The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

MARTHA BECK, PHD, is a life coach and monthly columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the author of the bestsellers Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live and the memoir Expecting Adam.

CHAPTER 1

WHY ARE YOU SO DAMN FAT?

Not that I think you are. No, no, no. Why, in those pants, with the light behind you, you look positively willowy. But even if you were large enough to have a gravitational field involving four independent moons, and I happened to notice this (unlikely, since I'm completely blinded by the solar glare of my own self-consciousness), I would never, ever ask you a question as cruel as this chapter title. Nor would you say such a thing to me, were the tables turned. No, you're only that rude and nasty to the one person you can never escape--yourself.

How many times have you accused yourself of excessive heft and inappropriate texture (squishy)? How many times have you asked, "Why am I so damn fat?" I'd try to estimate the number for myself, but I don't think it's possible to count that high. I think that if I programmed my computer to calculate the answer, it would explode.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, because pretty much everyone who asks the question "Why am I so damn fat?" already knows the answer. After all, it's in every magazine and about half the books ever published. While the details of each diet or exercise regimen vary from publication to publication, the basic message of all the vast literature on weight loss is . . . drum roll . . . wait for it . . . this is so exciting . . .

EAT LESS. MOVE MORE.

You're so damn fat because you eat too much and don't exercise enough, right? If you don't already know this, you and I aren't living in the same universe. We've been pelted with weight-loss instruction from the womb. Some of my friends had parents who offered to pay them for every £d they lost--when they were only in second grade. Some were weighed like livestock every morning in front of their families or classmates, but without the merciful follow-up of being immediately slaughtered. Some have circumnavigated the globe, one treadmill session at a time. Some actually paid to have their own jaws wired shut, like volunteer subjects in some barbaric Nazi experiment.

None of these people--not one--is ignorant of the basic principles of weight loss. They're some of the most intelligent, disciplined achievers I've ever met. All of them know many ways to eat less and move more. Is the problem that they lack willpower? Not at all--their willpower is above average. If you've ever stayed on a diet long enough to lose weight, so is yours. No, the problem, for my friends and all the rest of us, isn't that we don't know what to do. The problem is that we don't do what we know. Why not? Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most compelling answer is not in our refrigerators, our restaurants, our mouths, our stomachs, our weak wills, or our basically vile and godless natures. It's in our heads.

THINKING OURSELVES FAT

To get more than a few £ds over our healthiest weight, most of us have to eat more than our bodies really want. True, certain foods make us prone to overeating (dietitians have now proven, in laboratory experiments, that high-fructose corn syrup is the sweat of Satan). But even so, taking in far more calories than we need doesn't physically feel good. After the point when our appetites are sated, we're not increasing physical pleasure; we're overriding physical discomfort. By the same token, environmental factors may invite us to gorge, but they don't actually force us. Your local Burger Binge Bonanza managers may offer all sorts of tallow-laden food, but no one's holding you at gunpoint until you consume every last fry in a king- size super-trough.

Bottom line: Eating is a deliberate behavior, however compelling. Like all deliberate behavior, even if we do it without really thinking about it, the process of eating must be okayed by our brains before it reaches the "action" stage. I know first-hand what it's like to spend years feeling completely out of control in any area connected with food and eating. Many of my clients have been there, too. But we've also seen (and felt) what it's like to be set free from the struggle to control our weight. My experience and research tell me that these liberations didn't occur because we finally found The Right Diet or achieved superhuman willpower. They happened when we learned to operate our minds and thoughts in ways that, science has now proven, literally altered our brains. Why are you so damn fat? At the most fundamental and important level, it's because of the way your brain has been conditioned to operate--because of the way you think. And that's what this book is going to help you change.

THERE'S CHANGING YOUR MIND, AND THEN THERE'S CHANGING YOUR MIND

I reached the above conclusion after 20 years of intense study, research, and observation on the subject of weight loss. I began as an undergraduate at Harvard, trying to determine why eating disorders, so prevalent in the USA, were almost unheard of in Asia (the answer, I came to believe, isn't physiological, as much as it is philosophical--but we'll get to that later).

The reason this topic appealed to me was that, like many other college students, I had a hell of an eating disorder--and I use the word "hell" advisedly. It started as a simple diet, then morphed into an extended ride on the gain-lose-gain-lose roller coaster. In hindsight, I can see that my attempts to control my body size actually created a syndrome I now call "famine brain," which drew my behavior and attention to eating until my whole life became a struggle with food. This was one of the most horrible things I've ever experienced and is the real reason I'm writing this book. I never want another human being to feel the way I felt when bingeing, dieting, and obsessing about bingeing and dieting constituted my entire psychological universe. It was like one long, hideous visit to the Spanish Inquisition.

As I went on to get my master's and doctorate (also from Harvard, which by some tragic judgment error just kept admitting me), I became fascinated by sociobiology and social psychology, including the psychology of eating. I was particularly interested in the way the mind reacts to eating problems-- what, I wondered, was going on in the brains of people like me, people who knew exactly how to stay thin but somehow just couldn't do it? I read everything I could find on the subject. Since no one (at that time) could watch the human brain in action, the answers I found were sparse and incomplete. Still, they were better than nothing, and I began to emerge from weight obsession.

By the time I'd finished my doctorate, I had already become something that probably made my professors roll their eyes and groan: a life coach. Academia was never as exciting for me as was applying social science in the lives of real people; hearing about my clients' lives and watching them change was mesmerizing. In case you're wondering, a life coach is to a therapist as a personal trainer is to a doctor. Psychotherapists work with damaged minds to make them well. I counsel people who are mentally healthy but feel that they could do more with their lives. Since I believe that each person innately knows what his or her "best life" should be, my coaching is all about helping clients tune into their unconscious unrealized dreams, then making those dreams come true.

As I developed more and more effective coaching strategies, I noticed an interesting trend: Many of my clients were dropping excess weight, even though we hadn't talked about weight loss, and they weren't dieting. I began paying more attention to this phenomenon and even wrote a self-help book called The Joy Diet, which recommended several small lifestyle changes that I'd found were correlated with weight loss. This led to a joint project with the diet company Jenny Craig, whose wonderful, cutting-edge researchers collaborated with me in creating a DVD that helped their customers with the psychological side of weight loss.

All of these projects were fascinating, but things got even more exciting when computer technology reached a level of sophistication that allowed scientists to create "brain maps," images of the brain at work. Suddenly, scientists could literally map what was happening in the brain of a person with, say, ADD or compulsive cravings. It turns out that certain ways of thinking can literally change the structure of the brain, for example, in ways that make it less prone to craving and more prone to happiness. The implications for weight loss are huge. It's becoming increasingly evident that typical diet strategies actually tell your brain to trigger processes in the body that lead to weight gain. Happily, we can reverse that process, repair the damage, and get thin by thinking as well as behaving in specific, often counterintuitive, ways. Would you like to know what those ways are? As luck would have it, that's what this book is all about.

THE 4-DAY WIN PROGRAM

There are two ways you can use the information and strategies you'll find in this book: (1) a thorough course in thought and behavior strategies that will enable you to stay on a healthy-eating program forever with little effort; and (2) a quick fix I call the Jump-Start, which will help you start losing weight immediately. I suggest you use both strategies, though either one alone will help you lose weight. Let's look at the Jump-Start first.

THE JUMP-START: CHANGING YOUR BODY

If you turn to the Appendix of this book, which begins on page 309, you'll find a description of the basic logic behind the 4-Day Win and instructions for following a program that will start changing your body for the better right away. If you follow the program, you'll be thinner in 4 days--perhaps not as thin as you'll end up but noticeably leaner than you were at the outset. That's what adult development theorists call an "early win," and it will help motivate you to continue on the program. The first 4 days of your weight-loss routine will be the most difficult. After that, you'll experience an accelerating increase in motivation and success.

THE METAMORPHOSIS: CHANGING YOUR BRAIN

All of this is well and good, but changing your body, exciting though it is, won't be a sustainable transformation unless you also restructure your brain. If you've ever been on a diet or if you're overweight, you almost certainly have neural circuitry in your brain that's programming your body to add and hold on to fat. The astonishing fact that we can change our brains by using our minds and by behaving in new ways (some as simple as breathing differently) is the key to changing this programming. Each chapter of this book contains one or more concrete strategies for transforming yourself into a lean person from the brain outward.

To learn these skills, you could go the very long scenic route that I took: read hundreds of thousands of pages in subjects from nutrition to psychology to physics to animal behavior to philosophy to linguistic epistemology, then spend thousands of hours counseling and observing dieters. But the strategies in this book are designed to take you to Thinland quickly. Some are thought exercises that push your brain to process information in new ways. Others are real-world methods of making healthy living your second nature instead of an unsteady wagon you might fall off at any moment. Each skill is based on a great deal of research, thought, and real-world observation. Did I assemble them in one place because of my love for humanity? Partly. But mostly I did it because of a desire you'll recognize as more powerful and heartfelt: the desire to have thinner thighs.

PUTTING THE JUMP-START

AND THE METAMORPHOSIS TOGETHER

Metamorphosis takes time; caterpillars don't turn into butterflies overnight. It takes weeks to retrain your brain after a lifetime of punishing thoughts about why you're so damn fat. But I know, I know: You have that wedding next week, Uncle Earl's parole hearing right around the corner, and bikini mud wrestling season will be here before you know it-- and you want to look good. So I'll give you the best of both worlds. I'll let you leap right into the Jump-Start plan if you promise to come back and stay with me for the rest of the book. Deal?

Deal. We'll work together as if I were coaching you in person. First I'll have you implement the Jump-Start procedure, reading a few chapters to get a little basic understanding of the brain's reaction to dieting, then I'll toss you right into the motivating process of actual weight loss. Once you're losing weight, you'll read the rest of this book, absorbing the explanations and doing the exercises in each chapter. The chapters are short by design. Each one will provide an explanation for some of the problems that inevitably arise in the process of ordinary, willpower-based dieting. Then, I'll take you through an exercise designed to help you internalize the explanation, rewiring your brain and changing your psychological profile so that you'll never need to fall into the wretched, self-reinforcing cycle of typical ineffective dieting ever again.

If you think this means the 4-Day Win will give you more willpower, you're wrong; it will just help you need less. Believe it or not, your willpower is one thing that can't keep you thin. Basing a weight-loss effort on willpower does the very things to your mind and body that are virtually certain to make you fatter in the long run. The more time you spend doing traditional dieting, the more trouble you'll probably have keeping weight off, which is what makes it even more vital to undo the physical and psychological damage so that you can be thin and happy. Oh, yeah, did I mention that? If you do this program consistently, you'll end up happy, and not just because you've lost weight.

COLLATERAL BENEFITS

Of course, I know you're not a looks-obsessed dieter; you just want to be a healthy eater. And I'm certain you also watch porn purely for its sophisticated screenwriting. Let's be honest: If you could get chiseled abs by effortlessly trading in a little happiness, you'd do it in a hot second. In a recent study of 4,283 Americans, more than 600 said they'd rather give up 15 years of their lives than be fat.