Day 23 - Beck Diet Solution, Counter The Unfairness System

“We are conditioned to look for justice in life and when it doesn’t appear, we tend to feel anger, anxiety or frustration. Actually, it would be equally productive to search for the fountain of youth, or some such myth. Justice does not exist. It never has, and it never will. The world is simply not put together that way. Robins eat worms. That’s not fair to the worms…You have only to look at nature to realize that there is no justice in the world. Tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, droughts are all unfair.”

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones (New York: Avon Books, 1977), p. 173.

Yet many of us did grow up expecting, to some extent, that life should be fair and these beliefs can’t be unlearned overnight. To help counter the unfairness syndrome, BDS focuses here today and gives us some things to think about when we’re bemoaning how unfair it is that we can’t eat whatever we want:

1. Go back to your why’s. At least one fair aspect of being human is that we have free will, and most likely we have freely chosen to lose weight. We could just as freely choose to stop and eat whatever we want for the rest of our lives. But do we want to be the weight that comes with that? Or do we want to stick with our weight loss steps? The choice is up to us.

2. How many advantages do you have that other people don’t? Maybe you have an abundance of friends and family, pets, special talent, money, the freedom to organize your day however you’d like, a beautiful garden, house, and so on. Now think about all those people in the world who don’t have what you have. It’s unfair they don’t have all the wonderful things you do – but life is not fair.

3. Create a Response Card. Write down a few helpful responses to the STs of unfairness and pull it out whenever thoughts of unfairness tempt you to eat.

Another thing to remember – the “fair” way we were eating before, that caused us to gain weight, wasn’t normal and healthy. Wouldn’t it be much more fair to ourselves to eat in a healthful way, lose weight and reach our goals?

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