I received my latest order from Amazon yesterday.  (Yes, Bekki, there is something for you in there, too!    )   One of the items I ordered is a book entitled, Eating Mindfully, by Susan Albers, Psy.D.

An excerpt from the book:

Dieting and disliking your body are incredibly detrimental to your emotional, mental, and physical well-being.  They inhibit your ability to accurately decode your body’s messages and feeback.  The dieting mindset is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body’s only line of communication with your head.  The dieting mindset can skew your k nowledge of healthy eating so badly that you have no idea of what to eat.  Mindless eating is then manifested in two ways.  You can either “obsess” or “ignore” internal feedback from both your body and mind, rather than responding thoughtfully to your hunger and to your concern about your health.

In this book, you will learn how mindlessness unknowingly corrupts the way you eat a meal, and how it manifests in a variety of eating problems.  You will gain insight into why mindfulness, which is, of course, the opposite of mindlessness, can provide you with valuable skills to control the way you eat.

I am looking forward to reading this book and gaining some insight on why I choose food the way I do and why I’m eating at times when I’m not really hungry.  Why is my BMI up into a range where the doctor felt he needed to say something about it at my last checkup, and why have I lost the same ten pounds five times now and can’t keep it off?

I started counting my Weight Watchers points on January 2 and am now down 7.5 pounds since my weigh-in that morning.  So far, so good, but I need all the help I can get.  I don’t want to obsess about my weight; I just want to be consistently at my healthy weight and minimize my health risks that are directly attributable to being overweight.  That has proven to be an extremely challenging task over the last dozen years, and I’d love to get a grip on it.