There are two very important push-pull maneuvers you have to make when you are trying to lose your unwanted weight. They are persistence and disengagement. During the weight-loss process you will persist at those weight-loss activities that give you the biggest bang for your buck. You will also have to disengage from any activity that interferes with your weight-loss progress.

Believe it or not both persisting-at and disengaging-from present sticking points for women trying to reduce their weight. It’s easy to imagine how persisting-at can be troublesome, but you’re probably wondering why disengaging-from presents a similar degree of trouble.

Disengaging from an unproductive weight-loss activity is so hard to do because you have already invested a great deal of energy and effort and belief in the activity. You’ve encountered setbacks and failures and still you’ve hung on to the activity.

Let’s say for example that the activity that you really need to disengage from is fasting when you’ve gone off your diet. Instead of eating your diet lunch after you’ve had too big a breakfast, you wait to eat until dinner. This works well for you, so you think, and you begin to use it after you break your diet by having bigger breakfasts plus bigger lunches. Now you skip dinner and wait until the next day’s breakfast to eat, and so on. After a time, though, the cost of keeping up this depriving weight-loss regimen is too great, and you have to disengage yourself. But you’ve nowhere to turn, except back to your diet, which you’ve been disrupting for a long time by the fasting activities.

Disengagement becomes hard because of the commitment you made to the weight-loss activity that in the long run stopped working for you. Disengaging is hard when you have no good, alternative weight-loss steps to take.