This is the conclusion 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.

We’ve come a long way together in this book. A lot of ideas have been presented. Maybe not always in the best way possible, but I hope you’ll take away something useful. I want to thank you for sticking with me to the end. If you are one of those people who reads the end of a book before the beginning, I hope it’s good enough to read twice.

We all wish we could just take a pill and then eat what we want, when we want, and never gain weight. Why isn’t it that simple? My very unoriginal conclusion is this:

We really like food and that makes us eat too much of it.

Food is simply one of our greatest sources of pleasure and joy. To deny food is to deny a big part of what makes life worth living. Who is willing to do that?

We really like food for good and honest reasons. It’s not because of a lack of willpower or moral weakness as we’ve always been told. We humans are stunningly successful survival machines. Our bodies want to eat because eating when food is available has historically been the key to survival. Our bodies want us to eat and gain weight. And because cheap, great tasting, high calorie food is now available everywhere it’s just our nature as humans to oblige.

It’s not likely science will create a single miracle pill that will solve the obesity problem. Our bodies have so many ways of making us eat that finding a pill to handle all those possibilities will be difficult. Unfortunately, unless you are naturally thin or lived a hundred years ago, weight control may always be a challenge for you.

I really meant it earlier when I said you are among the first generation with complete responsibility for maintaining your weight. If you want to exercise more, you must find a way to make it happen. If you want to eat the right amount, you must find a way to make it happen. You can’t rely on your environment to make you exercise and you can’t rely on your environment to limit the number of calories you eat.

Staying on your diet is now all on you and it’s hard. It’s hard and until now there’s really been no reason for you to have figured out how to stay on a diet given how radically the world has changed.

The ideas, skills and techniques we shared in this book are an attempt to help you re-create your world so it helps you control your weight while still respecting the powerful place the joy of food has in life. What did you learn to help create your perfect Designer Diet?

You learned the surprising truth that your body plays the survival game; most people play the lose weight game, while you really want to play the stay on a diet game.

How can you stay on a diet? By creating your Designer Diet. A diet that responds to changes in your life and that helps you find ways to lose weight that takes advantage of your strengths while avoiding the destructive power of your weaknesses.

You learned how to create your Designer Diet using the Designer Principles. The key principles are: 1) Take responsibility, 2) Understand your three natures, 3) Identify the threats that sabotage your diet, 4) Discover your strategies for defeating the threats, and 5) Follow the Designer Way for continuously improving your diet.

Through the threats you learned how amazingly complicated we humans are and how our nature provides a stunningly large number of ways to gain weight. From your understanding of the threats, you learned how to develop effective strategies for defeating the threats.

After mastering the threats and strategies, you can then follow the Designer Way to control your weight in an ever-changing world. With the Designer Way, you continually learn which strategies work for you by using a feedback system of your own creation. And then you continually improve your diet by making changes to your strategies. You are unique in all the world and you need to find the strategies that work for you and your life. The end result is a diet created just for you that gives you the best chance of losing weight and keeping it off permanently.

And because staying on your diet requires a joyful vision of life, we learned about Joyful Eating. Joyful Eating helps you experience pleasure from food without needing to overeat. This is key because without joy you can’t stick to a diet.

We also learned about creating Safe Zones in which you “baby proof” your life by systematically removing diet slip-up opportunities from all areas of your life. This is key because you gain weight one little slip-up at a time. Minimizing slip-ups maximizes your chances of staying on your diet for the rest of your life, and that’s what this book is all about.

Some people ask me how I feel now that I’ve solved all my weight problems. I have to laugh when I hear that question. My weight problems will never be completely solved. Controlling my weight will always be a struggle. What is different now is that when I start gaining weight I’ll notice before it’s too late and I’ll be able to do something about it before my weight spirals out of control.

I may not have solved all my weight problems, but I no longer fear my weight either. I feel like I am back in control. And I like that feeling.

You may feel like you’ll never be in control of your weight again, but that’s not true. It’s never too late. You can take control. I am just like you and I have learned to stay on my diet, not by being strong, but by learning how to create my own Designer Diet. I know you can do it too.

If you still want more, please come visit us at http://YourDesignerDiet.com. We’ll try to support each other, learn from each other, and have a bit of fun. See you there!