CENTRE FOR FOUNDATION, LANGUAGE & GENERAL STUDIES

LGSE 3042 PUBLIC SPEAKING AND PRESENTATION

ASSIGNMENT 2
10%

You are required to complete this assignment INDIVIDUALLY.

Case Study Assignment Adapting to Audience

Assignment Deadline: 31st December 2021, before 5 p.m.

INSTRUCTIONS
1. For this assignment, each student will have to analyse the speech scripts given and
state the audience adaptation aspects used by the speakers.
2. Students may choose from any of the aspects listed below:

RELEVANCY INFORMATION CREDIBILITY

COMMON GROUND

3. Students need to indicate suitable audience adaptation technique(s) used for

aspects highlighted. Please see the example below:
Name : ______________________________________________________
JESLINA ANN A/P SANTHANADAS
BPSY 2110-4247
Matric Number : __________________________________________

Case Study 1
Watch the speech here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_alter_why_our_screens_make_us_less_happy?la
nguage=en

Why Our Screens Make Us Less Happy Audience Adaptation

by Adam Alter Technique Used

So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumour. Apparently,

the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual
shareholder's meeting with can of dog food. And he would eat the
can of dog food. And this was his way of convincing them that if
it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their
pets. This strategy is now known as "dogfooding," and it's a
common strategy in the business world. It doesn't mean
everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use
their own products to demonstrate that they feel -- that they're
confident in them. Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think
what's really interesting is when you find exceptions to this
rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in
businesses who don't use their own products. Turns
out there's one industry where this happens in a common way, in
a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry. 

So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described

the iPad as a device that was "extraordinary." "The best browsing
experience you've ever had; way better than a laptop, way better
than a smartphone. It's an incredible experience." A couple of
months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New
York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the
call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of
softball. He said to him, "Your kids must love the
iPad." There's an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said
really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because
he said, "They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our
kids use at home." 

This is a very common thing in the tech world. In fact, there's a Relevancy
school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Demonstrate the proximity of
Peninsula, and they don't introduce screens until the eighth the topic by explaining its
revelance to audience
grade. What's really interesting about the school is that 75 member's personal life space
percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level
Silicon Valley tech execs. So when I heard about this, I thought it
was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider
what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people
I loved, and to people at large. 

So for the last five years, as a professor of business and Credibility

psychology, I've been studying the effect of screens on Knowledge and expertise.
our lives. And I want to start by just focusing on how much time Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time
looks like. What I'm showing you here is the average 24-hour
workday at three different points in history: 2007 -- 10 years ago
-- 2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last
week. And a lot of things haven't changed all that much. We sleep
Common ground
roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people
Use personal pronouns: we
say that's declined slightly, but it hasn't changed much. We work
eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival
activities -- these are things like eating and bathing and looking
after kids -- about three hours a day. 

That leaves this white space. That's our personal time. That

Common ground
space is incredibly important to us. That's the space where we do Use personal pronouns: we
things that make us individuals. That's where hobbies happen,
where we have close relationships, where we really think about
our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to
work out whether our lives have been meaningful. We get some
of that from work as well, but when people look back on their Relevancy
lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of Personalize the topic by
their lives, you look at the last things they say -- they are talking demonstrating its personal
impact -its potential for,
about those moments that happen in that white personal economic impact on audience
members
space. So it's sacred; it's important to us. 

Now, what I'm going to do is show you how much of that space is

taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the
Relevancy
year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this
much. Now, this much. That's how much time we spend of that Demonstrate timeliness that it
is useful to the audience at
free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, present, or will be in the near
future.
is where the magic happens. That's where your humanity
lives. And right now, it's in a very small box. 

So what do we do about this? Well, the first question is: What

does that red space look like? Now, of course, screens are
miraculous in a lot of ways. I live in New York, a lot of my family
lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. The
way I've been able to introduce them to him is with
screens. I couldn't have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the
same way. So there's a lot of good that comes from them. 

One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that

time? How enriching are the apps that we're using? And some
are enriching. If you stop people while they're using them and
say, "Tell us how you feel right now," they say they feel pretty
good about these apps -- those that focus on relaxation,
exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an
average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make
them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt
them and say, "How do you feel?" say they don't feel good about
using them. What's interesting about these -- dating, social
networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing --
 people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We're spending Common ground
three times longer on the apps that don't make us Use personal pronouns: we, us
happy. That doesn't seem very wise. 

So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western

Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas Relevancy
in the workplace. Here's one example. This is a Dutch design Personalize the topic by
firm. And what they've done is rigged the desks to the demonstrating its personal
impact -its potential for,
ceiling. And at 6pm every day, it doesn't matter who you're economic impact on audience
members
emailing or what you're doing, the desks rise to the ceiling. 

Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a
week, into a dance club. It's really up to you which ones you stick
around for. But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at
the end of the day, everything stops, there's no way to work. At Relevancy
Daimler, the German car company, they've got another great Demonstrate timeliness that it
is useful to the audience at
strategy. When you go on vacation, instead of saying, "This present, or will be in the near
person's on vacation, they'll get back to you eventually," they say, future.

"This person's on vacation, so we've deleted your email. This

person will never see the email you just sent." 

"You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email

someone else." 

You can imagine what that's like. You go on vacation,

and you're actually on vacation. The people who work at this
company feel that they actually get a break from work. 

But of course, that doesn't tell us much about what we should do

at home in our own lives, so I want to make some
suggestions. It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not
use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on
different days. I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain
things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every
day, like eating dinner. Sometimes I'll be alone, sometimes with
other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but
the rule that I've adopted is: I will never use my phone at the
table. It's far away, as far away as possible. Because we're really Common ground
bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue Use personal pronouns: we

that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you

avoid temptation all together. 
At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO.
Credibility
I struggled.  Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
But what happens is, you get used to it. You overcome the
withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what
happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting -
- you have better conversations. You really connect with the
people who are there with you. I think it's a fantastic
strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this --
 and I've tracked a lot of people who have tried this -- it
expands. They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first
hour of the day in the morning. They start putting their phones Credibility
on airplane mode on the weekend. That way, your phone remains Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you are
a camera, but it's no longer a phone. It's a really powerful qualified to speak on this topic
idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when
they do this. 

So what's the take home here?  Screens are

miraculous; I've already said that, and I feel that it's true. But the Information
way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long Using "vivid" examples to
develop the speech content
road, and you're in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the
floor, it's kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. You've got a
choice. You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean
scenes and take snaps out the window -- that's the easy thing to
do -- or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of
the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes
and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand
feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap
at your ankles. Your life will be richer and more
meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and
because you've left your phone in the car. 
Case Study 2
Watch the speech here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend
How to Make Stress Your Friend Audience Adaptation
by Kelly McGonigal Technique Used

I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little

confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your
hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?

How about a moderate amount of stress?

Common Ground
Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too. Draw common experiences that
show how the speaker and
audience are similar, with
But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health regards to the topic
psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and
healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 Credibility
years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For Knowledge and expertise.
years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular
disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have
changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.

Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach
to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for
eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress
have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you Credibility
believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you are
public death records to find out who died. qualified to speak on this topic

People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as
harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of
dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively
little stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were
tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from
stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.

That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that
would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of Relevancy
death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin Demonstrate timeliness that it
cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide. is useful to the audience at
present, or will be in the near
future.
You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending
so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about
stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you
change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response
to stress.

Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are
participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social
stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to
give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal Information
weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of Compare unfamiliar ideas
you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights with familiar ones

and a camera in your face, kind of like this.

And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-
verbal feedback, like this.

(Exhales)

Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math
test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to
harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going
to be fun. For me.

Okay.

I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of

seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting
with 996. Go!

Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.

You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you
were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed
out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, Information
maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these Defining key terms- ensuring
listener comprehension by
physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well defining unfamiliar terms or
with the pressure. concepts

But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was
energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is
exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard Credibility
University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were Knowledge and expertise.
taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no
problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants
who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their
performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more
confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their
physical stress response changed.

Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your Information
blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that Using "vivid" examples to
develop the speech content
chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular
disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the Credibility
study, when participants viewed their stress response as Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you are
helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was qualified to speak on this topic
still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It Information
actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and
courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological
change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack
at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new
science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.

So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to Credibility

get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just Knowledge and expertise.
did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because
hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're
going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this
is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view
stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response
becomes healthier.

Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem

myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to
tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress
response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social.

To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone,

Information
oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a Defining key terms - ensuring
hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle listeners comprehension by
defining unfamiliar terms or
hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a concepts
very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Compare unfamiliar ideas with
familiar ones
Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social
instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close
relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your
friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you
more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some
people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become
more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't
understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary
gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much
a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your
heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it
is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is
nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it
up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when
someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each
other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be
surrounded by people who care about you.

Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you

healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts
on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your
cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-
inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during
stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the
heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps
heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced
damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart.

And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are
enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out
to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone
else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response
becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find
this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for
stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.

I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, Relevancy
because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about Demonstrate the proximity of the
1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to topic by explaining its revelance
to audience member's personal
93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you life space
experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have Credibility
you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your Knowledge and expertise.
community?" And then they used public records for the next five Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this topic
years to find out who died.

Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life
experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased
the risk of dying by 30 percent. But -- and I hope you are expecting a
"but" by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent
time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase
in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.

And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your
health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can
transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your
stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And
when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create
resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful Common ground
Use personal pronouns: us
experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new
appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The
compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with
others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to
give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in
this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually
making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust
yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that
you don't have to face them alone.

Thank you.
Case Study 3
Watch the speech here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_aamodt_why_dieting_doesn_t_usually_work
Why Dieting Doesn’t Usually Work? Audience
By Sandra Aamodt Adaptation
Technique
Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my
life. As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying
about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. Now I eat whenever
I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds.

This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. I look at that
picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion
consult. (Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I
gained it back, of course I blamed myself. And for the next three Credibility
decades, I was on and off various diets. No matter what I tried, the Knowledge and expertise.
weight I'd lost always came back. I'm sure many of you know the Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this
feeling. topic

As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? Obviously, how Credibility

much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much Knowledge and expertise.
energy you burn. What most people don't realize is that hunger and Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this
energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your topic
awareness. Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and
that is a good thing, because your conscious mind -- how do we put
this politely? -- it's easily distracted. It's good that you don't have to Information
remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. You don't using "vivid" examples to
forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for develop speech content

dinner.

Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no
matter what you consciously believe. This is called your set point, but
that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or
15 pounds. You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and
down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of
it. The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body Information
weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain Defining key terms -
ensuring listeners
that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell comprehension by defining
your body to lose it, and the system works like a unfamiliar terms or concepts
thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting
hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as
Information
conditions change. That's what a thermostat does, right? It keeps the Compare unfamiliar ideas
temperature in your house the same as the weather changes with familiar ones
outside. Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by using "vivid" examples to
opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the develop the speech content
setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the
furnace to warm the place back up. Your brain works exactly the
same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push
your body back to what it considers normal. If you lose a lot of
weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you
started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. We
would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to
lose weight or not, but it can't. If you do lose a lot of weight, you
become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. Dr. Rudy Leibel Credibility
of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 Knowledge and expertise.
percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because Convince them that you are
their metabolism is suppressed. That's a lot of food. This means that qualified to speak on this
topic
a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of
the same weight who has always been thin.

From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight

loss makes sense. When food was scarce, our ancestors'
survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight
when food was available would have protected them against the next
shortage. Over the course of human history, starvation has been a
much bigger problem than overeating. This may explain a very sad
fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. Now, if your
mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she
was talking about. (Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your
set point. Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven
years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. If that weight
loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible Relevancy
response. In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not Personalize the topic by
demonstrating its personal
working out so well for many of us. That difference between our impact -its potential for,
economic impact on
ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni audience members
Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his
patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the Credibility
reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you
most effective solution to obesity. are qualified to speak on
this topic

Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at

a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of
us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal.

Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their Credibility
Knowledge and expertise.
hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, Convince them that you
like most dieters. Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled are qualified to speak on
this topic
eaters. The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to
be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about Information
food. Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in Defining key terms -
ensuring listeners
response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat comprehension by defining
unfamiliar terms or
buffet. And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is concepts
more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. Children are
especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. Several
long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early
teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five
years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these
studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also
predicted the development of eating disorders. The other factor, by
the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family
members about their weight. So don't do that. (Laughter)

I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in

just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) This
is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based Credibility
on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise Knowledge and expertise.
Convince them that you
three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. Let's are qualified to speak on
this topic
start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. The height
of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four
numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy
habits that a given person had. And as you'd expect, the healthier the
lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. Now let's
look at what happens in overweight people. The ones that had no
healthy habits had a higher risk of death. Adding just one healthy
habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. For obese
people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times
higher than the healthiest groups in the study. But a healthy lifestyle
helps obese people too. In fact, if you look only at the group with all
four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little
difference. You can take control of your health by taking control of
your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off.

Diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most
people have regained the weight. Forty percent of them have gained
even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is
that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.

If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next

question is, what do you do about it? And my answer, in a word, is
mindfulness. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up
yoga. I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your
body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when
you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when
you're not hungry. How do you do it? Give yourself permission to
eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes
your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without
distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat
and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be Credibility
Knowledge and expertise.
done. It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been Convince them that you are
worth it. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever qualified to speak on this
topic
been in my life. I often don't think about it. I forget we have chocolate Common ground
in the house. It's like aliens have taken over my brain. It's just Draw from common
completely different. I should say that this approach to eating experiences that show how
the speaker and audience
probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when are similar, with regards to
you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that the topic
makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot
of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of
promoting weight loss. Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin Credibility
already. (Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and Knowledge and expertise.
expecting different results? Diets may seem harmless, but they Convince them that you are
qualified to speak on this
actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight topic
obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. In the Common Ground
U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a Use personal pronouns:our
diet. Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the
wrong scale. Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It
takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their
homework or to finish that important work project, and because
willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent
application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when
your attention moves on to something else.

Let me leave you with one last thought. What if we told all those
dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? What if we
taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? I think
most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of
them would probably be thinner. I wish someone had told me
that back when I was 13.

Thanks.