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What is Automatic Dieting? How do you make it automatic?

All successful dieters share a common ‘secret’ to consistently maintain their weight. The secret is that they do not have to think about what they are doing. Their food choices are instinctual and they already know what to eat when faced with the disastrous dieting situations we all encounter in everyday life. Whether it’s a cocktail party, on an airplane, or at an Italian restaurant, they know how to react and choose wisely.

The Automatic Diet is founded on the principle of "automaticity". Automaticity is a psychological term used to describe the unconscious way in which we make choices for our daily behaviors. Activities like setting an alarm clock at night, putting on shoes before you leave the house, buckling your seat belt when you get in a car, and remembering how to drive to the office - these activities do not require much thought, we just do them automatically. If we consciously thought about each decision that we make, we would be exhausted at the end of a day. Through automaticity, we unconsciously automate some of our routine processes. While automaticity has been working against you and your weight loss goals for years, The Automatic Diet will show you how to redirect your knee-jerk impulses so they can work in your favor!

We do things automatically because the brain needs its memory to process a high order of information, so to reduce its load the brain recognizes familiar tasks, and then it processes the information and applies the correct rules to the procedure in order to reduce the demand on the working memory and allow for higher order processing of information. What you will learn is how to reprogram the behavioral mechanisms that worked against you in the past to make them instead work in your favor. In doing so, you will be able to develop new patterns of behavior and effortlessly move towards your healthy goals - just as you unconsciously complete some other daily activities - automatically!

What’s the difference between this diet and the thousands of other diet books and diet products on the market?

The major difference is that if you follow the simple guidance laid out in the book, you will never have to worry about losing weight again. Too many of us are perplexed (and frustrated for that matter) when it comes to dieting and weight loss. There are many good reasons for the confusion. Every day we are inundated with ‘miracle’ products that promise to solve our weight loss problems: The latest quick-fix diet books lead the bestseller lists. Manufacturers market special drinks and diet supplements promising a better body in weeks. Television commercials showcase gimmicks promising to burn calories without our moving a muscle and feature testimonials from people who have lost tremendous amounts of weight on one program or another. All of this media exposure adds up to a $50 billion weight -- loss industry - yet, as a nation, we get fatter and fatter every year.

We buy low-calorie, low-carb, and low-fat products, deny ourselves delicious foods, drink only artificially sweetened soda, buy specially prepared meals and drinks, join fitness centers, take diet pills, submit to liposuction or gastric bypass surgery, and, when we’re feeling especially motivated, work out obsessively to burn off calories.

I can tell you from firsthand experience, despite what the products and advertisements claim, there’s no magic formula or quick fix solution for permanent weight loss. (And unfortunately, I haven’t read any research that indicates a ‘miracle’ will be coming any time soon.) So don’t expect this book to provide a ‘quick and easy’ healthy recipe for success to which you just add water and artificial sweetener, and then stir. If there were one simple specific answer to everyone’s diet dilemmas, you’d have heard about it by now, and almost 70 percent of Americans wouldn’t be overweight.

But what this book can give you are the essential ingredients and strategies you need to identify your own fat patterns - those unique circumstances, situations, and behaviors (including eating and physical activity) that have led to your own particular weight problem. With these tools you will be able to break those negative patterns and create a life that does not have to focus obsessively on dieting and losing weight because doing what’s necessary will become automatic.

The theories and techniques in The Automatic Diet are based on authoritative scientific studies, which have repeatedly shown that quick-fix diets are misguided and ultimately useless because they focus on advocating or restricting particular foods when the only really effective way to lose and maintain weight-loss over time is by carefully reviewing one’s past diet history, learning key behavioral strategies, and making small but significant alterations in one’s eating patterns and physical activity.

What this book professes is that by combining key behavioral modification strategies with food strategies, the reader will learn how to incorporate healthy food behaviors into his everyday and still be satisfied with what he eats.

-- Do it once, do it right, and make it automatic --

How does someone discover their ‘fat pattern?’

To discover your fat pattern you need to become a ‘diet detective’ and honestly seek out the facts and rituals that have led to your weight problems. To start the process of identifying patterns that haven’t worked for you and the Diet Traps that have tripped you up in the past, you have to delve into your history. This delving is not so you can find people, circumstances, or events to blame for your food patterns, but to help you see what does and doesn’t work.

Discovering your fat patterns and identifying your Diet Traps are steps toward new ways of thinking. And if you don’t learn to think differently about what you’ve done in the past you may find your diet history repeating itself.

If you understand what you are doing (such as making excuses for why you should eat another half-box of cookies), and why you are doing it (you had a fight with your best friend), you have a better chance of being able to break the ‘cookies-as-comfort-food’ pattern. A careful and honest examination of past successes and failures allows you to see the outline and substance of very distinct patterns. By recognizing these patterns, you can analyze them, see why and how they occurred, break them down, and focus on stopping the destructive behaviors - ending the vicious cycle of the ‘diet.’ You also learn to turn things around and capitalize on your positive patterns. You can harness these positive patterns to make huge advances and lose weight for good simply by making a conscious effort.

The operative word here is conscious. Click into your consciousness and out of unconscious patterns, and then create a new, more positive pattern of eating and physical activity - one you can live with comfortably, and that fits you just right.

Combining self-reflection and self-assessment leads to awareness. And awareness is one of the tools you will use to overcome the factors of genetics, hormones, and all the other influences that are making it difficult to reach your desired weight and body shape. Ironically, this conscious hyperawareness is the first step in creating a new automatic lifestyle. We all operate on autopilot some of the time - the key is to achieve a conscious understanding of what that means and how we want to change it. Once that’s accomplished, we can begin to consciously implement sustainable, practical changes that will become automatic.

What are some common Diet Traps and how do you avoid them?

Diet traps are those behaviors and influences that repeatedly get you into diet difficulty. A Diet Trap can be a certain food you can’t resist, or a situation and/or event that is either comforted or celebrated by food. Most of all, a Diet Trap weakens your determination to meet your weight loss goal. Everyone has Diet Traps, but anyone can beat them and get back on track.

One of the most common Diet Traps is unconscious eating. Conscious eating means eating when you’re hungry, enjoying the taste, smell, and texture of each bite of food, and knowing the food’s nutritional content. Unconscious eating, on the other hand, puts you in a kind of semi-dream state during which your hand automatically dips into a bag of junk food or you just keep opening your mouth and eating without thinking about ‘how much’ until you’ve eaten a lot more than you intended. It involves eating without paying attention to the experience. For example, standing in front of the refrigerator picking at a leftover piece of cheesecake while talking on the phone is mindless. And interestingly, in your estimation, these random bites probably don’t even really count toward your day’s total calories.

There are many reasons why people eat mindlessly, but Delayed Feeding, Entertaining the Mouth, Social Eating, and Comfort or Stress Eating tend to be the most popular.

The way to avoid falling into these traps is to always try to eat consciously. Always be there and be aware before you eat!

- Be attentive to what you eat and when.

- Be attentive to why you overeat and what triggered it.

Once you are, it will become second nature.

This new reality involves knowing your Individual Dieting Traits; being willing to change the way you relate to food and dieting; maintaining a positive attitude and continuing to make the effort to change. It means disconnecting from using food as a drug or a weapon; and, most of all, setting up healthier patterns of eating one small step at a time so that they become a part of your automatic eating behavior to replace the behavior that has not worked in your best interest.

Why do we need a new food label?

This is part of the ‘No Exercise, Exercise Diet’ where abstract calories are given a frame of reference and translated into more concrete ideas. If you’re even thinking of ‘cheating’ or eating something you know you really shouldn’t, stop for a minute and consider it in terms of the amount of exercise you’d have to do to burn it off. For instance, if we were to translate a Twinkie into exercise it would add up to the equivalent of a 30-minute walk. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could even require food manufacturers and restaurants to put the "exercise equivalent" on the food label. Imagine, a statement right there on the Cinnabon Caramel Pecanbon: "Warning: Eating This Product Could Require an Additional 4 Hours and 10 Minutes of Walking or 5 Hours of Continuous Vacuuming."

What do you mean by asserting that the Automatic Diet is based on the ‘state of the science?’

The state of the science means that the book is based on an analysis of several hundred scientific studies in the fields of nutrition, fitness, weight loss and biology as well as on client success stories, all of which indicate that the key to weight loss requires an intrinsic modification of behavior. Slashing calories or following fad diets will not yield permanent results.

What is a Calorie Bargain and how do you find one?

Calorie Bargains are foods that are both low in calories and satisfying for you. But remember, these are only to be used to replace something you are already eating on a regular basis. A Calorie Bargain should never be added to your existing diet; it is only a replacement for higher fat and higher calorie foods.

So what we need to do is find foods that taste good to us but have fewer calories by weight than the foods we’ve been eating so that we can eat more of them. Finding them may take some effort, but it can also be fun, and once you’ve found the Calorie Bargains that work for you, you’ll be set for life.

How do you create a ‘livable diet?’

Well, first let’s define what is a Livable Diet. Simply put, it’s a diet you can live with for the rest of your life. The most important factor to consider when you begin to think about creating a livable diet is accommodating your own individual food preferences and your personality when it comes to food. If you don’t do that, you’ll be feeling deprived, you’ll be suffering, and you won’t stick to the diet you’ve chosen because it won’t be satisfying.

What do you mean when you say that dieting is not about willpower, it’s about empowerment?

This is a critical concept, because there are so many people out there who are beating themselves up because they think they don’t have the willpower required to lose weight and keep it off. They’re wrong. I have less willpower than anyone. But what I’ve done is empower myself to achieve my goals. And that’s not just hokey semantics - there’s a huge difference between being empowered to make changes and simply relying on your own willpower.

Just to illustrate the contrast, take a look at the definitions. Empower means to invest with power or to equip or supply with ability, whereas willpower involves ‘having strength’ or ‘control.’ Clearly, giving yourself the power and ability to achieve something provides the energy you need to reach your goals.

In the second part of the book I give you the empowerment strategies you need to implement the tools you’ve acquired in the first part so that they do truly become second nature. With these empowerment strategies you will never again have to depend on something as weak and undependable as willpower to meet your weightloss goals. Instead your efforts will be fueled by the far more potent energy that comes from feeling truly empowered. For example, if you drive by a Dunkin’ Donuts every day on your way to work, you may have the willpower to drive on by once or twice, but by the third time you’ll probably pull in and pick up a box of glazed. An empowerment strategy would simply be to change your route so that you don’t have to look at that tempting pink sign every morning. That’s thinking ahead and changing your behavior, not relying on willpower alone.

What is the Blame Game and how does it work?

If you’re going to be successful in managing your weight, as I know anyone can be, it’s time to stop playing the blame game. Keep in mind that one of the key characteristics of all successful weight-losers is their ability to avoid blaming and accept responsibility for whatever failures or setbacks trip them up along the road to achieving their weight loss goals. With the exception of a very small percentage of medical cases, the only real obstacle most people face in attaining weight loss success is themselves - namely, their weaknesses, misconceptions, and most of all, their excuses. Money, time, schedules, a weakness for chocolate, slow metabolism: these are all excuses generated by the individual - in and of themselves, these factors do not constitute a legitimate barrier to weight loss.

For years, I was a master of the art of blaming, but it worked to my disadvantage. Blaming other people or external circumstances, situations, or events is just a way to excuse ourselves from doing what we really know we need to do, and once I understood that, I was able to find the tools I needed to quit the blame game and bust the excuses I’d been making. And those are exactly the tools I share with readers in my book.

Can you explain Excuse Busting?

An Excuse Buster is a persuasive self -- talk argument made to counteract a faulty dieter’s justification (aka excuse) for not controlling his weight. When you practice Excuse Busting, you think up positive strategies that replace negative excuses. There are many things in life (such as brushing your teeth) that you do automatically, without having to think about whether or not you’re going to do them. Creating a process of automatic, ‘prethought- out’ answers to counteract your most common excuses can help you to banish them once and for all.

The Automatic Diet describes the process of coming up with Excuse Busters and Plan B’s to help ward off the temptation to find excuses for not sticking to a weight loss or other goal plan. For instance, if you typically excuse yourself from your morning workout because you’re ‘too tired,’ you could fight back against this excuse with a persuasive Excuse Buster: Working out in the morning is a much better pick-me-up than a cup of coffee or an extra 15 minutes of sleep - plus, you’ll have more energy in the long run.

The book also recommends coming up with Plan B’s to fight back against those certain excuses that seem to be stubbornly ‘un-Bustable’. For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight and you twist your ankle, you will have to cut back on your running schedule - there’s no Excuse Buster to get around that. What you need, in this case, is a Plan B, or an alternate activity that will still allow you to achieve your goal, even within the limits of whatever setback you encounter. This type of proactive strategizing will allow you to reaffirm your commitment to your goal and stay on track no matter what life throws at you.

What is a life preserver and how do I get one?

There will be times when you have to make an immediate decision in a tough and tempting situation, times when even your best-laid plans simply won’t cut it and life, such as it is, threatens to take you off track. Those are the times when having a well rehearsed, clearly defined mental image of the future can prove to be a real life preserver. Because it’s already in the back of your mind, making the decision to stay on track will be automatic.

A Life Preserver is a positive, visualized, and fully imagined future event, situation, or circumstance that is tough enough to stand up to your worst food crisis. With your Life Preservers in tow, you’ll have the empowerment you need to emotionally and mentally walk away from the fudge, the fries, or the fettuccini. One way to keep the faith when the going gets tough is to hone your skills at visualizing the outcome - and to keep that vision close at hand. When you can ‘see’ an appealing image of an attainable future, it informs and inspires your actions, and helps to coordinate your plan and goals.

Creating a Life Preserver helps you in those ‘make or break moments’ to ‘remember’ why you wanted to lose weight in the first place as well as to remain focused on your goal. One exercise in the book asks the reader to develop three vignettes or visualizations of something that could happen in the future once they have achieved their goal. The purpose of these visualizations is to have three different motivational scenarios you can keep in your back pocket, purse, or wallet, to pull out when you’re having a tough time sticking to your plan. These are the images you will cling to when you find yourself desperately in need of dieting salvation, so make them as compelling, inspiring, and clear as you possibly can. They will, after all, have some powerful forces to stand up to: your own double-chocolate fudge birthday cake, the cheese platter during cocktail hour at your friend’s house, those tasty mayo-heavy side dishes your mother whips up for Sunday dinner, and every candy maker specializing in truffles sold by the box.

Here’s an example:

‘I’ve just come from an art opening. I’m wearing a size 8 turquoise sheath dress and carrying a matching vintage beaded handbag. It’s a summer night, and I pull up to the restaurant, pay the driver, and step out of the cab. My date is waiting for me by the door. I walk toward him with a confidence I haven’t felt in years. I am fit and healthy and I know that no matter how this evening turns out I will return home tonight feeling good about myself.’

‘My first husband used to make me feel terrible about my weight problem. Bob was always telling me I could never lose weight because I was ‘weak’ and had no control over my life. He would tell me he was going to find himself a new ‘hot’ woman who didn’t look like a ‘beached whale.’ Sometimes he’d say it as a joke, but I knew he was serious, and he actually did end up leaving me and marrying (and divorcing) a younger, thinner woman.

I haven’t seen him in a few years. I’ve heard he was having a hard time after his latest divorce, but I’m past all that. I’ve changed my life - taken control. I’ve lost about 50 pounds, I’m exercising, and I’ve gone back to school. Everything about my life is different, and I look great even if I do say so myself. Well, one day I’m headed to the mall after a long day of running around. I enter the mall by the food court

- and that’s when he sees me. He gasps, almost in shock at how much weight I’ve lost - and how good I look . . .’

Can you explain what SMARTER goals are?

There are essentially seven characteristics of effective strategic planning and goal setting that you can remember with the easy acronym SMARTER:

- Specific - Goals should be clear, and not too broad. To simply say ‘I want to lose weight’ is not enough. Try saying something like ‘I would like to lose 20 pounds over the next 6 months.’

- Motivating - Both the process and the end result should be exciting for you. Instead of creating a boring eating or exercise program, try to add some interesting components that will keep you going - instead of just going for a walk, try hikes and walks in unique areas. Instead of making bland tasting food that’s low in calories, sign up for a course in low-calorie cooking.

- Achievable - Be realistic. Stating that you want to ‘lose 20 pounds in a week’ will not help you achieve your goal - it will only move you closer to failure.

- Rewarding - Make sure the benefits of your goal are clear, and think about what it will be like to actually lose the weight. How will you feel? What will you look like?

- Tactical - Make sure to create a detailed action plan. Ask yourself (and write down): How am I going to lose the weight? What am I going to eat? What are my ‘eating weak spots’? What physical activity will I use to burn calories?

- Evaluated - Goals should be quantifiable and measurable in some way. The more specific your goals are, the easier it is to evaluate your progress and determine if you’re on track.

- Revisable - Goals also need to be updated as circumstances change. For example, if you take on a new position that involves extensive travel, your goal to cook most meals at home will no longer be achievable and will need to be revised.

You talk about physical activity as opposed to exercise. What’s the difference, and is it really possible to burn calories by doing everyday activities? Anyone can learn to weave physical activity into his or her life. And by that I don’t mean working out on some fancy machine at a gym or performing in an aerobics class. I mean, quite literally, putting one foot in front of the other and doing something as simple as walking or increasing your steps during the regular course of your day. As you make attempts to do that, and as you become more proficient through these experiences, you will see that you are able to get moving. By understanding and becoming more aware that all you have to do is get out there, make a few adjustments in your life, and take a few more steps each day, you will see that increasing your level of physical activity is something you can do. You don’t have to be an exercise junkie or a fanatic to reap the weight loss benefits of physical activity. Burning off 100 calories by walking for 25 minutes may not be as easy as cutting 100 calories (one large bite of a candy bar) from your daily diet, but it is better, and healthier, to do both. In addition to which, increasing your physical activity will speed up your metabolism so that you use more calories when you’re not being physically active - which is when you burn about 75% of your caloric intake. To discover where your own opportunities lie, you first need to evaluate what you typically do in a day (which means all your activities right down to how you shop and clean) and then look for ways to incorporate increased physical activity into your life. Take Brenda, for instance, a client from the outskirts of Sarasota, Florida. Brenda wasn’t really sure exactly how to do this. We needed to write down what an average week looked like for her. A typical suburbanite, she drove everywhere she could. If she had to go to the Post Office, even though it was down the street, she would drive. To her, walking was out of the question. There were time issues, and she felt self-conscious walking in her neighborhood because no one else did and because she was overweight. But the one thing she was willing to do was to start using a bicycle for many of her local errands. Her local streets were very bike friendly because there were two schools in the neighborhood, and she even thought biking might actually be more convenient than driving in some instances. She purchased an inexpensive bike with saddlebag-type baskets on the back, and after a while she found herself using the bicycle all the time. She lost 30 pounds and, since she’s continued to bike, she’s maintained the loss. Now she’s even started to walk on a regular basis.

You say that each person has one (or a few) individual dieting traits. How is that relevant?

From my years of counseling hundreds of thousands of people, I’ve learned that unsuccessful dieters seem to fall into a few simple categories - such as the person who thinks that as long as it’s ‘health food’ he can eat as much of it as he wants. In my book, I describe these individual dieting traits so that readers can learn to see themselves in the mistakes of others, which will help them to identify the particular dieting enemy they’re up against.

You don’t seem to put much emphasis on the types of foods people eat - protein, carbohydrate, fat balance etc. - which seems to go against a lot of the conventional wisdom out there.

Conventional wisdom aside, every nutritionist knows that in the end it’s the number of calories you eat versus the number you burn that will make you fat or thin. That’s why Calorie Bargains are so important - they allow you to eat foods you like and cut calories at the same time. What you’re looking for are foods - whether they’re protein, fat, or carbs - that fill you up without filling you out, and The Automatic Diet provides lots of ways for you to find them.

What is a "fat" pattern?

A "fat" pattern refers to the habits we develop that impede or reverse our diet efforts. Recognizing these patterns is a necessary step in creating a livable diet. By examining them, we can learn what we should and should not do to make our eating livable, automatic, sensible, effective, and satisfying in the future.

Whatever your ‘fat’ pattern is, it provides you with some kind of emotional or psychological benefit. This is important to keep in mind because, as we delve into your past, it will help you to remember that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself for being the way you are - there is a reason you have been doing what you’re doing. It’s not because you’re weak, it’s because you have been receiving a benefit from your current patterns.

The great thing is that you are the creator of all your own food preferences - your individual attitudes and feelings about food, your automatic eating responses, your use of comfort foods during times of stress - basically, what food means to you at the deepest level. This means you are in an incredibly powerful position: you have the power to change your preferences and habits. Once you understand your fat pattern as exactly that - a specific pattern with a specific purpose - and stop think.