Chapter 12: The Strategies—How to

After reading dozens and dozens of reasons why controlling your
weight is so hard, it’s natural to wonder how you can overcome
the threats. The threats seem overwhelming and inescapable.
Take heart, there is a way to defeat almost every threat. The ways of defeating
threats are called strategies.

A strategy is a counter move to one or more threats. If you have a problem
controlling your portions, there are strategies for helping you learn portion
control. If you naturally move less, there are strategies for helping you naturally
move more. You will be able to find a way to control your weight.

In all the chapters that follow, we’ll talk about the different strategies you
can use to defeat the threats. The strategies in this book have been specifically
structured to help you stay on your diet, eat in moderation, and naturally
exercise more, all without having to rely on willpower.

Please don’t interpret “not relying on willpower” to mean you don’t have
to do anything. You’ll have to do a lot of work, but it will be worth it because
you’ll see measurable results in your life.

❚ Just Knowing about the Threats isn’t Enough

You might think that just knowing about the threats is enough to control
your weight. Unfortunately, it’s not. Most of the threats operate at an unconscious level. You won’t even know when they are attacking you. So simply being aware of the threats won’t help you stop them.

Imagine you are watching TV and a commercial comes on advertising a
tempting food. It looks delicious. You can taste it. You can smell it. You want
it. And soon you find yourself in your kitchen looking for a treat to eat.
When you see the commercial, knowledge of the threats won’t help you.
The path from stimulus, wanting, and getting something to eat is automatic.
Unless you develop strategies for coping, you will mysteriously find yourself
eating without realizing how it happened.

That’s what knowing the threats is good for: helping you to create strategies
for stopping the threats. In the next four sections of this book, we’ll talk
about the strategies for defeating the threats:

❖ The Designer Way. In this chapter you will learn a complete process
for losing and maintaining your weight that works no matter
how crazy your life becomes.
❖ Learn the Art of Joyful Eating. In this chapter you will learn how
to eat in moderation and prevent diet-crushing cravings by turning
eating into a peak pleasure experience.
❖ Put the Brake on Automatic Eating. In this chapter you will learn
how to physically retrain your brain into healthier, more effective
behaviors and away from bad habits like automatic eating.
❖ Weight-Proof Your Life. In this large group of related chapters you
will learn how to create protected areas in your life in which you
naturally achieve your weight loss goals without relying on willpower
every minute of every day.

Taken together, these strategies help to make up for weaknesses in your
genetics and environment by showing you how to eliminate the slip-ups
that cause you to fall of your diet. They do this by recognizing, building
on, and taking advantage of the way humans work in real life. You use your
intelligence to outwit and outlast the ancient part of yourself that drives
you to survive.

Using the strategies puts you in the best position to succeed at controlling
your weight. The world is full of threats. Fortunately, you are full of strengths
too, many of which you aren’t even aware of yet because you’ve never been fully
exposed to all the strategies you may be good at. You’ll learn how to counter
the threats by finding your strengths. The result is a safe space where you are
no longer a victim of the unconscious processes behind the threats.

This book covers many strategies, and there are many more on our website,
but there are still a lot more strategies for you to discover for yourself. This
book is not the end. It’s just the beginning of a wonderful process that will
hopefully result in your losing the weight you want, maintaining the weight
you need, and staying on your diet for the rest of your life.