We love them, but sometimes our loved ones can make us a little grouchy throughout the holidays. Here are some tips to help you manage your stress, and take control over your emotional state:

1. Do not assume responsibility for other people’s problems
2. Focus on your POSITIVES
3. Recognize what is out of your control and really LET IT GO
4.  Meditate or pray
5.  Talk to someone who can be objective about the situation at hand
6. Keep busy
7.  Take care of yourself (exercise, vacation, find time for relaxation)
8.  Do something for someone else
9.  Engage in a special leisure activity
10.  Read something that makes you feel good

© 2012 Premiere Weight Loss

Often times, we care for others better than we care for ourselves. This can cause us to seek comfort from outside sources, rather than from within. However, there is a direct relationship between people that practice self-compassion, or self-kindness, and their ability to lose weight and keep it off.
This is evidenced by a study in 2007, by researchers at Wake Forest University: The focus was on restrictive and guilt behaviors and their correlations to emotional eating. Eighty-four female college students participated in what they thought was a food tasting experiment. The women were split into two groups in the beginning of the study, and were asked to eat doughnuts. One group was taught a lesson in self-compassion with the food. They were told that “Everyone in the study eats this stuff, so I don’t think there’s any reason to feel real bad about it.” The women were then asked to taste-test candies. The researchers found women that had guilty feelings about dieting and foods they should avoid, indulged less in the candy after the instructor’s encouragement. The women who were not reassured ate more.

The end result: women who felt guilty about consuming the doughnuts, and were not encouraged with positive talk, ended up in more emotional eating. (Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 26, No. 10, 2007, pp. 1120–1144).

There are further studies being conducted in the field of self-compassion. A pioneer of which is Dr.Kristin Neff, author of Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind.

(February 28, 2011, Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges by Tara Parker-Pope).  Her research supports that “when experiencing negative events, self–compassionate people tend to have less extreme reactions, ruminate less, and experience more positive emotions than people low in self–compassion. Self–compassion is related to self–esteem; people who react to negative events with self–kindness and equanimity also tend to feel good about themselves”. (Leary, Tate, Adams, Allen, & Hancock, 2007).

Neff has developed a self-compassion scale: 26 statements that determine the frequency of people being kind to themselves, which interprets how people cope with ups and downs of life. Click here to test your level of self-compassion http://www.self-compassion.org/test-your-self-compassion-level.html.

For those who score lower on the self-compassion scale, Dr. Neff recommends a few tips to help: “writing yourself a letter of support, just as you might to a friend you are concerned about. Listing your best and worst traits, reminding yourself that nobody is perfect and thinking of steps you might take to help you feel better about yourself, are also recommended.”

© 2012 Premiere Weight Loss

There are many weight-loss programs out there and while these programs may help with short-term weight loss, they may not be the best choice for long-term weight management in respect to financial decisions and in terms of nutritional balance.  Some programs sell packaged foods such as nutritional shakes and various other snack foods that are a core component of a weight loss program, and are not optional. This is something that we pride ourselves on here at Go Figure: you get to eat real food, which you purchase yourself. We believe this is more beneficial for healthy weight loss and maintaining your weight loss goals. While it may take a little preparation on your part to have the “right” foods available, we believe that this will help you long-term to be independent from us in keeping off the weight you’ve lost. Not only does eating real food provide a variety of nutrients, it also allows people to eat in many different settings, such as restaurants or others’ homes. You are also not paying for a program’s high-priced packaged food for the rest of your life in order to keep the weight off.
The HCG diet has gotten a lot of attention in the past few years. This consists of utilizing HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) a hormone that is produced by the human placenta during pregnancy. This is sold in the form of oral drops, pellets, and sprays. What the U.S. Food and Drug administration has found is that the prescription form of HCG is approved by the FDA as a prescription drug for the treatment of female infertility, and other medical conditions.  It has not been approved for weight loss. There is also no known benefit that HCG is an appetite suppressant or assists in weight loss.  According to the FDA’s Consumer Updates page: “These products are marketed with incredible claims and people think that if they’re losing weight, HCG must be working,” says Elizabeth Miller, acting director of FDA’s Division of Non-Prescription Drugs and Health Fraud. “But the data simply does not support this; any loss is from severe calorie restriction. Not from the HCG.”

There are other programs that focus primarily on portion control, and calorie counting in a point system.  While these can help you identify portion sizes, which is important for weight management, the point system allows any foods to be substituted into a point category. What we know here, is that not all calories are created equal: different foods can adversely affect your weight loss even if they are within the number of calories you can eat per day. For example: 150 calories of chicken affects the body very differently from the same number of calories of ice cream.  Without isolating certain foods from your everyday eating for a time and reintroducing them back in, in small amounts, you cannot identify what foods may trigger a gain, or even a binge eating effect.

While all of these types of programs can, and have, helped many people lose weight, they do not provide nutrition education that is comparable with what we have available at Go Figure. We believe that this can severely hinder an individual from maintaining their goal weight. Here, you learn how- and why- it’s necessary to eat this way: and when you have that knowledge, it can make it not only simpler to apply, but you understand the principles of healthy eating and weight loss that you can apply throughout your life.

You learn how to be in control of your own body when it comes to weight management. With our program, you learn why it’s important to eat several times throughout the day, for instance. The majority of our clients here have never eaten on any sort-of schedule, and thus this slows down their metabolism greatly and creates unstable blood sugar swings, which leads to diminished energy, overeating and binge eating.

The Go Figure program was developed by a doctor, nurse practitioner, and nutritionist, and we have a physician supervising our program.  This enables us to help people with medications and conditions that may slow weight loss, need extra attention, and to ensure your safety while your biochemistry is changing. Another advantage to our clients is the utilization of the prescription appetite suppressant and several other high-quality supplements that are available without a prescription and aid in weight loss.

We have a comprehensive approach to weight management which includes: support group meetings which are designed to tackle the mental health/ self-care component which is missing in many programs, exercise instruction with our staff Licensed Athletic Trainer, initial comprehensive exams in which we describe the program in detail, and B12 and B6/B12 vitamin injections to help with water retention, hormone regulation, fight fatigue and numerous other benefits.  Our staff is extremely knowledgeable and highly trained in the science behind the program.

Please feel free to share this article with friends who are interested in getting off excess pounds. We appreciate the trust you have placed in us and are grateful for the opportunity to help you with the support you need to achieve your health and weight loss goals.

© 2012 Premiere Weight Loss