INTRODUCTION
I’LL LOSE WEIGHT BY CHANGING THE WAY I EAT THINK
Shifting Your Mindset
This book is about losing weight and getting healthier, make no mistake. But it’s not about what to eat. It’s not a diet book. There are no recipes, no sample weeks of meals, no food recommendations or restrictions, no claims about which foods will make you gain fat or shed it. Does that surprise you? When people are on a weight-loss journey, their first consideration is usually something like, What should I eat? What CAN I eat? Low-fat, high-fat, low-carb, high-protein, low-sodium, low-cal, high-fiber, Mediterranean, vegetarian, vegan, keto? Diet A or diet B? (Or diet C–Z?) I’ve seen this whether at WW (formerly Weight Watchers), where I speak to members face to face or virtually at workshops around the country and the world, or among the thousands of people I have treated in group or individual settings, or among those I have just met who learn what my profession is. Everyone is focused on what and how to eat. I get questions like, Can you really eat bacon and lose weight? Should I eat certain foods in combination? What’s better, avocado or kale? What foods start my metabolism in the morning? What are the top five foods for weight loss? I heard about [fill-in latest fad diet]—what do you think? People often want to be told what to eat.
Yet most people don’t need me, or anyone, to script a meticulous moment-by-moment, meal-by-meal eating plan for them. When given a food choice (eat this or eat that), people generally know which is healthier. This banana (big, small, whatever) or that banana split? Deep-fried or baked? More times than not, it’s clear. Sure, with a few foods, like dark chocolate or coconut oil, it’s not quite so obvious how beneficial or not they are for our health. For the most part, though, we know.
NAME THE HEALTHIER FOOD1
1. (a) ground beef
2. (a) whole wheat pasta
3. (a) banana bread
4. (a) potato chips
5. (a) roasted potatoes
6. (a) grilled fish
7. (a) half and half
8. (a) oatmeal
(b) chicken breast
(b) white rice
(b) banana
(b) orange
(b) french fries
(b) fried fish
(b) 2 percent milk
(b) pancakes
Despite this awareness, when people want to lose weight they focus on food, assuming there’s something they haven’t learned that an expert needs to tell them.
I get it. At the start of my career as a clinical health psychologist focused on obesity treatment, I assumed the same thing—food first, food last. But what I learned time and again through my work with my amazing patients was this: What you eat and how much, along with levels of activity, may seem to be all that count in weight loss, and they do count, of course—but without another crucial component, they will not add up to long-term weight-loss success.
That component is your mindset. How you think.
Look at mindset as having two parts: how you think about yourself and how you think about the journey you’re on.
The ideal way to think about yourself is to accept you as you are now; a great way to do that is to practice self-compassion (the subject of chapter 1). The ideal way to think about the journey is to think realistically, flexibly, and with the big picture in mind; one way to do that is by identifying and countering unhelpful thoughts (the subject of chapter 2).
Let me share how I became convinced that mindset is critical for any successful weight-loss journey, and why, without the proper mindset, any success will be fleeting.
After majoring in psychology in college, I wanted to head straight to graduate school to become a practicing psychologist, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure of my path. My advisor suggested that I first learn about the field, by doing research with psychologists. I looked for jobs at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, about forty-five minutes from my home, and two positions caught my interest. The first was helping a researcher in family dynamics to better understand how family interactions impacted medical conditions like asthma, diabetes, and others. I’ve had type 1 diabetes since I was six years old, so the idea intrigued me. But the job involved watching and coding videotapes of family therapy sessions for eight hours a day. That didn’t speak to me.
The second position was in the area of obesity: A research group at Penn was focused on better understanding its causes and treatments. The work caught my attention, as did the way it was being conducted. Still, when I was offered the position with the obesity research group, I felt it was largely serendipity to find myself in that world. I had no previous interest in or meaningful knowledge of weight loss or obesity. I myself hadn’t struggled with those issues. My mom was overweight but not in a way that made a great impact on me or, as far as I could tell, on her. Back then, the prevalence of obesity in the United States was roughly 15 percent, not the 42 percent it is today. I confess with some shame that when I started in the field, I, like so many, held a simplistic, frankly prejudiced view of people who struggled with weight. Concepts like “willpower” and “discipline” were never far from mind. I wince to think I could ever have harbored such a misguided, hurtful, scientifically insupportable view.
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