Phillip C. McGraw, known simply as Dr. Phil, became an instant star after appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s program in 1998. He eventually produced his own syndicated TV show in 2002.
A brilliant psychologist and sociologist, Dr. Phil knows how to relate to his viewership thanks to his deep knowledge of human behavior coupled with a persuasive tone. His ability to stir people’s minds and move their hearts is largely due to his blunt style. Dr. Phil invites his audience to play a game of truth. He handles masterfully questions and solutions forcing his viewers into a gentle internal audit.
Discussed in many of his shows, weight is now the main subject of ‘The Ultimate Weight Solution’, a New York Times bestseller unlike any other diet book. The author offers some of the best advice on the management of obesity. In more than 400 pages, Dr. Phil counsels, helps and monitors all the men and women who are struggling with the idea of dieting and who need to be counseled and monitored through their efforts to shed unwanted weight.
“If you adopt what I will give you on every page of this book, you will overcome your weight challenges and struggles…Any plan that creates lasting, for-life results is going to have to be designed specifically for you, by you, with help from someone who has done his homework and has broken the code of what is truly required by you to lose weight and keep it off. That someone is me…Trust me , you are going to get there faster with this approach than if you had followed all the fad diets in the world, one right after the other. Whatever your current weight or diet history, this is something that you can do. All it requires is a willing spirit and an open mind” writes Dr. Phil.
With his usual frankness, the author warns his readers that he is not going to say what they want to hear rather what is difficult to hear hence the truth. We do not have to lose weight, we have a choice and we have to decide to make that choice freely.
After you take that decision, Dr. Phil explains that his strategy is not about counting calories, doing exercise and getting slim but it is about changing why you eat and what you eat in a way that is natural for you and “as normal as breathing”. The strategy is meant to keep you going even when you are experiencing problems and for that reason it works while other weightless programs fail. The seven keys which are part of the strategy correspond to specific behaviors faced by any person who goes on a diet. Each key marks a pause during which you will discuss with Dr. Phil your personal problems through self-evaluations and assignments because if you want to change you have to acknowledge the nature of the problem.
The first key is aptly named “Right Thinking, Unlock the Door to Self-Control” or in other words: you need to change your thinking to change your weight. All you need to do is to throw away all our negative thoughts and believe that you will succeed.
If you don’t get rid of self-defeating thoughts, they will become ingrained in your life. As long as you are telling yourself that you will never lose weight, or that it is an impossible task for you, you are only sabotaging your efforts to lose weight.
‘When you choose your thoughts, you also choose the physiological outcomes that are associated with those thoughts. For every thought you have, a physiological event occurs in unison with that thought. Take anger, for example. An angry reaction can produce elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, skin rashes, and other harmful physiological events.
Getting rid of your negative feelings and thoughts will break a pattern of conduct which always prevented you from changing for the best. You must always be aware that your way of thinking and self-perceptions are not constantly poisoned by faulty thoughts. As you learn this new skill, you must remember that you can only master it through practice.
As you are able to make the choices that create your emotional state, you will be able to exercise control over your emotions, particularly the impulse to eat. When you feel stressed, anxious or depressed, you are naturally drawn to food especially the so called “comfort foods” such as cookies, cake, candy or ice cream. However “these kinds of foods excite the same circuits in your brain that are stimulated by pleasure-inducing drugs, delivering a mild and short-lived high”.
Using food as a drug to cope with emotional pain and stress can quickly turn into an addiction with terrible side-effects such as weight gain, low-esteem, depression and unhappiness. Learning to handle your emotions helps you reduce the number of times you slide back into the old pattern of overeating and binging.
The third key unlocks the door to external control. This means that your environment that is your office or home should be safe from problematic foods. It is wise not to have around you cookies, chocolate bars, salty snacks and frozen desserts and to replace them with low-fat milk products, low-cal snacks, sugar free beverages and fresh fruit. It is also important to prepare a grocery list and to shop when you are not hungry.
The fourth key helps you control your eating habits and begin a new and healthier relationship with food which is no longer at the center of your universe. Before you use this key, you need to study your bad habits in order to understand which of your eating behaviors are ruled by habit. Once you stop the pattern of mindless, automatic eating, you will begin to lose even more weight.
“If people in your life do not find it glaringly obvious that you have changed the way you live, act, think and feel, then you have not made dramatic enough changes. You make a difference when you do different. When you behave like a winner, you are a winner” says Dr. Phil.
The fifth key helps you control your food intake. Dr. Phil makes a distinction between high-response cost food which require a deal of work and effort to prepare (eggs, lean meat, fish, nonfat dairy products, vegetables, whole grain, brown rice) but which are healthy and low-response cost food which require no preparation such as chocolate bars, puddings, croissants and all snack foods and are highly calorific.
High-response cost food are hunger suppressants which means they can curb your hunger and this is particularly true of protein based food such as chicken, beef and fish. Because they take longer to eat, your body has more time to receive stop-eating signals from your hypothalamus. By the time you chew and swallow these foods, you’re starting to feel full, so there is little chance that you will overeat.
The sixth key opens the door of body control through exercise and the seventh and last key stresses the importance of a support network. You need to surround yourself with people who want you to succeed, not just for today, next week, or next month, but for the rest of your life.
“It is you who must create the life you want…A life that with each passing day will bring you health, energy, confidence, peace of mind that cannot be disturbed, and a spirit that soars. If you can do this, and you can, then you will have what you want because you made the choices, you accomplished what was required, and you reached for the best that was within you.”
In “The Ultimate Weight Solution”, Dr. Phil uses his powerful psychological skills to accompany the dieters who need to be counseled and helped through their efforts to lose weight. His step-by-step, personalized approach based on scientifically sound information will help you regain control over your eating habits and achieve permanent weight loss.
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