Posted on September 17th, 2008 by admin

When Agnes Hunsberger started keeping records of her food intake, she was absolutely astonished.
“I had tried just about every diet you can think of, and none ever worked,” she says today. “The amazing thing I learned in the Behavior Weight Control Program was that I was never aware before of my eating habits. Some days I was eating constantly from morning to night and wasn’t even conscious of it.”

But Ms. Hunsberger lost 34 pounds in 20 weeks, and more important, she has kept it off. That is because she learned a vital principle that almost any other person can also learn and implement—that it’s entirely possible to lose weight and/or maintain one’s appropriate body weight without drugs, fad diets, pills or injections.
The importance of this nirvana-like principle should be obvious. One out of every three Americans is overweight, a statistic suggesting that obesity is this country’s number one health problem.

Our best-selling nonfiction book lists, which invariably include one or more diet books, reflect the American preoccupation with this weighty dilemma. There’s the high-protein diet, the alcohol lover’s diet. the water diet, the low-carbohydrate diet, the grapefruit diet and so on ad infinitum. It would hardly be a surprise if a new diet came out next month based entirely on tangerines, elbow macaroni and dried prunes. But while these various diets.have lessened the weight of their authors’ mortgage payments, they have been far less successful in permanently reducing the weight of the books’ readers.Organized or medically supervised diets may not be much better. A study by Albert Stunkard, M.D., at a behavior-modification weight-control clinic at Stanford University, revealed that drop-out rates in a large variety of other diet programs ranged from 20 to 80 percent. Of those that stayed with the diet therapy, fewer than 25 percent lost 20 pounds.

“The reason these diets almost always fail is that they do not change a person’s eating habits,” explains Dr. Leonard Levitz, Ph.D.* director of the Behavioral Weight Control Program at the University of Pennsylvania. “An overweight person can eat cottage cheese and celery for only so long. Eventually the dieter will feel so deprived, he’ll gorge himself on all the foods he has missed and will generally gain all the lost weight back.”

Tags: loss weight program, obesity