Lifestyle Choices

Where behaviorist techniques can help change the outer things that affect your appetite and eating patterns, creative imagery can help your inner attitudes. And attitudes are important. For how you see yourself, how you think of yourself, and how you think of food, day after day, has a great deal to say about what you become—fat or thin, in control or out of control, truly responsible for yourself or at the mercy of others and circumstances.

In recent years, many useful techniques of meditation, often coupled with guided fantasy or creative imagery, have been developed. They can be helpful to the dieter in three ways. First, all of them demand the use of some form of deep relaxation practiced twice a day. (more…)

Step Four: Take a Look at How Fast You Eat

Overweight people tend to eat much faster than their slimmer friends. When you eat too fast you bring about two negative effects, both of which should be eliminated from any weight-loss diet. First, eating fast makes you unaware of both the taste of what you are eating and also how much of it is going down. You eat a lot simply because you have no real idea of how much you are taking in. This, and the fact that you will not be able to digest fully the starches you eat unless you chew them thoroughly, make it important that you slow down. (more…)

Behavioral psychologists begin with the notion that eating behavior is learned and maintained as a result of interaction between you and your environment. And their definition of environment includes everything around you—people, events, things you see and respond to. These psychologists are not very interested in deep-seated motives for compulsive eating and they acknowledge that there is nothing you can do to change your genetic inheritance. But what you can do, they say, is to get to grips with overweight by looking at it as a voluntary disorder brought about by habit and environmental stimuli (remember how the habit of eating at certain times or the sight of food triggers hunger in overweight people). Change your environment, they say, and you will alter your habits and your eating patterns so you lose weight and keep it off. (more…)