Quit the diet! Diets do not work. Diets are temporary fixes to lifetime habits. Create a lifestyle, a healthy lifestyle. As humans, we should focus more on eating to live, not living to eat. I had a request to start a series on the psychology of dieting. It is interesting that the foundation of this article is based off thoughts. We all know what to do, what healthy food is and that reduced calories equals decreased weight. From a cognitive therapy perspective, knowing what to do and how to do it are entirely different skills. Weight loss is a $40 billion annual industry. The only thing as >>>

Affluenza is a combination of the terms affluent and influenza. In 1997, the term debuted in a book called The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence, written by licensed therapist Jessie O’Neill. In 2013, the term resurfaced as a tragic excuse for the actions of Ethan Couch, a teen who killed four people while driving drunk in Texas. Having grown up as the granddaughter of General Motors’ former president, Charles Erwin Wilson, O’Neill has lived an affluent life. She claims that the pop term is used today to describe “entitled” or irresponsible children. Recently, it has been touted >>>

In the new book Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler, coauthor of Nudge and a behavioral science and economics professor at the University of Chicago, recounts his struggle to change the way traditional economists look at the impact of human psychology on economics. Wharton operations, information and decisions professor Katherine Milkman recently spoke with Thaler about why he wrote the book, where behavioral economics has had the most impact, and which decision-making bias he would remove if he had a magic wand. http://www.valuewalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/151209_KW_ThalerBook.mp3 >>>

MTV NEWSJan. 13, 2016President Obama isn’t the only one shedding tears and choking up about the 30,000 Americans killed by gun violence every year. The unrelenting scroll of news coverage of the mass shootings in San Bernardino, Charleston, North Carolina and Colorado Springs might be taking a psychological toll on all of us. Mindy Mechanic, a psychology professor at California State, Fullerton, said she and her colleagues sometimes refer to a phenomenon they call “trauma by television” to describe how 24-hour news and social media reports on gun violence affect us. “People are traumatized >>>