The Four-Day Win: How to End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace Four Days at a Time

Written by Martha Beck

Narrated by Martha Beck

Author of Oprah’s Book Club Pick—The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

The bestselling author of Finding Your Own North Star reveals how to change the way you eat, four days at a time!

Everyone knows how to lose weight: eat less, move more. But so many dieters who know what to do still don't do what they know. Why not? Because they don't understand the brain-body dynamics of weight loss. Now, cutting-edge research has revealed that millions of dieters following typical weight loss programs are actually programming themselves to get fatter.

In The Four-Day Win, Harvard-trained Oprah Magazine columnist Martha Beck, Ph.D., reverses this trend and teaches dieters to get lean from the brain outward. The Four-Day Win tells how to reverse the brain-body programming that makes you fat, so you can create a new, leaner and healthier body...for good.

As empathetic and funny as she is informative, Martha Beck observes that:
—Traditional dieting relies on the ability to go numb or to override physical and emotional feelings.
—Overeating is a self-calming compulsion similar to OCD -- dieters turn to food (and lots of it) when they're deprived of comfort.
—Overweight people can reverse the brain-body programming that is making them fat. Instead of attacking their bodies, they can learn to support them.

Dr. Beck helps you to think thin and end your compulsion to overeat, and includes a Jump-Start weight-loss program that will help you shed pounds in the best way, both psychologically and physically. An inspiring and enlightening challenge to everything you think you know about losing weight, The Four-Day Win provides you with an easy and fail-proof way to change your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Jan 2, 2007
• ISBN: 9780743564168

Martha Beck

Martha Beck, PhD, is a life coach and longtime contributor to Oprah Daily. She is a Harvard-trained sociologist and New York Times bestselling author. She has published nine nonfiction books, one novel, and more than 200 magazine articles. Her book The Way of Integrity is a recent Oprah's Book Club Selection.

Reviews for The Four-Day Win

[Vy T Dao · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I keep this one on rotation because it’s got the most actionable advice I’ve ever read on behavior change. It goes way, way beyond a diet book. She points out why the “just don’t eat that and move more” approach fails often and in a funny, offbeat, but gentle writing style she offers up brain and self esteem science with thinking exercises that work better for me than anything I’ve come across. Highly recommended!

[clueless_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's such a pity that this ground breaking AWESOME information is hidden between the wisecracks, nasty puns and disorder of this wonderful book. But still YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!Beck synthesizes; 'Changing for Good', 'Intuitive Eating' and 'The Places that Scare You' into the most amazing diet advice book evah! And I'll give you hint - it's not what you eat. She uses some wacky, dumbed down exercises to get your psyche working on your side. Which because I love her so much, and I don't really mind lame navel gazing I am going to do. Watch this space. Let's see if I can effortlessly maintain happily ever after.In my senior year in high school I took a college study course that taught among other things like speed reading taught us ten barriers to learning. Some of those were; not liking the instructor or having the material poorly presented. The material is 4DW is sadly poorly presented but the underlying information was a revelation, to me.Okay now that I?ve had a day to review this and let things settle. Let?s see if revisiting the ?bent down corners? of this book can help me make sense of it.?I believe the West is in the midst of an obesity epidemic not only because we?re oversupplied with fattening food, but because we?re telling ourselves we must not eat it.??I found that writing with my non-dominant hand was exceptionally useful for determining what my subconscious mind was thinking about food and eating.?Have you even done well on a diet, even a moderate one for a considerable amount of time and then all of the sudden your find the urge to overeat a food that you literally haven?t had in years? Maybe this is what happened;?In situations where our brains perceive extreme threat, the neo-cortex ? may be ?hijacked? by the deeper, more primitive reptilian layer.?Beck doesn?t use Id and SuperEgo but I found her ?Wildchild? and ?Dictator? names stupid. I immediately visualized my Id as Lucy Lawless/Xena and my SuperEgo as Heather Graham dressed as a porn dominatrix in The Guru. I admit I have enjoyed watching the two of them duke it out in my head ever since the images appeared.?When we?re locked in the war between our Id and SuperEgo, our prevailing mental state is anxiety. This causes floods of stress hormones ? In biological terms, the opposite of getting fat is getting connected, and the antidote to being out of control isn?t being in control, but being in love ...?It has always irks me when someone states unequivocally that they weight X# of pounds. Our cells are constantly turning over, we?re consuming and eliminating, nothing is static about the body.?Learning never ends, and no condition is permanent. But life without change or challenge would be like life in a rubber room. The way to cope with life?s constant change and uncertain progress is to relish fresh experiences, not avoid them.?This was the sticking point for me in the book Intuitive Eating. I never, ever could trust this. But since Beck has revealed my multiple personality and that I only really need to listen to one of them. Well that changes everything.?Ultimately, you?ll be able to?with a high level of confidence that your real nature will choose to eat exactly what is right for you.?My son has a bowl of candy that I keep full for him. It stays full. Miraculously he eats when he?s hungry and stops when he?s full. It?s a miracle!?Removing fattening food from your house to make yourself eat less is about as effective as Prohibition was in making Americans drink less.??No matter what diet you?ve chosen, don?t adhere to it so strictly that you feel absolutely famished,. Ever.??Famine conditions cause the brain-body connection to haul out some very big neuro-chemical guns. The hungrier we get, the more a hormone called dopamine floods an area of our brains called the nucleus accumbens. This causes goal-seeking activity, including the search for food. If we eat immediately, the nucleus accumbens gets swamped with serotonin, we feel satisfied and we stop thinking about eating. If no food shows up, dopamine levels keep rising, driving increasingly urgent food-seeking. Over time, this creates structural changes in the brain so that cravings come to dominate our thoughts and behavior ? even if we get food.?It gets even worse if you know anything about Leptin, NPY and grehlin.?In many Asian philosophical traditions, on the other hand, the thinking self is called ?monkey mind,? and viewed as the resident idiot of the psychological village. ?The things Asian philosophers ?dropped? on their way to enlightenment were delusions ? thoughts that fuel neuroticism and overeating.?I think one of the big problems with Western thinking is that it doesn?t value reflection. All it takes is a short pause to consider why you are eating before you put any food in your mouth.There's that moderation word again; ?Another theme that?s stronger in Asian thought than in the West is simply moderation. Ancient Western images of ?perfect? humans are extreme: they seek poverty, starve themselves, whip themselves, whip other people. The Buddha, archetypal role model of Asia, wasn?t into that. ?Enlightenment in the West is all about self-deprivation. In Eastern thought, it?s about choosing the Middle Way of lovingly detached self-acceptance.?Here?s how to ignore Lucy and Heather and get on with the business of being lean;?according to some medical psychologist, it?s physiologically impossible for your mind to stay locked in a war of control when you?re engaging it?s ability to generate compassion and appreciation.?