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

By Martha Beck, PhD
Published by Rodale
January 2007;$25.95US/$33.95CAN; 9781594866074

Everyone knows how to lose weight: eat less, move more. But though they know what to do, millions of dieters don't do what they know. Why not? Because they don't understand the brain-body dynamics of weight loss. Now, cutting-edge research has revealed that millions of overweight dieters are programming themselves to get fatter. These unlucky individuals are following typical weight-loss programs and are being trained to become thinner versions of themselves, like caterpillars becoming thinner caterpillars. In The Four-Day Win, Harvard-trained Oprah Magazine columnist Martha Beck, PhD, reverses this trend and teaches dieters to get lean from the brain outward. Instead of becoming thinner caterpillars, those who follow The Four-Day Win will metamorphose into butterflies, with entirely new bodies . . . for good.

In the book, Martha Beck observes that:

• Traditional dieting relies on the ability to go numb or to override physical and emotional feelings.
• Overeating is a self-calming compulsion similar to OCD -- dieters turn to food (and lots of it) when they're deprived of comfort.
• Overweight people can reverse the brain-body programming that is making them fat. Instead of attacking their bodies, they can learn to support them.

By ending each chapter with psychological exercises, Dr. Beck helps her readers to think thin and end their compulsion to overeat. For those who aren't patient enough to await the transformation that will inevitably follow, she also includes a Jump-Start weight-loss program that will help them shed pounds in the best way, both psychologically and physically.

As empathetic and funny as she is informative, Martha Beck provides readers with an easy and fail-proof way to change their lives.

Reviews
"Martha Beck has a rare ability to see the world with wisdom and heart. She is a teacher in the truest sense of the word."
--Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger and The Dance of Correction

The Polar Bear Effect

Why Resistance is Futile

Try a little experiment for me. For 10 seconds by the clock, think about anything you like, as long as it has no relationship whatever, not even a tangential one, to polar bears. That means no bears of any kind, no furry white rugs, no snow or ice, no igloos, nothing that connects to polar bears in your mind. Got it? Go. 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8 . . . 9 . . . 10. Okay, now relax.

So, were you able to keep all polar bear-related thoughts out of your consciousness for the allotted time? Probably not, and even if you managed to keep such thoughts away for 10 seconds, you’ve had a bunch of them since you stopped trying not to think about them -- look, there goes one now. In fact, you’ve had more thoughts linked to polar bears since you started reading this chapter than you might have had all day -- all week, all year -- if I hadn’t told you not to think them.

This experiment was designed by Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychologist who studies "the evasion of suppression." Wegner has shown that under any number of circumstances, trying not to think or feel something makes our brains go right to that very thing, whether it’s insomnia, performance anxiety, shocking sexual images involving all nine Supreme Court Justices, or a hankering for fried chicken. The harder we try to suppress any mental state, the more our thoughts move into that state, set up camp, open a six-pack, and hunker down for the duration.

This phenomenon is known as the "ironic monitoring process," a label I love because its acronym is "imp." It happens because telling the brain not to think a thought is a paradoxical command. If I ordered you not to keep anything red in your house, and for some unfathomable reason you decided to obey me, the first thing you’d have to do is scurry through your house looking for red things. Your attention would be preferentially drawn to the very thing you were trying to offload. So, when you’re dieting strictly, trying very hard not to think about how much you’d love a burrito with spicy marinated chicken and four kinds of cheese melting in golden swirls through an avocado heaven of guacamole with a huge dollop of -- sorry. What was I saying?

Oh yes. When you’re trying not to think about your favorite gustatory temptations, you’ll think about them all the time, in great detail. That’s your imp-mind for you.

Wegner’s research shows that under ideal conditions, when we’re rested, relaxed, and enjoying life, we can suppress thoughts and feelings fairly successfully. But when we have a high "cognitive load," such as stress, annoyance, or time pressure, trying to resist creates "mental states that go beyond ‘no change’ to become the opposite of what is desired." This means that the more desperately we try to control the plethora of factors that go into losing weight, the more we create a kickback from our brains.

When I ran one of my dieting clients through this exercise, she immediately diagnosed herself with "bi-polar-bear disorder." She’d spent most of her life either suppressing food-related thoughts and behaviors, or experiencing uncontrollable backlash, in which she did nothing but plan menus, shop, cook, and eat. And eat. And eat. This dieting behavior is typical and predictable, given the ironic logic of brain function. And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets.

Reprinted from: The Four Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace by Martha Beck, PhD. Copyright © 2007 Martha Beck. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher by calling at (800) 848-4735.

Author:
Martha Beck, PhD, is a Harvard-educated 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. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her family. Her hobbies include excessive viewing of the Discovery Channel, occasional pondering, and naps.

She can be contacted at www.MarthaBeck.com