Thin from Within: The Powerful Self-Coaching Program for Permanent Weight Loss
232
Thin from Within: The Powerful Self-Coaching Program for Permanent Weight Loss
232eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
Renowned psychologist Joseph J. Luciani dives into the root causes of overeating and reveals that lose weight and keep it off, you have to retrain your brain.
The research is in: The next fad diet will not work! Of the millions of people every day battling temptation and trying to drop unwanted pounds, only a small percentage are successful. And of those, a whopping 80 percent quickly pack the weight back on! So what went wrong? The answer won’t be found in whatever the next new diet is. The answer to lasting weight loss can only be found from within.
Combining insight and inspiration with powerful cognitive tools, Thin from Within enables you to:
- Embrace change
- Strengthen your self-discipline
- Resist the lure of comfort foods
- Free yourself from destructive thinking
- Replace even the most stubborn bad habits with positive ones
- Learn from setbacks
Complete with simple self-coaching techniques proven to control cravings and break the cycle of self-sabotage, Thin from Within puts the decision in your hands. Will you try yet another fad diet and fail--or deal with the root problem within and find a permanent solution?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814436790 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Christian Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 901 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Thin From Within
The Powerful Self-Coaching Program for Permanent Weight Loss
By Joseph J. Luciani
AMACOM
Copyright © 2016 Joseph J. LucianiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3679-0
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.
Self-Coaching's Most Powerful Tool: Self-Talk
You may have heard the term self-talk already. Some psychologists use it to describe the mental dialogue that people have as a way to pump themselves up (or conversely, in an unhealthy way, to denigrate themselves). However, I use it in a totally different manner. When you hear me use the term Self-Talk, I'm referring to a specific, three-step technique that I first introduced more than 10 years ago in my book Self-Coaching: The Powerful Program to Beat Anxiety and Depression. I originally designed Self-Talk as a method of dismantling the stubborn habits that sustain anxiety and depression, and I introduced this concept to patients and readers from all over the world. However, in the intervening years, I have discovered that Self-Talk has much broader applications. In order to get beyond your particular stubborn habits of self-indulgence, emotional friction, or even anxiety or depression, it's imperative that you have the Self-Talk advantage.
We discuss Self-Talk in detail in Part III, but for now here's a brief overview:
The first Self-Talk step is designed to teach you to separate facts from emotional fictions. When it comes to lifelong weight mastery, the truth (facts) will indeed set you free. For example:
Fiction: "It's too hard, I can't do it!"
Fact: It may feel hard, but the fact remains that you could do it if you were more resilient.
Fiction:"I have to have something sweet right now!"
Fact: You feel like you have to have something sweet, but feelings are not facts.
The ability to separate facts from emotional fictions paves the way for the second Self-Talk step, in which you learn how to say no to ruminative thoughts and stop those impulses and cravings. As your resolve and self-discipline grow, you are ready for the third step, which teaches you how to liberate yourself from emotional friction, compulsivity, and struggle. In short, you learn to let go and self-trust.
Using Self-Talk, you not only release yourself from reflexive, mindless eating, but (more importantly for lifelong weight mastery) you remove the source(s) of your emotional friction, thereby eliminating the corrosive effects of stress. Do this and you'll be in the driver's seat — no longer choosing to seek the anesthetizing effects of unhealthy eating to get you through the day. You'll reach a point where you are maintaining your weight without much effort and, more importantly, without any discomfort. How is this possible? When you are empowered by insight, self-awareness, and resilience, your unhealthy habits recede as your healthy habits become more fixed. And once your habits are in line with your intentions, you'll be on autopilot — no thinking required! You'll simply be at a fortified place where you no longer struggle with that old, incessant debate: Should I?/ Shouldn't I?
Once you no longer need to use food to assuage your struggles, give meaning to your mundane day, or relieve boredom, you begin to find a new appreciation for healthy eating. I realize what I'm suggesting may seem rather far-reaching, especially if you picked up this book looking simply for practical tips on losing weight. If this is the case, I do apologize. However, I only ask at this point that you consider that your traditional struggle with food and weight stability has had more to do with your psychology than you realized. I hope I can convince you that only by going the distance and obtaining psychological resilience will you be in a truly fortified position to finally live your intentions — for life.
Breaking Old, Destructive Habits
As anyone who has ever turned away from a Venetian dessert cart knows, discomfort is learning to live with the word no. Maybe you've been convinced by some slick advertising campaign insisting that mature, moderate, healthy eating can be accomplished effortlessly without ever having to say no to the foods you love. Not true! Although this ruse sells diet programs, eventually, as the saying goes, you can't have your cake and eat it too — at least not on any regular basis. This is especially true with addictive, trigger foods that reawaken and sustain old, destructive habits. If you're still insisting that such-and-such diet guarantees that you can eat all the "cake" you want and lose weight, then keep this book on your shelf for future reference. You'll need it after you've exhausted your search for the holy grail of weight mastery by following nonsensical advice.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that you've more or less given up looking for that magical diet and that, once again, you find yourself struggling with the nagging conviction that you're a weak person who just can't handle the ongoing discomfort necessary to sustain sensible, healthy eating. In other words, I'm also going to assume that in your dispirited state, the very last thing you want to read is that lifelong weight mastery requires that you must first figure out how to handle discomfort. But don't panic. Let me quickly and emphatically point out that when it comes to ongoing weight mastery, the discomfort I'm referring to is only temporary. Repeat: temporary. And you'll find that whatever initial discomfort you do encounter, Self-Talk sees you through this phase.
Self-Talk is a simple, three-step, cognitive technique that allows you to navigate through the twisted minefield of distorted thinking associated with the challenges of taking your life back from old, destructive habits. Self-Coaching relies on the application of Self-Talk, and its essential goals are twofold: habit re-formation and psychological resilience. Habit re-formation is the process of extinguishing old, destructive eating (and thinking) patterns and replacing them with habits that are consistent with your intentions and aspirations, and with a totally new perspective on eating. Psychological resilience is the confidence that comes from developing your self-discipline muscle. With a Self-Talk advantage and fortified self-discipline muscle, you'll be pleased to find that eventual, lifelong weight mastery is not at all stressful or uncomfortable. That's right — sustaining optimum weight does not have to be a struggle. You will not have to live your life sulking, unhappy, or feeling deprived — not once you take your life back from the faulty habits that have held you hostage for so long.
Are you ready? Great! Now let's discuss the nuts and bolts of weight loss and weight maintenance.
Weight Loss Nuts and Bolts
See if this sounds familiar: You've had enough. You've thought about losing weight for a long time. After exploring the many diets available, you've made your selection, you're pumped up, you're ready. Day 1 of your new diet arrives. You're motivated, determined, and somewhat relieved — relieved to get off the fence of ambivalence and commit yourself to losing weight. After weeks and months of procrastination, you're there. Finally.
As the days go by, you're euphoric as the weight seemingly melts away. Amazed by the results and your determination, you feel exhilarated and energized. Then, after such an encouraging start, your progress begins to slow down. You find yourself floundering. Is this one of those dreaded plateaus where despite careful adherence to your diet and regular exercise, the needle on the bathroom scale seems to be painted at the same spot? How can this be? Those jubilant first few weeks, when you were dropping weight at an astonishing rate, mesmerized you into thinking you had finally found dieting nirvana. You were so encouraged, so confident, but now, as panic and old cravings quietly begin to stir, you realize you're stuck. You're doing everything you're supposed to. You're not cheating. What's wrong?
The simple answer is that nothing's wrong — not if you understand that not all weight loss is equal. There's water weight loss and there's fat weight loss. The truth is that the fat you thought you were melting away was water that you were ... draining away. Although you may encounter what feels like a plateau after only a couple of weeks of dieting, this is related to the initial water that your body lost due to restricting your caloric and sodium intake. The human body can safely lose about a pound or two of fat a week (compared to upward of 10 pounds or more of water weight). A true plateau is reached much later, when fat loss has become more significant and your leaner body is now establishing a new equilibrium by lowering your metabolism and burning fewer calories — which means that the same caloric restriction and exercise that got you to this point have begun to stall out.
You may find the factual truth about weight loss discouraging, especially if you've been sold a bill of goods by slick weight-loss programs or books making fantastic claims while ignoring the reality that extreme, rapid weight loss can cause gallstones, dehydration, irregular menstruation, muscle and hair loss, loose skin, and even disastrous cardiac arrhythmias. Understanding the truth about weight loss and lifelong weight mastery is crucial to developing a mindset that equips you to handle the ongoing demands of reinventing your relationship to food as well as to yourself. Of course, you're going to encounter frustrations and setbacks, but to assume you can sidestep such realities is a ticket for disaster.
The Anatomy of Motivation
In order to actualize your intentions and goals, you're going to have to instill a type of motivation that isn't dependent on external circumstances or events but on the motivation that comes as a natural by-product of psychological resilience. Understand that by using food to compensate for any psychological-emotional shortcoming or circumstantial stressor, you've developed a dependency relationship with food. You need the comfort of food. When you don't need to turn to food for solace, distraction, or anesthesia, you are finally in a position to break the bonds of your enslavement to destructive eating.
Whether it's sticking with a diet, handling the standstill of a plateau, or resisting the inevitable urges, impulses, and compulsions, the bottom line is you need to stay motivated. With the exception of the first few weeks of a diet, when you're feeling ecstatic over the rapid weight (water) loss, the key to all successful weight-loss programs is staying motivated. Everything good happens when you're able to stay motivated. Simply put, motivation is your psychic fuel. It fuels the motor that ensures self-discipline and optimism, essential ingredients when striving toward any goal.
Defining Extrinsic and Intrinsic Goals There are two basic forms of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside — being hopped up about a new diet plan, actually losing weight, fitting into those once-tight jeans, and so on. Intrinsic motivation comes from within you. It's the fortified, uncontaminated desire to be healthy and fit and to feel great. Extrinsic motivation depends on external circumstances to keep you going. Intrinsic motivation relies on an inner conviction to live your intentions. There's no contest as to which form of motivation sees you through the initial stages of losing weight and prepares you for lifelong, permanent weight stability.
Not that there's anything wrong with extrinsic motivation. In fact, when it comes to developing the necessary mental muscle to overcome old, destructive eating habits, if you have extrinsic motivation working alongside intrinsic motivation, you're wielding quite a one-two punch. Unfortunately, whether it's reaching a plateau or gaining a pound or two back, if you're relying solely on extrinsic motivation, you're putting your success at risk.
We motivate ourselves to work for extrinsic goals in many ways — reaching a target weight, fitting into a smaller size, getting beach ready, wowing the family at a wedding, and so forth — and there's nothing wrong with this. However, to really be in the driver's seat you're going to have to pay more attention to your intrinsic goals as well (such as attaining personal empowerment, psychological mastery, self-pride, and so forth). To do this you're going to have to learn to embrace an attitude consisting of optimism, self-trust, and self-confidence — the building blocks of psychological resilience. With a resilient mindset, you learn to stand up to challenging circumstances, urges, compulsions, and food addictions. Whether you're facing a temporary setback, a slip, or a plateau, with Self-Coaching resilience and intrinsic motivation, you'll be giving yourself everything you need to reach and sustain your goals.
The Anatomy of Self-Discipline
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there are two phases to successful weight mastery: the losing phase and the keeping-it-off phase. Regardless of how successful you are in the losing phase, if you aren't able to sustain your loss over time, it's all for naught (although some might argue that making it through a wedding, or getting that beach body for the summer, is sufficient success). For those interested in never having to diet again (my lips to God's ears), it all comes down to learning to stick with a lifelong eating plan of nutritional moderation and healthy choices — choices that are less focused on carbohydrates or calories and more on the ability (aka, self-discipline) to manage the transient discomfort inherent with change. This means you need to tolerate the discomfort in the losing phase and also in the keeping-it-off phase until you manage to change your physiological, psychological, and behavioral eating patterns.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thin From Within by Joseph J. Luciani. Copyright © 2016 Joseph J. Luciani. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Introduction, 1,
Part I: The Essentials of Weight Mastery 7,
Chapter 1 — What You Need to Know About Weight Mastery, 9,
Chapter 2 — Why It Is So Hard to Just Say No!, 28,
Chapter 3 — Why You Crave Food, and What You Can Do About It, 40,
Part II: The Path to Weight Mastery 59,
Chapter 4 — Getting Tough with Your Impulses and Cravings, 61,
Chapter 5 — Adopting the Food Journal Advantage, 76,
Chapter 6 — Cultivating a Resilient Attitude, 89,
Part III: Three Crucial Steps Toward Weight Mastery, 107,
Chapter 7 — The Self-Talk Approach to Dismantling Stubborn Habits, 109,
Chapter 8 — Step One: Separate Facts from Fictions, 119,
Chapter 9 — Step Two: Say No! to Ruminative Thoughts, 137,
Chapter 10 — Step Three: Let Go and Self-Trust, 153,
Part IV: Lifelong Success with Weight Mastery, 169,
Chapter 11 — Liberate Yourself from Anxiety, Depression, and Emotional Sabotage, 171,
Chapter 12 — Food Addiction or Compulsion: Where Do You Stand?, 189,
Chapter 13 — Beyond Weight Loss: Achieving Lifelong Weight Mastery, 204,
Index, 223,
About the Author, 229,
Free Sample Chapter from No Sweat by Michelle Segar, 230,
Copyright, 246,