The book in overview iii change. Most diets that get a second hearing bring about weight loss – but for how long? Eventually people give up. As I started to work with overweight clients I found that they kept bemoaning their‘ lack of self-discipline’. Many had come to see themselves as failures. This got me thinking. What actually is selfdiscipline and what role does it play in long-term change? The answer? In simple terms: not much of a role at all. Self-discipline might get us to study on Sunday and Monday evenings for an exam on Tuesday, but it simply will not get us to change our eating habits for the rest of our life. As I will discuss in depth in Chapter 2, self-discipline is of no use when trying to bring about long-term change. The suprising truth is that the more you find yourself having to use self-discipline, the more likely you are to fail. Instead we need to put effort in at the outset to creating what I call‘ strategic structures’: the building blocks of new habits. It is critical that you understand this distinction between effort and self-discipline – whether you are trying to lose weight, give up smoking or drink less. Effort is critical to success, self-discipline is not. The effort needs to be applied to planning for danger times because, if we are perfectly normal human beings, self-discipline will fail us at these times. Why a new approach? I was appalled when I started to look at the research into the effectiveness of traditional diets and found that the medical profession is better at treating most cancers than we are at treating obesity. In her informative book, The Psychology of Eating when reviewing the treatment of weight loss, Joan Odgen said,‘... in real terms, between 90 % and 95 % of those who lose weight regain it within several years.’ Some intensive programs have done a little better than this recently so, to be conservative, I work on a 20 % five year success rate as the best