Saturday Quick Tip: Visualize Yourself Thin

Visualization is a powerful tool in life. During weight loss we can use this tool to create a mental self-portrait of a thin and healthy being enjoying the spoils of weight loss and improved quality of life. Visualization exercises are powerful motivators to keep us head hungry for the goal of a healthier more enjoyable life through weight loss and obesity recovery.

Re-visit pre-surgery days when your head hunger was for a healthy weight body and all the things life held in store for you as you lose weight and become healthier and more energetic.

"We didn't ask for obesity and we didn't ask for the fight of a lifetime to keep it under control. Treat yourself kindly. Find your personal hell-bent determination. You already know how courageous and powerful you are: you learned that when you underwent bariatric surgery. The 5 Day Pouch Test will help you find that place again through the course of five days focused on your mental and physical wellness. Pull out your strength and reserves and let's do this together." ~ Kaye Bailey: The 5 Day Pouch Test Owner's Manual

What does your visualized image look like? Are you on track to see that reflection?

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Four Truths About Weight Regain After Weight Loss Surgery
Nobody undergoes weight loss surgery thinking weight regain will happen to them. But statistics indicate that 80 percent of those who undergo gastric bypass, gastric banding, or gastric sleeve weight loss surgery will at some point regain some of the weight they lost initially with the surgery. Learn four truths about weight gain after weight loss surgery. Link to Article

Weekly Digest: Self-Compassion Leads to Weight Loss

The 5 Day Pouch Test: Express Study Guide


The LivingAfterWLS Weekly Digest is out: Check your email Inbox or go directly to online archive to read the weekly newsletter: Digest October 14, 2014

"We didn't ask for obesity and we didn't ask for the fight of a lifetime to keep it under control. Treat yourself kindly. Find your personal hell-bent determination. You already know how courageous and powerful you are: you learned that when you underwent bariatric surgery. The 5 Day Pouch Test will help you find that place again through the course of five days focused on your mental and physical wellness. Pull out your strength and reserves and let's do this together.." 

~Kaye Bailey page 21,
5 Day Pouch Test Manual

Thank you for joining me in this week's LivingAfterWLS Digest, I know your time is valuable and appreciate you spending some of it with me. Today I address the issue of self-compassion and kindness and the role it plays in our health and weight management after surgery. As a group we are generous with our kindness and caring for others, but oh-so-hard on ourselves. Not a day goes by where I don't receive an email full of self-loathing and disappointment when WLS has not gone text book perfect as planned. Words like "failure" "disappointed" "angry" "depressed" and "hopeless" are used to describe setbacks that are perceived as personal weakness. Yet if we were to listen to a friend talk this way about herself we wouldn't allow it - we would build on her strengths and abilities and buoy her spirits with encouragement and praise.

It is time we turn the table and exercise self-compassion and self-kindness. Doing so is the first step in taking positive action to manage our weight and health using the surgical tool we so desperately needed. Our featured article, "Encouraging self-compassion for a positive body image" is a good starting place to launch your campaign for self-kindness. Follow that with some "me time" spent on the LivingAfterWLS Personal Self Assessment, your quarterly review of your goals, progress, and plans. Download the worksheet for free: Self-Assessment Worksheet.

Other features in today's Digest include some fact-filled links on the big health headline: Ebola Virus Disease; updates from the new and improved LiviingAfterWLS Blog; a great recipe for Beef with Soba Noodles; and a quick study on the health benefits of walking.

I hope you find this digest useful in your ongoing efforts for improved health with weight loss surgery. You have the power to make this your healthiest season ever! Let's do it together!

 

CHEERS!
Kaye

Link to Digest in our Archive

Author cracks the body-image issues

Interesting article on one woman's year of not looking in mirrors. The author, btw, is a Ph.D. Candidate in sociology at UCLA and a self-proclaimed "body-image expert with a body-image problem." Great interview on USA today, follow link:

Body-image alert: mirrors aren't all they're cracked up to be


Product link to Amazon:



Amazon reviewer: "“Gruys is an engaging, empathetic, and insightful storyteller, and her story needs to be heard. In a world full of conflicting messages about women's beauty and worth, it can be difficult to trust our own feelings about our bodies. Her year-long experiment illustrates how unchecked self-scrutiny can aggravate existing body-image issues, and how mirrors often play multiple roles in a woman's interior life. The media machine instructs women to control and monitor appearance at all costs, but Gruys shows us that there is freedom in letting go.”
—Sally McGraw, author of Already Pretty: Learning to Love Your Body By Learning to Dress it Well"