9. Honor thy family by succeeding together.

What good is success if those dearest to you don’t also enjoy it?

Can you imagine looking and feeling great while the rest of your family is still sinking in the sticky, smelly Fat Swamp?

FACT: You will feel like a superhero if you help your entire family become healthier.

Be a better mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, or son by practicing the Golden Rule—treat them the same way you would want to be treated. If you knew your mom was boarding a bus that was headed over a cliff, I think you would warn her and do everything you could to stop her from boarding that bus. Why then would you not warn her of the dangers of being overweight?

Leaving your family with a rich nutritional heritage is more important than leaving them monetary riches! Families cherish generational traditions and common ties. Heritage, after all, is something to be celebrated—from hair and eye color to endearing mannerisms and timeless stories. Recent studies, however, have found that there is one behavior that, when passed down, can be extremely detrimental to your health—poor eating habits and lifestyle. Children with an obese parent are three times as likely to be obese when they reach adulthood, and children with two obese parents are ten times (1,000 percent!) as likely. Why not pass down good habits to your children instead? You have the power through your actions and tongue to create a positive haven of health for your family in a raging sea of societal dietary sins.

You can choose today to become the “Nutritional Champion” that fights for your family’s health and nutritional heritage. By helping others, you become stronger and more empowered.

Realize that you have the power to change your environment, the foods that surround you, and your family’s health. Try an after dinner “bonding walk” with your spouse—where you talk, share the day, and unwind as you walk.

Let your kids and grandkids make “critters” out of fruit and veggies—using toothpicks to hold them together. Kids love making food sculptures, will cherish the memory, and enjoy eating them as much, or more, than homemade cookies.

As my mom says, “This is real lovin’–with or without the oven.”

8. Six days shalt thou labor, but in the seventh day thou shalt rest.

Everyone needs a break from time to time!

Dieting can be like babysitting a house full of kids—if you don’t take a mental break it can make you crazy! Going 24-7 is expected of the ambitious in every aspect of life today, but I believe mental “play time” is critical to our dieting success.

This may seem shocking to you, but it’s okay to take a break from this diet if you’ve reached your mental or physical limits. Why would a doctor write a diet book and then tell you its okay to not follow the diet strictly? Because diets that are too strict cause people to burn out instead of to burn calories. They retreat defeated and beaten by completely dropping the diet.

FACT: It is okay to take a “diet time out” if you need it! Choosing to take consistent small steps is much better than falling completely down the staircase.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day”—and neither will your new and improved physique appear overnight. It takes substantial time and food to store fat and become fat, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it takes some time to “deconstruct” it as well.

Choosing to be consistent over time is more important than choosing to defeat yourself with too strict a regimen. 

7. Thou shalt not lie.

Are we lying to ourselves about the true cause of our overeating? Are there insidious reasons behind our eating addictions that we are failing to recognize? Is stress, depression, or frustration negatively impacting our dietary choices?

FACT: We need to discover the cause of our overeating so we can effectively fight it. We have to know what the “the enemy” is before we can defeat it! Understanding why and when we overeat will help us win.

Everyone knows that eating and our emotions are intertwined. We don’t have to have endless research studies or scientific debates to know it’s the truth. We all look to food for comfort, energy, happiness, and more.

Chemical messengers in our brain (called “neurotransmitters”) respond to food intake by affecting our emotions, cravings, and appetites. For example, the messenger “serotonin” controls feelings of satisfaction and happiness. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression, decreased energy, and increased appetite. Stress can deplete serotonin, which may account for why we have food cravings when we are experiencing tense or difficult times in our lives.

People who are sad or fatigued may crave chocolate. The sugar and fat combination from chocolate is believed to increase serotonin and endorphin levels. Many parents give their child candy to soothe an injury or sadness. This may cause the child to mentally associate candy with comfort, even into adulthood.

A recent study found that people’s eating patterns altered based on their mood. While not “set in stone,” the results are interesting (this is one of the reasons that I’ve created healthy diet products that satisfy cravings for sweet, salty, and crunchy foods):

Stressed: salty foods like crisps and soy sauce

In need of comfort: ice cream

Sad: sugary foods and caffeine

Sexually frustrated: pretzels, breads, and crackers

Lonely: rice and pasta

How do we identify overeating caused by emotions? Most people can discover their triggers simply by taking some quiet time to analyze it mentally. An important question to ask yourself is, “Under what mental condition am I most likely to overeat?” Most of us already know what our weaknesses are. My most vulnerable situations are caused by stress, particularly if I’m working late at night. It’s easy to want to toss a pizza in the oven or munch on sour candies. If you can’t figure it out just by thinking about it, keep a simple food diary for a week by writing down what foods are consumed at what time, and how you were feeling at the time.

You may discover that there is not an emotional trigger related to your eating, but that is still very valuable information to know! It means your cause of overeating is simply physical hunger. You can take steps with my Slim and Beautiful Diet to satisfy your hunger without blowing up your calorie consumption.

And if you routinely crave a specific food that is related to a specific mood, create an “Emergency Emotional Pantry” with nutritious foods that will still satisfy your cravings without harming your body.

Knowledge is power to change! Choose to discover your emotional weakness so you can effectively plan ahead.

6. Thou shalt not cheat against thy confidence and self-esteem.

Has prior diet cheating or diet failure harmed your self-esteem? Failed dieting cycles can hurt something much more important than our wallets—it can hurt our self-respect and confidence to succeed.

Many people spend money on diet programs that falsely guarantee rapid weight loss. These devilish diets use false marketing claims and untested plans to give us false hope. We hungrily try to deprive ourselves of food on these diets against our own common sense. Then we feel guilty and humiliated because we’ve either cheated on the diet, or strictly followed directions to only achieve minimal results.

Sound familiar?

This dieting pattern produces emotional damage in our confidence to succeed. We start doubting if we will ever be able to look beautiful and fit. Our self-esteem darkens.

If you have fallen on your face because you trusted in one of these false hopes, you are not alone! Millions of dieters have unwittingly trusted in unattainable promises, only to fail and suffer the psychological consequences. There is one word to describe companies claiming 10 pounds of permanent weight loss in one weekend: Liars.

FACT: Small successes are the “best medicine” to start healing injured confidence and self-esteem. We will rebuild our self-respect and confidence better than ever. How? Winning the small battles over and over by taking the small steps.

Our Nutritional War will be won inch by inch. Every small win will help us build more confidence to win the next victory. To the victor goes the spoils—a beautiful and healthy body living a life that can be loved. As each inch is conquered, our waistlines will continue to shrink.

Choose to rebuild your self-esteem, confidence, and health by winning the small battles! 

5. Thou shalt not covet.

Is envy of someone else’s body hindering the success our own realistic weight loss goals? Trying to look like celebrities can cripple us psychologically. Why? Because unrealistic, unachievable goals lead to discouragement, which then leads to failure!

Today’s pop culture is obsessed with weight. Television shows focus on radical body makeovers and weight-loss challenges while tabloids are teeming with photographs that glamorize emaciated celebrities. At the same time, however, headlines pose the question, “Are They too Skinny?” The result—we are consumed with “looking good” and less concerned about overall health and well-being.

The grass is not always greener or leaner on the other side of the fence, whether you are famous or French.

French women don’t get fat . . . or do they? If I were to ask you to create a mental image of a French woman in your mind, what would she look like? I bet many of you are picturing a slender woman, lounging at an outdoor café with a cigarette (hopefully not with her children) and an espresso. Well, recent research has revealed that French women may not be as sexy and svelte as we imagine. About 41 percent of French people are overweight, and this number is growing each year.

We can’t let “smoke and mirrors” warp our perception of reality. Let’s keep it real by choosing to focus on healthy, realistic goals.

FACT: Setting a realistic, achievable first weight-loss goal is critical to our success, because it keeps us psychologically content. After we achieve the first goal, we can then set a new goal that is even better! We can and will repeat this over and over.

Understand what I’m saying? Choose a weight loss goal that you know you can achieve. Maybe your first goal is to lose 5 pounds. Let’s lose those 5 pounds then set a new, better goal. Using this stepped approach is a powerful psychological tool for long-term weight loss.

Think about walking down a staircase. It would be silly, dangerous, and scary to try to jump all of the way to the bottom, or to even try stepping down more than one step at a time! Instead, we systematically take the first step downward followed by a second step downward and so on. This makes walking down simple and safe.

Setting a first goal that you know is impossible will destroy your success and scare you. We humans are more likely to stay motivated if we are able to meet our goal in a fairly short amount of time. So it is better to set small, sequential, achievable goals.

Make sure you reward yourself in some small way at each phase. But not with a banana split, instead get a makeover with friends! Take a day off to yourself to do anything you want to do all day long—sleep in, watch a movie, go shopping or golfing or to a sports or music event. Or, drive to a beautiful place and read a great book.

Celebrating with friends who have also reached their goal is the best calorie-free treat in life.

Let’s choose to take “small steps”—or in our case, smaller bites—together toward our ultimate goals.