This is an excerpt from my new book, Immaculate Consumption: The Path to Lifelong Weight Management. I hope you enjoy it.

The Incurable Disease - blog post by Dr. Deena Solomon, weight management expert and author of Immaculate ConsumptionSince the turn of the 19th century, there have been many attempts to fix the problem of overeating.  Drugs, research regarding how to control hunger by severing hunger centers in the brains of rats, gastric by-pass surgery, LAP-BANDs, and abiding to caloric ceilings are examples.  It is evident that the medical model remains the protocol for virtually every treatment for controlling one’s weight.  That model views obesity/overweight as a disease that has to be cured.

In 1959, Dr. Albert Stunkard (considered an iconic authority in obesity research) concluded that “to-date weight loss methods were showing a 95% failure rate.”  Up until the 1970s, no weight loss program produced any long-term outcome data.  In 1983, Dr. Kelly Brownell pointed out that if a strict definition for the formulation of a “cure” is adopted for obesity (such as a reduction to an ideal weight and maintenance at an ideal point for at least five years), an individual is more likely to recover from most forms of cancer than to satisfy that criteria.  There has been no weight loss program or method that’s produced long-term outcome data for successful weight loss since 1970, except the ICP.

Successful weight loss and weight management systems haven’t been available for one very simple reason: The medical model has convinced the public that being overweight is bad.  Consistent with that model, current scientific evidence suggests that over-consumption is a disease that will never be “cured.”  The July 2011 issue of Discover Magazine contains an article entitled, “The Hungry Brain,” in which scientists claim the only way to attack obesity will be in combination with drugs.  There are also scientists doing research in “Deep Brain Stimulation” as a way to curb eating behavior by producing an electrical charge to the hunger centers and thus re-visiting the original 1903 study.

The World Health Organization is now focusing on prevention strategies for the younger population.  Most of the research is going into education.  Funding for the current population of obese people prioritizes “controlling the symptoms” of all the diseases incurred from being overweight.  Managing such symptoms is considered economically sound because a “cure” for being overweight is considered unobtainable.

The problem—until the advent of the ICP—is that there hasn’t been any system to help the consumer transition from external to internal reinforcement strategies at the point of consumption.  The traditional and sacrosanct guidelines externally imposed by a diet are intended to make the scale go down, but those guidelines still aren’t working.  All dieting programs fail over the long-term because they rely on external reinforcements, motivation, and willpower to handle unplanned, problematic eating situations.

A chapter in my book, Immaculate Consumption: The Path to Lifelong Weight Management, presents doorways for fine-tuning decision-making intersections before, during, and after every moment of consumption.  A personal GPS guidance strategy will be continually available and at your disposal, pointing you in the direction you need to go and targeting your weight loss goals after the first month.

Dr. Deena Solomon
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