In The Automatic Diet, Charles Stuart Platkin, one of the country's leading weight-loss advocates and popular syndicated columnist of The Diet Detective, synthesizes cutting-edge weight-loss research into an easy-to-follow 10-step process that can become automatic for anyone, a process that has proven successful for tens of thousands of the author's clients as well as for the author himself, who has lost 50 pounds-and kept it off for over 10 years-using the principles in this book. Research has proven repeatedly that fad diets are misguided in their focus on advocating or restricting particular foods and that the only way to permanently lose and maintain weight is through behavioral and lifestyle modification. Learning to identify one's fat patterns-the behavioral reasons why when we lose weight we always gain it back again-and how to break them enables readers to relearn how to create a relationship with food and fitness that is comfortable and maintainable, and shows that an individual's weight is completely within his or her control-regardless of genetics, metabolism, or other hard-to-control factors.