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Stephen Gullo

Stephen Gullo

Stephen Gullo
Click photo for larger image.

As the best-selling author of "Thin Tastes Better" and most recently "The Thin Commandments Diet: The 10 No-Fail Strategies For Permanent Weight Loss," Stephen Gullo is on a mission. Using his skills as a psychologist and former Columbia University professor and researcher, he has developed a method for beating that yo-yo dieting madness. So it's time to get in shape for summer and the seasons beyond.


Everyone knows it all comes down to eating right and exercise -- so why can't we do it?

That's right, and that's what got me into the field. I have been very concerned how to use psychological techniques to change human behavior and the programming of a lifetime. These are our treats, and therefore we sentence ourselves to a lifetime of being heavy because we can't live without an M&M. I cannot accept that my patients, who run from Nobel Prize winners to legends of the sports world, lack willpower. They lacked strategy.

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Do you think the diet industry, with all the books, programs, gadgets and pills, has caused more harm than good?

It has continued to miss the most critical variable for success at weight control, which is behavior and strategy. The knowledge of what to eat to lose weight has been available for decades, hello hello! If it were just a knowledge problem you could walk to the local bookstore, buy a diet book, read it and lose weight.

Is the need for instant gratification a big contributor to obesity?

I think it is partially. But we live in a massively food-oriented society. Look at the commercials at night. I am not even interested in these foods, and I'm getting hungry. Like we need three hours of commercials every night about eating!

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Are trigger foods the same as alcohol for an alcoholic and must just be avoided forever?

Well, you know, the whole field thinks calorically. I tell my patients if they think calorically alone they will fail. Ask yourself what is your history with this food. And if you have a long history of abusing a certain food, call it a trigger food. You should make a decision about either boxing it in or boxing it out of your life. If you want to box it in, you need the strategies of the "Thin Commandments." If you can't box it in, well, in a world where there is cancer, AIDS and homelessness, I tell my patients grow up. It is not that you can't have it -- it doesn't work for you!

You say keep a fat photo of yourself as motivation. Wouldn't a thin one be better, since it's positive reinforcement?

Ah, Patricia, in a previous life you must have been a shrink. You are absolutely right. Some of my patients respond better to a thin picture. Maybe guys like horror movies better, because if I look at a picture of myself heavy it really stirs my alarm bells. The idea is to pick what motivates you. We are visually dominant people so looking at food turns us on. So we need visual cues to motivate us to lose.

People can go on diets and even stay on them, but bingeing is a big derailer -- it's the battle of the binge.

Very good question. This is a life management skill. A diet is just words on a page, but knowing how to correct an error, make a mistake and not let it become a binge is very, very critical. Almost all bingeing is private eating. It's almost always about nibble foods, particulary sweets and flour products. Pretzels, candies, cookies and the like. Be aware of that. Thin starts in the supermarket. After studying 15,000 patients, I discovered a phenomenon called "Slip to Sleep." You start eating until you go to bed. In the case of the people who fail at dieting, they say to themselves, "Now I blew it," which lets the screen go blank for the rest of the day. They start eating everything around. If you have this, write out all the foods you are eating for the rest of the day. If you get yourself through that few-hour period from the slip to going to bed it almost always stops there. So hello, hello to common sense.

First Published: May 9, 2005, 4:00 a.m.

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