Let’s get real about diets. Regardless of the diet du jour or the fact that you may have even lost a few pounds on it, old-fashioned, quick weight loss diets inevitably fail. Not only that, but after the diet’s done, we gain back every precious pound we lost—and then some. But why does this have to happen?

It happens because, regardless of the gimmick or program, by their nature these diets prescribe a rigid eating plan that does not fit anyone’s lifestyle over the long term. And they also fail because they often require a drastic reduction in calories that triggers the body’s famine survival mechanism, which slows down your metabolism. Instinctively, your body wants you to survive, while your stomach and thighs say, “I just want to lose a few pounds around the middle!”

So what can we do to lose weight and really keep it off?

The answer is not a better one-size-fits-all diet, but rather a clear understanding of what I call your individual fat pattern: how it works, and why you’ve been unable to lose and maintain your weight loss. Breaking the Fat Pattern is a step-by-step process that teaches you what to do so that you can take weight off—and keep it off. What it’s not is another program for you to follow blindly so that you regain the weight you’ve lost six months after you’ve lost it. Rather, what you will learn is how to rethink the mechanisms that worked against you in the past so that they now work in your favor. By doing that you will be able to develop new patterns of behavior to replace those that have failed in past. You will create an automatic livable “diet” that works now—and in the future. And I’ll be giving you proven methods for doing that, as well as practical strategies for implementing them so that they become second nature.

The process works by teaching you to become aware of the disappointing dieting patterns that have prevented you from achieving success--and to take responsibility for how those patterns affect the way you live.

I’m a big believer in expectation management, and I think you deserve to know, before you begin the process what you’re going to get out of it and why I’m the right person to help you end the cycle of dieting déjà vu.

I became a nutrition and public health consumer advocate because I had discovered firsthand how maddening and futile quick-weight-loss diets were – high protein, low protein, low fat, high fat, grapefruit, no fruit – they all simply reduced calories by limiting the variety of foods I could eat. Highly restrictive and impossible to maintain over the long term, these diets all failed me and millions of others. I had been overweight my entire life, and I had given the responsibility for my weight loss to one fad diet after another. (In fact, when I was just ten years old, I pleaded with my parents to buy me Dr. Atkins’s diet book so that I could finally lose weight.) But once I understood and was able to apply the principles I’ll be sharing with you in The Automatic Diet, I did an about-face and was able to lose more than 50 pounds—and, perhaps even more importantly, have kept it off for 10 years.

It all began when I was a writing a book about how people can and can’t change, and cynically thinking they couldn’t, when, to my surprise, I discovered—after years of research and interviews on behavior modification, motivation, achievement, and personal responsibility—that a “leopard can actually change its spots.” People can change. In fact, the science of behavioral change has a long and successful history. Its principles have allowed people to change their weight – and their life. That first book, Breaking the Pattern, was a synthesis of what I’d discovered, and I’m proud to say that it has now been used by more than 20 universities around the country as a text for teaching behavioral change techniques to nutrition and dietetic counseling students.

Researching and writing Breaking the Pattern and my passion for public healthsubsequently led to my developing and writing one of the most widely syndicated weekly nutrition and fitness columns in the United States. The column now appears in more than 145 daily newspapers including the Seattle Times, the New York Post, the Buffalo News, the Miami Herald, the Orange County Register, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Honolulu Advertiser, The State (Columbia, S.C.), the Daily Oklahoman, and the Albuquerque Journal just to name a few.

I am also the founder and director of The Institute for Nutrition & Behavioral Sciences, a non-profit organization that is currently conducting two studies, one focused on using the Internet as a means to counsel adolescents to help them lose weight (using a modified version of the process in this book), and the other a pilot public health program in Southern Florida called Think Before You Eat, an educational campaign designed to create awareness about healthier eating by using a variety of media outlets.

In addition, two companies I founded are directly involved in delivering weight control and health information and advice to individuals throughout the country.

iWellness Solutions is responsible for developing a sophisticated on-line technology-based software integrating cutting-edge scientific research and the latest in “behavioral nutrition” information that is used by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, fitness centers, and large corporations to assist more than 500,000 people each year to lose weight and increase their physical activity.

Nutricise is the first program to provide individuals one-on-one weight-control counseling with Registered Dietitians via email. Nutricise is based on the principles of “behavioral nutrition,” and has now counseled more than 65,000 people helping them to understand that choosing to lose weight is not simply about choosing what we put in our mouth; it’s about choosing how we live our lives.

My proven methods have been refined and simplified to include only what actually works, and Nutricise has been given high marks by Fitness magazine (which recognized it as the “only program of its kind that offers such intensely personalized counseling”), PC Magazine, and Newsweek as one of the best interactive diets available. Additionally, Men's Health sent an undercover registered dietitian to try out the various diet programs available online, and the Nutricise program came out on top, the only site to receive four-out-of-four stars. The site has also been voted Forbes magazine's “Favorite” and "Best of the Web," as well as one of Health magazine's "Top 25 Web Sites for Women."