Excerpt from The Ultimate Weight Solution by Dr Phillip McGraw, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1
Getting Real About You and Your Weight

Change can come in either of two important ways: Start behaving positively or stop behaving negatively.
-- Dr. Phil

You have a decision to make.

You know it and so do I. At this very moment, you are standing in the aisle of a bookstore, or at an airport, thumbing through these pages, or you are sitting at home, reading this book. You are thinking about your weight and how you have tried to lose it in a million wrong ways. You are wondering if maybe, just maybe, there is something here for you, something you have wanted for a very long time. And if there is, should you try it?

But hear me out: this decision you are mulling over in your head is not whether to start yet another "diet." You have made that well-intentioned but misguided choice dozens of times. And through it all, your weight just keeps creeping up or maybe even shooting sky-high, and it is getting harder to control with each passing year.

The decision you must make is whether or not you will quit conning yourself and telling yourself what you so desperately wish were the truth: that there is some hot new diet out there, promising quick and easy results. So decide: do you want to keep fooling yourself or not? Do you want to keep chasing after, and being seduced by, "miracle" diets, slimming products, and "overnight" weight loss? You've known for a long time that you were going to have to get real about fat or stay real fat. But if you had done what I'm about to ask you to do, instead of going on that last diet you started or signing up for that last program, this decision would be behind you right now.

Let me be real clear: despite the millions of advertising dollars spent to convince you otherwise, losing weight and keeping it off is not "quick and easy," and you know it. You know as well as I do that what I'm saying is the way it is. You know it because you have been on umpteen diets, from the cabbage soup diet to the water diet, and not one of them has ever kept you slender and fit. You have always known that these quick fixes don't work, but it was fun to believe it, at least at first, until everything you tried brought you back to the same point of failure.

I have to get totally real with you: I know you are looking for something you can take tonight that promises slim tomorrow. I know you're looking for something that melts fat off like the sun melts ice. I know you want these things, but continuing to chase after them will bring you nothing but frustration, pain, and self-remorse. You will just continue to sell yourself short, stay stuck in your life and struggle day after day with overeating and being overweight, never doing anything constructive about it.

But stop right here: if you adopt what I will give you on every page of this book, you will overcome your weight challenges and struggles. Nothing will stop you from being anything other than healthy, vibrant, in shape, and fully in charge of yourself and everything you think, do, and feel. This will happen because you make it happen. It will happen because you have made the decision to step up and do what it takes to have what you want.

As we go through this book together, you will discover that unlike most lose-weight programs out there, there is no "one size fits all" solution (no pun intended!) to responsible and permanent weight control. It just doesn't work that way. Because you are a unique individual, your weight-control issues are unique, as well. The strategies you require must be yours and yours alone. Any plan that creates lasting, for-life results is going to have to be designed specifically for you, by you, with help from someone who has done his homework and has broken the code of what is truly required for you to lose weight and keep it off. That someone is me.

For more than thirty years, I have counseled people just like you, people battling weight problems, ranging from chronic obesity to life-threatening eating disorders, and I understand the impact on their life not just from a professional standpoint, but from a personal one as well. In 1995 my father, who struggled for years with weight-related heart disease, collapsed and died suddenly of a heart attack one Sunday morning while teaching Sunday school at his church. Obesity robbed him of many precious years of his life, and it has gravely affected the health of many other members of my family. To say the least, I am painfully aware of the toll obesity can take on every dimension of your life and health. Over these many years of counseling overweight patients, I have discovered what it takes for you to create the results you want. That means I know how you can get your weight and your life under control and back on the right track, permanently.

Copyright © 2003 by Phillip C. McGraw