Margit Berman - A Workbook of Acceptance-Based Approaches for Weight Concerns: The Accept Yourself! Framework

A Workbook of Acceptance-Based Approaches for Weight Concerns

This three-part workbook offers a concise and forgiving research-based guide to clients difficulties with sustained weight loss. Part 1 is a review of your clients previous efforts at weight control and image change, as well as information and a review of research to help your client understand why weight loss might not have worked in the past. Part 2 contains information and exercises to help your client develop a new acceptance of their body and their relationship with food, as well as tools to develop mindfulness and self-compassion. Part 3 will help your client identify, experiment with, and commit to values related to food, appearance, and other important areas of life, tackling troublesome mental and practical barriers along the way.

Margit I. Berman is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and associate professor of clinical psychology at the Minnesota School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University. She was the recipient of the 2015 Hitchcock Foundation Scholars Career Development award for her research and development of the Accept Yourself! intervention for women with obesity and depression. She is the past chair of the Society for Counseling Psychologys Section for the Promotion of Psychotherapy Science, and is on the editorial boards of The Counseling Psychologist and the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

A Workbook of Acceptance-Based Approaches for Weight Concerns

The Accept Yourself! Framework

Margit I. Berman

To Ruth Berman, who encouraged me to write.

Contents

Lots of wonderful people and organizations helped make this book a reality. My mentors, Mark Hegel, Jay Hull, and Steve Bartels, were all unbelievably generous with their time, wisdom, and humor; neither this book nor I myself would have developed as well without them. The Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth provided the early funding without which Accept Yourself! could never have been developed. Alan Green, psychiatry department chair, championed this work from the beginning and I am deeply grateful. The Hitchcock Foundation generously awarded me a 2015 Hitchcock Foundation Scholars career development award that made the research and writing behind this book possible. I owe both Jennifer Reining and Karen Jones at the Foundation my gratitude. Stephanie Morton co-authored the original self-help workbook for the Accept Yourself! intervention; her ideas are suffused throughout this book. My patients and research participants shared their experiences with candor, and helped guide me to the most helpful experiences. Michelle Neyman Morris consulted helpfully on nutrition and health behavior change aspects of the program. My postdoctoral fellows, John Park, Evan Bick, and Monica Lindgren, all assisted with the research. Theresa Glaser, John Billig, and Linda Bacon gave important help developing treatment fidelity measures. My husband and son supported me while I wrote and worked late nights and weekends. Finally, Accept Yourself! was also supported by a Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research Center supported by Cooperative Agreement Number U48DP005018 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The information and conclusions in this book are mine and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If you hate your body and how you look, if you have tried and failed at various diets or other attempts to change it, if your body image makes you feel bad about yourself and contributes to depression or an unhealthy relationship with food, this book is for you. If youre frustrated and tired from trying strategies that dont work to feel good about your body, this book is for you. You may already know that you need a new path to wellness and self-acceptance. This book shows you that path. Inside this book you will find research, writings, and interactive exercises and experience that will help you understand why you havent been able to successfully lose weight for good, and that will help you forgive yourself for that fact. Youll find out how to stop engaging in futile struggles with weight loss and body image, and youll directly experience real acceptance and genuine well-being in the body you have now. Youll develop a new relationship with physical activity, food, and how you look that offers you adventure and joy instead of shame and guilt. Finally, youll discover a powerful new path to achieve your dreams and goals now, without waiting another moment for your body and mind to change.

This book isnt just a book; its an experience. For this book to help you, you have to dive into it. Every chapter has new adventures for you, some quiet ones that you can do in bed with pencil and paper, and some dramatic, exciting, even scary ones that take place out in the real world. Some of the adventures will take you through some dark and difficult territory: You will be like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who if she wanted to get where she wanted to had to walk a challenging path, meeting wonderful people, and having thrilling experiences, but also facing doubt, danger, loss, failure, and sadness along her way. But all of these experiences, both difficult and fun, will carry you closer to your destination, a life well lived, full of self-acceptance and the things that matter most to you. Also, as you write in and interact with the book, it will become a record of a turning point in your life; a time when you gave up on self-hatred and an unhelpful struggle with your mind and body, and began a life committed to your deepest wishes and dreams. For that to happen, your participation is required!

The book is organized into three parts: In , youll identify, experiment with, and commit to your values related to food, appearance, and life in general, tackling troublesome mental and practical barriers along the way. In this part of the book, a life rich with your values, wishes, and dreams will take shape, as you allow your body and mind to carry you to the life you want most.

This book is your adventure, and your opportunity to live in your body in a very different way than you may have considered before, so try it! The book itself will help guide you through a process to , youll learn if its right for you.