The ABCs of Weight Loss

Your first six steps

The first three are A, B and C. Do them in order — after that, the rest of the alphabet is yours to browse however you like.

1. 1

   Step 1: Start logging what you eat

   The single highest-yield thing you can do, and you can start with your next meal.

   A is for Awareness

   Awareness is the first letter for a reason. Most eating is automatic — shaped by the size of the plate, the light in the room, the bag with no bottom in sight — and you cannot change what you have not noticed.

   Writing down what you eat is not about counting or judging. It makes visible the decisions you are currently making on autopilot. Do not change your diet yet. Just record it, honestly, for three days, and include where you were and what you were feeling, because the pattern is usually in the context rather than the food.

   Where you can, write it down before you eat rather than after. Logging afterwards is a record; logging beforehand is a decision.

   Log your next meal. Not tomorrow — the next thing you eat.

   Open the food log
2. 2

   Step 2: Understand why diets failed you

   It was not a lack of willpower. It was a temporary fix to a permanent situation.

   B is for Betterness

   Almost every diet works for a while. That was never the hard part. The hard part is that a temporary change produces a temporary result, which is why so many people lose the same thirty pounds over and over for decades.

   This course takes a different route. Instead of handing you rules to follow by force, it re-trains the systems that make your decisions for you — starting with the rooms you live in.

   You are not starting another diet today. You are starting an update.

   Listen to the session and let go of the idea that you failed.

   Read B is for Betterness
3. 3

   Step 3: Make one promise you are sure you can keep

   Small and kept beats ambitious and abandoned.

   C is for Commitment

   Every time you promise yourself something and do not deliver, you teach yourself that your own word does not predict much. The repair is not to try harder — it is to make a smaller promise and keep it.

   Write one sentence, in the present tense, small enough that you are certain you can hold it for two weeks. "I drink a glass of water when I get home." That is enough.

   Write your one commitment down and put it where you will see it.

   Read C is for Commitment
4. 4

   Step 4: Walk through one room

   Your environment is making decisions for you. Take one room back.

   The Environmental Operating System is the most concrete part of this course. You walk through a space and ask four questions: what is here, what is seen, what is convenient, and how does this place make me feel.

   Then you design one Rule and one Rearrangement for that space. You do not need to do the whole house today. Start with the door you come in through, or the kitchen.

   Pick the room where most of your unplanned eating happens.

   Start with Coming Home
5. 5

   Step 5: Finish the ABCs

   You have done A, B and C. The remaining twenty-three are about an hour and a quarter in total.

   The first three steps were the first three letters. The rest of the alphabet is the same shape — a few minutes each, one idea at a time — and finishing it gives you the whole vocabulary before the real work starts.

   There is no correct order and no need to rush. One a day works. So does listening straight through in one sitting while you drive or walk, using the full playlist at the bottom of this page.

   Work through D to Z, reading or listening, whichever you prefer.

   See all twenty-six letters
6. 6

   Step 6: Start the 15 Sessions

   The program itself — about seven hours of audio, in order.

   The fifteen sessions are the core of the course. They move in five movements: update your operating systems, build the lighthouse, leave the shore, sail the boat, and update the systems for good. Sessions 3 through 7 carry written exercises, and those are the ones that do the heavy lifting.

   Work through them in order — each one builds on the one before it. With the alphabet behind you, the vocabulary the sessions use will already be familiar.

   Begin with Session 1 and let the sequence carry you.

   Go to the 15 Sessions