Hi, I'm Brandon. I'm new to NoS (about 10 days so far), but I wanted to jump right in, so here goes...
I heard this story on NPR the other day, coincidentally within a few days of discovering NoS. Story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=10354959
About 2 years ago, my wife and I started Weight Watchers, which worked fantastically well for me. We kept it up zealously from about the first of June to around Thanksgiving. I lost around 60 lbs (and reached my goal weight), but we "fell off the wagon" around the holidays and never managed to get back on. However, after all that time of watching my eating and doing all the accounting that WW requires, I had learned a lot about my eating habits and about food. I didn't maintain the program, but I managed to keep almost all of the weight off for more than a year. I'm back up some now (about 15lbs), but still am way down from my starting point.
Given my own experience, and reading about Reinhard's experience and those of other successful board members, I have to think that the book referenced in the segment missed something important about those who actually are successful. I think it is much more about a mental state than anything else. I've studied and learned a lot about cognitive-behavioral psychology in the last 3 years or so, which was coincident with and important to my first really successful weight loss effort, and Reinhard's approach is a similarly self-aware approach that focuses on habit and thinking more than on specifics (i.e. calories or types of food).
Has the author of this book just missed the boat, or are successes really just anomalies?
Rethinking Thin
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