I’m pleased you found your way to this website and hope you’re inspired to learn how to use Cognitive Therapy not only to lose weight but also to keep it off permanently.

I want you to know that it isn’t your fault if you’ve had trouble losing weight or keeping it off. You just haven’t known how. After all, has anyone ever taught you how to:

• motivate yourself every day?
• build your confidence by giving yourself credit?
• create time and energy for dieting?
• get yourself to follow your plan even when you don’t feel like it?
• make a craving go away?
• refrain from emotional eating?
• get right back on track when you make a mistake?
• handle special occasions and people who push you to eat?

The reason I wrote The Complete Beck Diet for Life is to teach dieters how to diet, how to keep going when dieting becomes difficult, how to maintain their weight loss, and how to create a flexible and healthy eating plan. Dieters need to stop putting some foods off limits, but instead, learn how to eat their favorite foods (even candy, fries, or chips) every day.

I developed the five-stage program in this book as I helped yoyo dieters (including myself) in the past 25 years lose weight and keep it off.

If you’re like me and have dieted in the past, it’s so important for you to overcome your discouragement and to recognize that this time will be different.

This time you will learn Cognitive Therapy skills to help you when you’re feeling disappointed, discouraged, deprived, and unmotivated. If you have never learned Cognitive Therapy skills to address these problems, no wonder you haven’t been successful in the past. But here’s your chance to learn how to be a successful dieter - for life.

Helping my patients lose weight has been incredibly gratifying. Losing weight has made them gain confidence in many aspects of their lives — in forming new relationships and reviving existing ones, in pursuing new social and recreational activities, and in making strides in their professional lives. Equally important, losing weight has helped them improve their health, feel better physically, and improve their quality of life. The same can be true for you, too.

— Judith S. Beck, Ph.D