Peeke Blog

Over my career, Ive watched people battle their weight.  Men or women, young and old. Some have real challenges in their lives, others just never stopped to think about what they were putting into their mouths each day.

Ive listened to patients tell me their personal stories. Some are tragic, some are heart-wrenching, and some even caused a chuckle or two.

I figured out that there is a simple way to help each one of these people help themselves. I created the MMM Method Mind Mouth and Muscle. This is a holistic, integrative plan to lose fatfor life. Heres the basic template:

-          Think about what you do every day: MIND

-          Think about what is going into your mouth before every meal: MOUTH

-          And start using your muscles: MUSCLE

Its a straight-forward technique I have all my patients follow. I have each one keep an MMM Journal.

As I detail in my books Body for Life for Women and Fit to Live, I ask them to jot down each day something in each of these three categories.

-          What did you think about today that made you turn to food?

-          How did you plan your meals?

-          What physical activity did you do today?

None of these three things is hard. But each requires you to thinkjust a little bit every day.

These three questions help you keep on track every day when you get up. When you write these three things down every day, they help you focus on the goal; you learn that weight loss is something that takes time; and these patient little entries  make you realize that each day builds upon the day before.

And best of us, writing these entries becomes both a history of your journey and a daily pledge to yourself to keep movingin the right direction.

The MMM Method works too. You train yourself to think each morning about improving your lifestyle. You learn to put the right foods into your mouth, but also to buy the right foods when youre at the grocery store. And by getting up off the couch and moving every day, you learn that exercise, even if its just that long daily stroll, aint so bad after all!

The journal turns into a proud record of your achievements, both large and small. Youll flip back through it and re-read the passage you made on that Tuesday a few weeks back when you stepped on the scale and felt so proud, so giddy, and how you almost floated through the rest of the day, you were so happy.

These passages help bolster you on the down days, and are a source of pride when your friends ask you how you did it.

Sure, weve all read those diet books where they talk about nutrition here and pumping iron there. Many drone on and on, and you get lost in the lecture.

My MMM Method breaks it down for you in three bite-size ways to approach long-term weight loss. They help you focus on your two goals: losing the weight, and keeping it off.

I have patients who, years later, have kept all that weight off because they still follow the Mind Mouth Muscle Method. Writing that journal trained them to always be thinking in the back of their heads about the little things to avoid throughout the day. Almost every one of them tells me of days when they splurge, but they all know that a once-in-a-while lapse is no big deal, because theyve trained themselves to keep the big picture in mind.

Theyve taught me that you dont have to be a college graduate to follow my simple MMM Method. Mind. Mouth. Muscle. A simple way to keep on track for your lifelong goal of keeping that extra weight off.