How often have you thought no but said yes? About as many times as you've thought fruit cup and ordered cheesecake?Sometimes diet and exercise alone just aren't enough! Many women put too much on their plates, both literally and figuratively. For those who always put others first, psychotherapist Karen R. Koenig explains the link between being too nice and eating too much and gives detailed advice on how to lose that extra baggage -- both emotional and physical -- by becoming more self-focused and assertive in every aspect of life.
- Take the "How Nice Are You?" quiz to figure out if your Good Girl persona is sabotaging your weight-loss efforts.
- Try the "Grab Your Thinking Cap" exercises to understand why you mightbe finding fulfillment inside the fridge instead of in other aspects of your life.
- Use the "Nice Girl Recovery Tips" to learn practical strategies for saying noand putting yourself first...so you can finally lose the weight you want.
Karen Koenig's on-the-page psychotherapy helps women attack the source of their food issues and find a different path to happiness -- one that doesn't pass through the kitchen and does lead to healthy habits for life.Introduction: Nice Girls -- Read This
How Is Being Nice a Vice?Weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint -- and rare is the habitual overeater who goes on a diet, loses twenty or fifty pounds, and coasts slimly through the rest of her days. If staying trim were that easy, I'd be out of my psychotherapy job as fast as you could say Nutrishake. Instead of miraculous, overnight, permanent transformation, the stream of women I've treated for eating and weight problems over the past three decades had to struggle and settle for modest successes in improving their relationship with food and the bodies their aspiring spirits inhabit.
It isn't that they aren't motivated -- they are! -- or that they don't work hard in therapy -- they do! Their drive to eat normally and lose weight has the focus of a laser. Their diet histories could fill libraries. They've read all the weight-loss books, sat through the twelve-step meetings, swallowed the magic pills, and had their stomachs surgically sectioned and stapled. Their stories are unique yet oddly universal. These women have been there and done that and are stillsearchingfor the Holy Grail that will grant them peace with the bleeping scale.
As I sit and listen to the play-by-play of their lives, one thing becomes clear. It's not just their dysfunctional childhoods, crummy genetic loading, depression, or anxieties that hold them back from reaching their eating and weight goals. Nor is it their stressful jobs, loopy families, parched lives, or lackluster spouses or partners. What keeps them fat and stuck in the cookie jar, unable to climb out and stay out, is thatthey're too damned nice!
Theylovebeing nice. I do an exercise in the first session of my Quit Fighting with Food workshop in which I ask participants (who are -- big surprise -- mostly women) to share one thing they like about themselves. And what do most of them say? They beam and tell methey're nice, of course. Though many are highly educated and skilled, world traveled, at the peak of impressive careers, or have raised children alone with few resources except their own broad shoulders...they continue to believe that their most striking asset is "being nice." Not that there's anything wrong with it, as they say onSeinfeld, but come on. It makes me want to cry and shake some sense into them at the same time.
The women I treat are so übernice that they'd not only insist on giving you the blouse off their backs, they'd launder and press it first, wait around for you to put it on, then button it up for you! These kinds of women swell the ranks of t
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