This is the Introduction chapter of Your Designer Diet. It tries to give you a good feel for what the book is about and how you might benefit from reading the entire book.

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.

I am so disappointed in myself for letting myself go yet again.
Over the last 20 years, I have gained and lost literally hundreds
of pounds. Wouldn’t you think I could control my weight by
now? -Anonymous

I could have written this. It’s me and my life 100%. And if you are reading his book, it’s probably your life too.

If you are overweight, I know you are hurting. You are probably embarrassed and ashamed. You are probably at a complete loss to explain how you et your life get so far out of control.

I hate that you keep gaining weight and you don’t understand why. I hate that you think gaining weight is all your fault. I hate that you blame yourself nd you feel bad that you can’t keep the weight off. It’s a horrible and preventable downward spiral of depression.

You need to know that your weight problems are not all your fault. You can control your weight once you learn how to work with your nature as a human, your nature as an individual, and the nature of the world you live in. You can find your own strengths and use them to keep your weight off. You
don’t have to feel bad about yourself and your life anymore.

Through research and experimentation, I created a new weight loss method that helped me lose over 100 pounds, keep the weight off, and control my diabetes. My goal is to share the wonder of what I’ve learned with you, someone who has probably experienced a lot of the same difficulties I have.

I passionately believe this method, called the Designer Diet, will work for you too. One reason diets fail is they are one-size-fits all. They tell everyone to do exactly the same thing. But you are unique and your life is unique. How can a one-size-fits-all diet possibly keep up with your crazy life?

The Designer Diet is based on the idea of creating and designing the perfect diet just for you and your life. No single problem causes you to be overweight so there is no single solution either. You need a way of controlling your weight that changes as you change, adjusts to your unique individual nature, and
takes advantage of your strengths while sidestepping your weaknesses. That’s exactly what you learn how to do in the Designer Diet.

Using a simple step-by-step process, the Designer Diet teaches you how to control your weight by paying attention to your life, reacting quickly to reverse any weight gain, trying different strategies to help you eat less and exercise more, creating an encouraging environment, and learning which strategies work best
for you. The result is that you continually improve your diet and that’s what finally empowers you to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of your life.

Following your Designer Diet is a lot like hiring a world famous designer to create your dream wardrobe. Your new, expertly tailored clothes fit your body perfectly and the style always shows you at your absolute best. The Designer Diet helps you to do the same for your diet. Why use a one-size-fits-all off the rack diet when you can design a diet especially for you?

The Designer Diet goes way beyond simply hiring a designer. Designers hand you clothes and tell you what looks good on you. With the Designer Diet, you learn how to become your own world famous designer for your own diet. You need to be the designer when developing your diet. The Designer Diet teaches you a process to discover what works for you. No more will you have to rely on others to keep your weight under control.

How is the Designer Diet Different?

The world may not need another diet book, but this isn’t your typical diet book. It has a fresh, unique and hopeful approach. If you are tired of the same old thing and the never-ending fads and scams, this book is for you. This book is different from all the other diet books in three major ways.

The first major difference is that it focuses on controlling your weight by teaching how to stay on a diet rather than what to eat. There are enough books in the universe telling you what to eat. This book is a diet.helper, not another diet. It works alongside your current diet, helping you stay on your own diet, whatever diet you have chosen. What to eat is always your choice.

The second major difference is the use of diet threats as a means of understanding why staying on a diet is so hard. A lot of the advice in the diet world is no different from easily ignored marketing slogans. The threats are surprising and put into words the feelings we all have that staying on a diet and losing weight are really, really hard.

The third major difference is that this book focuses on developing positive skills, called strategies, which you can apply immediately to your daily life. In this book we won’t just talk about eating less and exercising more, you’ll learn exactly how to really eat less and exercise more.

The result is control. You’ll put yourself back in control of your weight. Does this sound a little different from the normal diet book? Does it sound like something that might work for you?

How this Book is Organized?

This book is organized into three sections:

1. The purpose of the first chapter—Why is Losing Weight So Hard?— is to help free you from old ways of thinking about your weight that haven’t worked. You need a fresh perspective, a new start. This chapter makes the case that much of what you know about your weight problem is misguided and that once you understand the real causes of your struggles, you can control your weight for the rest of your life. You are not what society says you are. You are not weak, lazy, and undisciplined. Being overweight is not all your fault. You are an amazingly capable world class survival machine. Unfortunately, in our modern world, that puts you at a high risk for being overweight. You can control your weight once you understand your true nature as a human and as an individual.

2. The second chapter—The 10 Designer Principles for Controlling Your Weight—presents the big picture of how to control your weight using the Designer Diet. You’ll learn about the Designer Way, the Designer Mind, and many other powerful weight control principles.

3. The rest of the book presents all the threats and strategies needed to implement the process described in the 10 Designer Principles. Understanding the threats against your diet and how to use the strategies to defeat them are how you’ll put yourself back in control of your weight.

To control your weight, you don’t have to become someone different from who you are right now. You don’t have to become someone better either. To control your weight, you simply need to become the best at being you. That means learning who you are, making friends with yourself, taking an interest in yourself, and being gentle with yourself. In that process, guided by the Designer Diet, you’ll learn all you need to know to control your weight.

There’s no better time to start controlling your weight than now. There’s no time in the future when you’ll be better prepared or more “together.” Start with who you are now and where you are at in your life. That’s good enough. That’s all you need. You can make it work.

Two Ways to Read this Book

The way I imagine you reading this book is by browsing.around and reading the subjects that look.interesting.to you. This book is organized to make sense if you read it straight through or just by picking a random page. You can read it either way. Whatever works for you.

All the Threats and Strategies are Numbered and have Summaries

To make browsing easy, the book is divided into chapters that group related threats and strategies into common themes. For easy reference, each threat and strategy is assigned a unique number.

A threat or strategy can be as small as one line, one paragraph or many pages in length. Each entry begins with a short summary of the essential take-home message of the threat or strategy. You should be able to learn the key points of the book by just reading the summaries.

Accessing the Additional Strategies

Unfortunately, books can only be so large. The publisher wouldn’t let me include all the strategies I wanted to. Rather than cut the number of strategies, I decided to put all of them on our website so you can read them at your convenience. Ninety-nine strategies are covered in this book, but there are over 150 on our website (http://YourDesignerDiet.com). Don’t think the strategies on the website aren’t good ones. They are great! Here are just a few:

Understanding Taste. You learn about your amazing sense of taste. Even the best wine experts in the world can’t tell the difference between red and white wine and you’ll learn why. You’ll also learn how to tell if you’re a supertaster or a nontaster. Supertasters are thinner so it’s good to know which you are.

Learn How to Taste the Big 5: Wine, Chocolate, Beer, Cheese, and Coffee. There’s a lot of food out there for you to have fun with. Each of these foods can provide a lifetime of wonderful eating experiences.

Create Your Senior Safe Zone. This chapter gives many strategies helping seniors keep themselves healthy. You’ll meet my grandma and read one of my favorite strategies, Think Fierce, which talks about how those who age well are the ones who don’t buy into negative attitudes about aging.

To read these strategies and many more please visit our web site at http://YourDesignerDiet.com.

When You Get Stuck

There may come a time when you get stuck. You will have gained weight. You will have fallen off your diet and you will be looking for what to do next. When that time comes, I hope you can just open up this book to any page and find something, any little thought or idea, that will help you over the bad patch you are having. That’s what I truly hope.

Maybe this book will interest you, maybe it won’t. I hope it does. If you aren’t interested, I appreciate all your time and consideration. If you are interested, please continue reading on. I am confident you can find some of your own answers in this book too.