that everything is interconnected and interdependent).
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Beginning Your Journey: Becoming Aware of the Big Picture
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Cultivating Balance in Your Life: You’ll discover how to simplify your life and bring you to a greater balance. You’ll cut back and gradually slow down.
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Becoming Your Own Lifestyle Self-Manager as you explore your patterns through use of many self-evaluation tools. You’ll also set realistic expectations as you learn how to be your own lifestyle self-manager.
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Discovering the Power of FUN: Celebrating Enjoyable Ways to Be Active for Life! Discover to savor the joys of an active lifestyle, even with health challenges as you improve your inner friskiness! You’ll learn about & overcome your personal barriers to being more active.
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Cultivating a Sustainable, Healthful Plan of Eating: What kind of body fuel do you need to heal your body of recent imbalances and keep it tuned-up so that it doesn’t ping, knock, or bulge!
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Planning and Preparing Delicious Recipes, Meals, and Snacks in a Hectic World: shows you exactly what to do
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Eating with Awareness and Pleasure: You’ll also practice eating with greater awareness—for health, vitality, and pleasure (even in a hectic world) and set up your various environments to support your success. Yum!
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Transforming Emotional Eating by understanding what leads to it and to apply healthy reasons to eat.
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Self-esteem and Self-nurturing: Developing an Unconditional Friendship with Yourself. You’ll also find out to become a more compassionate and loving friend to yourself.
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Seeking Support, Counseling, and Outside Resources for Your Journey
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Maintenance: Learning How to Cultivate Lifelong Well-Being
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Truly learn to appreciate and care for your body with the daily choices you make. My body has resisted my best attempts to kill it off and it still works!!!
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You will do this by identifying personal needs and discover how to meet these needs.
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Gradually you’ll improve overall self-care and figure out what you need to be a healthy, happy camper as you come up with your own personal maintenance schedule!
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All of this helps to transform emotional eating as you understand why you do it.
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You’ll learn how to take the long-term view as you gain perspective that life is a journey, not a race!
3. Who is Bob? Why am I qualified to have a website BALANCED WEIGHT MANAGEMENT.COM? As a tour guide, I know the territory! I’ve lost about 240 pounds and have kept it off for over 46 years and am drug and alcohol-free for over 31 years. Before my lifestyle behaviors were out of control and unhealthy. I knew how to be fat and out-of-balance…but I didn’t know how to be healthy.
So, How did I make lasting changes? I found that success at achieving a healthier life and weight, permanently, requires learning a series of new life skills. (You can check out my story on my site). In my career as a dietetic professional, I’ve worked in hospitals as clinical DTR helping sick people, and since 1982 have been in the field of health promotion/education and done numerous outreaches, including cooking classes, and nutritionist at eating disorders clinic, and received award of excellence in practice in Oregon and nationally by American Dietetic Association. I’ve seen about 75 people every week for the last 26 years (until I retired) and helped them manage their challenges at achieving a healthier life and weight. I’ve written TONS key articles on my website and my book with positive, practical, and helpful information so people can lose weight and keep it off. They include helpful tools, tips, and resources to manage life-long well-being.
a. So, I’ve been there & understand: 1. how one gets stuck, 2. what that feels like, 3. how to get unstuck, 4. what the obstacles & barriers will be, 5. how to overcome them.
b. I know what it feels like to be fat and have multiple addictions; I know the path out of hell, into personal freedom!
4. Who is the site for? Individuals and whole families who struggle with managing life’s challenges effectively without harmful habits (the use of food, alcohol, drugs, spending, over working) as a response to inner overwhelm and pain.
a. Most do function quite well in life, they are successful, passionate, intelligent, and overweight—they may have lots to lose. They are not broken; their life works well on many levels….and they can’t seem to manage their weight!
5. So what are people’s challenges? Why haven’t they been successful long-term? Many are caretakers for other people (professionals: nurses, teachers, administrators, sectaries, and have many family commitments as well)
a. Many are overcommitted and overwhelmed by life and have developed the habit of deferring self-care and …
b. Many have struggled with weight and addictions all of their life, have tried multiple diets and programs, but have not achieved lasting success—they don’t know how to care for or nurture themselves without using food or other substances.
c. Frequently they don’t eat or live their lives with much awareness.
d. Most don’t know practical, fun, and healthy lifestyle skills: they don’t have many self-management skills or have much self-awareness; their self-talk & esteem and nurturing may need some help. Another KEY is to find ways to set limits and live life in a balanced way, which is extremely difficult for them.
e. Most people easily fall back into OLD patterns and don’t have the tools to help them get back on track.
6.My primary goal is to empower you to become a loving caregiver to your body, mind, and spirit—in effect, to learn how to nurture yourself from the inside out.
How do I help a person explore and learn these Essential Skills? What’s the process? Well you start where you are, because you can’t be anywhere else! My approach is very eclectic; numerous techniques, tools, and resources (including my own Website and Playbook). The KEY skill to set your intention for your life and to develop compassion and kindness for yourself. I’ll show you how in a minute.
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My approach is about you; you have the answers inside of yourself. So I encourage the practice of daily quiet reflection time and personal study.
i. You feel empowered as you come up with your own positive and practical plans. You go inside to chart your own course. As you chart your course; you will discover skill power, not will power! You’ll use a daily personal check-in to find answers.
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Gradually you develop a witness self that sees patterns of success or self-sabotage and helps plan alternatives.
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You begin to ask yourself: What are my personal obstacles? Environments that cause problems? My patterns? What have I tried? What have I learned? How would my life be different if I learned a new skill to manage an area better? Am I ready? What might I need to change? What support would do I need to go forward? What would be fun to learn about? How can Bob’s materials support my journey towards increasing health and friskiness?
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You do a self-evaluation of your life—you check it out: Identify what the problem is; what are your challenges?
i. You get a plan
ii. Put it into motion
iii. Check back in: What worked? What didn’t? Refine the plan. Try again.
iv. It’s a process. You figure out how to do it. Celebrate every step. It’s all learning.
· Remember the bottom line, to transform yourself you must come to know yourself—the factors that have led you to weigh what you do and to begin to do a compassionate and wise self-assessment, and then explore skills that can allow you to make lasting changes in our lives. Realistically, this process of exploration takes time—for many people 1-3 years…or more! It took awhile to get where you are at now, and it will take awhile to make changes.
· You set yourself free to explore all of life’s possibilities. You step back and take a peek at your lives. You notice how various factors influence the choices you make. You practice accepting yourself, taking inventory and move forward, step-by-step. There are NO failures, it’s all learning!
· I help you find the inspiration to take the first step AND to keep going!
· You choose to be healthy not because the MD said to, but because you deeply love and respect yourself (just as you do many other people in your lives). You want to free your heart and mind from personal distress.
· You learn to release self- judgment and …
· You’ll learn to become your own mindful and compassionate personal lifestyle coach or guide by following this process.
· Out-of-balance living is transformed through compassionate self-care.
· Gradually you discover how to balance self-care with service to others, and you nurture an unconditional friendship with yourself.
· I also encourage you to take note of and appreciate your many talents and successes and take a regular inventory & notice joys and blessings in your life! Ask yourself: What’s NOT wrong?!
7. What kind of feedback have you gotten from people who have read my website?
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What Bob’s readers say: “Bob taught me the many aspects of one’s life that can contribute to being overweight: stress, boredom, anger, anxiety, lack of fun in my life, self‐image problems, and much more. Managing my life leads me to be successful in managing my weight!” Cheryl R.
“Bob changed my head, heart, and body in such a wonderful way. He helped me overcome a fear of change and taught me to embrace it!” Claire V.
“Bob helped me figure out, one day at a time, how to get what I need for myself and what will work best for me.” Ron S.
Bob Wilson’s book is a wonderful resource book for healthy living. You can read one page or many pages and you will find helpful hints on every page. It is the kind of book that if you mark it with “post it notes” there will be a note on every page. He has good humor and encourages us to be gentle with ourselves. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is discouraged with previous dieting failures. Bob’s book is not about suffering over less food for a few weeks. It is all about a new energetic way of living for a lifetime. Marlise Stroebe, musician What's the Payoff? Read Testimonials! |
8. Final thoughts that I’d like to share with my readers today?
So in summary, you can see my website Balanced Weight Management is about cultivating a healthy and frisky life!
Everything is based on the truth that:
What You Plant Is What You Get!
Your Moment-by-Moment Choices Shape Your Life.
You literally BECOME what you think, what you eat, and what you do!
Consider that You Create Your Life with Each Choice You Make.
Discover How to Be a Skillful Gardener In Your Own Life.
Learn to Plant the Garden of Your Life With Seeds of Wellness and you…
gradually…Reap Your Harvest of Health and Friskiness!
At this time in the world you can see how important your healthfulness is to all of life.
And as Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
It’s been a pleasure to share these ideas with you.
I have complete confidence that you can
become lighter and free from the inside out!