Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: What You Need to Know About Weight Mastery
An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day.
—Irv Kupcinet
There’s a reason why long-term weight loss is so elusive, and I’m willing to bet you already know the answer: Successful lifelong weight mastery has more to do with your mind than it does with your mouth. Losing weight and keeping it off has less to do with what you eat and just about everything to do with why you eat it. In other words, unless you can deal with stressful emotions, physical cravings, or food addictions, ultimately no diet in the world will bring you the lasting change you seek. But, as I said, I bet you already knew this.
From the start, let’s get one thing straight: Thin from Within isn’t a diet book. I leave that to Weight Watchers, South Beach, Atkins, Zone, Jenny Craig, Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s nutritarian lifestyle, or one of the more than 70,000 (!) diet books offered at Amazon.com, all of which present methods to lose weight. You don’t need more information on calories, points, portions, or carbohydrates. If you’re really serious about losing weight and keeping it off, what you do need is a progressive, psychological solution that can answer such common frustrations as: Why can’t I handle stress without resorting to food? Why do I feel too tired to exercise? Why can’t I tell when enough is enough? Why can’t I just say no to self-destructive impulses? Why can’t I keep the weight off?
So before you embrace that next miracle, eat-all-you-want-and-still-lose-weight diet, recognize the simple truth that the last thing you need is another diet. What you do need is another perspective—a perspective that will never again allow you to be victimized by impulsive cravings, self-sabotage, or mindless emotional grazing.
The Key to Psychological Resilience: Self-Coaching
Losing weight is, of course, why you diet, but as you know, that’s only half the battle. The other half is keeping it off. And for many, it’s the keeping it off that seems so impossible. Although the challenges you face in the losing phase (i.e., dealing with long-standing destructive eating habits and crippling compulsions, handling the discomfort of a reduced-calorie diet while sustaining motivation, self-discipline, and so forth) can persist into the keeping-it-off phase, this time you’re going to have an advantage to keep you on track. By blending powerful cognitive, psychological insights with motivational coaching, the Self-Coaching method that I systematically describe over the course of this book goes beyond simple slogans and one-liners and gets to the emotional core of mindless, compulsive, or even addictive eating. Once you are liberated from faulty perceptions, insecurities, frustrations, and even anxiety or depression, you will be empowered to handle life’s challenges—not sidestep them through food.
As anyone who has ever yo-yoed with weight loss/weight gain can tell you, given time, your old habits can (and will) attempt to undermine your resolve, which is why you need to establish a totally new relationship with food—a relationship in which you, rather than your desires, compulsions, or addictions, call the shots. One in which you stabilize your mind, your physiology, and your behavior to embrace a new philosophy of learning how to eat to live, rather than living just to eat.
Take a moment to think about the times in your life when you felt invincible, able to walk away from temptations, the times you felt totally confident and in control. Maybe it was a time you stepped onto a scale and saw a significant drop in your weight, or perhaps when you declined a particularly tempting piece of birthday cake, or even the moment you decided,
No more procrastination. I’m going to lose weight! These were empowered moments of psychological resilience, times when you felt motivated and focused on your intentions. Unfortunately, as you will most likely agree, these times were often fleeting, as old habits inevitably reintroduced themselves.
What if you could harness that same resilience and motivation and allow this strong, confident, self-disciplined mindset to become your new, steady state? You can. And this is where Self-Coaching has you covered.
