Think and Lose Weight

Think and Lose weight? What a load of dirty socks, you say. Is this some weight loss take on the psychic book The Secret?

Well, a recent NPR Article, Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect, describes the weight loss effects of Hotel Maids. If you are not familiar with the placebo effect, the placebo effect is when you think something is going to happen and it happens even though whatever you did really did not cause it.

When you think of a Hotel maid, they’re doing working all day. Would you call that work exercise?

What about a roofer or construction worker? Is that work considered exercise?

Most of us would say yes, but to the Maid, they just think its their job. So, the Maid is not aware of the physical exertion he or she is doing on a daily basis. What the article demonstrates is that if you think you are not doing exercise, your body acts like you are not doing exercise.

Wow- What a negative placebo effect. You mean if I am carrying my 6 lb baby around the house all day, and I don’t think that is exercise, then I don’t benefit from the exertion.

That’s what the Harvard psychologist states in the NPR article.

I’d personally like to think I would probably benefit from the exercise, but maybe not as much if I think carrying a baby around is exercise.

Can we do the opposite? If I think my work, which consists primarily of desk work, is exercise, will my body react by losing weight?

Sure why not? As long as you can convince yourself that your day-to-day activities actually burn calories, then yes, I think you would have some positive effect from the placebo.The key is Can you convince yourself with honesty? You have to make the vision so realistic and so vivid that you convince yourself as well others.

So. Can you think and lose weight?

Yes! That’s an emphatic Yes! In fact, I say if you don’t think you will NOT lose weight.

So, let’s think, think, think (as Winne the Pooh says)

So many diet plans say,

• Lose weight without trying.
• Lose weight the easy way.
• Lose weight by eating the same foods.
• Lose weight without making any changes.
• Lose weight without thinking.
• Lose weight by surgery.
• Lose weight with diet pills.
• Lose weight without going to the gym.
• Lose weight with only 7 minutes a day.
• Lose weight…. etc.

How can any diet, exercise, fitness plan make these claims? If I read that, I have to NOT think to believe those claims. Everyone knows to lose weight one must eat less food than they expend.

My take from the NPR article is: The only way to lose weight is to think.

By thinking, we live consciously. Some examples:

• Think: that food going into my mouth is good for me and helps me lose weight.
• Think: the bouncing of my leg while working at my desk helps burn extra calories and stimulates weight loss.
• Think: the standing up straight and smiling is more difficult to do than slouching and frowning so it uses more muscles and I burn more calories providing better weight loss.
• Think: Before I take this bite of food, Am I full? Can I live without it?
• Think: At the restaurant, that plate of food sure is big, before I even take a bite, Can I get a to-go box?
• Think: I am losing weight therefore I am.
• Think: My clothes are starting to feel big on me.
• Think: While doing exercise, think how many calories you are burning and how great it feels to burn those calories. Stay focused. Remember, if you are doing the exercises mindlessly, you might as well be a hotel maid doing work.

By Thinking, you will actually begin to create habits. By creating habits, that’s when you can lose weight without even knowing it.

Many people shoot down books like The Secret, Think and Grow Rich, and Creative Visualization, because they tell the reader you can think to achieve some goal. But, really, You have to think.

Another example, I have to think to remember to record my weight every day. I have to think don’t eat all that fatty restaurant food, because they’re just giving you a ton to make you feel like you had a good value.

So, yes, for every action, there is an equal reaction.

You can Think and Lose Weight!

You don’t believe me, do you?

Here is a challenge:
Before you go to bed tonight, Write down your weight loss goal in present tense and describe in vivid detail you in your perfect form. When you wake up tomorrow morning, read your goal out loud. Do it again the next day, and I do literally mean physically write out again your weight loss goal and perfect body in graphic present tense detail. Then wake up in the morning and recite the goal. Repeat these steps every day for 30 days.

For example,

By entering my weight into simpleweight, tracking my activities, and by logging the calories I ate daily, I am losing 2lbs this week while eating less and thinking my activities are burning calories. I have a size xxx pants, and the feeling of my flat stomach in the form fitted shirt makes me confident, etc… I am burning calories by standing up straight, walking to work by parking my car in a far away parking spot, and walking up two flights a stairs each day, etc…

The key here is try to be as specific as possible and do some variation from day to day reflecting what you visualize for the next morning.

By taking this action daily of writing down your goal at night and reciting your goal in the morning, you will Think and Lose weight.

Photo Credit: ‘why yes I love him, but keep it secret!’ via Flickr, by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Update 80% complete

Hey Everyone,

We’ve finished our update of Simpleweight.

We’ve got a few more things to finish with the new search index, but the site is back up and usable. We will have another scheduled downtime to complete the next step. Thanks again for your patience.

Keep in mind, if there is anything we can do to help you achieve your weight management goals, let us know.

Introducing Freemium simpleweight

What’s new with simpleweight?

As I started earlier, we’re planning an update to simpleweight tonight. For many of our users, you will not notice a ton of difference. As I stated in the Weight Loss Incubator, this update is more a behind the scenes technology update.

What are the big changes?

1. We’re updating from Ruby on Rails 1.x to the latest Ruby on Rails 2.x release.
2. We’re fixing quite a few bugs related to indexing and searching food. We’ve tried to keep this bug from effecting anyone, but occasionally when someone searches, our index would freeze while using ferret. We’ve fixed that by using more of a distributed process.
3. We’ve updated our paging of foods which will make it easier to jump through a large list of foods.
4. We’ve made it easier for us to add new features which we hope to do so more often.
5. Some other minor changes to some custom food and recipe functionality.
6. We’ve moved to implementing Google’s chart api for faster response times and easier printing. We’ll leave flash charts in some areas that require more interactivity.
7. Finally, the big change……

After debating dead accounts and researching successful websites, such as 37signals.com products, we’ve decided to move to a more ad-supported freemium product. what do we mean?

Well, we are going to have two types of products.

1. Free ad-supported accounts with some restrictions like limits on the custom foods or recipes one can enter.
2. Paid Premium accounts which include increases in our prices for 2008. However, if you sign-up now, we’ll guarantee the $18 price will remain the same for this next year.

Please tell us what you think, and as always. you can’t change what you don’t measure. So, add your weight today to learn what you want to change.

Update soon.

Look out tomorrow evening. Ryan has been doing some great work with Simpleweight. We’ll be doing a minor upgrade Sunday, Jan 6, 2008. There may be some down time between 9pm and 12am  updated: 6pm - 9pm CST.

There are no big feature changes for paying customers. (Those will come soon.) But, we do have some changes. I’ll detail later.

Thanks for your patience.

Weight Loss incubator?

Sometimes baby chicks just need to incubate.

As you can probably tell, my brother and I took most of the past five months off from serious Simpleweight development. We made sure to continue using simpleweight in some capacity or another. We prepared a blog post or two (some are still unpublished waiting for future dates). We made sure simpleweight was working and continued to provide personalized service to our subscribers, but we delayed some feature development.

Like newborns learning how to adjust their own body temperature right after birth, we wanted simpleweight to incubate.

By stepping away for the summer and fall, we were able to gain some perspective and motivation. Not to mention, we were also able to enjoy the time off for play time with families, running a triathlon - great job Ryan, bring a new baby into the world - that’s why Scott is tired, and generally just concentrate on fun and other work.

Funny thing about stepping away. When you come back to a passion that you set aside to incubate. One gains a greater understanding of the whole picture. Our huge simpleweight to do feature list we had is not as huge.

We can re-evaluate:

• Do you really need this new feature we’re planning?
• Is this the best way to complete that task?
• Is this getting real with weight management?
• Our we meeting our stated goals and mission?

Let’s step back: What’s our Philosophy?

Our philosophy is to make weight management so simple you’ll actually do it. Food In = Food Out.

Funny thing about newborns. They just seem to know how to moderate their temperature and know how to eat and grow. Same thing with chicks in an incubator. They get out of the incubator and then grow and grow with a beauty a child adores. Natural organic healthy moderated growth.

That’s our plan. Take our new perspective and follow the natural organic moderated growth pattern of simpleweight. We’ll go where the simpleweight users take us.

So, What’s next?

• We’re (I should say Ryan is) migrating Simpleweight to the latest Rails 2.0 release. We’re making some bug fixes and stabilizing some internals.
• After we iron out these technical details, We’re going to add some new features we’ve been promising such as implementing the Simple Weight Club, Simpleweight Workouts, Forums, and User Interface changes. (One at a time of course, it’s much better and easier to do it the slow weigh.)

Stay Tuned for more information on our pending release.

Remember, If there is one thing we can do to help you achieve your weight management goals, tell us, and we’ll do our best to help you!

Let us know what you think should be next for Simpleweight?

Photo Credit: Watching the Hatching via Flickr, by Troy B Thompson