The Dieter's Companion: How to Make Any Diet Work

Moscovitz ( The Rice Diet Report ), who says she lost 140 pounds and has kept it off for six years, maintains that successful weight loss depends as much on learning new ways to think and behave as on the diet plan one selects. She pulls no punches about the misery of being overweight: ``Obesity is a very self-absorbed, inward way of living, an anti-life stance, nothing less than a living death''; and the necessity of radically changing eating habits: ``modest alterations will lead to only modest improvements.'' Despite grim statistics to the contrary, Moscovitz asserts that ``keeping weight off is not harder than losing it''; she blames quitting a diet program before becoming genuinely thin as the culprit in those cases. A welcome resource of practical advice, this book will help those people committed to permanent weight loss to learn assertiveness in handling food pushers and flexibility in dealing with their own imperfections. Author tour. (Mar.)