Ten steps to losing weight forever--how many times have you heard this before? But this time, the claim delivers. In The Automatic Diet, weight-loss and behavioral-change expert Charles Stuart Platkin identifies the 10 steps to understanding and changing your personal pattern of eating and weight gain. You'll examine your habits, master diet traps, craft strategies, and make change happen.

Platkin's program is not a diet, and not a one-size-fits-all program. Based on empowerment, not will power, it's a carefully organized, research-based plan for understanding your own pattern and making changes for life. If you follow his steps, exercises, and strategies, the plan will work because you'll learn to eat consciously, eliminate overeating triggers and habits, and make food substitutions using "calorie bargains" instead of comfort foods.

Platkin, a leading weight loss/ nutrition expert, with daily columns in 155 U.S. newspapers, founded three obesity and weight-control companies: The Institute for Nutrition & Behavioral Sciences, iWellness Solutions, and Nutricise. His earlier bestseller, Breaking the Pattern, has been used as a behavioral-change text in 20 universities. Highly recommended for people who want to understand and change their weight-gain and eating patterns once and for all, and are willing to do some work to get there. --Joan Price

A bestselling author and one of the country's leading weight-loss advocates offers readers a proven behavior-based program to end yo-yo dieting once and for all

Sensible becomes sexy in the face of fad diets that have left chronic dieters frustrated and fat.

In The Automatic Diet, Charles Stuart Platkin, one of the country's leading weight-loss advocates and popular syndicated columnist of "The Diet Detective," synthesizes cutting-edge weight-loss research into an easy-to-follow 10-step process that can become automatic for anyone, a process that has proven successful for tens of thousands of the author's clients as well as for the author himself, who has lost 50 pounds-and kept it off for over 10 years-using the principles in this book. Research has proven repeatedly that fad diets are misguided in their focus on advocating or restricting particular foods and that the only way to permanently lose and maintain weight is through behavioral and lifestyle modification. Learning to identify one's "fat patterns"-the behavioral reasons why when we lose weight we always gain it back again-and how to break them enables readers to relearn how to create a relationship with food and fitness that is comfortable and maintainable, and shows that an individual's weight is completely within his or her control-regardless of genetics, metabolism, or other hard-to-control factors.