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.