Article: What diet programs are missing (deep inner work) by Dr.

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Dieting Success: The Missing Link

An eDiets.com Exclusiveby Dr.

As I surfed the web recently I discovered an article entitled “The Weight Loss ABCs.” Its subtitle was, “The winning formula: Activity + Behavior Change = Calorie Control”.

On the whole, the article made sense and offered good advice. However, it had one fatal flaw. That flaw was not contained in anything the writer had to say -- it was in what the author left out. The factor that was omitted is crucial to successful long-term weight loss.

Everyone who has tried to lose weight and failed (almost all of us) has encountered this factor. Yet 99 percent of diet processes and programs leave it out.

Activity, behavior change and calorie control are important to weight loss, but can you name the fourth basic and crucial ingredient?

Before I give the answer, I want to say one more thing about weight. Over 55 percent of Americans are overweight. Weight loss is one of the hottest subjects in the news and on the web. There must be 1,000 or more programs that promise to help us shed unwanted pounds and keep them off. I would think that with all that attention and all that experimentation more professionals would get the point.

I don’t know why we don’t get it but it constantly frustrates me that we don’t. OK, I do have one opinion about why we don’t get it. But I will name the ingredient first and then offer my not so humble point of view. The missing ingredient is the letter D for what I call “deep inner work.” We overeat for reasons that lie deep inside of us. Inner work is necessary for long-term weight loss and nothing will ever be an acceptable substitute for it. Otherwise we lose weight for a while and then our inner drives take over and we put it all back on again.

Willpower and self-discipline are useless when it comes to the power of the unconscious. Inner pain, trauma, anxiety and fear drive our eating habits and A + B + C are not even vaguely strong enough to control or eliminate them. We have to go inside and do the work. Otherwise we will stay fat. A + B + C need D to succeed.

I have written many articles about the importance of inner work and you can see all of them if you click on “More Articles” at the end of this one. I will not go into more depth about it here but I do want to briefly discuss the reason I think Americans do not get the need for item D in weight loss.

Americans do not understand the need for inner work in order to sustain long-term weight loss because we are incorrigible externalists. We live and work as if all the important things in life are external to us. We have a common disdain for internal matters and motivations. In my opinion, it's no wonder almost every weight loss program completely avoids or ignores the inner work concept.

It scares us to death to imagine that we have deeper forces that drive us and control our habits and decisions on a daily basis. So we attempt to live as if it were not true and we ignore the obvious consequences that our denial creates.

It's sadly ironic that our fixation on externals is one of the reasons we so desperately want to lose weight. We think we will be more loveable and acceptable and valuable if we are thinner. We've become stuck in front of the mirror and have learned to hate the body that sustains us. Our external shape, size and tone dominates our sense of self and drives us to look for the fastest and easiest techniques for reshaping our physical self.

Most of us would be much happier and far less tortured if we stopped for a moment and looked inward. The happy fact here is that our inner self is always enthusiastic to help. But God forbid we should go to it for assistance. We are rugged individualists, externalist Americans who think there is an answer for everything “out there.”

I think that our struggle with weight loss may be the place we finally come to terms with our out-of-balance attitudes. We will have to look at our bodies and face the fact that we have no real control over size and shape until we heed their intrinsic message: “Go within.”

If you want to succeed with long-term weight loss, then, I suggest you give more time and effort to your inner work. Add “D” to your ABCs. It will make all the difference and you will be surprised at all the other happy changes that occur as a result.

, D. Min., is a counselor, organizational consultant and seminar leader. He lives and works in Boca Raton, Florida. You can contact him at mattcoyote@....

If you are interested in obtaining Dr. 's powerful Eating To Kill cassette tapes -- they offer the same tools and inspiration he used to lose more than 55 pounds -- please contact him at mattcoyote@.... If you enjoyed this Coyote Wisdom article please check out his archives by clicking on More Articles directly below.