A short spoken piece by Jim Katsoulis explaining how to resist food temptations to support weight loss and maintain a thin-person lifestyle. He stresses that knowledge alone is insufficient and identifies two determinants of food choices in the moment: (1) how you feel (emotional state) and (2) what you are thinking. Recommended practice: cultivate emotional indifference toward tempting foods and prepare specific internal statements (thought scripts) to remind yourself of consequences (example given for sugar: avoid glucose spikes, crashes, cravings, and empty calories). He notes occasional permissiveness but emphasizes practice and consistency to improve weight control.
Chapters
How to say no to food. So this is one of the biggest skills you need in order to lose weight and live as a thin person. And it's something that you have to practice and develop because knowing what you should and shouldn't eat is not enough. That does not make you choose the right food. What makes you choose the right foods are two things. How you feel in the moment when you're about to decide and what you're thinking in the moment when you're about to decide. So the first thing you want to do is you want to practice feeling a sense of indifference for these foods. You need to relax and disconnect yourself from all of those emotions because you've spent your entire life being condition through advertisements to associate fun, pleasure, excitement to all these foods. So when you get in a situation where you see that food and you say, I'm not going to have it now, you start to feel deprived. So we want to avoid that by relaxing and feeling more indifferent for the food, disconnecting from those emotions. Now the second thing, and this is the big one, is what are you thinking in that moment when you're going to make that food decision? And so you want to start practicing what you are going to focus on and what you're going to say in that moment. So I'll share with you. I have different ones for different foods. But for sugar, for example, I will say, I don't want that sugar. My body, I don't want to spike my glucose levels. I don't want to create a spike and then a crash and then have cravings for more sugar in an hour or two. I don't want to deal with any of that. I don't want those empty calories and I don't want that in my life. Now, again, sometimes I say yes to those foods. But when I want to say no, that's what I focus on. That's what I think. I relax myself, I disconnect my emotions from that food, and then I say that to myself. And most of the time that allows me to say no consistently. And if you practice this, you can get very good at saying no to these foods. And when you get better at being able to say no to foods, you're getting much better at controlling your weight.
