In "The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person," Dr. Judith S. Beck offer a psychological plan — not a food plan — to get you to lose weight, keep the weight off and eat right. Here's an excerpt:

Chapter 3
How Thin People Think

Have you ever wondered why you can’t lose weight or keep off the weight you’ve lost? You certainly know many people who don’t struggle with eating the way you do. Are you different? You probably are, but not necessarily for the reasons you think. Consider the following questions:

• Do you sometimes eat even when you’re not really hungry? In other words, can you easily tell the difference between being hungry and just wanting to eat?

• Are you sometimes concerned that you might not have an opportunity to eat? Do you ever have such thoughts as, What if I get hungry later?

• Do you sometimes eat past the point of mild fullness?

• Do you fool yourself about your eating? In other words, do you sometimes tell yourself that it “won’t matter” if you eat a small piece of something you’re not supposed to eat?

• Do you comfort yourself with food?

• If the scale goes up, do you sometimes abandon your diet altogether?

• Do you sometimes eat because it doesn’t feel fair that you can’t eat just like                 
everyone else?

• Do you stop dieting as soon as you’ve lost weight?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you possess characteristics that can make dieting difficult.

Characteristic 1
You Confuse Hunger with the Desire to Eat

Naturally thin people are more easily able to differentiate between when they’re truly hungry because their stomachs are empty and when their stomachs aren’t empty but they have a desire to eat.

Thin people say to themselves, I know I’d like to eat [that food] ... But I just ate a little while ago ... I’m not going to have it. You, on the other hand, may label any desire to eat as hunger. You probably get the idea that you ought to eat whenever your stomach feels empty and you feel an urge to eat.

The Beck Diet Solution

To think like a thin person, you must learn to tell the difference between hunger and the desire to eat so that you can make better decisions about when it’s appropriate to eat and when it’s not. You’ll do so by paying attention to how your stomach feels before and after meals. You’ll also do such experiments as purposefully making yourself hungry so that you learn to recognize what true hunger feels like.

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