Product Description

Any sensible diet will help you lose weight, but the challenge for 90% of Americans is actually staying on the diet they choose.Enter Dr. Judith Beck and The Beck Diet Solution.Dr. Beck, one of the foremost authorities in the field of Cognitive Therapy, has created a four-week plan that will help people stick with their diet, lose weight with confidence, and keep weight off for a lifetime. This program is not only based on the authors personal success and on her success with her many clients, but also on published research. It all starts with how you think. With other programs, you think about nothing but food: counting, weighing, and worst of all, food you cant have. This way of thinking inevitably contributes to diet failure. The Beck Diet Solution is the only program that helps dieters use Cognitive Therapy methods scientifically proven over 20 yearsto forever change those treacherous thought patterns that lead to overeating, cheating, excuses, and other dieting downfalls.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1069 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-20
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Can thinking and eating like a thin person be learned, similar to learning to drive or use a computer? Beck (Cognitive Therapy for Challenging Problems) contends so, based on decades of work with patients who have lost pounds and maintained weight through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Beck's six-week program adapts CBT, a therapeutic system developed by Beck's father, Aaron, in the 1960s, to specific challenges faced by yo-yo dieters, including negative thinking, bargaining, emotional eating, bingeing, and eating out. Beck counsels readers day-by-day, introducing new elements (creating advantage response cards, choosing a diet, enlisting a diet coach, making a weight-loss graph) progressively and offering tools to help readers stay focused (writing exercises, to-do lists, ways to counter negative thoughts). There are no eating plans, calorie counts, recipes or exercises; according to Beck, any healthy diet will work if readers learn to think differently about eating and food. Beck's book is like an extended therapy session with a diet coach. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Judith S. Beck, Ph.D. No one is better positioned to write about Cognitive Therapy for weight loss than Judith S. Beck, Ph.D., director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and the daughter of Aaron Beck -- the founding father of Cognitive Therapy. The Beck Name is known throughout the world. Aaron Beck is known as one of the top ten most influential psychotherapists in history, on the same list as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Nationally distributed newspapers and magazines often seek out Dr. Beck for her expertise on a range of psychological topics. She is also a frequent guest on national television and radio news broadcasts.

Customer Reviews

This isn't what cognitive behavioral training is for.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it clearly has helped some people to succeed at dieting and to lose weight, although there has never been a study on well this works in the long run. (One year is not "the long run"!) On the other hand, I think it promotes some incorrect ideas about what cognitive behavioral therapy is actually for, and what it can accomplish.

In my (informed) opinion, CBT in its original form, as first pioneered by Dr. Aaron Beck, really only works for things like minor depression and adjustment disorders. (Yes, Dr. Beck wrote the foreword, too.) I lead PHP (partial hospitalization groups) for a very large mental health provider. These are designed for people with very serious mental health issues-- bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder.

We use CBT techniques a lot, and it's true that CBT has been proven to show results for people with these serious mental illnesses. The problem, though, is that the way it works in this context is just not the same as the way it works for people who are, say, depressed because they have specific problems in their lives. This is a really important point, because I think it explains why this diet technique isn't any more likely to work for most people than any other technique is.

Nobody with minor, low-level depression has a biological need to think negative thoughts or make negative evaluations of situations. So a therapy like CBT, which is designed to correct these types of thoughts because they tend to lead to negative feelings, will work very well. But there is NO psychotherapy-- whether it's CBT or anything else-- that will work to control the symptoms of severe and persistent mental illnesses all by itself. The reason is that these symptoms ARE biologically based. It would be considered malpractice for any doctor to use only CBT for these mental illnesses. It can help, but there is just too much of a biological reason why the symptoms are there.

Similarly, people DO have a biological need to eat (quite apart from the whole world of psychosocial reasons why people eat how and as they do.) You just can't use CBT to control a biological urge. It doesn't work. If it did, then we wouldn't need drugs like lithium, Lamictal, and Seroquel. But trust me, we do! Some people with mental illnesses really are able to control them with therapies like CBT for a limited amount of time. A good example is a bipolar woman who becomes pregnant and can't take her normal medications. CBT can work in the short term to control her symptoms. (I have to be honest, though-- I've never actually seen this work very well at all.) But in the long run, it just doesn't happen. I have to say it-- I just plain don't believe that this diet works in the long run any more than any other diet does, except for a very small number of people. And I'm afraid that it provides the same setup for failure and self-hatred as all the other diets do. That's my .02 cents, and I'm sticking to it!

One of the best decisions I ever made
I'm so glad I got this book. I am actually a therapist, and very familiar with CBT, and the idea of applying it to weight loss makes profound sense. I heard Dr. Beck on NPR, and I was not in the mood to listen to what she had to say, but then it made so much sense, I started to take notes! And even though I didn't feel like making an effort to follow a diet, I got the book anyway. And I liked how it went one day at a time, and very slowly. I recommend this book because it's just plain reasonable, useful, and it works. So far I've lost 27 pounds, since the first point in the book where I had to weigh in, so at this point, I've probably actually lost at least 30 pounds. I'm doing this with a friend and she's lost 15 pounds. Before I read this book, I believed I was overweight because I was the wrong kind of person to be thin: too in love with food and addicted to it and I'm too fun and too spontaneous for a diet, etc., etc., but it was encouraging to find out that I can learn how to think like a thin person. Now I know how to "strengthen my resistance muscle and weaken my giving-in muscle" and it's paying off! I look forward to moving along five pounds at a time until I reach my ideal weight. I'm really proud of what I've been able to achieve by following this. I'm using many concepts from this book in my own therapeutic practice for cognitive and behavioral skill-building, also, and finding it helpful in that way, too.

Mind Over Matter
by Rosally Saltsman

Ever wonder why no matter what you do, you can't lose weight? Dr. Beck has the answer - it's because you're not thinking like a thin person.

According to Dr. Beck, the problem isn't the diet you're on. In fact she says her program works with any diet. What's different about her program is that it focuses on cognitive nutrition, about thinking about food and eating in a new way.

For example, a thin person eats till they're full or slightly full and stops. An overweight person keeps on eating even if they're not hungry. Why? Because they perceive food differently.

In a six week program comprising 42 succinct lesson plans, Dr. Beck gives people the tools they need to change their relationship with food so that they can follow a diet, lose weight and keep it off. Using cognitive therapy, she teaches how changing your thoughts changes your behavior. It's simple, it's straightforward and it's easy to implement. Well, not terribly difficult anyway.

Dr. Beck provides techniques, choices and troubleshooting tips to help insure a successful result and continued maintenance once you achieve your goal weight. She also discusses how to set realistic goals.

The Beck Diet Solution isn't about food, it's about food for thought. We mistakenly believe that dieting is about eating less and how long we can stand it. But Dr. Beck provides techniques for life that will keep us - if not reed thin - at least in control of the food we consume and not the other way around. This is a diet plan that works because it's all in the mind. Well, you might have to eat some rice cakes.

An added bonus is that the theory can conceivably work on any bad habit. Though the tools are geared toward weight loss, they can be applied to help quit smoking, overspending or any bad habit because the program works on changing your behavior by changing your mindset.

If you follow the recipe for weight loss in this book and apply the cerebral strategies outlined therein, it is likely you will lose the weight you've been unsuccessfully trying to lose, especially if you haven't been thinking along the right lines. I highly recommend it and that's not to be taken lightly.

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