The Easier Way to Diet

I bet you struggle with your weight. Call me psychic, or just call the National Center for Health Statistics, which will tell you that more than 66 percent of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Most of the remaining third are perpetually trying to lose those last five or ten pounds. True, Americans obsessively diet off pounds, but most eventually regain them—plus a few more—as comic Roseanne puts it, "just to punch out the dents."

I spent decades struggling with my own weight. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, which, in all modesty, is saying something. But I also now know the blessed feeling of discovering how to stay lean without noticeable effort. I want you to have that experience. So right now, I need you to stop what you're doing. Imagine that I'm gently holding your face—your adorable, tortured, chubby, chocolate-smeared face—and staring into your eyes with the expression of a beagle who urgently wants a walk, and saying: "Listen! You can do this! You can be effortlessly thin! Just please, for the love of God, pay attention to the rest of this column!"

If I sound desperate, it's because I can't get most people to try what works. Why? Because it has little to do with food. Dieters are food addicts. "Lite" recipes, carb counting, fat gram logbooks—all of these strategies indulge an addict's obsessive focus on the drug. If the techniques worked, you'd be cheetah thin. If you aren't, they don't. Getting to a healthy weight requires something initially less gratifying: thinking in a way that changes your body by starting with your brain. Here's how to do it….

Drop Those Nachos! Focus!

When I tell people that thought exercises can keep them thin, their eyes narrow. "Is there any science behind that?" they demand. "Tons!" I say, and start describing the science, with which I once filled a 300-page book (The Four-Day Win). I also tell them about an exciting new study: Researchers from my favorite school of psychology—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—gave a day of purely psychological training to 43 people who'd repeatedly tried to lose weight. A control group received no instruction. The ACT-trained group lost significantly more weight, sustained weight loss more effectively over three months, and became happier overall than the control group. Let me thump that one home: These chronic dieters became far more successful at weight loss after a single day spent learning to think differently.

But the folks who ask me for the science behind thought-based weight loss always seem bored by these dramatic findings. "Oh, man, that's complicated," they say. "I think I'll go back on the Key lime enema cleanse. I lost eight pounds that way, and insurance covered most of the medical bills."

Please don't do that. Just mentally track the following four points, all of which, I assure you, are based on solid science: