Food Fantasies: Overcoming the Diet Lies We Tell Ourselves

Food Fantasies: Overcoming the Diet Lies We Tell Ourselves is a self-help book about tackling the common rationalizations, fantasies, and outright lies people use to keep themselves from sticking to a diet and the anger people feel when those lies are exposed. While diets like Weight Watchers push a gentler approach emphasizing moderation, for people like me who struggle with food addiction, these diets leave us feeling like failures when we can't learn to eat the higher point foods in moderation. For food addicts, we need to accept that only a more radical approach based on abstinence will work for us.

As a clinical psychologist and as a food addict in recovery, this book takes both my professional and personal experience to address the resistance that people like me have to adopting a more radical approach to dieting, despite the fact they have spent years, if not decades, of their lives trying and failing using the more popular diets that preach moderation rather than abstinence. I believe that this book is vital in a market that promises quick, fun, and easy diets that leave food addicts feeling dismissed by the excessive positivity. The sobering reality is that it takes time to gradually wean ourselves from the foods that make us fat that we feel compelled to eat on a daily basis as we learn to fill ourselves up on the least fattening foods.Not just my diet alone, but my approach to the lies I told myself has saved my life by arresting the development of the diabetes and atherosclerosis that took down my father and brother. I believe that this book will save the lives of people like me who are at risk of suffering the medical consequences of being overweight.

Within the scientific community a consensus has been emerging that a low carbohydrate/ low fat diet is the way to go (i.e. Paleo Diet, Weight Watcher's zero points). Nevertheless, many overweight people have tremendous resentment about practicing a low carb/ low fat diet. Overweight people need help overcoming the diet lies they tell themselves and the resentment that prevent them from adopting a low carbohydrate diet absent the processed carbs that are highly addictive. My book fills a much-needed niche by providing the assistance people need to gradually acclimate themselves to such a diet despite their wishful thinking about what works and their anger when their bubble is burst.

I am a professor at Adelphi University and a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City. I am an expert in relationship science and evolutionary psychology who is applying my expertise to the problem of food addiction and a food addict in recovery myself. I published an op-ed piece in the New York Times on infidelity. The American Psychological Association recently published my book The Dynamics of Infidelity: Applying Relationship Science to Psychotherapy Practice (2018). I have a Psychology Today blog on relationship issues and more recently weight issues. In Food Fantasies I use my expertise in relationships and evolutionary psychology to the psychology of overeating and food addiction and develop a practical approach to losing weight and keeping it off.