Archive for 'Weight Loss'
ALTERNATE MENUS FOR THE ROTATION DIET
Posted on May 4, 2010, under Weight Loss.
You can choose a complete day from the Alternate Menus to substitute for any equivalent day in the standard menus on your second time around (Week 3) on the Rotation Diet. Just make sure you are at the appropriate calorie level. I include several days at each level of the Rotation Diet, from 600 to 1800 calories, among the Alternate Menus.
If you do not feel like sticking with any full day in its entirety, you can mix and match your own meals. Choose a standard breakfast at each level, if you like, and repeat it for several days if that will make your food choice easier. (If you choose a fortified cereal for breakfast, such as 40% Bran Flakes or Raisin Bran, you will help ensure that the nutritional value of your diet closely approximates the RDA’s, even at 600 calories per day.)
For lunch and dinner, however, be sure to include a wide variety of different foods both during your twenty-one days on the Rotation Diet and in maintenance.
If you design your own menus at any time during the Rotation Diet, remember the formula:
Women – For Weeks 1 and 3:
600 calories for three days
900 calories for four days
For Week 2:
1200 calories for one week
Men – For Weeks 1 and 3:
1200 calories for three days
1500 calories for four days
For Week 2:
1800 calories for one week
*50/235/5*
EATING DISORDERS: THE PROCESS OF FAMILY THERAPY
Posted on April 22, 2009, under Weight Loss.
It’s hard enough for an individual to enter therapy. How does a whole family manage it?
Families’ needs, and thus their motivations, are different. Many families come because they have reached a point where therapy simply seems like “the thing to do.” They have struggled with the disorder for a long time, have handled it on their own, but now feel something more is needed. Sometimes, however, such families spend much of the session denying anything is wrong. They want to convince the therapist they are perfectly normal, and receive his or her blessing to go on living their lives as before. As Selvini-Palazzoli observes, such families go through the “ritual” of seeking help but have no real intention of changing.
Other families come because a crisis occurs that tips the balance. Often an older child is about to leave the family, perhaps because of an impending marriage or the start of school. The patient -the symptom-bearer – experiences a worsening of her illness in a desperate attempt to hold the family together and maintain the status quo.
Sometimes the family has grown so used to the patient’s ways that her starving or her bingeing fails to produce any emotional effect. She no longer gets the attention she once drew. As a result her symptoms may worsen, or she may become depressed. Sometimes it is this depression that brings the patient into treatment.
Another main reason for getting help is relentless pressure from other people. Oddly, many parents blind themselves to their daughter’s condition. Only when an outsider notices -”My God, Tricia has gotten so thin!” – does the ball start rolling.
How does the family select a therapist? The usual method is through a referral by a psychiatrist, pediatrician, or family doctor, or a recommendation from the local mental-health association. A few families let their fingers do the walking and look in the phone book.
It helps if the parents and the patient all attend the first session. Doing so provides a snapshot of how the family operates in each other’s presence, clues that will affect the course of therapy. It also prevents “splitting” – giving the patient the feeling that her parents have ganged up with the therapist against her, or that the patient and one parent have conspired against the other. It also gets all the therapeutic cards on the table: No one can accuse the others of telling tales behind his or her back.
*104/35/5*