The Beck Diet Solution: Help Yourself Stick with your Diet

From SharpBrains.

Dr. Judith Beck is the Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond.

Her most recent book is The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person.

Cognitive therapy, as developed by my father Aaron Beck, is a comprehensive system of psychotherapy, based on the idea that the way people perceive their experience influences their emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses. Part of what we do is to help people solve the problems they are facing today. We also teach them cognitive and behavioral skills to modify their dysfunctional thinking and actions.

I became particularly interested in the problem of overweight and was able to identify specific mindsets or cognitions about food, eating, hunger, craving, perfectionism, helplessness, self-image, unfairness, deprivation, and others, that needed to be targeted to help them reach their goal.

A unique feature is that the book doesn’t offer a diet but does provide tools to develop the mindset that is required for sustainable success, for modifying sabotaging thoughts and behaviors that typically follow people’s initial good intentions. I help dieters acquire new skills. Problems simply reflect lack of skills--skills that can be acquired and mastered through practice.

Some of the key critical skills are:

  • 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.
  • Tolerate hunger and craving. Overweight people often confuse the two.

The way you think about food, eating, and dieting affects your behavior and how you feel emotionally. Certain ways of thinking make it difficult to follow a diet and to maintain weight loss. The Beck Diet Solution takes you through a six-week process to change sabotaging thoughts (that cause you to stray from your diet) to helpful thinking (that will lead to success).

Related: Thinking thin can help you be thin. ‘The Beck Diet Solution’ says your mind is the key to weight loss.

In CT, therapeutic change is the result of clients confronting faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they have gathered and evaluated.


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