Living Right - Losing Weight

One thing that I personally feel that defines spirituality is the ability to experience life more than just what is “here and now”.
I’m talking about a feeling of transcendence,
Which under certain circumstances will feel like a rich feeling of amazement.
So what does it has to with your diet program?
It has lots to do with it.

#1 Transcending Everyday Pressures
A diet is a long term goal.
When we think of such goals, we believe that we will invest a lot of time in order to achieve said goals.
But think about this: how long have you invested this last week in achieving your diet goals? In comparison, how many hours have you invested in things that are not as important to you like watching TV,
Shopping for things you don’t necessarily need surfing the net aimlessly,
Or even writing e-mails.
I’m not saying that these things are not important,
I’m just implying that they are not AS important to you,
And yet you invest much of your time doing them.
In order to achieve your goal you need to think how to utilize your time in a way that will reflect your desires better.

#2 Transcending Temptations
Some of the things I’ve just mentioned are temptations.
It’s tempting to relax in front of the TV after a long days’ work.
It’s also tempting to buy a snack when you’re tired,
Or buy fast food when you’re hungry.
These temptations are disrupting your diet.
Every time you find yourself facing this sort of temptation,
Just think about this:
This day is exactly like tomorrow,
These are ALL links in a chain that leads to my goal.
To achieve my goal, I have to rise above current temptations, and do what I know to be right.
You must remember that tomorrow won’t be any easier than today, so you can’t let your guard down and say: “just this once”
Believe me, it’s a good way to start making a difference in your life.

#3 Transcending Your Own Diet
I want to be more accurate something I said earlier: Diet for itself is not a goal.
Not really.
If you think of it, a diet is only a tool to achieve something else.
What do we wish to achieve?
The uttermost goal of dieting is to achieve happiness.
It’s to alleviate my self esteem and confidence,
It’s to alleviate my health,
It’s to alleviate my openness to experiences.
So – if a diet is a tool to achieve happiness, why not start feeling happy right now?
Obviously this is not as easy as it sounds,
But what I’m saying is that you don’t need to lose some extra pounds in order to find peace of mind. You can find it right here. Right now.
Take a moment for yourself. Listen to a favorite album. Call a friend.
Appreciate something beautiful.
Do something for yourself that will make you truly happy.
Go beyond your diet –
Work hard to create happiness in your life.
As we said before - just because you have a road ahead of you, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the view.

Human beings are special, unlike other animal we have a natural ability to transcend ourselves.
We are spiritual animals.
Use this natural ability to change your life for the better.
Click Here to find out what’s wrong with your diet
Click Here to use your mind and make your diet easier

Good luck,

David H. Mason

And as with all journeys – a diet has a beginning, middle and an end.
Every part of the journey ahead of you has its own set of hardships.
In this first part of the eBook I want to detail some of these hardships that I have notices in my own journey as well as others.

The beginning of the journey is always filled with doubt and fear.
Starting a Diet is a serious decision.
A lot of people tend to take this decision lightly only to find themselves making it over and over again when their diet fails.
To start a journey you want to the right tools with you: you need a good understanding of what you’re up against,
You need self awareness to your weaknesses,
And you need the right mind set.
My suggestion to you: take your time and accumulate some knowledge.
Aqcuire some knowledge about dieting in general and about dieting experiences in specific.
Also, Get aquainted with yourself – learn what are your abilities, what kind of healthy food do you tolerate, how fit you are.
Learn about the different diets that are out there and figure out which will be most suitable for you.
All of these will give you some clue to where you are heading.
And most importantly - Make sure you’re beginning the journey for the right reasons.
Are you doing this for yourself? A relunctent traveler is a weary traveler.
What is your inner motivation? Why are you really eager to lose weight? Find your inner motivation and keep it close to your heart. This part of the diet is yours and yours alone.
Good answers to these questions will make less hesitatent to make the first steps.

The middle of is the journey is filled with many pits you might fall into.
First, you will have to face your doubts: Are you losing weight fast enough?
Is the investment of time really worth it?
Second, almost every dieter faces a certain level of exhaustion.
Third, almost every dieter slips from time to time and eats something he or she knows they shouldn’t.
These are all to be expected, and as such, they shouldn’t frighten you.
Be prepared for them with the help of your family and friends standing by to give you support.
Be honest to yourself and them about your hardships.
Allow them to encourage you.
Make sure you take time for yourself and get enough rest.
If you’re on a very unbalanced and unhealthy diet there is always time to change it.
There is always time to learn something new.

Then it finally comes true, the end of your journey.
You step on the scale one morning and see that you’ve lost what you aimed for.
You start to get compliments from your friends and co-workers.
You did it!
Is there something more to learn? I think there is.
There is a saying in Zen-Buddhism that translates to something like: once you think you know everything – then you can be sure you don’t really get it.
The meaning is this: you should always be aware of yourself.
If you stop taking care of yourself, you’ll get back to old habits and find out you need another diet pretty soon.
Also, it means that there is always room for growth.
There is always something that you can do better.
If you’ve lost weight, take care of your health.
If you’re completely healthy, work on becoming a better person.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love yourself or your life.
On the contrary, you should love yourself for working hard you do to better yourself.
This is true even if you haven’t yet lost one pound – not many people are willing to improve there life. Do not underestimate that.

And one last thought for conclusion:
In the “Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy and her friends’ goal was to get to the Emerald city to see the Wizard.
When they finally met him they found out that their goal didn’t matter all that much – it was actually the long journey on the yellow brick road that was the most important.
If you put all your effort in life in chasing the next goal – you will never find satisfaction. There will always be another goal to chase.
So what I’m saying to you is this: If the road towards the goal is at least as important as the goal itself, try you best to enjoy the view along the way.
That is a hard lesson to learn, but if you implement it in advance it will make your diet experience much more enjoyable, and because of that – much easier to sustain for a long time.
Click Here to find out what’s wrong with your diet
Click Here to use your mind and make your diet easier

Good luck,

David H. Mason

P.S
Please share your thoughts and comment

Buddhist teachings, like yoga, are getting more and more attention in the last decade.
People are becoming aware that Buddhist teaching has ideas to contribute even to us westerners.
The problem is: it takes a long time to get familiar with these concepts, and one thing most of us don’t have is time.
So I’d like to introduce three concepts that might interest you and have a lot of relevance to your diet.

#1 Desire
According to Buddhist teachings - desire is the greatest cause for our suffering.
We desire material and sensual pleasures under the pretence that they will give us lasting happiness or well-being.
Such pleasures can take many forms – one of these forms is food, especially sweet or fatty foods that are consumed for pleasure or sedation of negative emotions.
The catch is that after we acquire our object of desire we do not achieve happiness – we only desire more.
The nature of such objects of desire is imperfect – and so it cannot make us truly happy.
Think of the things the food that your desire or crave.
Are they making you happy? Truly happy? Maybe they satisfy you for a short while but they might also make you feel guilty, and they disrupt your dieting efforts.
When we define ourselves through our desires, we throw ourselves into a circle of pain.
Instead, Buddhism teaches that a person should aspire to higher purposes: steady changes for the better.
Realize that these things are not really important, and get yourself out of the Circle.

#2 Suffering
An old Buddhist tale goes: a woman that had lost her husband came to the Buddha and asked him to help her vanquish suffering. The Buddha told her, go to all the families in your village and bring me a grain of salt from each family that never knew pain.
In short, the woman went, and came back empty handedly.
The meaning is this: life involves pain, and it can’t be avoided.
We suffer because we deny that truism and try to ignore it.
I’ve talked on other eBooks and articles why suffering should never be a part of your diet. In these articles I stressed that you should pick a diet that does not include starvation or any unpleasant experiences.
I haven’t changed my mind – a balanced diet should not make you suffer.
But changing your life for the better is obviously not an easy process, especially when you’re trying to change basic habits like eating and working out.
So, each time your diet becomes hard,
And every time you feel like you can’t handle it,
Just accept it as a form of pain that you can’t avoid in the way to change.
If you won’t dwell on it, and if you raise your head and continue on,
You will see that you can put your energies to better use.

#3 Sacrifice
One last thing I would like to share,
In the Buddhist tradition, it is conceived wise to make small sacrifices in order to achieve the greater good.
The greater good is a changed life style, and a higher feeling of self worth and well being.
The small sacrifices to make are the snacks that are tasty, the fast food that is available and resting in front of the TV which is easier then working out or making a healthy dinner.
If you regard these things as nothing then small sacrifices – you’ll see that it’s much easier to give them up.

I hope I showed you how Buddhist teaching can be relevant to your diet,
Please take these old old pearls of wisdom and put them to good use.

Click Here to find out what’s wrong with your diet
Click Here to use your mind and make your diet easier

Good luck,

David H. Mason

Just to make things clear, I want to define what faith is for me:
Faith is the belief that things are not random.
When you have faith, in God, in yourself or in a notion – you believe that good things can come true.
Faith is the opposite of cynicism, it means you are willing to trust.

All of these make faith an inherent part of your diet.
Faith is what helps us fight temptations
It reminds us that there is more to life than just this next moment,
It helps us understand that our hard toil will bear fruit one day.
It gives us the knowledge that we really can change for the better.
Without faith, it will be ten times harder to put in the required efforts to achieve your weight loss goals.

Now, let’s talk about crisis of faith.
This is what happened to me years ago, and it was disastrous.
After 6 months of dieting, I collapsed and went on week of gross overeating.
I gained most of the weight I lost within that week.
All of this happened because I had a crisis of faith.
I did not believe I can hold off temptations any longer,
I did not believe this diet will help me,
I did not trust myself to keep putting in the effort.
So I just gave up.
I have lost faith in myself,
I have lost faith in the notion of living a better life,
And to some degree I have lost some of my faith in God (I was that upset).
It took me a while, and a lot of help from my wife and my friends, before I realized that what actually happened was loss of faith.
The world has stayed exactly the same – It is me that changed, and not for the better.
All of this make the recognition a crisis of faith very important to your diet.
Because sometimes things won’t happen the way we want them,
Sometimes we’ll get weak and fall to temptations,
Sometime stress and routine will get the better of us and we’ll forget to workout.
These things happen.
You should know that, and forgive yourself for them.
You should not let it disrupt your efforts and stop your diet because of it.
If you lack faith in your abilities,
Find a way to restore it:
You can restore it by feeling compassion for yourself instead of anger.
You can restore it by reminding yourself of your goals and victories thus far.
You can restore it by focusing on what you can achive.
You can restore it by talking to a friend a relative or even a priest.
You have the power to really make a difference.
You always had it. You just have to find the right tools to do it with.
Let go of your cynicism.
Let go of your self-criticism.
Remember the faith does not necessarily mean that good things will happen each and every moment, it means that good things can and will happen eventually.
If you keep working hard, I’m positive you can reach your goals.

Yoga at last is coming into its own in the Western world.
After many years of being dismissed as a bizarre activity attractive only to eccentrics, it is today recognized as an art and skill.
When one mentions the term “yoga” people conjure up different images, from impossible poses to mystiques and yogis.
Whatever the image, it is mostly considered irrelevant to our well being, and even more so to our diet.
Here I would like to argue that yoga is beneficial to your diet because of three major reasons.

#1 Yoga promotes health and fitness
Yoga is basically a series of physical exercises.
The physical aspect of yoga promotes both flexibility and strength along with cardiovascular health.
Being an old practice,
Yoga has branched into many different sorts and types,
Each promotes different muscle groups.
Various yoga positions exercise the different tendons and ligaments of the body.
For example, the “Tree Pose” (or: “Vriksha Asana”) works on your thighs, calves, ankles, and spine.
It improves sense of balance and Stretches the groins and inner thighs, chest and shoulders.
Even though it is not a natural calorie burning sports, it can be done in ways that will definitely help you burn fat.
But most importantly, yoga will help you change your overall lifestyle and thus help you reach your weight loss goal.

#2 Yoga reduces stress and enhances well being
Our fast world can be exciting, but it can also be very demanding.
Eventually, this high pace of living takes it’s price in the form of stress.
I’ve talked on other eBooks what are the dangers of stress: it impairs your judgment and enhances the chance of emotional eating, that is because stress induces automatic processes in our brain.
In simple terms, while stressed your mind will try to sooth itself in the simplest way possible, for most of us that includes eating.
Exercising yoga on a regular basis under the right guidance will reduce stress levels.
Taking this time for yourself, slowing things down every once and a while will help you buffer some of the rush and keep you more focused on your diet.

#3 Yoga increases self awareness
Most yoga practices, preformed in a certain way, have a meditative aspect to it.
Meditation is a spiritual endeavor: it enhances the ability for self reflection as well as emotional regulation.
It makes you more aware to mind-body connections.
By practicing yoga you can enhance your body awareness which will improve your diet.
Practicing yoga will also increase your self control, which is a prominent part of dieting.
Self awareness to your cravings, the reasons behind them and how best to deal with them will make your dieting experience much easier, as well as other aspects of your life.

I hope I helped you understand why yoga is good for you.
I recommend you to consider adding yoga to your overall weight loss program.
Go to a local gym or even try to look it up online: there are plenty of good books for to read if you want to begin practicing.
And don’t worry, yoga can be practiced no matter your age or body structure.

Use your head to improve your diet
Where did your diet go wrong?

Good Luck,
David