SubscribeThe Beck Diet Solution: How to Think Like a Thin Person
SharpBrains has interviewed Judith Beck, author of The Beck Diet Solution. Beck brings the principles from cognitive behavior therapy into the field of weight loss.
The Beck Diet Solution is designed to be used alongside any healthy and nutritious diet.
What are the cognitive and emotional skills and habits that dieters need to train?
- How to motivate oneself
The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 reasons why they want to lose weight and read that list every single day. - Plan in advance and self-monitor behavior
A typical reason for diet failure is a strong preference for spontaneity. I ask people to prepare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it. - Overcome sabotaging thoughts
Dieters have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelpful eating behavior. I have dieters read cards that remind them of key points, e.g., that it isn’t worth the few moments of pleasure they’ll get from eating something they hadn’t planned and that they’ll feel badly afterwards; that they can’t eat whatever they want, whenever they want, in whatever quantity they want, and still be thinner; that the scale is not supposed to go down every single day; that they deserve credit for each helpful eating behavior they engage in, to name just a few. - Tolerate hunger and craving
Overweight people often confuse the two. You experience hunger when your stomach feels empty. Craving is an urge to eat, usually experienced in the mouth or throat, even if your stomach is full.
Regarding the last point, Dr Beck (in her clinic) teaches people how to handle hunger:
I ask dieters, once they get medical clearance, to skip lunch one day, not eating between breakfast and dinner. Just doing this exercise once proves to dieters that hunger is never an emergency, that it’s tolerable, that it doesn’t keep getting worse, but instead, comes and goes, and that they don’t need to “fix” their usually mild discomfort by eating.
Different kinds of cravings
Beck identifies the different kinds of cravings and suggests planning ahead of time: "dieters need to learn exactly what to say to themselves and what to do when they have cravings so they can wait until their next planned meal or snack".
- environmental (seeing or smelling food),
- biological (hormonal changes),
- social (being with others who are eating),
- mental (thinking about or imagining tempting food), or
- emotional (wanting to soothe yourself when you’re upset).
See the full interview here.
More like this in Books and Psychology · Sep 25, 2007
Wow, I love the advice this book offers. Cognitive behavior therapy is so successful in treating mental health issues like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and it makes sense to transfer those principles to weight loss.
Overcoming sabotaging thoughts is probably one of the biggest struggles that anyone faces. It's easy to say "I'll never lose this weight, I'm not good enough" or other harmful things that keep us from achieving our goals. I also like the advice of planning in advance - before I started to lose weight, I mentally prepared myself for what I wanted to accomplish and it definitely helped.
Great Advice! :)
ReplySounds promising. I think I will take a look...
ReplyI love the fact that thinking actually has physical effects on the brain - you can literally change who you are. I wrote this one up on my site, too, and may get the book.
ReplyI have always been told to think thin and it some sense it has made my eating habits smaller. Eating less more throughout the day is exactly what people need to do more often.
ReplyPlanning planning planning. That is such a key point. I take a little tupperware with a snack EVERYWHERE because you never know when you're going to be stuck and...hey...it's just this once...a little convenience machine snack...that's okay...right? No!
Like the boyscouts say: Always be prepared!
Yesterday I had a "Think Like A Thin Person" moment when I was standing behind a very thin woman who kept grabbing and putting back a Kit Kat bar. She was embarassed because she kept picking it up, putting it back, reaching for it, taking back her hand. In the end she decided "I don't need it" and walked away. Seeing that was inspirational.
Reply"Hunger is never an emergency". So true! I remember once when my grandpa was alive...he was a FIRM believer in "3 squares a day" and never missed a meal. Once we went to a breakfast buffet on a Sunday at around 10 am and ate pancakes, sausage, bacon, eggs, muffins and coffee. We finished and I was stuffed to the gills. We were then going to drive to the lake and go for a walk, but my grandpa pulled into a Hardee's at exactly 12:00 (about a half hour after we'd finished breakfast) because he wanted lunch! It wasn't really any surprise to me that he weighed a good 300 lbs or more and suffered from heart disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol. This book looks like it'd be pretty interesting.
ReplyThis is the trick!!! You don't just need to change how you eat, you MUST change how you think to loose weight. Overeating is often just a symptom of a bigger problem. To truly solve the problem, you have to go to the root cause. Otherwise those pounds will just creep back on.
ReplyThe difference between hunger and craving was always a problem for me. I love food and eating. So I would confuse my craving for food with real hunger, leading me to eat when I was already full. It was a hard habit to break. I basically needed to stop eating food when ever I felt like it and put together a more structured eating plan.
Gal
ReplyIt is a great way to go for any weight loss. If we want to look good, we must think good. I always believe in the power of thoughts. If we want to be successful in anything, first the thought must be set right. Our minds work miraculously somehow to direct all energies towards achieving these thoughts. Focusing on losing weight, we will lose weight.
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