Once you've succeeded in controlling your weight, a tremendous weight is lifted from your mind as well as your body. Discovering you have the power to lick a long-standing and difficult problem may motivate you to attempt many other things you scarcely contemplated before. Go to it! You gain not only physical stamina by losing weight, but a sense of power that contributes to anything you undertake.
But don't let success in weight control engender disdain and contempt for others who haven't yet achieved your happy state. Disrespect for and discrimination against those who happen to be overweight is bad enough already without adding recruits to the ranks of the self-righteously slim. You succeeded by understanding you suffered not from a character flaw or weakness of will, but a broken feedback system: not a deep-seated psychological problem but a built-in eat watch that ran too fast.
Now that your weight problem is solved, don't become a tiresome nag, exhorting others to emulate you. Your very success is the strongest form of persuasion: the argument by example. As the months pass and those who predicted, ``Just wait, he'll gain it all back'' are proven wrong, others may begin to wonder if they, too, can solve their weight problems as you have.
If you want to recommend this book, hey, go right ahead. But just because this plan worked for you doesn't mean it will work for everybody. Anybody can control their weight: it's simply a matter of balancing calories, but the means that work for you may seem intolerable or utterly baffling to the next fellow. That individual may eventually become thin and healthy with a plan that strikes you as fascism cloaked in mumbo jumbo. In this book I've tried to present a relentlessly rational approach to weight control. You can't persuade somebody to be rational. You're better off trying to out-stubborn a cat.
By John Walker