Open a Book

Open a Book. 
Choose a book and open it to a random page and point to a phrase. Use that phrase to get you writing today. Free write for 15-20 without stopping.


I decided to find a random page in my kindle. I also thought that using a book of fitness/health was very appropriate as well. The book I chose was The End of Overeating. I could easily relate to what was being written as I am transitioning only minimally successfully to not eating a chick fil a and just having a nutritious  shake. For eating processed junk food and snacks to eating fresh fruits and vegetables. 
It is such a work in progress. I have to retrain my mind and fix my bad habits. One of the biggest challenges is that doing what I have been doing feels good in moment and is so much easier. I really need  to read more and get better tools for adjusting my eating.  


I added the actual text below....


To alter our behavior, we need to change our emotional appraisal of salient food. We begin that process by recognizing our capacity to assign food a value, either good or bad. If we learn to view the pursuit of sugar, fat, and salt in a negative light, and to imbue with equal emotional significance behavior that encourages us to turn away from it, we can reverse a habit. 


Psychologist Arnold Washton offered a vivid description of the emotional underpinnings of old habits, and the challenge of mastering new learning, when he related the story of a medical student who struggled with addiction. The first time the young man was caught diverting drugs at work, he was encouraged to enter rehabilitation. The second time, he was again urged to seek treatment and warned that he would be expelled from medical school if he stole drugs again. 


The young man, said Washton, "will tell you that he wants nothing more in life than to finish his MD/PhD program and be a physician, that this is of the greatest value to him, that his entire self-esteem, his self-worth, rides on this." And yet the student took drugs a third time. "Evidently to him the reinforcement value of the drugs is still far greater than the reinforcement of his career path." 


Changing that kind of behavior requires almost heroic effort, acknowledged Washton. "What ends up being critical is the way in which you're appraising the meaning of the stimulus," he explained. "You can move from one highly charged affective appraisal to another-from `That's going to be fantastic' to `That's the most disgusting thing in the universe; I don't want to come near it."'


David Kessler. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (Kindle Locations 1826-1835). Kindle Edition.