The "Write Way" to Lose Weight

by Mariana Bozesan

There was a funny email circulating around the Internet a few years back entitled "News from the Future," and it contained a long list of fictitious headlines from the year 2050 like "Plague of Spotted Owls Threaten Crops" and "Texas Executes Last Remaining Citizen." But one of the funniest of all was no different from a headline that might appear in the papers today, "50-Year Study Reveals Diet and Exercise Key to Weight Loss."

And that was the joke—that 50 years from now, we will still be debating the best ways to lose weight, and that 50 years from now, the answer will be exactly the same as it is today. This joke actually reveals a welcome truth about the nature of losing weight: we already know everything we need to know in order to do it. In other words, we know what to do but we don’t do what we know.

Then why is it so incredibly difficult?

Behaving Oneself

It’s difficult because the most essential component of weight loss is changing our established patterns of behavior. Notoriously difficult to change, these patterns of behavior are especially resistant when they’re linked to basic human behaviors like eating, because our brain is hardwired to tell us that eating is good. Nevertheless, if we want to succeed, we must change our behavior. So how on earth can we do this when our brains, our consumer culture and our busy, no-time-to-cook lives seem to be conspiring to get us to eat all the time?

First, let’s put aside for a moment the notion of losing weight. For now, let’s just focus on the primary emotions that create the connection between our thoughts and our behavior. There are all kinds of scientific studies to show that doing this is likely to help us in our goal of losing weight. But let’s forget about the studies and the science. Instead, let’s look at our own behavior. And for simplicity’s sake, let’s begin with a powerfully effective way of doing this: keeping a journal of what we do and more importantly, why we do it.

How to be a Journalist

Journaling is a very important step in evaluating our emotions. Through recognizing why an emotion is played out a certain way helps us to better understand our reactions. Then we use this positive understanding to incorporate lasting change.

So for an entire month, we’re going to keep a journal devoted entirely to examining our eating habits and everything connected to them: what we eat, when we eat it, how we were feeling when we did, how we felt after we did it, our bodies, our families, our clothes, our triggers – what event lead to the indulgence, our suspicions, our hopes, frustrations and fears. Once a day, preferably at the same time every day, we’ll write in this journal for 30 minutes. This is what’s known as "structured writing," and it will help to make keeping this journal a manageable daily activity. And please know that I don’t mean counting calories, forget about those. What’s important right now is to learn about our emotional life and how we can put the same cues that lead to disempowering eating habits to work for us with losing weight. In the same manner that we can be prompted to overeat by a negative trigger—having a stressful day at work or finding out a loved one is ill—we can be prompted to engage in positive coping strategies instead.

Finally, remember in the midst of the process to be kind and loving to yourself. The key is to lead the brain to associate pleasure with eating right versus beating yourself up. Decide now that from today onward, you will be in control of what goes into both your thoughts and your mouth.

Walking the Path
Remember, it’s not the information that we’re struggling to remember. Losing weight is not dependent on knowing things. Knowing things is useful, but ultimately, our ability to lose weight and feel better in our bodies is dependent entirely on our ability to change the behaviors that are keeping us heavy¹. Keeping a journal gets us out of the abstract realm of feeling frustrated with our bodies and gets us into the realm of taking responsibility for them. When we enter this magical realm, it’s possible to eat those rich, fatty foods with a sense of joy and celebration because we know that we are actively choosing them, instead of always feeling like they are choosing us. Journaling connects us to our behavior in a way that nothing else can.

Why not start right now?

Sample journaling questions:

1. What is my identity? Fat or thin?


2. What is the relationship between what I eat today and how I feel tomorrow?


3. When am I most likely to overeat? How am I usually feeling in those moments?


4. Why do I want to lose weight? What will the accomplishment give me?


5. What prevented me from achieving my goal in the past?


6. How much weight do I want to lose?


7. By when, will I achieve this goal?

Congratulations! Now that you have made the mindful decision to follow a path of emotional mastery to achieving weight loss, take the next step and commit to doing the following: (1) purchase a journal; (2) call a friend and share with them your commitment to weight loss through a higher level of consciousness – sharing this decision makes it more real; and (3) throw away all the junk food. Go for it!