Brain-Powered Weight Loss: The 11-Step Behavior-Based Plan That Ends Overeating and Leads to Dropping Unwanted Pounds for Good

by Eliza Kingsford, Debora Yost

Overview

Losing weight and successfully maintaining it over the long term is not as much about what you put in your stomach; it’s more about what’s happening in the brain. In Brain-Powered Weight Loss, psychotherapist and weight management expert Eliza Kingsford shows that more than 90 percent of people who go on diet programs (even healthy ones) fail or eventually regain because they have a dysfunctional relationship with food. Changing this relationship by changing the way you think about and behave around food is what it takes to permanently achieve weight-loss success. Kingsford’s 11-step first-of-its-kind program enlists dozens of mind-altering and behavior-changing exercises and techniques and shows you how to:

• Identify and reverse the conscious and unconscious thinking errors and food triggers that lead to the behaviors that drive our food decisions.
• Let go of the mindset of going on or off a diet in favor of a conscious quest to pursue a lifestyle of healthy eating and everyday activity—one that can last forever. 
• Successfully use what Kingsford calls “dealing skills” to outsmart high-risk situations, tame stressful times, and prevent an eating “slip” from leading to a setback or all-out binge.
• Find out if you have what emerging research shows is an addiction to certain high-fat and sugar-added, processed foods that can be as powerful as addiction to cigarettes and narcotics.
• Design a personal healthy eating program built on Kingsford’s 10 Principles of Healthy Eating.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623368098
Publisher:	Harmony/Rodale
Publication date:	01/03/2017
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	510,314
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

ELIZA KINGSFORD, MA, LPC, is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in weight management, food addiction, body image, and eating disorders. She joined the Wellspring Weight Loss Camp in 2007 as a behavioral coach and was promoted to its executive director in 2014. A certified personal trainer, group fitness instructor, and lifelong athlete, Kingsford has been passionate about combining psychological intervention, nutrition, and exercise since she began her graduate studies at the University of Colorado more than a decade ago. She lives in Boulder, CO.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Food, Behavior, Addiction, and Overweight Mark S. Gold, MD ix

Why I Wrote This Book xiii

Introduction: Why Diets Fail … Every. Single. Time. (And This Plan Doesn't) xv

Step 1 Cultivate a Weight Loss State of Mind 1

Step 2 Face Your Biological Truth 19

Step 3 Identify Your Thinking Errors and Food Triggers 32

Step 4 Find Your Wise Mind through Mindfulness 53

Step 5 Learn Your Dealing Skills-Then Use Them 67

Step 6 Adopt a New Lifestyle of Healthy Eating 94

Step 7 Make Room for More Movement in Your Life 133

Step 8 Set SMART Goals and Plans 152

Step 9 Prevent a Lapse from Becoming a Relapse 163

Step 10 Outsmart High-Risk Situations 185

Step 11 Cross the Bridge to Heal thy Obsession 209

Acknowledgments 215

Selected References 217

Index of Exercises and Worksheets 221

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

01/16/2017
Kingsford, a psychotherapist, shares weight-loss wisdom informed by her expertise. Instead of laying out a diet or exercise regimen, Kingsford tackles the behavior behind weight gain; she asks readers to examine their own behavior and relationship toward food so that they can change poor, ingrained habits and effectively lose weight. Kingsford uses two talk-based therapies, cognitive and dialectical. Each chapter is dedicated to an individual step in her weight-loss plan: first, readers are urged to cultivate a “healthy obsession,” or obsession about health, and to write honestly to and for themselves. Subsequent steps explain the body’s resistant biology and how fat cells and genetics work before asking readers to identify flaws in their food thinking, live in their “wise mind” through mindfulness, and learn and use coping skills. The final chapters contain ways to find motivation to be more active, and strategies for overcoming temptations and overeating habits and adopting “healthy obsession” as a long-term lifestyle. This book is easily recommended to anyone who has ever tried, and failed, to lose weight through methods that emphasized the body at the expense of the mind. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly