The Four Day Win Quotes

“Emotions are virtually always responses to thoughts. That’s great news, because while it’s impossible to control an emotion once a thought has triggered it, we can change our thoughts deliberately. We do this not by contradicting them, but by questioning them. EXPLANATION:”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“it becomes a problem when we mistake the stories in our minds for The Truth.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“you are the authority figure in your life.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“The only way to get out of this suicidal pattern is to leave the battlefield by going to the Watcher’s place of peace. EXERCISE:”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“When you find yourself stressed, tense, and veering toward anxiety eating, take a time-out for just three breaths. Long, deep breaths.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“It’s been said that the entire philosophical foundation of Zen is contained in three small words: “Not always so.” If you want to stop emotional eating (which means you’ll eat only out of physical hunger, which means you’ll eventually be the right weight for your body) you must become willing to apply those three words to your own beliefs. THE”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“you’ve learned to align your consciousness with your inner Watcher and perch there, observing your physical and emotional feelings. Just one step remains in your contemplation training—the step that’s most profoundly healing and most difficult for a person raised in the rationalist tradition. You must learn to watch any or all of your thoughts without believing them. This is a skill that allows you to break away from any psychological conditioning that predisposes you to weight gain.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“We also believe thoughts like “I’m hungry” or “I need pie” even when they aren’t true. We react to these inaccurate statements as though they were scientific fact. As”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“we don’t just react to the world as it is. We react to the world as we think it is—the”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“people with weight issues often feel judged and attacked, partly because they spend so much time judging and attacking themselves.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Research has shown that focusing on appreciation and gratitude has all kinds of positive health effects, lowering indicators of disease-causing stress and increasing the flow of healthy hormones in our bloodstreams.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“research on meditation does indicate that staying in a compassionate mode toward one’s self removes brain activity from zones that trigger flight, fight, and frenzied eating.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“The good news is that you can step off the battlefield any time. You do this by aligning yourself with the Watcher part of your brain, then observing the conflict from a kind, detached distance. The more time you spend observing the battles, the less energy the war will have, and the sooner it will end. Strange but true: the brain that observes itself, changes itself. A”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Extreme overeating is basically a warp spasm, a violent tantrum thrown by the deprived or captive Wild Child in our brains. When it hits, rational thinking goes out the window.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“your neocortex is the part of your brain that tracks time.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“In any situation where our brains perceive extreme threat, the neocortex (the most recently evolved layer of the brain, which performs logical calculation) may be “hijacked” by the deeper, more primitive reptilian layer.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“to the extent that you’re anxious about your weight and struggling against the desire to gorge on wickedly fattening food, you live on a battlefield.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Stepping back from the Dictator and the Wild Child and becoming the Watcher is like thinking you’ve been stuck on a railroad track, able to move only backward and forward, and discovering that you had the capacity to fly all along.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“according to some medical psychologists, it’s physiologically impossible for your mind to stay locked in a war of control when you’re engaging its ability to generate compassion and appreciation.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“close your eyes. Continue offering these good wishes while visualizing both the Wild Child and the Dictator until you genuinely mean it, until you can feel compassion toward both sides of yourself. When you get there, consider the following question. Who are you? The only reason you can “see” and offer kindness to both Dictator and the Wild Child is that you’re not either one of them. You’ve moved into a third realm of consciousness, which resides, literally, in a different part of your brain. Call it the Watcher.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Think through the well-meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that within their limited perspectives they’re doing their very best. Then offer them both kindness.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Now, while watching these two mini-you’s, I want you to see that as dysfunctional as they may be, both of them are essentially good. The Dictator wants you to be healthy and beautiful. It gets frantic about your weight for the same reason you might freak out if you saw a beloved pet wandering into traffic. It screams and yells, pens you in or drags you around—anything to keep you from a horrible fat fate. On the other hand, the Wild Child is the part of you that evolved to avoid starvation and captivity. It panics when the Dictator berates, shames, and tries to control it. It knows the Dictator is planning to starve it. So it’s not surprising that the instant the Dictator is weakened by stress, hunger, or environmental chaos, the Wild Child leaps into action and eats like a junkyard dog.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“Now hold up your left palm (you may have to put down this book for a minute) and picture your Wild Child there: 2 inches tall, dressed in skins and bark, covered with scars, waiting for an opportunity to escape or subvert the Dictator’s brutal control. Watch until you can see them both clearly in your mind’s eye.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“hold out your right hand, palm up. Imagine a 2-inch-tall version of yourself in a military uniform, with a whip in one hand and a gun in the other, stomping around in your palm, shrieking deeply personal insults and commanding you to lose weight. This is the Dictator.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“In this chapter, we’ll picture these rule-making and rule-breaking parts of you as humans. Tiny humans. We’ll call them the Dictator and the Wild Child.”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace

“EXERCISE: THE WATCHER, THE DICTATOR, AND THE WILD CHILD”
― Martha N. Beck, The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace