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.

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