Controlling your weight provides an interesting window on the enigma of sentience, the distinction between mind and body. Weight control involves the body at the simplest level; eat more and gain weight, eat less and lose it. Yet the reasons we become overweight and the difficulties we have in losing weight often stem from the subtleties of psychology rather than the mechanics of mitochondria.
To control your weight, you need only eat the right amount. To eat the right amount, not just this month or next month, but for the rest of your life, you need not only the information--the display on the face of the eat watch--to know what's the ``right amount''; you need an incentive to follow that guidance. Wearing a watch doesn't make you a punctual person, but it provides the information you need to be one, if that's your wish.
This incentive is the ``motivation to control your weight,'' often simplistically deemed ``will power.'' Where can you find this motivation, especially if you've tried diet after diet and failed time after time? This book will help you to find the motivation in the only place it can be found, within yourself, by laying out a program that makes the steps to success easy and the thought of failure or backsliding difficult to contemplate.
This constitutes manipulation, but manipulation's OK as long as you're manipulating yourself. After all, in order to manipulate somebody you have to understand them, and who do you understand better than yourself? The goal is empowerment: the sudden realisation, ``Hey, this isn't hard at all! I can do this!'' It is such discoveries that give us the confidence and courage to go onward to greater challenges. The course of a life is often charted by such milestones of empowerment. Manipulation in the pursuit of empowerment is no vice.
Latent within you is the power to control your weight for the rest of your life. All you need to do is realise that your weight is under your conscious control. With that knowledge, you can peel off your excess weight and achieve physical fitness. Once you've accomplished those goals, you'll be in a position to make them central to your self-image.
Less than 12 months from now, new people you meet will be incapable of imagining you as overweight. Next year, you'll be able to run up four flights of stairs and scarcely notice the exertion. If, like me, you've been overweight most of your life, you're about to partake of a new and rich part of the human experience: the exultation of living in a healthy animal body.
Once you've experienced the joy, the confidence, and the feeling of power that success entails, you'll never consider giving it up--not even for that extra slice of pie.
By John Walker