How to effect lasting change in 2009

“Don’t listen to your feelings,” Dr. Jacobs said. “Feelings lie.”

But they also evolve, at least to judge by Oprah Winfrey’s experience. While she is back on the treadmill and off the carbs, Ms. Winfrey is talking about different objectives.

“My goal isn’t to be thin,” she wrote in O. “My goal is for my body to be the weight it can hold — to be strong and healthy and fit, to be itself.”

In concluding this, she may have stumbled across a more realistic form of change for 2009: self-acceptance. - NYT

NVDL: I'd add to this by saying that you need to change your identity (and self-concept) as a first step. If your identity is that you're fat, losing weight is always going to be a negative association. Same with smoking. "I am not a smoker" is the first thing you do on the road to not smoking.

Personally I intend to dwell in the 70-something kilogram range this year. I am just over 80 now. Watch this space.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The first, he said, is to “start with big changes, not small ones,” a strategy likely to yield immediate, noticeable benefits that inspire more positive change. The second is to act like the kind of person you are trying to become; even if you hit the jogging trail with 30 pounds of flab, think of yourself as the jock you want to be. The third strategy is to “reframe” the situation. Recovering alcoholics, for example, have a higher chance of success if they reframe their sober life as a divorce from a tumultuous love affair with drinking, because they can then look back at their old life as a romantic adventure, rather than a sinkhole of regret. The fourth, and crucial, strategy, he said, is based on the “don’t do it alone” advice that is the bedrock of 12-step programs.