“When you eat well, you live well. When you eat healthy, you are healthy. When you nourish your body, you nourish your mind.”
—Margaret Marshall
Imagine how a shift in thought and a change of eating patterns would affect your level of success, joy, motivation, and direction in your life! Envision goals once believed out of reach to be possible. Picture how improved your life would be if you restructured, recreated, and reignited your eating satisfaction.
Discover your body, mind, and mouth connection. The realization of how your mouth (your eating), whether consciously or not, relates and reacts to the health of your body and your mind.
Twenty-six years ago, at age thirty and a size 16, my body, mind, and mouth were not communicating effectively with each other, and I began to disconnect with people. It was not about the way I looked, it was about the way I felt. At that time, I wondered what size I would be at age fifty. But, of course, the real question was, did I want to spend my adult life in an over-weight, unhealthy body? No!
Early on, I realized you can’t get your power from a commercial diet program; the power must come from within you. I realized people joined and continually rejoined diet programs many times over because they had never believed in themselves or in their own power. Instinctively, I knew sustained weight loss is more than counting calories and collecting new recipes. For my own well-being and lifestyle, I developed my own philosophies that have enriched me, and enabled me to continue living my life in the size 10 that is so important to me. For the past twenty-five years, my body, mind, and mouth have worked in unison to keep me healthy and increase my energy.
In 2004, after seventeen years as a speaker for a commercial weight loss company, I resigned to established Margaret Marshall Assoc., Inc., and the Why Weight coaching method to implement my mission: discovering the body, mind, and mouth connection in each life.
A healthy body and mind is essential to people of all ages. Healthy eating and a basic understanding of good nutrition are vital at every age. Depending on our stage of life, we eat and respond to situations differently. Through experience, education, and example, I teach the concepts of weight loss without drugs, surgery, or tasteless diet products. There is no magic to weight loss. You must eat healthily, eat the correct balance of food for your body, and move. You need to master successful skills and habits by practicing. You don’t need gimmicks or weight-loss products. You need information, education, and direction. Knowledge, practice, and patience are the cornerstone to managing body weight.
This book is not about quick ways to shed pounds or “revolutionary” new treatments that very soon become obsolete. Rather, it’s proven strategies, thoughts, ideas, and scenarios to help you lead a thin healthy life, throughout your life. It is a guide on mindsets that enable you to live in a thin, healthy body. You will begin to understand that weight loss at any cost is not good weight loss. A rapid loss is not lasting, and leads to an overweight existence throughout your life.
Create relationships and a lifestyle that work for you, and then concentrate on good nutrition. This book guides you to gain control of your thoughts, feelings, actions, environment, and body. Your thinking dictates your feelings and your feelings dictate your eating. Concentrate on your thinking, and you can improve your life in many ways:
• Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol, and Diabetes: How you eat and your body size play an enormous role in managing—or avoiding—these conditions all together.
• Fatigue: Carrying excess body weight is taxing on your body. Carrying excess weight each day is exhausting!
• Depression: If you are not feeling positive about yourself, you internalize your reactions to outside stimuli in a negative manner leading depression. Having said that, I have met many overweight individuals who have claimed, “Regardless of my size, I’m happy.” I wonder why they need to say, “Regardless of my size…?” What’s not being said?
• Chronic pain: Excess weight wreaks havoc on joints. If you’re thirty pounds overweight, that means you have an additional 180 pounds of pressure on your knees.
• Mental attitude and sex drive: When your body weight affects your mental attitude, leaving you feeling that you are less than you are, how can it not affect your sex drive?
• Your respect for others and your ability to love others: When self-respect and self-love are lost, your ability to show others how much you love and respect them is diminished. Your weight should play no part in self-respect or self-love, but your self-care does. No matter how much you weigh, hold on to self-care and you will keep your self-respect and self-love.
When you take good care of your body and really embrace it, the feeling from within will trump outside stresses. However, you must hold on tightly. Life’s twists and turns sometimes have a way of winning. I offer you the story of my weight issues, struggles, insights, and victories from which I have learned a great deal, as well as the experiences and stories of my clients from which I have also learned a lot.
The key, for you is, don’t give up!