The obstacle to reaching your fitness goals could be all in your head.
If you’re one of those people who can walk by a candy dish without the urge to grab a handful, if you’ve never missed a Pilates class and if losing 5 pounds takes no more effort than the decision to do it, you can go ahead and skip this article. But for the rest of us, who have more than once lost the battle between willpower and temptation, a leading voice in Cognitive Therapy (CT), has some promising news: All we need to win the willpower war is already within us.
“The idea behind Cognitive Therapy is that it’s the way we look at situations that influences how we feel, what we do, and our physiological response more than situations themselves,” says Judith Beck, director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy in suburban Philadelphia and daughter of psychiatrist Aaron Beck, MD, who developed CT in the early ’60s. The therapy, which revolutionized the way depression and other mental illness are treated, focuses on teaching people skills to anticipate and avoid or defuse situations that trigger unwanted behaviors. The elder Beck’s innovations had such a profound impact on the discipline of psychology that in 2006 he was awarded both the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award. The Beck Institute, founded in 1994, grew out of Aaron Beck’s Center for Cognitive therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, where Judith is clinical associate professor.
About 20 years ago, Judith Beck realized that the therapy, which had been so successful in treating mental illness, could also help people make their weight-loss goals stick. So she developed a program to teach groups of overweight people the cognitive, behavioral, motivational and problem-solving skills needed to succeed at dieting. The results have been impressive program participants now only lose weight during the program, but after 18 months, they’re still losing weight. Even Judith, after years of dieting, lost 15 pounds using the system and has kept it off for 10 years.
The group weight loss program has been so successful that Beck compiled all the years of research, along with her and her father’s vast body of knowledge, into The Beck Diet Solution (Oxmoor House, April 2007). The book’s six-week plan works with any diet and promises to “train your brain to think like a thin person.” Each day, the reader masters a different skill or technique designed to change attitudes about food and exercise. The approach may seem slow to some, but it’s important to go day by day, according to Beck. “Sometimes we take on too much,” she says. “The big problem people have with dieting is they don’t realize there are skills they need to learn. They think they can just get the diet and follow it.”
In fact, success in dieting is all about building the proper skills like learning to tolerate hunger, recognizing and correcting thinking mistakes (see below) and planning to prevent unplanned eating. That’s what Beck sets out to teach in this book, and she does it with the insight of a really, really good psychologist. At every turn, Beck anticipates when you’re thinking of skipping a step or taking a shortcut and, like an angel on your shoulder, calls you out on it. It’s these little mistakes and excuses, Beck says, that are the undoing of any diet. If you take the plan seriously and commit to every step, however, you can take weight off and keep it off for good.
First Things First
Why do you really want to lose weight? Is it to fit into that sexy red dress that’s been peering at you from the back of the closet? To be lighter on your feet? More athletic? The first step in the Beck Diet Solution is to think of everything that motivates you and write it down on what Beck calls the Advantages Response Card, which from here on out you’ll carry with you everywhere.
Preparation, according to Beck, is one of the most crucial tools for weight loss success, and the Advantages Response Card prepares you for the sabotaging thoughts and temptations that can interfere with your goals. It’s an essential step to the process, and one that you cannot skip. You’ll read it at least twice a day until you’ve reached your goal, and after that whenever you feel yourself struggling. Next time your hand is nearing the brownie platter, pull out the card and make yourself decide which is more important: a momentary chocolate rush, or the lasting memory of the look on your high-school boyfriend’s face when he sees how stunning you look at the reunion.
Sabotaging Thoughts
A large part of why chronic dieters can’t lose weight is that their minds get in the way. On each day of the plan, Beck outlines several “sabotaging thoughts” that might come up and offers ways to reframe them. “When you notice that your mood is going down or you’re engaging in some unhelpful behavior, stop and ask yourself, ‘What was just going through my mind?’ Having identified the thoughts, you can evaluate to see how accurate and helpful they are,” says Beck.
For instance, when you’re feeling full, but there’s still food on your plate, you might think, “It’s not right to waste food,” and go on to join the Clean Plate Club. When that thought pops in your head, Beck says you should identify it and reframe it with a thought that will help you achieve your weight loss goals like, “If I don’t stop eating, I’ll be wasting the food by putting it in my body where it will turn to fat. What’s a better way to waste food?”
How Hungry Are You, Really?
A key difference between people who struggle to lose weight and those who don’t is how they react to hunger. “Chronic dieters are very intolerant of hunger,” notes Beck. People with a healthy relationship to food get hungry just like the rest of us, but they don’t see it as an emergency or something they need to fix immediately. Chronic dieters, on the other hand, fear hunger and work hard to avoid it, which means they either eat too much or too often.
That’s why on day 12 of the Beck plan, participants are instructed to experience true hunger pangs by skipping lunch. “We actually want dieters to learn how to be hungry,” Beck says. “It’s like exposing to a person with a fear of dogs to a dog and letting them see there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
This exercise teaches another important lesson: what hunger is and what it isn’t. How often do you eat because something is available and looks or smells tasty, or because your body seems to be calling for something sweet or salty? In the first case, you’re eating out of desire; in the second, you’re giving in to a craving. Easy to see in hindsight, but even the most dedicated dieter can confuse them with hunger from time to time. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you’ve had a reasonably sized meal in the past three hours, it’s probably either a craving or desire. Wait it out and eat when you’re genuinely hungry.
Give Me No Choice
Another important way to avoid giving into cravings and indulging in what Beck calls “unplanned eating” is to plan out what you’ll eat each day the night before. Write down everything you plan to eat so you don’t have the pressure of making in-the-moment decisions about food. You’ll stick with what’s on your plan if you tell yourself that you have no choice.
This particular tool has been one of the most important ones for the participants of Beck’s group programs. Sticking to the day’s food plan goes in the ‘no choice’ category, like other everyday actions that do not require decision-making. “Do you give yourself a choice over whether to brush your teeth at night? Hopefully not. Do you struggle over it?” asks Beck. “It’s not emotionally painful and not hard to do. Think if I struggled with it every night. That emotional struggle takes a lot of energy, but most of us have been able to put it in the ‘no choice’ category.” Likewise, if we put our daily food plan in the ‘no choice’ category, we’ll save ourselves the emotional energy needed to say no to that candy bar or extra serving of pasta.
‘Til Death Do Us Part
It doesn’t particularly matter which diet you follow, as long as it’s good for you and you stick with it long-term. Think of it as a long and healthy marriage.
What are the secrets to a great marriage? Commitment and forgiveness. To foster the first, each day on the Beck Diet Solution you’ll be asked to write down your commitment to stick with the lesson of the day. “When people actually write down their promises, they’re more likely to follow through with them,” Beck asserts.
And as for forgiveness in this marriage, you’re the one who needs absolving. We all make mistakes, but chronic dieters often see small slip-ups as signs of failure, throw up their hands and ditch the diet completely. But there’s no need to be so fatalistic, according to Beck: “When you make a slip, it’s just a mistake, but let’s fix the mistake as soon as it happens.” That means you don’t say to yourself, “Well, I messed up, so the day is shot. I’ll start again tomorrow.” There’s no reason to wait until tomorrow to get back on track. A dietary transgression will not send your whole effort down the tubes. Using it as a reason to ditch the diet for the rest of the afternoon, day or week, however, will. Cognitive therapy is all about using your mind to change your actions, and each time you make the right decision and take the right action, it will become easier to do in the future.
A Little Help from Our Friends
It’s hard to diet alone. First of all, you have no one to gripe to when you’ve had a challenging day. More importantly, though, you have no accountability. That’s why a coach is one of the must-haves in the Beck plan.
Do you have a particularly supportive friend or family member you can enlist? If not, think about joining an organized group or looking online for a diet buddy. This person will help keep you motivated, build your self-confidence, help you solve problems, keep you accountable and give you a different perspective. And those can be the difference between sticking to your guns and falling off the wagon.
If you decide to join in the effort with a friend who is dieting as well, make sure you motivate each other and don’t just fall off the wagon together. Beck tells of someone she knew who joined a community weight loss group with a friend, and at first they were good inspiration for each other. However, as time went on, the friend stopped going to the group meetings, so she used that as an excuse to skip them, too. Not exactly the kind of inspiration you’re looking for.
And Keep it off
Could this really be the solution for permanent weight loss? Well, it’s worked for Beck’s clients many of whom have daunting weight-loss goals for the past 20 years. It’s all about building the right skills to deal with what life throws your way. “If you have the skills, you can get through the difficult times,” Beck says. “Then you have the skills for the rest of your life.
When Enough is Too Much
Before embarking on any new diet plan, make sure you actually need to lose weight and aren’t suffering from an eating disorder. Ask yourself these questions:
Are you obsessed with food, dieting, weight or appearance to the exclusion of other aspects of your life?
Are you already in the lower range of your ideal weight range?
Have you severely restricted food in the past?
Do you binge and purge, or do you use laxatives for weight loss?
Do you overexercise to keep weight down?
If you answer yes to any of these questions, you may have an eating disorder and should consult a health care professional before trying to lose weight.
9 Common Thinking Errors
1. All or nothing thinking. You see things in only two categories, when there’s really a middle ground. (e.g., I’m either completely on my diet or I’m off my diet.)
2. Negative fortune telling. You predict the future negatively, without considering other possible outcomes. (e.g., Since I didn’t lose weight this week, I’ll never be able to lose weight.)
3. Overly positive fortune telling. You predict the future too positively, without considering other possible outcomes. (e.g., I’ll be able to eat just a little bit of this food I crave, feel satisfied and stop.)
4. Emotional reasoning. You think your ideas must be true even though objective evidence says not. (e.g., I feel like I just have to have something sweet right now.)
5. Mind reading. You’re sure what others are thinking, even in the absence of compelling data. (e.g., She’ll think I’m rude if I don’t try the brownies she baked.)
6. Self-deluding thinking. You rationalize by telling yourself things you don’t really believe at other times. (e.g., If no one sees me eating, it doesn’t count.)
7. Unhelpful rules. You mandate actions without taking circumstances into consideration. (e.g., I can’t waste food.)
8. Justification. You link two unrelated concepts to justify your eating. (e.g., I deserve to eat this because I’m so stressed out.)
9. Exaggerated thinking. You make a situation seem greater or worse than it really is. (e.g., I can’t stand this craving.)
By Deirdre Shevlin Bell
Adapted with permission from ‘The Beck Diet Solution’ (Oxmoor House, April 2007).
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