Let's back up a bit. If you suffer from bingeing, compulsive overeating, diet addiction, emotional eating, stress eating, night eating, or eating in secret, these may be symptoms of too much dieting. All folks with these kinds of food dysfunction have much in common, regardless of their weight.

If you do have weight problems, you've probably tried some methods to lose the weight. Now you're frustrated by failure, and you're not alone. Even the famous Weight Watchers company advertises this disclaimer™, "For many dieters, weight loss is temporary." And have you ever noticed this disclaimer, "Results not typical"?

Isn't it time you stopped expecting yourself to magically succeed on a diet when the truth is that most people eventually fail? Worse yet, the act of dieting itself creates new problems.

Even if you don't appear to have weight problems, you still may have eating dysfunction. Perhaps you are starving yourself, or you are bingeing and then compulsively exercising to burn the excess calories.

Diets are intended to solve problems, but they can cause new ones. Some of those problems can become life-threatening. Others can be an annoyance that diminishes the quality of our lives.

Are diets really the problem?

Actually, it's not really the diet's fault, and diets don't have to fail. Rather, dieters often abuse their diets or put their diets in charge. By giving over your judgment and "food wisdom" to a plan, a club, or a regimen, you do your body a disservice.

How so? Look at it this way. You're overweight because something about your hunger and fullness sensor is out of whack. Yet, all those diet rules have nothing to do with restoring your proper hunger and fullness sensor. In fact, they take you further away from tuning in to what your body needs. Your judgment only gets worse.

The solution is to treat the diet rules with some disregard, and instead seek out your own judgment. Then, and only then, will you be free to choose a diet which will bend to your needs, or better yet, set aside the diet mentality altogether.

"How do I lose weight, then, if I'm not on a diet?" you might ask. The answer is that there's another way.

You don't have to alter the content of your food or count calories to lose weight. Instead, you can learn the "hunger and satiety" approach. You can learn portion control and normal eating. It's not easy, though. It takes work, but not the work of willpower. It takes internal work.

How do I learn normal eating?

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