Would you like permanent, stress-free, worry-free weight loss?

Sure who wouldn’t?

It’s understood by most people that losing weight is doing something healthy for yourself. But you don’t have to change what you already do, in terms of healthy living, to lose weight.

What?!! What’s he saying?

I’m saying that if your goal is to lose weight in a reasonable, reliable manner, then you don’t have to do “healthy” things to do it. You don’t have to do things like eating the “right” foods or getting off your couch to exercise. If your goal is to become very fit and healthy in all manners, then by all means, eat right and exercise – full steam ahead. While your cardio vascular health and the condition of your arteries are vitally important, they are topics for a different article.

This article is about permanent, stress-free weight loss. But before we get into what that means, let’s talk about what it does not mean. At least what it does not mean here. We are not talking about becoming sculpted healthy poster people. We are talking about losing weight. Our focus is losing weight, period. What you will learn here will not in any way be bad for your health. It is dangerous and outright stupid to jeopardize your health to lose weight. However, losing weight and becoming fit are two different things.

It is important to separate the issues. Losing weight down to a normal weight is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. Everyone knows that being overweight or obese is very bad for your health. The World Health Organization has said that obesity is becoming the single largest health issue of the 21^st century.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s get on with the specific issue we came to learn about; stress-free, permanent weight loss.

The first thing you’ll want to understand is that to be successful with permanent, stress-free weight loss, you’re going to need to give up a few tried and tired staples of the weight loss world (oh, darn!).

• You have to give up the idea of changing your diet.
  • NO changing what you eat is required.
• Then you have give up the idea of going on a diet.
  • NO counting calories, points, or watching portions.
• Next you have to give up the idea of starting an exercise routine.
  • NO exercise program.
• After that you have to give up the idea of finding a good diet pill.
  • NO pills needed.
• That also means you have to give up on finding the right vitamin or mineral supplement
  • NO supplements needed.
• And you have to give up on those products that cleanse toxins from the body.
  • NO cleansing required.
• Also, you will have to give up the idea of changing your lifestyle – you love your current lifestyle, don't you?
  • NO changing your lifestyle
• You even have to give up the idea of any gimmicky belts, shoes, suits, wraps, etc.
  • NO foolish gimmicks ( I know, oh darn again!)

After you’ve given up on a few things, there are a few other things that should resonate with you:

• You have struggled with your weight for a long time
• Dieting is very hard, even outright miserable
• In fact, losing weight by any method is hard
• You have gained the weight back after losing it by any method
• You are tired of the yo-yo or constant overweight
• You are tired of buying the same weight loss things just repackaged
• You are willing to learn something new
• You are willing to put aside what you "know", and use your logic and intellect to determine if what you learn in this article is true for you

If you recognize yourself in any one of these statements, this article is for you. If you see yourself in two or more of these statements, then you won’t want to leave this page without reading the entire article:

• You gain weight when emotional or stressed
• You eat or snack when you are not hungry
• You eat or snack when you have said, even promised yourself, you won’t
• You feel it is not fair that others get to eat what they want and not gain weight
• You can just about always find room for something that tastes good
• You generally clean your plate
• You are afraid of having to give up the foods you love

In this article we will explain why losing weight is so hard, what causes some people to be overweight and what can be done about it. But first we will have to clear some misconceptions and errors about weight gain and weight loss. In speaking to thousands of people individually and at many seminars I have found it necessary to address many of the myths of weight loss. Trying to skip these steps has always resulted in coming back to them sooner or later anyway. So let’s look at those issues now.

You don’t have to change your diet. There are plenty of scientists with very real unbiased studies showing this such as the Harvard study published in the September 2007 issue of the American journal of Clinical Nutrition. But for this article, let’s set aside the science of chemistry, and use your own experience. Sure, some foods digest easier, others turn to fat easier, some bind with something and pass through the system but all of that doesn’t hold up against the real world we live in, as far as who is eating what and who is overweight. Watch everyone who ever buys a Snickers bar, real Coke, pizza or gets the vegetarian entre, and you will notice that they come in all shapes and sizes.

Think about that for a second. Take a moment and examine your overall diet. Now, is there anyone in the world who eats virtually the same type of foods as you? Unless you have an extremely weird diet, you can bet there are plenty of people who eat pretty much the same foods that you eat. It is also a safe bet that many of those people are thin, many are overweight and some are even seriously obese. When discussing this concept that you can pretty much eat what ever you like and become and remain thin a woman asked if that meant that she could continue eating Mexican food.

If you think about that a second the answer becomes obvious. Since just about everone in Mexico has eaten Mexican food for many generations, and most of them are not obese, then it would be safe to say that indeed, you could still continue to eat Mexican food and still lose weight.

This is very important. While some foods are obviously less fattening than others - it is not so much what you eat, but how much of it that you eat.

No matter what you eat, if you eat too much of it for your current physical needs you will gain weight. There is no way around that simple fact.

Eat what you love; you’ll be happier! Eating what you don't like because it is better for you or you are "supposed" to is actually fattening in the long run because it adds stress and aids in emotional eating.

Again, just use your common sense and personal observations. How many couples do you know, or have you seen in restaurants, where they eat the same types of food yet one is thin and the other is obese? I see it all the time.

Step away from the hype and you can see that, while eating a healthy diet is important for good health, it can’t be the key to causing or preventing obesity – and therefore can’t be the key to losing weight.

As far as going on a diet, well, the answer is in on that. Citing from a 14 page scholarly paper from researchers at UCLA titled: Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments Diets Are Not the Answer: “Reviews of the scientific literature on dieting (e.g., Garner & Wooley, 1991; Jeffery et al., 2000; Perri & Fuller, 1995) generally draw two conclusions about diets. First, diets do lead to short-term weight loss. One summary of diet studies from the 1970s to the mid-1990s found that these weight loss programs consistently resulted in participants losing an average of 5%–10% of their weight (Perri & Fuller, 1995). Second, these losses are not maintained. As noted in one review, “It is only the rate of weight regain, not the fact of weight regain, that appears open to debate” (Garner & Wooley, 1991, p. 740).”

The following quote is found on Diet Blog. This is their final conclusion when researching where the commonly cited 95% diet failure rate comes from. “While we cannot put an exact figure on it (e.g.95%) – we can conclude that most efforts at calorie restriction result in only very short-term weight loss, and, could even ultimately lead to weight gain!”

If you want to learn more about specific diets go to Best Diet Plans on Hubpages. It is an excellent overview of the most popular diets from a positive perspective. But as stated in the UCLA study, it isn’t a matter of if the diet fails, it is just a matter of when, and that is the real problem. Our goal is to find permanent, stress-free weight loss. Clearly, diets are not the answer.

Again, as with health food proponents, there are those who swear that exercise is a vital and even critical aspect of weight loss. Also, like some health food supporters, some supporters of exercise will want to jump up and down about my comment that you don’t have to exercise to lose weight. They will say, and I agree, that exercise helps build self esteem. I might agree that it helps build discipline and a lot of other positive things. What they won’t say is that if you really don’t like exercise, or have been significantly overweight for a long time, that any real exercise, is for you, an act of torture. In that case, it’s just another set up for failure and another notch lowering your self esteem.

The implication is that if you don’t like exercise, then there’s something wrong with you. That is something I strongly disagree with. Personally I have never enjoyed exercise and in fact don’t care much for most physical activity, so don’t do much. Yet I am thin. According to the Multiple Intelligences Theory, pioneered by Harvard professor Howard Gardner, some people are physically oriented and may love to exercise, and many are not. For those who are not physically oriented, it is time to relax and honor your desire to do other things.

While we understand that burning calories through exercise is not a simple mathematic equation, the math of exercise versus eating, is a rather telling story. If you are in about average condition and can safely go out and run for a half hour, you will run about three miles in that period of time. Doing that, you will burn around 240 more calories than if you had just remained comfortable in your chair for the same thirty minutes. When you get back, if you were to eat a couple of regular chocolate chip cookies you will take in a little more than 275 calories. So, run for thirty minutes, eat for two minutes, and have an extra 35 calories. There is absolutely no possible way you can burn as many calories in exercise as you can consume. You can always and easily out eat what you can exercise off.

However, as exercise buffs will rightly say that it is more than just a mathematical equation of calories burned. But, again, let’s forget about the science of what percentage your metabolism will increase with so many minutes of different types of exercise and for how long that effect will last burning up “x” number of calories over a day. Once again I ask you to use your own experience and common sense. Who do you know, or can think of, that gets a lot of exercise and is overweight? Who do you know, or can think of, that gets little exercise and is thin. The archetype of the librarian is the thin woman in glasses. She was the bookwork at school that always had her head buried in a book and hated physical education or exercise in any form.

In years past, nurses who were on their feet all day were quite thin. Today nurses are still on their feet all day, but just as in the average population, only about one third are thin, the rest are overweight or obese. School teachers used to sit at their desks most of the day and most of them were normal weight. Today school teachers are very active in their classrooms, yet two thirds are overweight or obese.

Bottom line: Exercise for health, not weight loss.

Again, no science – not that science is somehow wrong. I am sure there are plenty of chemists who can explain or refute the claims of just about any pill made. Since we are not chemists we can let them argue at that level. Let’s look at it from the same perspective that we have been using all along. Let’s use our own good common sense and existing knowledge.

How many people have you known that have used some form of pill or supplement to lose weight? How many of them actually lost weight? My experience has been that while some didn’t lose any weight at all, a pretty good percentage did lose weight at first.

Now, how many have stopped taking the pill or supplement and have gained the weight back. How many continue to use the pills or supplements, but have stopped losing and are now gaining the weight back? My experience, with those I know, and the thousands of stories I have listened to, indicates that almost all have, or will gain the weight back. Does this sound very much like the yo-yo process of dieting or changing to a more healthy diet to you?

At best pills and supplements are a temporary measure. Unfortunately, the stories also include many dangers and ailments with taking diet pills. A few years ago it was fen phen, then, it was banned. Today it is Hoodia and Alli.

Alli is a fat blocker. That means that fats are not absorbed into the system but rather just pass through. Other than that it does not deal with the underlying cause of overeating, it also is reported to create a problem with loose or oily stools – possibly even uncontrollable and embarrassing events. The following quote was one of many comments attached to the “Poopy Pants” video: “I'm a pharmacist. When I worked in retail, I never once refilled a Xenical prescription (the prescription form of Alli), and many people wanted to bring their remaining capsules back for a refund. We would have if it had been legal to do so.I'm going to send this to every pharmacist whose e-mail address I know!”

Where will these diet pills be in a few years? At one point, heroin was declaired as the official treatment in this country by the medical industry as the cure for opium addiction. The drug cocaine was once an ingredient in Coca Cola that was sold in every store and loved by children.

My argument here is that the whole idea of a magic pill is fundamentally flawed. When looking at any of the diet assistance formulas they all state that a good regime of diet and exercise is necessary for sustained weight loss. In other words, don’t eat too much and you will not gain weight. Duh! The issue is that what ever caused weight gain in the first place remains and can not be cured with a pill any more than it can be cured with a diet.

The claims that you will lose weight, be healthy, have more energy and even dream in color are nothing new to the world of cleansing products. The staple of cleansing for weight loss has been the colon cleansing. I am not a medical doctor, nor do I know much of anything about the virtues or dangers of colon cleansing. What I do know is that for thousands of years in hundreds if not thousands of cultures, eating extremely varied diets, the average person has not typically cleansed their colon other than normal bowel function. Also, for all of that time and in all of those places the same people were not significantly overweight or obese. Some may say, well they did not have all of the toxins in their diets. Stop right there! Go back to the section above about diet and note that people on the worst junk food diets are still just as thin as the people on the healthiest diets in any given culture.

Colon cleansing may be good for your health, or it may be harmful. Quackwatch “Your guide toQuackery, Health Fraud, Intelligent Decisions” makes a rather compelling argument against it. However that is not our real question here. The question here is: Does it help weight loss? According to one weight loss researcher, the verdict, while still out, is really more likely to be a scam than a genuine assist. And, there are literally hundreds of millions of thin people around the world alive today, eating every imaginable diet, that don't do any form of cleansing.

Yup, you already know what the perspective here will be. Use your own observations and common sense. Are there any people that have a substantially similar life to yours who are thin? Just like the same question about what you eat; unless you have an extremely weird lifestyle, there will be many people who live in a similar manner. How many people watch TV for how many hours a day, or play computer games, or read, or do the things you do. There are almost 300 million people in the United States alone. With the rapid cultural changes going on, people in India, Asia and the Middle East are living much more like the Western industrialized nations all the time; there are many hundreds of millions of people who share lots of lifestyle aspects with you.

The two biggies of lifestyle that are always pointed to are how much exercise you get and what you eat. We have already dealt with both of those. What is left? When you eat and how often you eat are sometimes talked about. Do you snack late at night just before going to bed?

Go to any college dorm and check the eating habits. You will find; plenty of thin students with particularly bad eating habits; many who eat just once a day, those who frequently eat pizza after midnight, and just about any combination of all the wrong stuff, yet they remain thin. Not all of them, many will be overweight as well. But if the thin and the thick share the same lifestyle then it isn’t the lifestyle that causes some of them to be overweight.

Again, if it isn’t the cause, then changing it won’t be the cure.

Time to Do Something Different - What we have been doing is not working!

According to the US Surgeon General 61% of adults are overweight. Half of them are obese. The percentage of overweight and obesity has tripled over the past 20 years and all of the traditional answers for what causes it and what to do about it have failed. Clearly something else is at play. We need a new understanding with a new approach.

Understanding What Is At Fault; Taming Your Food Monster

So if a lack of exercise, poor food choices, or bad eating habits, aren't the culprits nor do they bring with them the answer for winning the weight war, what does? It’s that constant, gnawing anxiety that drives you to eat when you have said, even promised yourself, that you won’t. It is what we call the Food Monster. It’s what makes dieting so unbelievably miserable and hard. It’s what makes it feel like other people can eat more than you and not gain weight like you do. It is what has you eating everything in sight when you finally quit that miserable diet. It is why you gain all the weight back. It is what has people overeating even though they have had surgery.

The Food Monster is not an addiction to food; it is a compulsion to eat. It is not officially identified as an Eating Disorder; not yet, but as it becomes better known, it will be. But, make no mistake about it; it is an eating disorder just as powerful as any of the well known disorders. The official criteria for what makes an eating disorder are symptomatic behaviors; typical overeating does not fit within the guidelines. However, the reason for the behaviors is really what matters.

What causes the typical overeating is in fact a compulsion. It is a compulsion I have termed the Food Monster. If you have a Food Monster, you will immediately recognize what I mean when I say it is like a monster that drives you against your will.

Over the past 30 years I have talked to or formally interviewed thousands of overweight people about their weight issues. I have never met a person who wanted to be overweight.

Yet everyone felt that they were either ultimately powerless to control their weight, or at the very least, were constantly struggling against weight gain. I have also interviewed many thin people who just have no idea what the overweight person is talking about. They just don’t get it. They don’t understand that it is a compulsion driving the overweight person to eat.

So if overweight and obesity is caused by a compulsion, exactly what is a compulsion? A compulsion is defined as an irresistible urge to perform a certain act, regardless of the rationality of the act. If that is true, then why are people compulsive about eating when they detest the results? There are two issues that have to be understood. Why is this compulsion so powerful and how did it develop?

It is so powerful because it resides as a motivation in the subconscious. Since it is in the subconscious, the person with it does not recognize that they are being motivated by it, only that they are anxious and driven to a particular behavior. In the case of the Food Monster eating disorder compulsion, they are driven to eat. It does not matter how badly they feel in their conscious mind about eating too much. The subconscious motivation always wins.

The Food Monster is developed through classical conditioning during childhood.

That can best be explained by an example that does not involve eating. After this example we will come back to how eating is involved.

A "normal" and acceptable compulsion most agree is a good thing

Most Americans shower once a day. Some shower twice a day, some every two or three days. What ever your time frame is, if you go longer than that you will probably become very uncomfortable.

How would you feel if you could not shower for a week or two? Take a moment here and think how your skin would feel. Do you think you would you notice your own body odor? What would you hair look and fee like? What would happen if it stretched out for a few months or even a year? If for some wild circumstance you could not shower for a year, and then things changed, would you start taking showers again? How long would you stay in your first shower, even if it were only a week or two since your last shower?

I have asked many people this question; invariably they make horrible faces when thinking about going for a week without a shower. Yet today people in many countries bathe once every two or three weeks and they are very comfortable with it. Even in this country, as recently as 50 years ago, the average person bathed, at most, only once a week. We know from going around the world and looking into our own past that there is really no reason to bathe daily. Yet we strongly feel the need to do so. In fact we feel driven to do so. Why?

We have a subconscious compulsion to bathe or shower daily and it was developed in our early childhood.

I’ll tell my story. Perhaps you will recognize yourself in it.

When I was a little boy of 3 and 4, every evening my mother would put me in the tub with a few inches of water. I would splash around and generally enjoy myself while she washed me. Then, she would help me out of the tub, dry me off with a big towel, and get me dressed. Most evenings she would hug me and say, “You smell so good.”

What was going on is operant conditioning in a rather pure form. While I was bathing, I was being loved and accepted. My subconscious was cataloguing the behavior of bathing as a good thing, meaning that I was a good boy while doing it.

When I was around 5 or 6 my bath routine changed. I was old enough to take a bath by myself. At that point my mother began reinforcing me from the negative position. She would point at me and tell me to go take a bath. When this happened my subconscious catalogued that when I was dirty, or if I could smell my own body odor, I was bad and needed to bathe in order to be good again.

Now as an adult, my subconscious is patterned to believe that when I shower, I am a good person; to be a good person I must shower. If I can smell my own body odor then I feel uncomfortable and must go shower. There is no logical reason to be uncomfortable with my own body odor. Those people who shower once every two or three weeks certainly can smell their own body odor, yet they are quite comfortable with it. Yet if I go past a day without showering and can smell myself, I feel compelled to shower. It does not matter if anyone is around or if I am completely alone. I still must go shower because I have a compulsion to do so.

Developing a Food Monster Eating Compulsion Disorder.

Some people are raised in an environment where they are happy when eating. Somehow eating is associated with being happy, just like being clean was associated with being loved when my mother bathed me.

A particularly powerful yet simple example is the following: One woman came home from school every day to the welcome embrace of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. The four of them would spend some time, chat and eat a snack. She could depend on this special time every day. Eating a little snack was incidental but it logged in her subconscious: when she was happy, accepted and loved, and therefore a good girl, she was eating. When she grew up, her subconscious held the illogical belief that she was a good person when she was eating.

Another woman told how her childhood was very unsettled, with her father’s alcoholism creating havoc. The days he was drinking, life was miserable and dinner was never eaten at the table. When he was sober for the day, dinner was always eaten at the table; there was a family rule of no arguing at the table. She grew up knowing that if she got to the table it would be a good time. She knew that when she ate dinner she was safe and a good girl. As an adult her subconscious held the illogical belief that she was a good person when she was eating.

Another way to set up the subconscious connection of being a good person while eating is to somehow be told that to eat is being good. The clean your plate club is the most common form of that. The message is pretty clear, clean your plate no matter if you are hungry or not, and you are a good child. Leave food on it and you are bad. A lesser version of the "clean your plate club" is having to eat everything before being rewarded with dessert.

While many people have told me that their mothers pushed them to eat, it seems that grandmothers have been especially vested in having their grandchildren eat a lot. In some groups, such as Italians in the North Eastern states, the fathers were big food pushers, wanting their children to eat a lot. Many times the stories revolve around the father making the daily dinner time a big celebration. It was a very happy time that the kids got to relax and were showered with love. After dinner was time enough for questions about school work and the stresses of daily life.

For others eating while watching TV was the way it happened. While I was growing up, we rarely, only on very special occasions, got to eat while watching a favorite TV show. As a child watching TV, there were no constant reminders about our table manners or all of the other little things like; questions about how we were getting along in school or asked on the spot what 6 times 7 equaled. Not only were we free from the watchful eye of our parents, we were entertained by the TV. At that time we were relaxed and feeling good. The association of being good and eating was catalogued in our subconscious; that when we eat and watch TV we are good. Is it any wonder that my biggest problem with overeating as an adult has been snacking all evening while watching TV?

These types of situations create the subconscious motivation of the Food Monster compulsion to eat. The Food Monster eating compulsion is a true eating disorder.

Unlike all of the common ideas about why people are overweight, where some people do have it, while others don’t, the creation of the Food Monster is universal. I have interviewed thousands of people since 1978 all across the USA and throughout Southeast Asia (the region with the lowest incidence of obesity any where in the world) .

In all that time I have yet to find a person who does not fit into the pattern. Many times someone has said they didn’t think it fit them, only to have the lights come on when we discussed their parents’ attitudes and behaviors, how there was a special time with a grand parent, while they watched Disney on Thursday evenings, or some other special event that was always associated with eating.

All other strategies for weight loss, like the ones discussed previously such as diet, dieting, exercise, and lifestyle, are attempts to control the compulsion and do nothing to eliminate it. For people with a FoodMonster compulsion, and there are literally millions of them in the States alone, the only way to successfully have permanent, stress-free weight loss is to neutralize the Food Monster, that subconscious connection between being a good person and eating. Once that subconscious connection is neutralized, the person becomes a natural, normal eater, with weightloss being a natural outcome.

At this point I’d like to take a moment and address emotional eating. Many people are suggesting that emotions are the cause of chronic obesity. Of course that is the easy answer – but it does not hold up. Once again I ask you to use your own reasoning and experience with three points:

1. Do you know anyone who gains weight when stressed? You bet!

2. Do you know, or know of, someone who loses weight when stressed? Yup.

3. Do you know anyone who does not change weight when stressed? Yah, most normal weight people have periods of stress and stay the same weight. I rather imagine being president of the USA is stressful. Imagine if Bush, Sr. or Jr. or Clinton gained or lost weight when stressed.

The Food Monster is about more than just emotions. The issue of weight gain isn’t just about emotions, you have to also answer the question: Why do some people react to stress the way they do, by overeating? The answer is they have a Food Monster that makes them eat when they are stressed.

We’re not dismissing the idea of emotional eating. Clearly it is a huge issue. According to Dr. Phil, over half of overweight people are emotional eaters. Looking at emotions helps us begin to look at the psychological factors, and move away from being fixated on the physical symptoms. In recent years a number of people have begun to look for the deeper emotions causing obesity.

Other than the Food Monster, all research that I have found which attempts to deal with these deeper emotions, focuses on individual circumstances rather than an identified syndrome. Very much like a therapist will delve into an individual’s personal history to uncover the specific incident that caused a phobia or unreasonable fear, weight loss caregivers have looked at individual cases.

This approach can work quite well if the counselor is gifted and the patient has the ability to be insightful about difficult issues. They also need to have the tenacity and finances to continue in counseling until they have uncovered and solved their underlying problems.

Unfortunately, this process does not work at all with those who had a relatively happy childhood, such as the woman who shared the special time with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. It does not address the hundreds of thousands who grew up in loving homes with the simple mistake of frequently eating or snacking while watching TV.

There is one very important issue with emotional eating, however, that many practitioners are able to help with. And that is in dealing with the immediate cravings that come with emotional eating. Although dealing with immediate cravings does not cure the underlying problem, it will help with additional weight gain in a current stressful situation.

In years past, hypnotherapy was the best process for dealing with immediate cravings. Disappointingly, there are several hurdles to overcome. The therapist has to be good at hypnotherapy and at understanding the issues of overweight. The patient has to be good at being hypnotized. But when everything comes together correctly, this can be a powerful tool. Some gifted hypnotherapists are able to get to the core issues as well.

We recommend and utilize the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

EFT is an excellent tool for resolving both subconscious issues such as the Food Monster compulsion and current cravings. Many EFT practitioners work with the emotions of overeating and do very well with eliminating cravings. The following video is a first-rate example of two women dealing with their constant cravings. The first dealt with Coke, the second talks about eliminating her craving for chocolate three years earlier.

Like other EFT counselors, we deal with current cravings and current overeating with EFT. That is the short term issue. Regrettably, it is not the long term issue. As you may have noticed in the video, the woman who got rid of her chocolate craving was still overweight. She may have gotten rid of her chocolate cravings, but she still had to overeat to maintain her weight for three more years. If she had neutralized her underlying compulsion to eat she would be a healthy, thin, normal weight person.

The FoodMonster approach is different from traditional weight loss methods because we are the only ones that routinely neutralize the illogical, subconscious connections with being loved, acceptable, a good person, and eating. Our primary tool is EFT. We use EFT because it is the most effective tool to deal with the subconscious we have found. Also it is easy to use and can and should be done by the individual.

Another excellent tool for working with the subconscious is Eye Movement Desensitization Rebuild (EMDR). EMDR is not quite as precise a tool as EFT, never the less it is very good for dealing with subconscious feelings. It is not a tool for the average person to use. In fact, only licensed psychotherapists and psychologists may legally practice it. There are a few psychologists, mostly in Europe, successfully using EMDR to permanently cure obesity. The success they are sustaining goes to prove the theory that the cause of obesity resides in the subconscious.

The bottom line is this: if your goal is to lose weight in a reasonable, reliable manner, then you don’t have to do “healthy” things to do it. You don’t have to do things like eating the “right” foods or getting off your couch to exercise.

This article has explained the true cause for overweight and obesity, why losing weight is so hard, what causes some people to be overweight and others not to be, and what can be done about it. Hopefully what you have read here has resonated with you and offers you some help and insights.

If you wish to learn more about permanent stress free weight loss the book Taming Your Food Monster goes in depth on all that has been briefly discussed here; plus much more. Click the link above for a free preview of the table of contents and the first four chapters.

If you wish to learn more about the EFT process you can download a free manual from the EFT website. EFT is also explained with all the necessary diagrams etc. in the book Taming Your Food Monster; Permanent stress free Weight Loss without diets, pills or exercise.

Last, I would like to ask you some questions.

Does this make sense to you?

• Does it make sense that while what we eat may have some impact it can't be the driving issue?
• Does it make sense that while of course we burn more calories by exercise that we can not out exercise what we can overeat?
• Does it make sense that there has to be something psychological going on that makes us eat when we are not hungry?
• Basically, does the concept of the Food Monster make sense to you?

I would greatly appreciate your answers to these questions - agree or disagree, your comments are more than just welcome; they are wanted.

Jason Stanley