First-- I want to say that I am NOT the owner of this page and am not trying to take over. I am just really interested in connecting with other people following the Beck principles and hoping to benefit from other's experiences and insights. To that end, I have been trying to stimulate discussion and hope other will as well. I know that for me, getting back to a healthy weight and staying there is going to be a lifelong journey and I appreciate all the support, motivation and "aha" moments I can get.

This is a blog I wrote on 6/07/2015 after attending a Beck Diet Solution Workshop-- I am very fortunate to live in the Philadelphia-area and to have easy access to the Beck Institute. Although I had read two of the Beck books before attending the workshop, some really important concepts came together for me during the workshop

I work in a research center that studies neurodegenerative diseases at a large university in Philadelphia. It could be considered an occupational hazard to become fascinated with the brain and how, and why, we think what we do. This fascination has led me to do more personal research into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and think about how it relates to years of yo-yo dieting.

The basic assumption of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that the thoughts we have about a particular situation influence how we feel about the situation, and then how we respond to the situation. Aaron Beck, the father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, has developed interventions for everything from depression to anxiety to eating disorders embracing the idea that if individuals can replace their distorted thoughts about a situation (i.e. "No one cares about me") with more realistic thoughts about a situation (i.e. "I do have people in my life who care about me, but when I isolate myself, I don't always feel that caring"), it can change how they feel about a situation (i.e. less depressed) and how they respond to it (i.e.reaching out to others for support).

I recently learned about Dr. Judith Beck's books (The Beck Diet Solution and The Diet Trap Solution) that teach how to utilize a cognitive behavioral framework and techniques not only to lose weight, but to keep it off for good. I quickly became a big fan of her books and jumped at the chance to attend a full-day workshop on the Beck Diet Solution yesterday, facilitated by Deborah Beck Busis a social worker and the daughter of Judith Beck and granddaughter of Arron Beck. The fact that the Beck Institute is fifteen minutes from my house made this a very easy decision for me, but some of the other 50 or so attendees came from as far away as Georgia, Florida and and even Canada.

Many really important concepts were discussed yesterday and I would love to do them all justice. As that is not practical, I wanted to share two that really resonated with me.

The first idea that really struck me related to unplanned eating when you are trying to lose weight or maintain a weight loss. Deborah Beck Busis told us: "Every bite matters. It's not the calories that matter, it is the habit itself." Letting ourselves give in to a craving and having unplanned food makes it easier to do it again the next time we are faced with a temptation. Almost as importantly, when we give in and eat something we hadn't planned on, we enjoy the food for a moment, but then most of us are racked with guilt, start feeling like we have no will-power and really beat ourselves up. We tend to either see ourselves as succeeding or failing, we rarely think, "I made a mistake. No big deal. I will get back on track right now and no harm done."

This ties into the larger problem that many people who are trying to lose weight or to maintain a weight loss tend to engage in all-or-nothing thinking that we would NEVER engage in when faced with other situations. For many of us, if we eat a cookie we didn't plan on, we immediately feel like we have "failed" on our diet and if we have already failed on out diet, we might as well continue to eat whatever we want for the rest of the day, which makes it easier to eat off-plan the next day and the day after that , etc. until we REALLY are off-track and it is so much harder to get back on. Deborah Beck Busis used the following examples to remind us how absurd this line of thinking is. If we run a red light and get pulled over by the police and ticketed, we wouldn't think to ourself, "Oh, I've blown driving today. I might as well keep running red lights." Or if we stumble going down the stairs, we would never think, "Oh, I've blown stairs today, I might as well throw myself down the rest of the flight of stairs." She reminded the audience that it makes no sense in dieting to continue to use the memory of one mistake to justify making more mistakes. Why do we resort to such all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to food?

To think like a thin person we have to learn that eating an unplanned food is just a mistake, not a catastrophe. We are only human, we will make mistakes. Progress, not perfection.