Ditching Diets

How to Lose Weight in a Way You Can Maintain

By: Gillian Riley

Narrated by: Gillian Riley

Ditching Diets is the alternative to dieting and slimming clubs—because a diet only works while you stick to it and hardly anyone sticks to any diet forever. The best way to lose weight is by developing a style of eating you can live with, because it’s flexible and probably unique to you. But often that’s easier said than done.

You’ve no doubt tried some different things already. Maybe you’ve been advised to eat only when hungry and stop when full; to overeat your favourite foods so you’d learn to get over them; to find the right kind or combination of carbs, proteins, and fats, or micronutrients; to deal with your emotions in order to stop wanting to eat so much.

None of this takes into account what happens in your brain when your natural, survival drive to eat (and eat and eat) becomes activated. The purpose of this drive is to get you through the next famine, but in these times of plenty it’s a disaster. In the face of this, nutritional advice may not make much of a difference. You can know what’s healthy, but find it impossible to stick to for long enough.

Do you feel hungry after a meal, no matter what was in it? Do you lose weight only to yo-yo back again? Do you think about food too much of the time? Would you like to stop dieting and eat ‘like a normal person’?

Ditching Diets explains how to stop eating so much by thinking in a way that’s the opposite of dieting. The opposite because it’s the dieting mindset—especially the prohibitions—that contribute to the problem in the first place.

You will discover how to eat in ways you truly want to live with, rather than ways you later regret; how to eat less without following any rules, either your own or those taken on from others; how to develop the motivation to make changes, and stay in touch with that motivation long term.

You will learn how to eliminate:

• persistent cravings and obsession with food
• feeling deprived, miserable or irritable when you don’t overeat
• an all-or-nothing relationship with food
• rebellious overeating and bingeing.

Ditching Diets will give you control around food so that you can lose weight—and maintain that weight loss in the longer term. This is about how to make a shift in your thinking about food that will last, and once you’ve made that shift there will be no need to diet again.

Ditching Diets is easy to listen to, with thought-provoking and practical advice that the author has taught in seminars for many years. Not a book on nutrition, this is a common sense, gimmick-free approach that enables you to overcome your attraction to all that food you don’t really need.

A Note from the Author
Many years ago I signed up for a liquid diet program, and the day I was to begin I woke up with a strong desire for a large, fried, English breakfast. The thing was, I didn’t ever eat breakfasts like that at that time. Nothing about my biochemistry had changed at that point; what had changed was the way I was thinking.

©2001, 2009, 2013 Gillian Riley (P)2023 Gillian Riley

Critic reviews

“I am eating healthier food and less of it. What I like most is the idea of never going on a diet again.” (The Independent)

“I can sense the shift in my thought process and I am no longer grazing from the fridge all night.” (The Daily Telegraph)