Margaret Homsy Continued Journey

Since my last entry as to my weight loss journey, I have shed a few more kilos!  I am stablising now, which is fantastic!

I can't believe I have lost a total of 98kg.  It really does blow my mind!

Cohen's has taught me to listen to my body and only use food as my fuel. I have learnt that I am unique and I'm no longer that unhappy person I once was. Shedding my sumo suit has revealed so much about my emotional struggles and I'm grateful everyday that I deal with my emotions without food as my saviour! 

I still have much to learn about my body; but in the midst of the discovery I am having so much fun!  The greatest thing and the one thing I was truly concerned about was my excess skin.  The human growth hormone is still doing its job and I am proud to say, I am still shrinking in! Woooo

98kg gone and loving life! Thank u to everyone who has been a part of this with me! 

Much love xxoo

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Say No To The Victim Mentality

Say NO!

How do you react if your day doesn't go the way you planned? At first you might feel pain, but after your initial feelings, do you think of yourself as a victim with little or no control or power? You might slip back into a headspace where you feel sorry for yourself and it feels like the whole world is against you. Many people get stuck in this mentality from time to time. Here are a few things that may help you move out of this mindset:


See the benefits of the victim mentality

The victim mentality is addictive and can be pretty beneficial in the short term and for instant gratification. A few benefits are:

• Attention and validation - You can always get good feelings from other people as they are concerned about you and try to help you out
• You don't have to take risks. When you feel like a victim you tend to not take action and so you don't have to risk rejection or failure
• You don't have to take the heavy responsibility. Taking responsibility for your own life can be hard work, you have to make difficult decisions and it is just tough from time to time. In the short term it can feel like the easier choice to not take personal responsibility
• It makes you feel like you are right. When you feel like the victim and like someone else is wrong and you are right then that can lead to pleasurable feelings

By being aware of the benefits you can derive from victim thinking, it becomes easier to say no and to choose to take a different path.

See the long term consequences of the victim mentality

• How will it hold you back from achieving the goals you deep down dream about in life?
• How will it affect your most important relationships?
• How does it affect your relationship with yourself?

Be honest with yourself and get motivation to change by seeing how destructively this will affect your life over the next year or even 3 to 5 years from now.

Replace the victim mentality with something more helpful

Gratitude - It is healthy to recognise and accept the initial pain when something goes wrong in life and to not just paint a fake smile on your face. However, after that initial pain is gone you don't have to create more suffering for yourself. Instead, you can tap into gratitude and ask yourself: "Does someone in this world have it worse than me?" and then take a few minutes to think about the small and bigger things you have in my life that you can be grateful for.

Learning and taking action - After tapping into a more grateful frame of mind, you will be more open to getting a good answer out of this next question: “What is one good thing about this situation?” or “What is one thing you can learn from this situation?” You can then follow it up with: “What is one small step you can take to move forward or out of this situation today?” By asking these question and taking some small steps forward over and over in these situations you will build confidence in yourself and while you cannot control everything in life you can build more and more power and influence over your own life and achieve your goals!

Source: Cohen's Lifestyle Clinic

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Guilty As Charged

We are all guilty of breaking "weight-loss rules" from time to time. It comes with being human. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes. Label them as experience, put them behind us and keep working towards our goal. 

I will start again next week

You decided that you wanted to start living a healthy lifestyle when you signed up for your Cohen's Lifestyle Clinic Program. Sure, but it is Thursday. Might as well wait and start fresh on a Monday, right? Wrong. It is all too easy to put off that initial move, but chances are if you wait until Monday, you will only be met by another excuse. The trick is to start today. It could be just sticking to your three main meals and the correct foods, or making sure you drink at least 2 litres of water through the day. At least take small steps to instigate action now and you are on your way. Remember every journey starts with a single step. Today is the day!

I went for a walk, so now I can eat something extra

Unfortunately, working out does not give you a pass to eat whatever you want. It will help get your heart rate up, but you will not see significant fat loss because of it and it may leave you feeling tired and hungry. Instead of exercising and sitting down to a larger serve of food, enjoy your 'food as medicine' and watch the fat melt away - it is that easy!

I gave in to my chocolate craving

Lapse does not mean collapse. The worst thing you can do is use it as an excuse to write the day off. A whole day of deviations may lead to weight gain, cravings and not being able to get back on track as easily. Instead, make sure your very next meal is perfect and focus on your goal. You can then continue on to achieve it.

I have not lost weight in a week - I may as well give up

Almost everybody who is losing weight experiences plateaus from time to time. Instead of feeling disheartened, reflect on the weight you have lost and the centimeters you are losing. Measure yourself each week as it is a much better indication of fat loss when your body is doing its maintenance and reshaping. Only weigh yourself once every 4 weeks and concentrate on how you are looking and feeling. If you are diligent and continue on, you will achieve your goal!

Source: Cohen's Lifestyle Clinic

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Margaret Homsy in the Hills Shire Times - Let's beat the obesity epidemic together!

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Make A Decision And Focus

Keep your focus on things that are useful

The things that you dwell on in your conscious mind, grow in your experience, so the key to success is to focus your conscious mind on the things you desire, not the things you may fear. This is very important and sometimes clients do not grasp the full extent of it. When your focus is split and you fill your mind with a normal amount of negativity or dwell on times that you slipped up with your Eating Plan, you are using up valuable time, energy and available focus to pull yourself backwards and to make mountains out of molehills. Problems will seem to become even bigger in your mind than they actually are, because you are dwelling on them.
However, opportunities and gratitude work in the same way if you dwell on them. What you focus on is what you will see in your reality (opportunities vs more reasons why “you are never going to get there”). What you dwell on becomes bigger and bigger in your mind and what you think about is what you will act upon. That is why it is so important to keep your focus and your thoughts in the right place and on the positive and useful things in your life as much as you can. If you focus on the negative and irrelevant stuff it is quite likely that you never will reach your goal.

Ask yourself helpful questions

It can be helpful to ask yourself two questions after every difficult situation you face: "What did I do that was right?" and "What would I do differently next time?" The questions you ask yourself in life will determine much of your outlook and success. If you ask negative questions like "What is bad about this situation?" then you are creating a lot of unhappiness and victim thinking. If you on the other hand keep it to useful and empowering questions, then your chances of succeeding and reaching your goal will go up.

Focus on the activities that bring you results 

There are a lot of people who perform activities that are tension relieving, rather than goal achieving. You may like to just take it easy or relieve tension, but you end up creating more of it by procrastinating and complaining instead of doing. It seems easier on the surface but in the long run it tends to cause you more disappointment. Of course, you must take time to relax, but find a good and helpful balance for the two aspects of life and the best ways and most positive ways to relieve tension. You could take up meditation in some form or watch a good movie or just read a magazine or newspaper.

Make a decision and do something

Decisiveness is a great characteristic and usually any decision is better than no decision at all. It is one of the most fundamental things that hold clients back. Sitting on your hands and hoping that someone else will do something for you usually results in a lot of waiting. Just make a decision and take the first step. The sky will most likely not fall if you fail or have a few hick ups along the way - You may just feel bad for a short while and learn a few things by asking some simple questions. Then you make a new decision based on what you have learned and take action again!



Source: Cohen's Lifestyle Clinic

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A Little Loss Weighs Up to a Lot

Personal note from Margaret:- I am getting a lot of people comparing their weigh loss to mine and they are becoming very disappointed that they are not losing the same amount of weight. People shouldn't be comparing their weight loss. When I was a bigger girl I would do the same. The weeks I had lost 500grams, I had lost a heap in measurements and the weeks I had lost a heap of weight my measurements didn't really shift. So appreciate all weight loss and get in the habit of measuring yourself weekly.

A little loss weighs up to a lot and when it comes to losing weight, a little bit can mean a lot. A modest weight loss of 5% to 10% of body weight can lower blood pressure and provide other health benefits even to very obese  people, according to an article in the journal Obesity Research.

However, patients don't always listen when their doctors try to give them that message. If a patient weighs 130kg and then loses 13kg, their doctor says "That's great. You've lost 10% of your weight and reduced your blood pressure", says Arthur Frank, MD, medical director of the weight management program at George Washington University in Washington. But the patient says, "I still weigh 117kg!" In the article, Ilse L. Mertens and Luc F. Van Gaal, of the department of endocrinology at the University Hospital of Antwerp in Belgium, examined a number of studies that looked at the effect of modest weight loss on blood pressure and other health problems.

In one such study, a group of high blood pressure patients all discontinued their medication; one group made no other changes while the other group lost nearly 3.6kg. At the end of the study, nearly two-thirds of the high blood pressure patients who lost weight still had normal blood pressure. "A modest weight loss significantly reduced the risk for high blood pressure", the authors write. "These results suggest that, in adults and in the elderly, modest weight loss is an effective therapy for the treatment of hypertension. That's a message that more doctors need to spread," says Frank. "We have to reinforce the value of a modest weight loss". Cultural pressures have prevented many obese patients from considering the value of even a small weight loss, according to the authors of the study.

The authors point out that patients often have unrealistic expectations about their ideal weights. Even losing 5% to 10% of your body weight and maintaining the loss, will have a continuing positive effect on one's health and wellbeing!

Source: Cohen's Lifestyle Clinic

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How to beat the Easter Chocolate Crave!

The countdown is on! Easter eggs have taken over the supermarket isles and children are counting the sleeps until the Easter Bunny pays them a visit! With any holiday, most people associate it with glucose gluttony and health experts are urging Australians to think about Easter treats in terms of exercise rather than eggs. It's not just the chocolate that we eat over Easter that keeps us from achieving our healthy weight, so I'm not going to rant about the calories in chocolate or the amount of exercise we all need to do to burn off a hot-cross bun. You guys are smarter than that. You don't need warnings about the perils of chocolate and junk food. It's not going to help you with your weight-loss goals. 

I must say though, isn’t it convenient that Easter falls 12 weeks after our New Year's resolutions, which is why it's a good a time to sit down and reflect upon your goals. Evaluate your eating habits over the week. It's what we do day in and day out that really counts the most.

It is also a long weekend, one that provides us with quality time to spend with family and friends doing what we love, for many it also brings with it stress and worry about how you are going to resist the temptation with all those treats screaming “just eat me!”

I really don't want you all to think about the junk food over the weekend, so I  have put together some tips to get you through this long weekend and to keep you on track:-

1. Plan your meals and snacks for the long weekend so you know what you are going to eat. Choose healthy options you LOVE. Prepare plenty of yummy healthy treats by using your allowances to make something delicious so you are not tempted. Those already on Cohen's will find treats in your recipe book.
2. Drink plenty of water! Water will help flush out toxins, help you feel fuller, you will be hydrated and have more energy.
3. How about instead of eating the chocolate or that hot cross bun, you arrange a fun Easter egg hunt, or boil some eggs and have fun with the family colouring them.
4. Brush your teeth when you get that craving; it will quash the appetite of even the most dedicated sweet tooth.
5. Take chromium (sugar balance by Blackmores is a good one)
6. Keep your goals in check.  Remind yourself that it really isn’t worth it – you’ve come so far since you set your goal to lose weight!
7. Enjoy the time with your family and friends.

Easter is the one time of year where size does matter and I am really encouraging you all to choose wisely!

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