Caroline Dooner

The truth is, your body does not want you to restrict your food, and it does not want you to lose weight, especially when it feels like food is scarce. So, your body will sabotage your efforts almost every time — while also making it harder and harder to lose weight the more 'famines' you put it through.

Pretending you’re OK when you're not is lying — lying to yourself. And it will keep you not OK.

I'm an anti-diet teacher. I teach chronic, obsessed dieters how to eat normally, trust their bodies, and fully commit to living their lives now, not 30 pounds from now.

It’s that time of year when everyone is obsessed with not eating too much food. It’s like a cultural rite of passage: Will you complain about how much food you’re eating this holiday? Will you discuss how bad you’ve been and how you plan on repenting come January 1st?

Do you feel like you have an addiction to food? Do you think about it all the time? Fixate on it? Crave it constantly? Feel like you have no control once you start? Do you just eat and eat and eat until you are stuffed and miserable?

Most women's magazines will have a meal plan for you to eat the right amount. Eat the amount that Eva Longoria eats. How to eat the amount Jennifer Hudson's trainer's friend's mom says she eats.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are really resistant to movements that aim to inspire people to drop the fight against weight. There are lots of fat-haters.

We haven’t quite escaped the influence of the Puritans yet...We still tend to regard our bodies, our eating, our desires, and anything else of this earth as “bad,” “weak,” or “sinful.”

I teach people how to eat normally after dieting. And across the board, the people I work with all describe themselves as “type A personalities” or “perfectionists.”

We have been told that that's how it works: calories in vs calories out. "Eat less than you expend and you'll lose weight."