Shirley Simon begins her book, Learn to Be Thin, by telling her story. Like most people who write diet books, Shirley started out obese. She tried every diet, lost and gained many pounds, and still ended up fat. Nothing was working, she said, until she took a class in behavioral psychology and realized that her weight problem resulted not so much from eating the wrong foods in the wrong amounts and lacking the willpower to change, but from her eating behaviors--how she ate. And learning about behavior modification helped her realize that behavior was something she could change.
That's when Shirley, a psychology graduate student, decided to research eating behavior. She found there were a number of studies done on that subject, investigating differences in people's eating behavior, concluding that obese people behave differently around food and eating than do people of normal weight. Other researchers, she learned, had come up with a variety of techniques for changing that behavior to help the obese learn to eat normally and finally lose weight permanently.
Shirley used her research and her own personal battles with obesity to develop the learning program she lays out in her book. As she says in her Preface, "This book will give you an understsanding of how you learned and are continuing to learn eating behaviors that guarantee that you will never successfully lose weight and maintain the loss" (6). It will, she says, "teach you to control your actions and to become master of those things in your environment that have ruled your eating life" (7).
Though I've read these passages many times over the years, they never cease to inspire me. Shirley's story is my story too. For the last twenty years or so, my weight has climbed, despite my best efforts to prevent it. Eating habits that were learned at home and somehow kept in check until middle age are now in full sway. But I haven't given up on changing my eating habits. Though the goal seems further away than ever, maybe this time, with Shirley's help and this web log, I can finally succeed.
