These authors are not miracle workers who can get you bikini-ready for a midwinter vacation, but their approaches can work wonders for those determined to lose weight permanently, even with limits on time or budget, or with a social or occupational need to dine out often.

Treating body and mind

Science-based improvements in the diet-book genre began about five years ago with the publication of The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan: Feel Full on Fewer Calories, by Barbara J Rolls and Robert A Barnett (HarperCollins). Dr Rolls, chairwoman of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University, shunned specific diet plans and instead developed an approach to eating based on her findings from numerous clinical studies that people need a certain volume or weight of food to feel satisfied.

Accordingly, the “volumetrics” plan, spelled out in a follow-up book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan: Techniques and Recipes for Feeling Full on Fewer Calories, emphasises getting more for less — meals that include filling foods like soups, salads, vegetables and fruits that on a volume basis are naturally low in calorie density because they have a high water content.

But as most dieters know, eating habits that lead to weight gain, a failure to lose weight or an inability to maintain weight loss are as much a matter of mind as of body.

Judith Beck, a psychologist and the director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research in Philadelphia, had spent many years helping patients achieve their weight-loss goals, not through particular diets but by learning how to think and behave differently with regard to food and eating. Her two recent books, The Beck Diet Solution and The Beck Diet Weight Loss Workbook (Oxmoor House), aim to retrain the brain. Dr Beck teaches someone who is overweight how to think like a thin person, with practical strategies to reduce eating prompted by emotions and stress.

Readers seeking a more light-hearted though still science-based approach might consider the 2006 book, You On a Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management, by Dr Michael F Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic and Dr Mehmet C Oz of Columbia University (Free Press). The authors have devised principles of waist control based on the latest findings about appetite, metabolism, temptation and the biology of fat. In emphasising the medical benefits of losing inches and not just pounds, these doctors focus more on the importance of exercise to produce a healthy, strong and attractive body.

Of course, the modern epidemic of overweight and obese adults didn’t spring up overnight — for many people, weight problems have their origins in childhood. Last year, Dr David S Ludwig, paediatrician and endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, tackled the underpinnings of the nation’s weight problems in Ending the Food Fight: Guide Your Children to a Healthy Weight in a Fast Food/Fake Food World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Dr Ludwig’s approach emphasises on foods that are digested and absorbed more slowly than high glycemic foods — white bread, white rice, highly processed cereals and concentrated sugars — that cause a rapid rise in blood sugar and lead to a sugar-hormone that drives hunger.

But Dr Ludwig recognises that some foods that have a high glycemic index in the laboratory, like carrots, do not have a high glycemic effect in the body when consumed in normal amounts. Unlike most fast foods and highly processed foods, the meals and snacks recommended by Dr Ludwig are rich in non-starchy vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, minimally processed grains (like brown rice and steel-cut oats), wholesome fats like olive oil and avocado, and protein, including vegetable protein.

Dieting by instinct

A comprehensive approach to eating for effective weight control is offered in a book to be published next month by Workman, The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep It Off, by Susan B Roberts and Betty Kelly Sargent.

Dr Roberts, a professor of nutrition and psychiatry, explains how natural hard-wired instincts to eat in response to hunger, availability, caloric density, familiarity and variety, which served us well in Palaeolithic times (and until the mid-20th century), have been compromised by changes in the kinds, amounts and constancy of foods in the modern world. These changes, in turn, undermine the ability of many people to maintain a normal weight.

The book guides readers to alternative approaches to fulfilling the demands of these instincts in ways that can help them lose weight and, at the same time, adopt a more wholesome, nutritious and healthy eating plan that can be adapted to anyone’s lifestyle. Though the instinct diet is rather prescriptive for the first two weeks, it offers a reasonable number of options to accommodate different tastes and eating schedules. The next six weeks of the eight-week programme enable dieters to adopt and adapt eating plans that can result in permanent weight loss and improve health.

The diet is high in fibre, which demands a significant intake of water and other non-caloric or low-calorie beverages. Dr Roberts insists on three meals a day and wholesome snacks in between to reduce the risk of binges and unwise hunger-driven food choices.