Women's Health & Fitness, July 2004
When Diet & Exercise Aren’t Enough:
Overcoming Your Personal Obstacles to Weight-Loss Success
by Teri Cettina
You've been skipping desserts, working out five times a week and eating your vegetables...but the scale won't budge. There might be something else in your way.
Claudia Peresman of Newburyport, Mass., was doing all the right things to firm up and lose weight. She ate a balanced diet, lifted weights at the gym and walked as often as possible. She also read the latest books on diet and exercise, and learned lots of tricks for getting in shape.
But no matter what she tried, Peresman’s shape didn’t change.
Slowly, over several years, the former teacher put on a little extra weight here and there. Then Peresman took a new job for a textbook publisher. She began traveling extensively for her job—a big challenge to both her workout schedule and her desire to eat healthfully.
When Peresman woke up one morning and realized that her formerly thin frame now carried an extra 20 pounds of weight, she knew something had to change. “I felt like I was losing control,” she says. “I wasn’t at all comfortable with where my weight was heading.”
Her biggest concern was: why wasn’t the traditional combo of exercise and dieting working?
According to exercise physiologist and psychotherapist Michael Gerrish, for many people, diet and exercise are often not enough. “Lots of folks are already doing the ‘right things’ to lose weight—exercising and watching what they eat—but they have unique obstacles that are holding them back,” he explains. Gerrish calls these personal blockages “unidentified fitness obstacles,” or UFOs. According to Gerrish, an undiagnosed UFO can undermine even the best diet and exercise plan.
UFOs can run the gamut: food and chemical allergies; conditions such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), and depression; and unresolved emotional baggage such as perfectionist tendencies.
Full article text available upon request.
[<<< Back to Teri Cettina Writing Portfolio]
