Sunday, December 28, 2008

Getting Ready

Judith Beck (The Beck Diet Solution) advocates getting the mind ready for a weight loss program.  Her book offers a series of daily exercises to practice - and the first week is all about getting the mind ready.

I'm not willing to follow the structure of Beck's program (yet), but I am willing to take some ideas she has and put them to use in my own program - which is more aligned with Martha Beck's The Four Day Win.

I'm also willing to use Dr. Amanda Sainsbury-Salis's  approach to identifying hunger and satiety levels before and after eating.

One of Judith Beck's exercises is to identify all the reasons you want to lose weight and write those down and review them several times a day.  One of Sainsbury-Salis's approaches is to give yourself a pause before & eating to assess your hunger and satiety levels.  She also takes it further by suggesting you ask yourself questions about your food choices:  

1.   How will this feel as I eat it?
2.   How will this food feel as soon as I've finished eating it?
3.   How will this food feel in my stomach an hour after I've finished eating?
4.   How will this food feel in my stomach 2-3 hours after I've finished eating?

Martha  Beck's approach is to set a goal, simplify the goal until it is almost impossible to not do it and the do it for 4 days.  Reset, go.

What I'm finding is that I start my days with good intentions to assess my hunger levels and ask the 'how will this feel' questions.  But I forget to do it.  Here's where Judith Beck comes into play.  She's big on fixing the forgetting to do it part by keeping the reasons in front of you.  What I'm going to do is keep the questions in front of me.  Or at least in front of my food.  I pack my breakfast and lunch every day.  I'm going to include a card with those questions written on it each day. A card for each meal and I'm going to write the answers down on the card.  And the post my results on the weight management site I use - MyFoodDiary.com

And I'm going to set this as a 4-Day Win, a la Martha Beck.

I think I'm taking the best of the three top 'diet' advisors out there and combining some of their solutions to make my own plan to address my own shortcomings.   

I also believe in accountability.  I haven't been posting here on a regular basis for some time.  I'm looking at how I can improve that.  


1 comment:

  1. Hi Maura,
    I am currently following the Beck Diet plan and have discovered some interesting diet tips that I had not considered before. Some of her suggestions are not really that interesting or helpful to me but others are really hitting home. I will enjoy this year as a journey seeing you get to your desired weight. Many of the struggles you have mirror my own.

    Sorry I have to be "anonymous" but I do not have an account with the identity's below. :)

    Polly

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