The Diet Trap Solution by Beck & Beck

This is the second time I have purposely read through The Diet Trap Solution. It is one that you can keep referring back to when you find your eating going out of control.

The blurb says:

Most diet programmes work at first. We lose a few pounds in a few weeks, but then life happens and the bad habits and the weight return. In this invaluable book, Judith Beck PhD offers the solution to break free from these common diet traps and keep the weight off for life.

Judith Beck explains that when it comes to losing weight, it's not just about what we eat – it's also about how we think. To consistently eat differently, we must learn to think differently. Diets fail us because they don't offer effective strategies for overcoming the common traps – emotional eating, social pressure, dining out – that can derail us. Now, she and her daughter, Deborah Beck Busis, share the techniques they have successfully used with thousands of clients, revealing exactly how to overcome the thoughts and behaviours that have been holding you back.

With The Diet Trap Solution, readers on any diet can learn to identify their specific diet traps, prepare for their personal triggers and create action plans to strengthen their 'resistance muscle' – making losing weight easy, sustainable and enjoyable.

This is another book that I was reading through with my friend, as we try to encourage each other to get healthier and lose weight.  

The book goes through the psychology of dieting and why most diets fail - not because of the diets themselves, but rather because of ourselves.  There are various core strategies that is recommended you do every day (for example, reading through your Advantages List of why it is important to you to lose weight). There are reminder cards for you to carry around with you to help prepare and prevent your sabotaging behaviour, and you are encouraged to think in advance about what normally happens to sabotage your weight loss, and what strategy you will use to mitigate it this time.

At the start of the book there is a quick quiz to determine which traps affect you the most, and then the book goes through each of eight traps in groups of two: Internal Traps, Interpersonal Traps, External Traps, and Universal Traps.  For me, I ticked 'yes' to almost all of them, but even if you don't, I'd recommend you at least skim read through the other chapters, even if you don't pay as much attention to the ones that affect you.

I like this book because it is no nonsense,  Again, it's not a magic pill that will solve all your weightloss problems, but it helps focus your mind.  Whilst some of the suggestions seem like common sense, I dare say that if you perfectly enacted all of them in your daily life, you wouldn't be needing to lose weight.