Response Cards are helpful phrases written down on 3×5 cards or kept somewhere on your phone. They are one of the most powerful tools in the journey towards gaining control over your thinking, which will ultimately help you gain control over your eating.
CBT for weight loss and maintenance teaches us that it’s never the situation or the trigger that automatically leads someone to eat something, it’s their thinking about the situation. For example, my client Rachel got in a big fight with her sister and ended up going to the kitchen to eat a lot of cookies. It wasn’t the fact that Rachel got in a fight that automatically led to her eating cookies, it was her thinking about the situation. When she gets really upset, Rachel has the thought, “I’m so upset, I deserve to eat to help myself feel better.” Once she has that thought, of course she then goes and eats cookies.
In other applications of CBT, we call these “automatic thoughts” because they’re thoughts our brains make without deliberate effort on our part. In CBT for weight loss and maintenance, we call them “sabotaging thoughts” – thoughts that sabotage one’s overall eating, health, and weight goals.
While we can’t stop anyone from having these sabotaging thoughts (after all, they’re automatic), we can teach people to respond to them effectively so that they have a different outcome. This is where Response Cards come in. Whenever someone has a sabotaging thought, we ask them, “what would you like to say to yourself the next time you have thought? What might be helpful to hear?” Then, we have them write it down and read it every single day. Coming up with a great response to a sabotaging thought is wonderful, but it won’t do much unless you read it over and over and over again. The repetition of reading it is what will help it start to make new inroads into your brain.
In response to her sabotaging thought, “I’m so upset, I deserve to eat to help myself feel better,” Rachel made the following Response Card:
If I’m upset, I do deserve to feel better, but I also deserve to achieve my health goals. Instead of using food as a means to feel better, I can go call my mom, take a walk, do a mindfulness meditation or some yoga stretches, or listen to some music. These activities will help me feel better without sabotaging any other goals. 
When I first started working with him, my client Mark was often going to a friend’s house and overeating pizza. He told me that his friends were all eating many slices of pizza, so it felt normal for him to do it, too. We discussed that Mark had to make choices that worked for him, based on his goals, not choices based on what other people were doing. Mark made the following Response Card:
My body doesn’t know or care what anyone around me is eating, it only knows what I’m eating. Just because other people are eating something, doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work for me. I have to make choices based on my goals and what will work for me.
Read every day, these Response Cards are a powerful tool in helping you to shift your thinking and response to triggers in a different way. There are no right or wrong answers about what Response Cards should say; it’s only important to figure out what responses are persuasive and resonant to you. Any time you catch a sabotaging thought, make sure you think about what you’d like to say to yourself the next time you have that thought (because if you’ve had it once, chances are very high you’ll have it again), and write it down. Read it every day! That’s what will enable you to have a different outcome the next time the sabotaging thought pops up.