Food, air, and water are the sacred triumvirate that allows life to happen.  These elements are vital to survival.  But food serves a more complex function. It also can be used to provide enormous pleasure and legitimate comfort.  When used to excess, however, the evidence of this overindulgence can be striking and unhealthy and is often linked with obesity and shame.  Having personally and professionally experienced years of my own anguish and that of my clients, I chose to title my book Immaculate Consumption because I believe it provides science-based guidance at the critical moment of consumption when taking complete responsibility for what you choose to put in your mouth is absolutely vital. For me, this moment is almost sacred and represents the cornerstone of my methodology.

Immaculate Consumption© examines the dynamics of a highly effective and scientifically proven weight loss methodology and provides the reader with an accessible and easy-to-understand and easy-to-master system that makes sustainable weight loss attainable.  The system represents a major paradigm shift in the field of weight reduction.

The book reveals that every commercially advertised and mass marketed diet is based on the medical model that is used to treat diseases and addictions.  This medical model is predicated on the following principles:

• If the patient is overweight and has been unsuccessful in losing weight, it’s the patient’s responsibility to seek treatment for his or her “illness.”
• The selected program should provide a systematic method for “recovery” from the illness.
• After the “sickness” is cured, everything must be done to prevent relapses.

In the world of dieting, obesity is thus considered a “disease” that must be healed, and the weight loss industry has lavishly benefitted from this perception. Commercially marketed diets exploit a core concept that has been foisted on overweight individuals, one that perpetuates feelings of humiliation, shame, and embarrassment about the inability to regulate their food intake. Our culture has created the belief that if people would only acquire willpower and self-control, then they would not have a weight problem.

If you’re fat and have failed to lose weight and/or maintain your weight loss, you probably have bought into this idea.  I certainly did for almost 30 years, and the majority of my patients during my subsequent more than three decades of clinical practice have described identical feelings.

Immaculate Consumption© furnishes a self-help program for life-long weight loss and weight management that celebrates the uniqueness of the individual.  Beginning any weight loss program requires motivation to achieve a goal (which I call “Stage One”), but the Immaculate Consumption Program goes far beyond other diets in its overall emphasis on permanently altering eating habits and enhancing your personal responsibility for your eating choices and behaviors.

Because every commercial diet, in essence, considers being overweight an illness, these programs rely on rigid rules and restrictions to break the “addiction cycle” and avoid relapses (i.e., episodes of “falling off the wagon”). This is the same core methodology used legitimately and effectively in the treatment of drug or alcohol dependency.  I contend that unlike drug dependency, acquired deleterious food habits are in a completely different category and must be dealt with differently. In stark contrast to protocols commonly used to treat addiction, the methodology advocated in this book utilizes a “minimal intervention” approach that makes the sequential transition from the development of one key beneficial eating habit to another seamless and almost inconspicuous.

Immaculate Consumption© teaches readers to collect relevant data and become their own “Single-Subject Researcher” (Stage Two) so that they can determine how best to accomplish their personal weight loss goals, given their own particular idiosyncrasies.

In Stage Three, readers learn the one vital cognition that prepares them to recover from inevitable regressions. This cognition is derived from principles of classical and operant conditioning, whose powerful dynamics the brilliant Russian psychologist Pavlov first explored in the early part of the last century, led to titanic shifts in the field of behavioral psychology. Ultimately, this one core principle, which Pavlov meticulously described and scientifically proved (and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize), has been shown to create reinforcement schedules and constructive habits that can quickly become permanently embedded and can become even more powerful than the immediate gratification of the most enticing food cravings.  Enduring weight loss is realized during this maintenance phase of the program. The dynamics of this stage are examined and presented comprehensively and systematically so that they can be completely understood, fully integrated, and proactively applied.

Distinguishing Key Points