Beck Judith S. - The diet trap solution: train your brain to lose weight and keep it off for good

Chapter 5
Week 1: Get Ready: Lay the Groundwork

Chapter 6
Week 2: Get Set: Prepare to Diet

Chapter 7
Week 3: Go: Start Your Diet

Chapter 8
Week 4: Respond to Sabotaging Thoughts

Chapter 9
Week 5: Overcome Challenges

Chapter 10
Week 6: Fine-Tune Your New Skills

To my husband

Special thanks to Phyllis Beck and Naomi Dank, two remarkable women whose continual encouragement, advice, and support allowed me to write this book. And to Debbie Busis, who helped me develop and implement this program. Many thanks, too, to Richard Busis and Alice Beck, for their careful editing and helpful suggestions.

I would also like to thank the many people who inspired, informed, and produced this book: Sarah Busis, Ruth Hanno, Lois Whitman, Barbara Whitman, Jody Beck, Jane Hausner, Brian Carnahan, Beth Grossman, Mary Guardino, Mickey Stunkard, and the Beck Institute staff.

I am deeply grateful to my gifted editor, Alisa Bauman, who helped shape and translate my vision, and to Debora Yost, who helped sharpen my writing. And many thanks to my extraordinary agent, Stephanie Tade, who saw promise in a manuscript and was instrumental every step of the way in turning it into this book.

Thanks, too, to all the dieters with whom Debbie Busis and I have worked and from whom weve learned so much. And my deep gratitude to and overwhelming pride for my dad, Aaron T. Beck, M.D., whose development of Cognitive Therapy produced a revolution in the field of mental health.

T here is a serious and growing health crisis in the United States. Nearly two-thirds of adults, and an ever-increasing number of children and adolescents, are overweight. And research continues to show that people who are significantly overweight are at higher risk for a number of diseases and medical conditions. Most individuals who lose weight on a diet start to gain it back within a year. Few medical treatments have been developed to ameliorate this problem, and the treatments that do exist have significant drawbacks. Medication can be effective in the short run but is accompanied by undesirable side effects. Its also short-lived: People tend to gain weight once they stop taking it. Bariatric surgery for severe obesity, as with any operation, carries risk and requires that patients eat drastically reduced portions of food (usually tablespoons at a time).

The Beck Diet Solution was developed to help provide an answer to this health issue. It contains the missing ingredient lacking in other weight-loss programs. Based on the techniques of Cognitive Therapy, it helps you learn to think differently so you can change your eating behaviornot just in the short run, but for the rest of your life.

Research shows that people can learn to change their behavior and, importantly, maintain the change. Battling spouses, for example, can learn how to communicate more effectively. Shy people can learn how to be more assertive. But unless they also change their thinking, they generally revert to their old behavioral habits sooner or later. The same kind of relapse is true in dieting. Unless you change your thinking, you wont be able to sustain new eating habits.

Dr. Judith Beck has created a novel step-by-step program that has a dual focus on changing both behavior and thinking. Most dieters know that they need to eat nutritiously, lose weight slowly, make dieting a priority, use good eating habits, be assertive with food pushers, tolerate hunger and craving, exercise, refrain from emotional eating, and motivate themselves continually. But they either dont know how to do these things or they dont know how to consistently get themselves to do these things.

When I first developed Cognitive Therapy as a treatment for depression, I had no idea that a whole new generation of psychologists and psychiatrists would apply this treatment to a wide range of psychiatric disorders, psychological difficulties, and behavioral health problems. Although the specific techniques vary somewhat from one problem to another, what remains constant across treatments is a focus on helping people to change their self-defeating thinking and beliefs. When people learn to think more realistically, they feel better and can achieve their realistic goals. Depressed patients, for example, have negative thoughts about themselves, their worlds, and their futures, which not only make them feel miserable but interfere with their daily living. Anxious patients overestimate the danger in various situations and, thus, feel nervous much of the time.

Dr. Judith Beck has identified the key distortions in the negative thoughts of dieters that prevent them from reaching and maintaining their desired weight. She has identified the crucial sabotaging thoughts of dieters. Examples are: Rationalizations (Its okay to eat this because ... ); underestimation of consequences (It wont matter if I eat this); self-deluding thinking (Since I cheated a little, I might as well eat whatever I want for the rest of the day); arbitrary rules (I cant waste food); mind-reading (My friend will think Im rude if I dont eat her cake); and exaggeration (I cant stand being hungry).

Learning how to correct these distortions, learning how to solve diet- and non-diet-related problems, and learning how to motivate oneself to adopt helpful eating behaviors is what distinguishes Dr. Judith Becks program from all others. She developed the Beck Diet Solution over two decades, learning from her psychiatric patients who wanted to lose weightand from her own experience as well.

It is with great pride that I wholeheartedly endorse this book. My pride is both professional and personal, since Judith is my daughter. I speak objectively, however, when I say that she is not only a world expert in Cognitive Therapy, but also a gifted therapist, supervisor, and teacher. In addition to writing more than 50 articles and chapters on a variety of applications of Cognitive Therapy, she has also written several books, including the basic textbook in our field that has been translated into 18 languages and is used worldwide. She has presented hundreds of workshops and trained thousands of people in Cognitive Therapy, both nationally and internationally. I predict that her latest contribution to the field, The Beck Diet Solution, will have a profound impact on people who wish to lose weight.

Aaron T. Beck, M.D.

University Professor of Psychiatry

University of Pennsylvania

School of Medicine

I m so glad that youve chosen The Beck Diet Solution to help you lose weight and keep it off. I developed and fine-tuned this program during the many years Ive worked as a Cognitive Therapist.

Its been wonderful working with dieters during the past 20 years. Its been so gratifying to see how their lives have improved; how losing weight built their confidence; and how their confidence helped them to form new relationships, get better jobs, and engage in more enriching activities. Equally important, losing weight has helped them improve their health, feel better physically, and improve their quality of life.