Welcome to our first official Bloggy Beck Book Club “session,” y’all!  I am excited to get into the nitty gritty of this book with you, so I am going to get right to it.  Scale Warfare and Bella will be joining us here today, and we will all rotate hosting future blog posts about this book.

Your homework for today was to read pages 1-49 of The Complete Beck Diet for Life and complete the homework given in those pages.  A summary of your to-dos includes:

1. Gather your supplies:
   1. 3×5 index cards
   2. Blank business cards
   3. A diet notebook
   4. A digital scale
   5. Graph paper
   6. A small box
   7. A larger box
   8. Multiple sets of measuring spoons & cups
   9. A digital food scale
2. Set a modest weight loss goal.
3. Make time for dieting (read: schedule it in!).
4. Get a Diet Buddy.
5. Get organized – make the supplies you need easy to find, and get rid of foods that don’t support your goals.
6. Make a Memory Box.
7. Fill your Distractions Box.
8. Talk to your family/friends/support system about what you’re doing.
9. Build a sense of entitlement.
10. Make your Response Cards.
11. Make your Advantages Deck (a special set of Response Cards that you read daily to remind yourself why weight loss is so important).

We’ll touch on most of these homework items today (warning, warning, long post ahead!) and, for some of them, revisit them over and over throughout the book club discussion in the coming weeks.

So first question – how’d you do with the homework?  Did it feel like a lot?  Did you find yourself thinking, “This is an awful lot of work, I wonder if it’s really worth it?”  I know I did.  Last year I first came across one of Beck’s books and I remember thinking how much work it all seemed to require.  Surely one could lose weight without spending THAT kind of time and putting THAT much energy into the process.

Or not.  So fast-forward to this year when I started reading this book, and I was a whole lot more willing to do the work.  Are you?  I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on this.

I went back and reread the introduction/first chapter this week.  What would you do if I told you that you could be free from guilt, worry, self-consciousness, and self-blame regarding your weight?  How would it feel to be free of hunger and your fear of losing control?  What if temptation was no longer overwhelming to you and you were able to quit eating emotionally?  Beck suggests that all these things, and many more, are possible for everyone who implements the skills she outlines in her book.

I won’t promise you that this book is the silver bullet; a magic “pill” that will make losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight feel easy.  It won’t.  The skills you learn in this book require time and work in order for you to reap the benefits.  But I can tell you that, in my personal experience, these skills really do help.  For me, the biggest benefit I have gained from practicing these skills is the ability to remember, at any given moment, what my goals are and why my behavior and choices in that moment matter.  Mindfulness of what I’m trying to achieve has enabled me to make much better choices the overwhelming majority of the time.

Questions for y’all to chew on and talk about in the comments:

1. Did you do all the homework?
2. Was there a part of you that resisted doing any/all of the work?
3. What was your favorite part?
4. Is any one of these tools proving to be more useful to you than the others?
5. What are your favorite “advantages” and “responses”?  I’d love to hear what kind of self-talk is working for y’all!

Please jump in with your thoughts, questions, ideas, and feedback.  Let’s make this discussion meaningful not only for us, but as a resource for anyone who might stumble upon this post in the future!