Conquer Your Food Addiction: The Ehrlich 8-Step Program for Permanent Weight Loss - Softcover

Ehrlich, Caryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743232828 ISBN 13: 9780743232821

Verlag: Free Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Conquer Your Food Addiction is not a diet book.
But if you're committed to losing weight, it's the right book for you!
Nobody can cajole, trick, or provoke you into shedding those excess pounds. But if you are genuinely ready to go for it, Caryl Ehrlich is here to lead the way with her 8-step program for permanent weight loss. The perfect solution for people who are overweight -- many of whom are compulsive eaters -- Ehrlich's is a behavioral approach to weight loss that teaches you how to change habits in order to overcome food addiction. As she observes, no deprivation diet will work for food addicts, because they use food the way other addicts use drugs or alcohol: not to satisfy physical hunger but to distract oneself from painful feelings -- loneliness, anger, boredom, sadness -- with a never-ending conveyor belt of food.
A former compulsive eater herself, Ehrlich developed this easy-to-understand program for herself more than twenty-five years ago and has taught it to others, with astounding results, for more than two decades. With the help of Conquer Your Food Addiction you will:

• Learn how to distinguish physical hunger from emotional hunger
• Become aware of your unconscious, ritualized eating habits
• Develop the skills necessary to approach food differently
• Change your behavior in order to change your body
• Awaken to an improved, realistic relationship with food
Using original concepts and easy assignments, Ehrlich's proven 8-step program retrains your thought process so that you can begin to see food in a new and healthy way. Once you do, you'll be amazed at how the pounds come off!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caryl Ehrlich has had an extraordinary record of success with the Ehrlich 8-step program, a behavioral approach to permanent weight loss for food addicts. It is one of the longest-running programs of its kind; Ehrlich has maintained it for over twenty years, supporting it as host of a radio program on WMCA in New York, and more recently with her current television show on Manhattan Cable. She lives and teaches in New York City.

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Dear Reader

This is not a diet book. There are no recipes, no counting of calories or figuring of fat grams. There is no prop or pill, nor is there any diet or deprivation. There is no special food and no liquid concoction to mix. Conquer Your Food Addiction is a behavioral approach to weight loss. It is about learning to eat real food in the real world, but it's not even about food. It's about conquering your inappropriate use of food.

The weight-weary might be thinking, "But I know what to do." And you might. But if you don't know how to do it, you know nothing.

Every opinion, thought, and conclusion about weight loss in this book is my own, gained not only from keeping off 50 pounds for more than a quarter century, but also from successfully teaching my program to thousands of others.

Compulsive overeating is a full-blown addiction because you continue doing what you're doing even though there are negative consequences, and you are in denial about what you're doing and how it contributes to your weight. Even consuming an entire package of TicTacs every day of the year is a weight gain of more than 7 1/2 pounds by year's end.

If you swallowed it, you ate it, and it all adds up.

If it's not water, it's food.

Your ritualized eating behavior is most likely mindless, unconscious, thoughtless, and automatic. My goal is to lead you to mindfulness, consciousness, and thoughtfulness. Instead of thinking, I'm not doing anything to contribute to my weight problem, you begin to think: Oh yes. I do that. Next time, I can do something else.

You don't change the foods you eat.

You change your habits instead.

Old trigger situations don't disappear. You will feel lonely, tired, bored, frustrated, and angry again. But it's not a reason to eat. You can learn a new automatic response.

This book is designed to help you gently change your thoughts and actions in small, incremental steps from your old it-isn't-working way of thinking to a new can-do-it way of thinking. Let me hear an I can do it. And if you want to learn how it has helped other participants in The Program, you can find their verbatim comments throughout the book.

The Program Way

The Program -- everything I talk about in this book is The Program -- begins with a question, one in which most people are interested. What can I eat? they ask. The answer is, Anything; you just can't eat it all in the same meal. The problem is that most people watching their weight are so used to limiting what they can or cannot eat based on the mass of misinformation -- ill-informed, over-hyped weight-control messages -- in the marketplace that they simply don't get enough variety or satisfaction from what they do eat. The Program shows you more interesting possibilities of how to enjoy what you're eating and still lose weight. Yes, butter on your baked potato is fine.

The more important dimension of this program concerns the inappropriate, ritualized use of food that you've created to distract yourself from feeling things you don't want to feel. It contains many components. Food is just one of them. The other parts are the behavioral ritual blanket you've woven to self-medicate, to zone out; the way your mood, situation, and circumstance dictate when, what, and how much you're going to eat. Before you know it, you're eating just because it's there, or you're bored, or it's the only thing you could find, or the stock market went down (or up). It doesn't matter. You're weaving a ritual web of distraction (from feelings you don't want to feel). That web of distraction comprises the things you say (I can't eat that; I can't stop once I start; I can't eat in that restaurant), what you wear (I only wear dark colors; I can't wear belts; I can't shop in that store; all the clothes in my closet are tight), finding the right recipes (This is fat free; this is sugar-free; this is taste free).

Another part of your web of distraction might be how you buy and keep clothes you've never worn. Or discussing with friends every up and down of how "good" and "bad" you are with your weight-loss plan. Or avoiding going to the beach for fear of walking around in shorts or a bathing suit. When it comes to distracting ritual behavior, it is just as seductive as the smell of a cup of coffee, the texture of a roll, the flavor of a sirloin steak, the crunch of a baked potato. Your behavioral rituals evolved from your parents' passing along to you their family rituals to which you've added some of your own: This is how I eat in a Chinese restaurant, an Italian restaurant, Sunday brunch, when I celebrate, when I grieve. These behaviors are familiar and comfortable.

As someone once observed, "It's deadening pain by means of a more intense pain."

Yes. Some idiot might have cut you off on the turnpike. Or a friend hurt your feelings. Or one of your children was sent home from school and you had to leave work early, or you're lonely or tired or angry. No matter. Eating doesn't change the outcome of anything but your waistline and your self-esteem.

The mind is ruled by its most dominant thought. If you keep thinking, This is how and what I eat when I'm depressed, or This is how I eat at Passover, at Thanksgiving..., you yield the same old result. You can learn to create something more appropriate for the smaller person you want to be, enjoy the mealtime moment, and be happy with the new result.

The Program will lead you from your old way to a new way of thinking and then cheer you on to the finish line as you choose to weigh ___ pounds.

In each segment, you'll read about successful ways that have worked for others. You'll be encouraged to find the method that works for you. The connection between thought, action, and feeling needs to be pulled apart and separated from the ritual of buying, ordering, preparing, serving, and eating food.

If you're hungry, you'll eat. People with diabetes may need to eat differently than The Program suggests. Fourth Meals, explained in the book, will most likely be helpful, but check with your physician to be sure.

Thirsty? You'll drink water. And if neither but thinking about food, you'll learn to create different behavioral rituals to absorb your mind. Any effort is better than none. Perfection is an illusion.

If you stopped smoking or drinking or taking drugs, that would be that. But you can't stop eating, so you have to learn how to do it. The book will show you how best to serve your goal of achieving your desired weight.

The way to deconstruct the snarl of ritualized behavior you've created is to rewrite, in your own handwriting, the foundation of The Program. Then read and reread those sections. Practice the new way, and your new way of thinking and acting will become comfortable, automatic, and preferred.

E-mail your positive stories about The Program to me at: ConquerFood@aol.com

Enjoy the journey.

Copyright © 2002 by Caryl Ehrlich

My Story

I am a compulsive eater. And yet more than twenty years ago, I lost 50 pounds and never gained them back. I didn't wake up one morning and weigh 50 pounds more than I wanted to weigh. It was gradual. Two pounds became 5. Five became 10. And just when I was thrilled it wasn't 15, it became 20, 30, and then 50.

I couldn't wear my rings because my fingers were so fat. Tuck-in blouses were renounced in favor of overtops. A button fell off a pair of pants, but I knew that even if I sewed the button back on, the pants would not fit. The button would not button; the zipper would not zip. In my thirties, I felt like a fat old lady.

I caped and draped to cover my girth and was embarrassed to take off my clothes...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Free Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743232828
• ISBN 13: 9780743232821
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande