Free The 20/20 Diet by Phil McGraw Page A

over some ridiculously inappropriate food choice, take control of your thoughts. Replace the excuse to indulge with a rational thought from this list or one of your own so you have a clear-cut
    strategy when you have a moment of weakness:
     Choices I make now will impac
    BOOKS,
    t my future. I will turn down this
    temptation now so that I don’t regret my decision later.
     The payoff of instant gratification isn’t enough for me any-
    more. I care too much about reaching my goals to sacrifice
    them for something that tastes good in a fleeting moment.
     If I’m genuinely experiencing physical hunger, I will eat some-
    thing from this plan to hold me over until the next mealtime.
    What’s Your Rout STREET
    ine?
    If I asked you about your food routine, what would you say? Do you even
    have one? Or is eating more like a haphazard, “grab ’n go,” stuff some-
    thing in your face when it’s convenient scenario most days of the week?
    Many of the overweight patients I’ve worked with and counseled
    over t BIRD
    he years report that they pretty much eat whatever is around,
    whenever they can. But the lack of a purposeful routine is still a routine.
    It’s not a healthy one and it’s not one that lends itself to weight loss, but it’s a routine nonetheless. And it actual y could be a huge factor in your current weight problem, because the latest theories indicates that when (or how often) we eat is just as important as what we eat.
    48 | The 20/20 Diet
    For one full day, write down everything that goes in your mouth.
    From the coffee with cream and sugar in the car to the handful of
    chocolate candies at work, the chicken nuggets you grabbed at the
    drive-thru to the bag of chips you inhaled while watching a sitcom;
    write it all down. You can record it in a food journal, in your phone, a spiral notebook, or a collection of Post-it notes. You should eat like you normally do on an average day; the only thing that’ INC.
    s different is
    that you’ll record it and keep that record.
    To make this even more useful, you’re also going to write down the
    time that you ate the foods and a little information about what you were thinking about when you ate them. If you weren’t thinking at al , you can just write “nothing”—that’s fine. Or if you ate as a response to hunger
    and all you were thinking about was that you were absolutely famished,
    write “famished.” Alternatively, if you’re thinking about how stressed out, pissed off, or exhausted you are, say so. All of it is very useful data.
    This exercise is going to provide y BOOKS,
    ou with a world of information.
    It will reveal to you what kind of value you are assigning to your food currently. I’ll get into that more later, but for right now, make a pact with yourself that, starting when you wake up tomorrow, you will
    record everything that you consume.
    When the chart is filled in, look at your results. Do you notice a
    pattern? Are you coming to realize that more of your food choices are
    based on an emotion, a trigger, or just pure habit rather than a physi-
    cal need to eat? Or did you let yourself get so hungry that by the time
    you finally ate, y STREET
    ou severely overate?
    My One-Day Food Journal
    Time of Day
    Food or Drink
    What I’m Thinking About
    BIRD
    Getting Out of Your Own Way | 49
    We’re going to look at these habits and trends in more depth a
    little later, but for now, this is a great starting point for acknowledging your routine—one that we will change together.
    Are You Ready? (Or Just Pretending?)
    Do you want to be thinner but aren’t willing to give up yo INC.
    ur favorite
    foods? You’d love to be healthier but exercise is out of the question?
    Are you still thinking, “I suppose I’ll get around to losing weight at
    some point down the road”? If those thoughts ring true, then you are
    not ready and there is little or nothing that I can say to convince you
    to get ready at this point.
    If, however, you have hit