Chapter 1: The Key to Success

I have a tendency to skip to the end while reading. Always looking for a shortcut! I have read the full Chapter 1, but I'll start this post by listing the summary from the end of the chapter:

The Solution at a Glance

• Cognitive Therapy is a psychological treatment that will help you successfully lose excess weight and keep it off.

• The way you think about food, eating, and dieting affects your behavior and how you feel emotionally.

• Certain ways of thinking make it difficult to follow a diet and to maintain weight loss.

• The Beck Diet Solution takes you through a six-week process to change sabotaging thoughts (that cause you to stray from your diet) to helpful thinking (that will lead to success).

My first mental roadblock here is in reading the word "diet" so many times in this chapter. (Yes, I realize that the word is in the book's title, so what did I expect?) I have no interest in "dieting", in the typical definition of the word. I want to change my eating habits permanently, not just as a temporary diet to lose weight.

I am going to take the first two definitions of the word from Merriam-Webster, and tell myself that this is what Beck means whenever she uses the word "diet".

¹di·et

 noun \ˈdī-ət\

Definition of DIET

1

a : food and drink regularly provided or consumedb : habitual nourishment

Dr. Beck explains her story in this chapter. She started dieting (yes, dieting) as a teenager and went off and on diets for many years after that. Success, failure, sabotaging thoughts....the standard path that many dieters follow.

How did she learn what she is now teaching people? She learned it from her patients, as a psychologist. She helped a depressed patient see how unrealistic and inaccurate her thoughts were, about aspects of her life AND about eating and dieting. From what she learned while helping this patient and subsequent others, she was able to apply those cognitive changes to her own eating habits, and she lost 15 pounds and has kept it off for many years.

The premise of the plan is that we will learn one new skill every day for six weeks. And by the end of the six weeks, we will have learned everything we need to know to change our eating habits.

We shall see. Six weeks doesn't sound like a very long time.

Day 1: Introduction

I have read just about every diet and/or self-help for weight loss book out there. Finished reading some of them, too. But very few of them have enabled me to make permanent changes in my weight or my relationship to food.

Now I am starting The Beck Diet Solution, by Judith S. Beck, Ph.D. I have read very good things about this book, and her approach makes a lot of sense to me. The subtitle is Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person. The premise being that people who are overweight (and have been for a long time) think about food differently than people who are not overweight. I have long thought that my brain was different in this regard, so why not embrace it? And see if I can modify it.

Since I am just getting started with the reading and work, and I want to journal as I go along, I thought I'd like to do this in the form of a blog. It's easier for me to put my thoughts down in this format, and maybe I will be able to share some of what I'm learning with other people.

So I'll start at the beginning. In the Foreword, Judith Beck's father, Aaron T. Beck, M.D., talks about how he developed Cognitive Therapy as a treatment for depression, and how it can help people think more realistically about things in their lives. He explains that Judith Beck has used this approach to identify distortions in the negative thoughts of dieters; distortions which keep them from losing weight, and which often show up as self-sabotage.

Sounds very familiar to me!

In the Introduction, Judith Beck says that unsuccessful dieters often blame their failures on weakness, or a lack of willpower. But this isn't true, she says. The problem is that those dieters don't know how to motivate themselves continually. They don't know how to move forward after they cheat, instead of giving up. And they don't have the skills to motivate themselves to keep going, even when they feel hopeless or overwhelmed.

This resonates with me, because I am very good at starting new eating or fitness plans with great enthusiasm. I have started many times. Where I tend to have trouble is in staying with it, in being less than perfect and being able to forgive myself and keep going. This is what I want to learn. And if that means changing my thinking, so be it.

Here is a list of statements from dieters who Dr. Beck has been working with for a while. Things they know now that they wish they'd known years ago. This isn't the full list from the book, just some of the statements that I think apply to me:

• I can control my eating if I plan in advance what I need to do and if I practice what I need to say over and over to myself.

• When I'm tempted to eat something I shouldn't, I need to pull out my list that contains all the reasons I want to lose weight.

• Cravings go away, and there are things I can do to make them go away faster. I don't have to give in to them.

• If I don't follow a nutritious diet, I am more likely to cheat.

• I have to make time for dieting and exercise.

• I have to prepare in advance for sabotaging thinking.

• If I eat something I shouldn't, it's just a mistake. It doesn't mean I'm hopeless or bad. I don't have to make it a bigger mistake by continuing to eat whatever I want for the rest of the day.

• I have to watch out for fooling myself. Every single time I put food in my mouth, it matters.

• I need to give myself credit every time I do what I'm supposed to do.

• If I regain weight, I can go back to using the skills I learned to lose it—every time,

• I can do it! I have the skills now. I know how to do it, and I'll have these skills forever.

Tomorrow I will dive into the body of the book. Chapter 1: The Key to Success.