Thinking Thin

From the Author, Tom Nicoli

If you’ve picked up this book, hoping for a handbook that tells you how to really buckle down and lose all your excess weight in the next 30 days – or sooner – you might as well put it down right now, and grab one of the many others next to it on the shelf. Not that any of those others will work, at least not on a long-term basis, but maybe you’ll feel encouraged by all the promises they make, or perhaps have your sense of guilt alleviated by the pain so many of them will tell you that you must bear (and have been led to believe you certainly deserve). And as for that 30-day promise, I have always felt that promises of a “quick fix” are misleading, if not downright deceptive. Yet we gobble up these promises up, so to speak, because in our society we’ve become accustomed to instant gratification of all our desires. But many of us have found out the hard way, wasting time and money and feeling worse than when we started, that the “quick fix” just doesn’t work for permanent weight control. If you’ve devoted years to training your body to accumulate excess unwanted fat – however unknowingly you may have done so – you simply can’t expect to reverse all that “training” in 30 days or less and automatically maintain the changes. You most likely have done it before and know it just doesn’t work!

If, however, you would like to learn how to lose the weight, get healthier, and improve your sense of well-being – for the rest of your life – without the familiar pain, struggle and constant internal debate making you feel worse about yourself instead of better, this book may well be for you. But enough of the sales pitch. Let’s get down to what this book is, why I wrote it, and how it can really help improve your life, while making the pounds go away. It may help you to know that thousands of people in 16 countries have already experienced the results of what you are about to learn.

Here’s the premise: We are the most affluent society in earth’s history, with a standard of living beyond the dreams of most of the planet’s population, and beyond the comprehension of those living just a couple of generations ago. That’s the good news. The bad news is that our butts, bellies, and thighs give clear testament to that affluence. To put it delicately, we are a society of fat people, and that excess weight threatens to offset many of the advances science has made toward allowing us to live longer, healthier, and happier lives.

Granted, some people are obese as a result of genuine physiological dysfunction, such as glandular disorders and the like. For those whose obesity has a medical cause, there is no substitute for professional medical care. But these people are a small fraction of the obese population, and even they would almost certainly benefit from my approach in concert with treatment from their physician.

But back to the premise. First, how did we come to accumulate all the excess weight in unhealthy, unwanted stored fat? More to the point, how can we solve this problem once and for all? We must not be doing something right, because while we feed the weight-loss industry over $38 billion a year, we just continue to get bigger (as does the industry itself!). You would think that, being as how we’re so incredibly affluent, we ought to be capable of spending ourselves thinner, trimmer and healthier. But it just doesn’t work that way, any more than we would be able to spend ourselves out of debt. We have to approach the real problem — to first understand why we’re so fat and how we got that way. Then we need to address the real issues and fix the things that are broken, rather than inventing new ways to convince ourselves that they aren’t really broken, after all. Not to imply that you are “broken,” but it’s the simplest way to make my point.

That sounds pretty straightforward and simple, doesn’t it? Well, not to give away the ending before you even start reading the book, but the solution is pretty straightforward and simple. The trick to getting the right answers, however, is to start asking the right questions. And that’s what we haven’t been doing to date. This book is my attempt to help you identify and clarify the factors that have left you “more” than you used to be, and ultimately, to help you reverse the behaviors that got you that way, without inflicting a bunch of pain, suffering, and guilt. The end result that we’ll strive for – and which many of my clients have achieved – is a healthy lifestyle and, by extension, an improved body and sense of well-being. We won’t do it overnight, but by the same token, we won’t be suffering in the process.

And we won’t be using any untested “miracle breakthrough” cures, either. We will, instead, go to the heart of the problem that drives so many people to unhealthy, negative behaviors. We will strive to understand the lifelong “programming” that we are each subjected to – some of it helpful, some very harmful – and will begin using proven tools to free ourselves from that which hinders our quest for happiness.

This is where my concept of D.E.P.T.H.™ comes in. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.” This may seem like an oversimplification, and perhaps for some global issues it is. When it comes to you as an individual taking responsibility for your own life, however, it fits perfectly. If you have a problem and are not actively doing something to solve it, more than likely you are only making it worse. Most problems will not go away if you ignore them. If you put off making an important decision, you are still making a decision to do nothing. In other words, you cannot be an “innocent bystander” in your own life – you are either part of the problem or part of the solution. D.E.P.T.H. is my acronym for Denial, Emotional Pain, Truth & Honesty – a concise description of both the problem and the solution. More accurately, it explains the origin of the problem (whether it is overeating, substance abuse, gambling, compulsive shopping, or numerous other self-destructive, self-sabotaging habits) – and it also provides the key to the solution.

In our affluent, distraction-filled society, it is all too easy for most of us to live in complete denial of our core problems. And in this land of plenty we have so many ways to alleviate the emotional pain that results from not dealing with our personal issues responsibly. Stuffing our faces (for reasons other than physical hunger) is one of the most common ways. This often causes problems that ultimately make us even unhappier, so we “feed” our pain ... and so on, and so on. The key to escaping this cycle of denial/pain/deeper denial/deeper pain is to face our problems with truth and honesty. In that sense, you could also say that D.E.P.T.H. describes the journey from unhappiness to fulfillment. It is my hope that this book will be a road map for that journey.

D.E.P.T.H. has another meaning too, a deeper one, if you will. In order to make real and lasting behavioral changes we have to “dig down deep” and get to the root cause of the behavior. Externalized approaches simply do not work. Instead we must access the subconscious, for it is there that the “programming” (both good and bad) resides, and it is there that “reprogramming” must occur. This doesn’t mean we have to spend years talking it out with a therapist, or sitting on a mountaintop meditating. In this book I will explain some simple and straightforward techniques to access the subconscious. You can do many of these yourself, and there are resources available if you desire outside assistance.

Most of the information in this book is not new. The principles and the techniques have been around a long time, but in this society of inflated expectations and instant satisfaction, too many of us have forgotten them. I wrote this book to help you remember, and to help you put these principles and techniques to work in your own life. There might not be all that many truly win-win situations in life, but if you come along with me on this most pleasant journey, I think you’ll agree that this process is, by any measure, a winner. For you will have taken responsibility for your own life – you will have become, perhaps for the first time, part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

So here’s to “a better you” – and that, in a nutshell, is why I wrote this book.

In happiness and health,

Tom Nicoli