What do I know about weight loss? For starters, I am a medical doctor with a nutrition minor from Cornell University, obesity research experience, and experience having worked with a world-leader in the psychology of obesity while at Cornell. But most of all, I know about the subject from my own personal experience. I grew up morbidly obese and then lost 75 pounds 25 years ago--and kept it off.



Through my research and personal experience, I learned that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to attune to your hunger pangs and learn to use them the way God intended. Let yourself become hungry, and then eat smaller portions of normal (non-diet) food. And exercise more. Basically, you must mentally retrain yourself to eat for internal reasons (hunger pangs), rather than external reasons (the site of food, smell of food, emotions, etc.).

When you go on a traditional, restrictive reducing diet, you typically end up wanting what you think you shouldn't eat (fattening food like junk food, fried foods, breads, and desserts) even more. Then, you might even overeat those foods when you finally give up and "cheat." When you are on a diet, you eat as though you're in a famine, depriving yourself the food you crave. And when you are off the diet, you splurge, and eat as though every meal is a feast. In turn, that roller-coaster-like erratic eating pattern affects your metabolism and causes you to gain weight when you actually wanted to lose it.

Dieting also reinforces your habit of eating for the wrong reasons--reasons that have nothing to do your body's physiologic need for fuel. On a diet, you may be required to eat according to the clock, at certain times of day, and eat only the amount or type of food the diet allows. All those things are very unnatural, and far too difficult to keep up indefinitely. Hence, most people regain the weight they lost, and more.

That's why I advocate the opposite philosophy when I counsel my patients for weight loss. Instead of giving them a detailed menu or pre-set plan, which only reinforces their eating for external reasons, I teach them how to eat small portions of food in response to their internal cues (their hunger pangs). And I teach them how to beat the urge to eat when their bodies don't actually need food. That part can be tricky, but with time and a little effort, it is a method that delivers long-term, postive behavioral change--and, hence, permanent weight loss.