That might help—if the basic underlying theory of eating to avoid famine is correct.
IIRC, she only advocated this theory for people who were binging in response to anticipated hunger, and not as a general theory of weight loss. It’s only a tiny part of the book as a whole, which also discussed other emotional drivers for eating. Part of her process includes making a log of what you eat, at what time of day, along with what thoughts you were thinking and what emotional and physical responses you were having… along with a reason why the relevant thought might not be true.
I haven’t tried it myself—I actually didn’t buy the book for weight loss, but because I was intrigued by her hypothesis that it only takes four days to implement a habit (not 21 or 30 as traditional self-help authors claim), provided that the habit doesn’t represent any sort of threat to your existing order. For example, most people can easily learn a new route to work or school within four days of moving or changing jobs or schools.
That is, it’s only habits that conflict in some way with an existing way of doing things that are difficult to form, so her proposal is to use extremely small increments, like her own example of driving to the gym every morning for four days… but just sitting in the parking lot and not actually going in.… then going in and sitting on a bike but not exercising… etc. At each stage, four days of it is supposed to be enough to make what you’ve already been doing a non-threatening part of your routine.
I’ve used the approach to implement some small habits, but nothing major as yet. Seems promising so far.
IIRC, she only advocated this theory for people who were binging in response to anticipated hunger, and not as a general theory of weight loss. It’s only a tiny part of the book as a whole, which also discussed other emotional drivers for eating. Part of her process includes making a log of what you eat, at what time of day, along with what thoughts you were thinking and what emotional and physical responses you were having… along with a reason why the relevant thought might not be true.
I haven’t tried it myself—I actually didn’t buy the book for weight loss, but because I was intrigued by her hypothesis that it only takes four days to implement a habit (not 21 or 30 as traditional self-help authors claim), provided that the habit doesn’t represent any sort of threat to your existing order. For example, most people can easily learn a new route to work or school within four days of moving or changing jobs or schools.
That is, it’s only habits that conflict in some way with an existing way of doing things that are difficult to form, so her proposal is to use extremely small increments, like her own example of driving to the gym every morning for four days… but just sitting in the parking lot and not actually going in.… then going in and sitting on a bike but not exercising… etc. At each stage, four days of it is supposed to be enough to make what you’ve already been doing a non-threatening part of your routine.
I’ve used the approach to implement some small habits, but nothing major as yet. Seems promising so far.