The following article is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator, McMaster University’s partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.
Mary K. Nolan
The Hamilton Spectator
(Jan 19, 2010)
The reason Valerie Taylor calls her new publication a workbook is simple: It involves work.
"The concept of a workbook is work," says Taylor, director of the bariatric surgery psychiatry program at St. Joseph's Healthcare.
Work and weight loss take time, she says, and overweight people generally are "desperate and they want a quick fix."
It's well known that fad diets don't work, yo-yo dieting is unhealthy and exercise is imperative, says Taylor, who is also assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster University.
"Weight loss has to be regulated in a rational way," she says.
"Unless you lose a limb, nobody should drop 40 pounds in a month. It's just not healthy."
She will be bringing her messages and methods of sensible weight loss to the public tomorrow night during a free lecture at The Hamilton Spectator auditorium.
She'll also be bringing copies of The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Weight Management (New Harbinger Publications, $21.95), which she recently published with colleagues Randi McCabe and Michelle Laliberte.
Taylor will be talking about why diets don't work and how they are actually counterproductive in reaching and maintaining a healthy weight.
She says people need to learn moderation, a "rational approach to food intake," instead of exercising either no control over what they eat or microcontrol of every single crumb.
The lecture, says Taylor, is for anybody who wants to get a weight problem under control or people who care about someone who has a weight problem: "Which pretty much applies to all of us."
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