This is Chapter 2 of Your Designer Diet.

Many chapters are free online: Table of Contents, Introduction, Chapter 1: Why is Losing Weight So Hard?, Chapter 2: The 10 Designer Principles for Controlling Your Weight, Chapter 13: The Designer Way, Conclusion, and the Index. If you like what you see in these chapters you'll probably like the book too. One reason to purchase the book is that the formatting is much nicer, though the content is the same.

Out of control. That’s how most people feel about their weight. Do you feel like weight just happens to you? Do you feel like you keep getting heavier and heavier and you don’t know what to do about it? You don’t have to feel that way any longer. Using the 10 Designer Principles you can learn to control your weight.

The Designer Diet is revolutionary because it adapts a powerful control technique that has been successfully used to solve some of the world’s toughest problems. Following this process, you’ll learn how to create a diet designed especially for you.

That’s why the Designer Diet creates your perfect diet. At any time, your diet works perfectly. The instant you find your diet isn’t working for you anymore,you change it so it starts working again. On the Designer Diet, you are always learning how to improve your diet. If your diet can be improved, you’ll find a way to improve it. So your diet is always perfect for you.

Creating your perfect diet is powerful because it gives you your best chance of controlling your weight. Your typical one-size-fits all diet is hit or miss. It might work for you and it might not. Some parts of it might work better than others. We gather all different diets, all the different ideas and suggestions for losing weight, figure out which of those work for you, and then call that your diet.

That’s what the Designer Diet helps you do. It helps you explore all the different ways you can eat less and exercise more and then helps you decide which of those work best for you. So, part of the Designer Diet is searching for new ideas. Another part is testing to see if those ideas work for you. And by repeating this process you learn what works for you, and your diet constantly improves. Constant improvement is a big part of what it means to be in control of your weight.

Another part is to understand your nature as a human, your nature as an individual, and the nature of the world. All these forces impact on your weight. Your body is unique. Your life is unique. Your strengths are unique and your weaknesses are unique. You have your own way of being overweight that is different from everyone else in the world. It just makes sense that your diet plan should be as unique as you are. A big part of how the Designer Diet helps you control your weight is to teach you to understand your nature and how this information can be used to pick better and better weight controlling strategies. The better you understand your nature, the better you will control your weight.

Noticing changes in your life and then responding.effectively to those changes is another overlooked aspect of controlling your weight. A simple one-size-fits-all approach to weight loss can’t handle your complex life. Let’s say a shock happens in your life. Perhaps you get sick or change jobs. How will you notice and what changes will you make to put yourself back in control of your weight? A diet based on just eating fewer carbs or more vegetables can’t handle the constant change in your life. You need an approach to your weight that helps you overcome these life changes, not be victimized by them. The Designer Diet is that approach.

Why do you need to create a perfect diet?

In the last hundred years, there has been a revolution in how people live their lives. Food used to be scarce, and mere survival required hard physical labor. Now cheap, tasty, high calorie food is everywhere and many people do very little exercise at all.

For the first time in history, controlling your weight is completely and totally up to you. You are among the first generation of people who can no longer rely on your environment to naturally control your weight. If your weight is going to be controlled it’s you that is going to have to figure out how to control it. There’s nobody else you can rely on to do it for you.

Isn’t that a stunningly different way to look at weight problems in the world? It’s not surprising so many people are having a hard time controlling their weight, because nobody has had to control their weight before! Why would anyone know how to do it?

Almost every human being has a bold new adventure ahead of them as they try to discover their own way of controlling their weight. The question that you and everyone else has to answer is how, exactly how will you control yours?

How to control your weight is what this book is all about. The essence of how to control your weight is described in these 10 Designer Principles:

1. Take responsibility.
2. Understand your three natures.
3. Identify the threats that sabotage your diet.
4. Discover your strategies for defeating the threats.
5. Follow the Designer Way for continuously improving your diet.
6. Nurture your Designer Mind.
7. Strive for improvement.
8. Whatever works.
9. Take the long view.
10. Ask for help.

We’ll talk about each principle in this chapter and explore them all in the rest of the book. By following the ideas described in the principles, you will learn exactly how to control your weight, in your own way, for the rest of your life.

Principle 1: Take responsibility.

Many people have problems with their weight because they expect someone else to tell them how they should control it. Unfortunately, that just won’t work. We are all different and what works for one person may not work for you. You have to discover your perfect diet for yourself and keep on discovering it throughout your life.

That’s why the responsibility for your weight is ultimately yours. Nobody else can tell you which strategies will help you. Nobody else can notice when changes in your life are making you gain weight. Nobody else can notice when there are opportunities to make your diet better. And nobody else can make the necessary changes in your life. Only you can do these things.

Yet responsibility is not the same as blame. You are not to blame for your weight. For many of us, weight problems are unavoidable. Our lives are very different than they were in the past and the same natures that historically have helped humans survive now make us overweight and threaten our health in the present. Remember the story of Hero and the Genie? There is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing wrong with you. In our current world, your body may simply be a perfect weight gaining machine. And that’s not your fault. It’s tragically unfair. But it’s not your fault.

Many bad things happen to us in our lives. We do not ask for them to happen and seldom do we deserve them, yet it is still our responsibility to deal with them. Being prone to being overweight is just another unfair bad thing we must learn to deal with. The good news is you’ll learn exactly how to control your weight in this book.

Principle 2: Understand your three natures.

When you understand your three natures: your nature as a human, your nature as an individual, and the nature of how your environment influences you, then controlling your weight becomes common sense. That common sense helps you control your weight by building on your strengths and sidestepping your weaknesses. Everything in this book flows naturally from understanding your three natures.

You may not believe that now, but think of it this way: When your car goes too fast you put on the brake. Braking is just common sense because you know how to drive. In the same way, once you understand your three natures, controlling your weight becomes common sense because you’ll know exactly why and how losing weight is so hard. It then becomes clear what you can do about it.

As a human being, you are a highly skilled survival machine. You can survive in any environment, outwit any threat, perform Herculean amounts of work, and outlast gnawing periods of hunger. Unfortunately, these super powers have a cost in our modern world. That cost is how easy it is for you to become overweight.

As an individual, you have a unique nature that can both help and hurt your weight. The problem is that there’s almost no way for you to know your individual nature without experimenting on yourself. By experimenting you can find your unique way of being overweight and in the process answer questions like: Do you have a genetic predisposition to become overweight? Would you do better on a vegetarian, low carb, or low fat diet? Are you a person who naturally moves less? Nobody can tell you these things; you have to puzzle them out for yourself.

The Designer Diet helps you to understand your nature. In this process, you are connecting to a story that is as big as humanity. The knowledge you gain helps you find ways of amplifying your own strengths and minimizing your weaknesses. You’ll finally start working with your nature and not constantly fighting against it. You aren’t exploring your nature in order to highlight your failings, but to exploit your strengths.

This is hard work. It’s hard to confront your weaknesses and work through your failures. In the end, you become a better person for it. A great person is someone who has triumphed over hardship and suffering. That’s what makes life worthwhile. That’s what character is made of. On the Designer Diet, you aren’t just controlling your weight. You are also forging your character and you are working toward becoming a great person.

Principle 3: Identify the threats that sabotage your diet.

Threats are the reasons you fall off your diet. You don’t go quietly off your diet. The threats push you kicking and screaming, but push they do. Over 60 threats are presented in this book and you can find many more on our website. Some examples include not sleeping enough, having a genetic defect, living in the suburbs, hosting a particular virus or bacteria, eating from big plates, or simply having a body that doesn’t like to move.

You don’t even know most of the threats exist, because their effects are out of your awareness. Yet the threats are active every moment of your life, sabotaging your diet by tempting you to eat more and exercise less.

We’ll cover six key power threats:

• The Power of Starvation Threat. Your body has an incredible ability to adapt to starvation by reducing your need for energy, making you hungry, and filling your mind with nothing but thoughts of food.
• The Power of Genetics Threat. Genetics has about the same effect on your weight as it does on your height.
• The Power of Food Threat. You fall off your diet not because you are so weak, but because food is so strong.
• The Power of Rest Threat. You don’t have a drive to exercise; your instinct is to rest and conserve energy.
• The Power of Environment Threat. You probably won’t become obese, even if your genetics make you prone to obesity, as long as your environment makes it necessary for you to work hard or food is scarce.
• The Power of Slip-Ups Threat. Small slip-ups over time equals obesity. You make well over 200 food and exercise decisions a day and research has shown as few as 50 extra calories a day leads to obesity. A few bad decisions a day is all you need to gain weight.

We are each affected differently by each threat. Each of us is overweight in our own way and is why you need to find your own way of losing weight that fits your nature and your life. You can read more about the threats by turning to Chapter 4, The Threats—Why Your Diet Fails.

Once you’ve figured out which threats are your worst enemies you are in a perfect position to defeat them.

Principle 4: Discover your strategies for defeating the threats.

The good news is, once you learn about the threats, you can figure out your own ways to defeat them. These are called strategies. A strategy is anything you need to know or do to control your weight. Some examples include playing video games to lose weight, moving to a location that will help you exercise more, finding ways to take more steps, using smaller plates, pumping up the volume to eat more food for less calories, learning how to hide from food, and creating a more favorable environment in your neighborhood, home, school, and work.

Currently there are over a 150 strategies to help you lose weight. Many are covered in this book and the rest can be found on our website. Using simple strategies, you can realistically lose a pound a week by making only small changes to your life.

The strategies are organized into four major themes:

• The Designer Way is a revolutionary new process for controlling your weight on any diet that works, no matter how crazy your life becomes. We’ll talk more about the Designer Way in Principle 5.
• Joyful Eating shows how to eat in moderation by extracting enough pleasure from food that you feel satisfied after only a few bites.
• Weight-Proofing is like baby proofing your home for your diet. Systematically remove diet slip-ups from your life by creating an encouraging environment in which you naturally achieve your goals without relying on willpower.
• Lifeguarding stops you from being a victim of your thoughts. Retrain your brain to stop the unwanted thoughts that make you start eating and stop exercising.

Joyful Eating

The Joyful Eating strategies teach you how to eat less by enjoying your food more. This is based on how your sense of taste works. You naturally stop tasting food after a few bites, so eating more than a few bites of any food is a waste of taste. Learn how to eat one glorious, delicious, perfectly eaten bite of any food you want and you can be satisfied with just a few bites.

The benefits of this simple practice are many and surprising. Cravings, restricted food choices, boredom, and eating too much are just some of the reasons for falling off a diet. Joyful Eating solves all these problems in one strategy. Joyful Eating makes it possible to eat any food you want in moderation. You won’t have to restrict your diet to a small set of boring foods anymore, the pleasures of the entire world of food are there for you to explore.

Weight-Proofing

The Weight-Proofing strategies protect you from diet slip-ups by turning diet danger zones into Safe Zones. A slip-up is when you eat more or exercise less than you want because of the ever present threats that surround you. A Safe Zone is a protected area you create in which you naturally achieve your goals without relying on willpower every minute of the day. Using Weight-Proofing strategies, you systematically remove diet slip-ups from your life by creating ever widening circles of Safe Zones around you and your loved ones.

Weight-Proofing is about continually thinking how you can put yourself in the best position to succeed at four goals: eating to your diet, burning more calories, finding more joy, and preventing slip-ups. Weight-Proofing is like baby proofing your home. When baby proofing, you remove every possible way a baby might hurt themselves. When Weight-Proofing, you remove every possible way you might fall off your diet. In the Weight-Proofing chapters, you learn how to create Safe Zones for many important parts of your life: personal, home and family, exercise, portion control, car, shopping, work, school, and community.

Lifeguarding

The Lifeguarding strategies retrain your brain to stop the unwanted thoughts that lead to automatic eating and urges to stop exercising. You don’t have to be a victim to your own random thoughts. You can learn to retrain you brain to stop unwanted thoughts, because of something called brain neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain to change itself. Your brain is not hard-wired into its current behavior and can be retrained to reverse the years and years of bad habits that have been causing you to gain weight.

You can read more about the strategies by turning to Chapter 12, The Strategies—How to Stop the Threats.

All the strategies in the world won’t help you unless you also learn how best to apply them in your life. That’s what you learn in the next principle.

Principle 5: Follow the Designer Way for continuously improving your diet.

The key idea behind this principle is: if you keep doing the right things you’ll get the right results. The problem is figuring out the right things to do. Usually the right thing is said to be something simple like avoid fat, but these simple approaches rarely work.

The first reason diets don’t work is because the chances are very high you. won’t follow your diet. You are not a computer mindlessly following instructions. The odds are you’ll make enough mistakes on your diet that over time, you’ll lose control of your weight.

Even following a diet perfectly is still not good enough. This leads us to the second reason diets don’t work. Strictly following a diet won’t work because you constantly change, your life constantly changes, and your approach to weight control needs to change along with those changes. If you don’t adapt your diet strategies as you change, you’ll naturally lose control of your weight. You can’t do the same thing all the time and expect it to work when nothing around you stays the same.

Here we’ve finally found the deepest reason why your typical diet doesn’t work. We talk about “controlling” your weight. Interestingly, how to control things is a field of study unto itself. It turns out there are different ways to control different types of things. These are called process control methods.

There are two general process control methods: defined process control. and empirical process control. Your typical diet uses a defined process control approach, which doesn’t work because it was meant to control simpler problems than your weight. Your Designer Diet introduces a new weight loss control method based on empirical process control ideas, which does work because it was designed to control very complex processes like your weight.

We are getting a little technical, but stick with me. It’s worth it to know why Your Designer Diet will help you really control your weight when other approaches have failed you.

Let’s start with understanding what a process is. According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, a process is “a systematic series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result.” We are involved in processes all the time. There’s a process for vacuuming your home. There’s a process for controlling the heat in your house. When we want to achieve a result, there are a series of steps that need to be taken to make that result happen and whatever those steps are is called a process.

Controlling your weight is a process too. You take a series of steps with the goal of losing weight. The question is what is the best type of process for controlling your weight?

The defined process control method is used in your typical diet. It assumes the underlying thing to control (your weight) is completely understood, well-defined, repeatable, and predicable. They assume there is a well-defined set of inputs and the same results are generated every time from the inputs. Based on these assumptions, diets tell you exactly what you should do to lose weight and try to convince you their prescription will work the same for everyone, no matter what. Usually, defined process control methods are used for well understood processes like an assembly line where everything can really be thought out completely in advance.

But your life is not an assembly line and neither is your body. That’s why diets based on this method just won’t work. Very little is understood about the exact mechanisms of obesity, much less the unique ways in which you are overweight. And to make the problem worse, your life continually changes in ways no one can predict.

Right now, nobody on earth can tell you exactly what you will need to do to control your weight. Sure, they can give you generalities like eat less and exercise more, but what exactly should you as an individual do to eat less and exercise more right now? To know that, you have to know your genetics, everything that’s happened in your life and the results from all the different strategies you’ve used to control your weight. Only then are you in a position to know how to control your weight.

This is exactly the type of problem where the empirical process control method shines. It is specifically designed to expect the unexpected and work with very complicated systems that change over time. This method has been used successfully by giant companies like Toyota to quickly and efficiently produce quality cars. And many of the world’s most successful software companies use this approach to develop software.

What I’ve done is take the extremely successful and powerful empirical process control model and adapt it to controlling your weight. That’s why this book is revolutionary. It’s a completely new approach for weight control. I call this new process for controlling your weight the Designer Way.

A powerful way to think about being overweight is to understand that there are millions and millions of ways for you to become overweight. Threats are everywhere and they never let up. Yet, there are just a few ways for you to become lean and strong. The process captured in the Designer Way is how you sift through all the possible strategies to figure out which strategies are your ways of becoming lean and strong.

If all this just sounds like gibberish and you are bored to tears reading about it, don’t worry. I just wanted you to be aware that there’s some deep thinking going on in the approach used in this book and that the ideas have been used very successfully in other areas. There’s no reason you can’t be just as successful.

The Designer Way has a steady rhythm of three actions that happen once a week, once a day, and whenever the opportunity arises:

• Start Spin. A time for reflection. Every week, take time to check if you are meeting your goals, set new goals, and update your plan on how you want to meet your goals.
• Daily Check. A time for quick response. Every morning, perform a quick check to see if you unexpectedly gained weight. If you gain weight, quickly respond by adjusting your strategies.
• Make a Move. A time for immediate action. Always look for opportunities to prevent slip-ups, exercise more, eat to your diet and find more joy in your life. If you see an opportunity to implement a strategy, take it.

If you follow this deceptively simple process, you’ll immediately notice when a new threat enters your life. Once you notice a threat, you’ll immediately respond with a counter strategy. Ideally your counter strategy reduces your weight again. If it doesn’t, then work out why not and use what you’ve learned to select another strategy to try. By reacting quickly to reverse any weight gain, you put yourself back in control of your weight.

The secret of the Designer Way is to make small changes in your weight control strategies in response to what is really happening in your life. The result is your diet continually improves and that is what finally empowers you to lose weight and keep it off.

This approach is stunningly effective. You can read more about the Designer Way by turning to The Designer Way, Chapter 13.

Principle 6: Nurture your Designer Mind.

The Designer Diet is not just a list of goals and practices. It’s a mindset. It’s a way of looking at the world. Once you make this mindset part of who you are then your weight loss won’t be a one time thing anymore. Keeping your weight off will be something you do naturally.

Why isn’t the Designer Diet about goals? Because goals mean there’s a finish line. There is no finish line. You are always trying to learn and improve your diet. There’s no peak to climb where you can shout “Eureka, I am done!” The moment you think you are done the weight will fly back on and you’ll be forever frustrated.

Why isn’t the Designer Diet a fixed set of practices? Because the Designer Diet is a lifestyle, a mindset, a journey, not a destination. Once you understand that, you can ease up on yourself and relax. There is no list of things for you to do or not to do that will work for all time and every situation. You don’t have to run around looking for the solution. There is no one perfect solution for weight loss. You can’t be fixed because you are not broken.

That’s the Designer Mind. Don’t worry about goals or practices. Be steady. Don’t get too low when you gain a pound. Don’t get too high when you lose a pound. Just keep trying to do the right thing and over time your weight will work itself out.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t lose weight every day. It doesn’t matter if you don’t lose weight every week. It doesn’t even matter if you gain a little weight. All that’s normal and to be expected and can be handled. What matters is you keep on trying to do the right thing.

What else can you do? Give up? No, you can’t give up. Can you eat less than what you should be eating? No, your body will think you are starving and do everything it can to make you gain weight. Can you exercise more than is reasonable for you? No, you’ll just end up quitting or getting hurt.

There is no escape from your weight problems. No magic can turn you into a thin person. Weight problems are a natural and normal part of modern life. That means there’s no reason to feel ashamed about your weight struggles. It’s part of what it means to be human.

So, follow the Designer Way. Keep learning and getting better at your diet. That’s what it means to have complete responsibility for your weight in the 21st century.

Principle 7: Strive for improvement.

Never feel satisfied with where you are. You can always do better. The moment you start feeling you’ve learned all there is to learn or you’ve done everything you can do is the exact moment you’ll start gaining weight again.

At some point you are almost certain to think you’ve got your weight problems solved. You’ll abandon the Designer Way and go back to your old habits. Well, you don’t have your weight problems solved, as your scale will soon tell you. So don’t get down on yourself when a little weight comes back on. Just pick up where you left off and keep going.

Feel proud and happy with your progress. But remember, progress isn’t a sign it’s time to stop, it’s a sign there’s more progress to be made in your future.

Principle 8: Whatever works.

Whatever works and be as extreme as you need to be is a good one line summary of the Designer Diet. What will work for you? Nobody can tell you. Nobody, not your doctor, not your partner, not your best friend, and certainly not the media. Nobody can know how you feel inside or how your body will respond to different strategies. Believe in your own experience to figure out what works for you.

To know what works you’ll have to experiment with different strategies using the Designer Way as a guide. Don’t feel bad if a strategy doesn’t work, but keep trying and be creative. Try something and see what happens. Something will work.

When you do find a strategy that works, be as extreme as you need to be to make it work even better. Don’t feel embarrassed. If you need to hide food from yourself at a table so you won’t be tempted to eat, then that’s just what you’ll have to do. Remember: whatever works and be as extreme as you need to be.

The Designer Diet doesn’t waste any time on the philosophy or the politics of weight loss. It doesn’t try to tell you what foods you should eat or stay away from. It doesn’t spend time trying to make you feel bad or guilt you into anything. No, the Designer Diet is about helping you understand why losing weight is so hard and then using that knowledge to explore all the possible ways of losing weight that work for you and your life.

On the Designer Diet, you don’t accept anything on anyone else’s authority. You test everything against your own experience and take nothing on faith.

It’s completely practical. You try different things and if a strategy works for you then that’s all that matters. What matters is what helps you control your weight, nothing else is important. Ultimately you must make up your own mind about what works for you.

Principle 9: Take the long view.

Nothing is more frustrating than your weight. It magically fluctuates up and down for seemingly no reason at all. And it’s so easy to let these little failures make you depressed or angry at yourself. We often let so much anger and disappointment build up in ourselves. Over time, constant failure often becomes a deep point of shame and that shame can easily cause an ever worsening downward spiral of dysfunctional behavior.

Let go of that anger, shame, and disappointment. How do you let go? By having perspective. Step back and remember the great challenges you face with your weight. You are a highly efficient weight gaining survival machine. Your hunger is real, natural and expected. Controlling your weight was never meant to be easy. And it isn’t.

You will have weight problems. That’s the way of it. That is your nature as a human, your nature as a person, and the nature of the world you live in. You are the way you are so you’ll have the best chance of surviving in a dangerous, unpredictable world. That’s why there is no need to feel shame or embarrassment. There is no reason to torment yourself. Weight control is simply a problem most modern humans must now learn to deal with.

You can control your weight if you keep doing the right things and don’t quit. Nurture your Designer Mind and follow the Designer Way and you will put yourself back in control of your weight. By immediately noticing any weight gain, finding the cause, and then figuring out counter strategies, you will get your weight back down again. You can always control your weight. This is the long view.

So forgive yourself! Forgiving yourself is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of mature strength. Realize you do not deserve to be punished for the rest of your life for weight problems that arise directly from your nature. Once you understand this in your heart, you can finally be honest with yourself and accept yourself for the complex being you truly are. And it’s this honesty and acceptance that will keep you in control of your weight for the rest of your life.

Please see Strategy 28, Forgive Yourself—Prevent a Lapse from Becoming a Collapse for more discussion on this topic.

Principle 10: Ask for help.

All the principles, threats, strategies, and ideas in this book aren’t enough to free you from your weight problems. Most of them arise from impulses beyond your conscious control. These impulses can’t be completely destroyed because they are part of your nature. And if you give in to your impulses you will gain weight and increase your health risks.

What you learn in Your Designer Diet is another way. You learn to be alert to your weight problems. Being alert gives you a gap, a window in which you can change how you would normally respond to the forces throwing your weight out of control. That gap gives you the space you need to see possibilities in your life you might not have considered before.

By being alert, you can choose to respond differently. You can respond using strategies in this book, strategies you’ve created for yourself, or strategies you’ve learned from other helpers along the way.

You can’t be alert to everything. A lot of weight gain happens from unnoticed life changes. Perhaps a change in jobs, a change in season, or a lingering cold is the root cause of a recent weight gain, but you are too close to a situation to see it. Or perhaps you notice a problem but you’ve run out of creative ideas of how to respond.

What do you do in these situations? Ask for help! Do your best, but sometimes your best isn’t good enough. Every problem can be solved with enough dedicated and friendly people helping you. Someone will have an idea or suggestion that will help you get your weight back under control again.

Please see Strategy 33, Create Your Support Group—Long Term Support Systems Work for more discussion on this topic.

The Essence of the Designer Principles

If you extract the essence from the Designer Principles, here’s what they ask you to do:

Understand the threats and how they make it hard to lose weight. Learn the strategies and how you can use them to control your weight. You are seldom done with a strategy; most strategies are endless. Sometimes you will do better. Sometimes you will do worse. This is the ebb and flow of life. Don’t worry about where you are at now, it’s what you do next that matters most. Seek help and give help, both are good for the soul. Pay attention to your life. Think about changes you can make for the better. Notice what works for you and what doesn’t. Forget what doesn’t work. Embrace what works. Be as extreme as you need to be. Be gentle on yourself, what you are trying to do is not easy. Keep trying. That’s the best any of us can do.

A Real-Life Example: My Unexpected Weight Gain

How do all these principles work together to put you back in control of your weight? A fair question. Let’s look at an example of how I handled some unexpected weight gain using the 10 Designer Principles.

One morning I was a bit shocked to notice I had gained weight. But through my Daily Feedback System, which we’ll talk about more in the Designer Way chapter, the evidence was right in front of my disbelieving eyes. My clothes looked and felt tight. And when I looked at myself in the mirror there was definitely some extra flab around the middle.

I was more than a little confused. Why had I gained weight? I was pretty sure I wasn’t eating any more or exercising any less than usual. What was going on?

I started thinking about what new threats may have entered my life. Nothing came to me at first, but then it hit me: the weather had turned cold and rainy a few days earlier. That was it. I wasn’t getting out as much so I wasn’t burning as many calories as usual. I just hadn’t noticed until my Daily Feedback System gave me an early warning of a train load of weight gain heading for me in the future.

I had my early warning so what was I going to do about it? I started by making a few small strategy changes to bring my weight back down. The first was to reduce my afternoon snack so I was eating 100 fewer calories. One hundred calories is about a mile of walking and with the horrible weather it would be hard to walk that mile.

I waited a few days to see how that strategy change worked. Using my feedback system I determined that my weight hadn’t dropped. And that’s really excellent news! Not gaining weight is a huge win. Just think how much better off you would be if you could just not gain any more weight. But I wanted to lose the weight I gained, so I decided I needed to be more extreme.

Next, I spent 5 extra minutes a day on the elliptical cycle. After a few days my weight was going down again. My clothes fit a little better, but it was clear I wasn’t losing enough.

I realized I had to move more, even though the weather was like a prison cell with ropes of rain for bars. My strategy was to find more steps whenever and wherever I could. I took the stairs more. I cleaned the house more. I got up and walked more. I played with the dogs more. I did everything I could to find more steps to take. All these little strategy changes worked. My weight went back down. That is, until the next problem popped-up causing me to gain weight again!

By finding the weight gain immediately and doing something about it immediately, I kept my weight from ballooning out of control. That’s a big change from how I’d handled weight problems in the past. Previously, I would only have noticed I gained weight after I put on 20 extra pounds. And at that point it was hard to do anything about it. Finding problems early makes them much easier to fix.

This is just a simple example, but it shows how all the principles, threats and strategies can work together. You can always keep your weight under control by adapting to your changing life.

The true power of this approach is that it allows you to make things better by finding problems early. Actively finding problems rather than being the victim of problems is a real switch in the typical power relationship we have with our weight. Usually we feel victimized by our weight. Following the 10 Designer Principles changes that.

You become the powerful problem solver in your life. First you find problems and then you quickly solve them. That’s the continuous cycle of improvement that puts you back in control of your weight. You continually improve yourself by making small changes in response to what is happening in your life, seeing how it works out, and then making more changes.

You are learning by doing, which requires you to act. Don’t worry that you don’t know everything and are unsure about what to do. Go ahead and take.action. Taking action moves you forward, helps you learn, and makes you better and better at staying on your diet. Constant.improvement is how you reach and maintain your goals over a lifetime.

Finding, rather than ignoring, problems has another not so obvious yet critically important benefit: you can ask for help.

As we talked about in the Ask for Help principle, there is no problem that can’t be solved with enough dedicated and friendly people helping you. In my case, once I detected the problem I could have immediately asked for help from my friends, support group, or from the http://YourDesignerDiet.com forums. Someone surely would have suggested the changing weather as a possible cause for my weight gain. And once the cause was diagnosed, some other people would have surely suggested small improvements I could make to bring my weight back down. It’s amazing how much people in a group can help when you give each other a chance.

In this example, my problem was that I didn’t notice the world had changed around me. I didn’t notice I was spending more time inside and that was all it took to start the weight gain train in motion. You are always changing, your life is always changing, and your weight is always changing. You stay in control of your weight by quickly adapting to these changes.

You Can Do This

It’s a relief to know there’s something you can do to control your weight. Most diets want you to do something you know deep down you can’t do over the long run. Can you really eat low-carb for the rest of your life? Can you really go to the gym every day? The chances are against it.

The Designer Diet is something you can do because you create your own path for yourself. There’s no need for you to give up. You can learn to channel your energy and effort in the right direction. You can do this.

The Designer Diet is the only thing I’ve been able to do consistently. I can’t always exercise more and eat less. I can’t always eat or do the right things. But I can do the Designer Diet because it’s quick, simple and it works. It allows me to be who I am within a safe structure. That’s the beauty of the Designer Diet.

What’s Next?

The rest of the book talks about the threats and strategies you’ll need to implement the 10 Designer Principles. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about a few initial strategies that will help setup the rest of the book. Then we’ll spend a lot of time talking about the threats. And after the threats we’ll talk about all the different strategies you can use to defeat the threats.

So, let’s get started!