Book Review: The Four Day Win

Review:
The Four Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace
By Martha Beck, PhD
2007
Rodale Books, New York, NY

Reprinted with permission from Blogcritics Magazine

In deciding to review The Four Day Win, I'm not sure if the incentive was more to actually lose weight myself, or have a chance to evaluate work by Martha Beck, whom I've long admired as columnist for O Magazine. Go ahead and groan, but I'll have to conclude that either way; it’s a win-win situation.

Throughout she is clearly trying to reassure and convince the reader that she is on their side. She’s been there, and she’s been with others who've been there. She wants to save the reader from anymore self inflicted pain, poor body image, and stress than absolutely necessary. To express her belief – that dieters, or anyone struggling with life changes – have suffered long enough, often at their own hands; she uses a combination of humor and hard science. In fact, Beck’s humor is one of the book’s strengths, although it maybe be off-putting to some. She uses some jargon and catch phrases that might seem a little contrived. (Think Rachel Ray’s “EVOO”, or Jon Stewart and his “moment of Zen”).

But personally I found her style and humor delightful. Martha Beck’s desire to help others comes across the page easily. Her approach is non judgmental and it is very important to stress that although she doesn't necessarily champion one diet plan over another, she is firm in stating that no plan will work permanently without readjusting one’s outlook.

The premise of her book is this: Human nature allows us to learn new behaviors and adapt fresh outlooks in only about four days’ time. Beck, a Harvard trained life coach, noticed countless clients’ abilities to break through old patterns of behaviors in four days. A week was too daunting, and two or three days were not enough, but somehow four days would typically do the trick.

This rule of four is also found when learning phone numbers, account numbers or any longish series of information; the data will be internalized easier if broken down into three or four digit or character groups. Beck even saw a connection when a news broadcast stated that “they don't like to keep the [stock] market closed for 4 days.” The assumption attached is that a four day stretch is seen as “status quo” (and certainly having the NYSE down cannot be seen as the norm, not in a capitalistic society anyway.)

So what happens in these four day stretches? Brain retraining, to put it bluntly. Beck relates the work of a Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, who had been studying the behaviors of people with OCD. Schwartz, an MD, showed his patients MRIs of their brains’ activities. These images would show atypically high activity in the section of the brain that initiates fear type reactions.

The significance of these findings proved amazing; Dr. Schwartz’s patients, once they could visualize what was going on in their craniums, could actually begin to talk themselves out of their compulsive behavior. Knowing that their urges to wash their hands, check their doors, or any number of compulsive behaviors were simply temporary brain aberrations helped them gauge their feelings more rationally. Then they'd substitute a pleasurable activity for the compulsive one, and eventually, after several sessions, the compulsion diminished significantly. What’s even more interesting is that when Dr. Schwartz took newer MRIs – he saw that his patients’ brains had been restructured.

Because Beck compares the urges behind OCD to those of overeating, she takes the significance of this restructuring or neuroplasticity to encourage the reader that there is most definitely hope for those who feel trapped by self-defeating mind sets. To further get the point across, Beck uses more of these kinds of real life examples to describe the theory behind The Four Day Win.

In a chapter called “The Body Whisperer”, she tells of a friend who is an accomplished horse whisperer and how this woman was able to completely connect with and subdue a horse that was so aggressive and unpredictable, that it was recommended that his owner shoot him. She was able to do this after much time spent observing horses’ behaviors and ‘language’. Beck’s point was that we need to understand and connect with our own physiology’s style which she calls Prey/Predator.

The Prey/Predator M.O. is like comparing the inner child-like scared part of us that feels cornered when the intellectual, bossy part of us decides that we need to lose weight. (Or Freudians may feel more comfortable with Id vs. Super Ego.) Our inner Prey creature is terrified of the stealthy Predator, and begins to sabotage all the good intentions of exercise and calorie limits. In The Four Day Win, Beck gives many simple – but often profound – exercises to continually help the reader recognize what they are really doing to themselves, and how to help their bodies trust their minds.

For more from this talented writer, click here.