Thinking thin can help you be thin

No Lost Causes
The Beck Diet Solution is based on the same plan that I use with my patients who want to lose weight. It works, regardless of your unique psychological makeup, lifestyle, and family circumstances. Whether you’re depressed or content, a stay-at-home or working parent, a binge eater or social eater, a dieting novice or dieting pro, this program can help you.

In the past, you may have been able to make short-term changes in your eating habits to help you lose weight. But when the going got tough, you abandoned those changes because you didn’t know how to talk back to such sabotaging thoughts as:

• Dieting is too hard!
• I have to eat this. I have no self-control.
• I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I’ll eat what she made.
• I can’t diet when I’m stressed.

The set of psychological strategies in this book will help you in many ways. You’ll learn how to resist the urge to overeat when you’re confronted with cravings, hunger, stress, social pressures, and myriad other problems. You’ll learn how to follow your diet and exercise programs no matter what happens. You’ll learn how to think like a thin person. These strategies take practice, but in time they’ll become automatic.

My Story
I personally can understand the challenges that dieters face, and I also can attest to the success of using Cognitive Therapy to overcome them. I started dieting as a teenager and went on and off diets for many years. I, too, had lots of sabotaging thoughts, such as:

• I should eat as little as possible.
• If others don’t see me eating, it doesn’t really count.
• If I give in to temptation, it’s my fault for being weak.
• If I eat something I hadn’t planned to eat, I may as well abandon my diet for the
• whole day.

How did I finally succeed at losing weight and keeping it off? I learned from patients I counseled. One of the first people I worked with when I became a psychologist was a woman who suffered from depression and anxiety. After several weeks of therapy, she began to feel better and told me she had a new goal: She wanted to lose weight. Well, it was easy for me to see how unrealistic and inaccurate her thoughts were when it came to eating and dieting. I could readily see how she needed to change her thinking so she could change her eating behavior. I learned a lot from her and from many subsequent patients who also wanted to lose weight. Then I applied what I had learned to myself, and I lost 15 pounds. That was many years ago, and I’ve kept it off ever since.

During the past 20 years, I’ve learned through trial and error what works and what doesn’t. During this time, I discovered a number of crucial factors. For example, I’ve found that to lose excess weight and keep it off, it’s important to do the following:

• Choose a nutritious diet.
• Create time and energy for dieting.
• Plan what and when you’re going to eat.
• Seek support.
• Deal with disappointment.
• View overeating as a temporary problem that you can solve.
• Cope with hunger and cravings.
• Eliminate emotional eating.
• Give yourself credit.

You don’t yet know how to do all these things—or how to get yourself to continually do these things — but you will.

With the Beck Diet Solution, you’ll learn one new skill every day. By the end of six weeks, you’ll have learned everything you need to continue losing weight and to be on your way to keeping it off — permanently.

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