Day 3 - Beck Diet Solution, Eat Sitting Down

And the Real Beck Dieters too!

The task of the day?  Sit down to eat!  A simple enough concept, but sometimes hard to put into practice, especially if you're in the habit of standing up to eat.  Eating while standing up might be the product of such unhelpful, sabotaging thoughts as these:

1. I don't have time to eat while sitting down.
2. It doesn't matter if I just have a few bites on the go.
3. I'll sit down to eat next time, cross my heart!
4. I like the freedom to just graze - I don't want to be restricted.
5. Food eaten while standing up contains no calories.
6. It doesn't matter if I just ate some celery or carrots while standing up - my diet allows me to eat as much of them as I want.

Using the Beck method, we contradict these Sabotaging Thoughts right back - here's a few examples, you can customize your own:

1. I make time for doctor's visits, picking up prescriptions, taking medicines, and doing treatments, don't I?  This is no less important.  I'm going to look at how I spend my time and reorganize it to make sure I take the time to eat sitting down.
2. I know full well that every calorie counts.  I'm not going to kid myself.
3. This time I might have only eaten vegetables standing up.  But it's the behavior which I need to change.  I need to make sitting down to eat a habit.  If I keep the habit of standing up to eat, eventually it won't be just vegetables, it'll be bars of chocolate.
4. That "next time" where you sit down to eat may never come, unless you do it now!
5. I have to choose my "hard."  Which "hard" do I want - the burden of restricting myself so I don't walk around mindlessly grazing, or the burden of carrying the extra weight and possibly never fulfilling my "whys"?

You might also ask why it's so important to eat sitting down.  Beck focuses on the concept of "mindful eating," which will be discussed in more detail later.  The point is that we want to be aware of and appreciate every bite that enters our mouths.  To diet successfully, we have to do away with the mindless eating, where we don't hold ourselves accountable for what enters our bodies, think that what we eat doesn't matter, and end up gorging ourselves before we feel satisfied.  Beck is training us to be satisfied with a reasonable, healthy diet, and a crucial component of that is to eat sitting down, where we are more aware and mindful about what we are eating, and thus become more satisfied by our allowed portions.