If Oreos are proof that God exists then I was a fervent believer. I’d eat mounds of them and never gain weight. Skinny all my life, I ate fat and sugar bombs with impunity, earning admiration from many and ire from most. I was not familiar with the word “diet,” though I had seen it on cans of Coke. It all came crashing down in my late 20s when I started to gain weight. The chickens had come home to roost and they weren’t organic. They were vengeful. In short order I had gained 14 pounds and almost two pant sizes.

Suddenly I became intimately familiar with a truckload of diets and tried many variations of them, all to no avail. I found the idea of being on a diet the rest of my life, well, unappetizing. So I went on a quixotic quest for a way to lose weight without sacrificing my favorite foods.

Lose Weight Without Dieting

This blog is about how I lost 14 pounds and 2 waist sizes and kept it off for 25 years without ever going on a diet. Inspired by Walter Mischel’s iconic The Marshmallow Test, I developed my own delayed gratification techniques, which painlessly—and dramatically– reduced the volume of food I ate. I then adapted strategies psychologists use to overcome drug addiction and phobias (systematic desensitization and habituation) and applied them to eating. The result? I stopped binging on problem foods.

Together, these strategies helped me do what few can: Eat whatever I want in moderate portions.  I’ll explain what I did to lose weight without dieting and lay out a plan for how you can too. Weight loss without dieting is a 3-step process—Reframe your goals from weight loss to health enhancement, Eliminate binge eating through desensitization and Reduce the volume and frequency of problem food consumption through innovative delayed gratification techniques.