Have you tried every diet or weight loss plan under the sun, but still can't manage to lose weight and keep it off? You aren't alone. Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on weight-loss products, yet we continue to have the highest obesity rate in the world. After trying and failing countless times, you have to begin to wonder, "What am I doing wrong?"

The problem with most fad diets is that they only attack the symptom of the problem, not the cause. No matter how much you try to deny yourself the food you crave, you always end up reverting back to bad habits. You might even lose weight initially, but more often than not you'll gain it back--with a couple extra pounds to boot In order to make real change in your life, you need to change the way you think about food, weight, and what's most important to you.

"The Diet Trap "offers proven-effective methods based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you develop mindful eating habits, self-compassion, and a greater understanding of what it means to live a valued life. ACT is a values-based therapy that has been proven effective for the treatment of weight loss. Because ACT encourages you to accept and experience uncomfortable emotions--rather than succumb to emotional eating--it helps you to stay on your path to lose weight, while also helping you develop compassion toward yourself, no matter how much you weigh.

Written by two researchers in the field of ACT, this book offers evidence-based solutions to help you fundamentally change the way you think about food, so that you can successfully lose weight, get healthy, and live a happy, fulfilling life without costly and frustrating fad diets.

Millions of people in the United States suffer from eating disorders, and dissatisfaction with weight and body type-even in individuals whose weight is considered normal-is similarly widespread. In addition, more than half of Americans could benefit from healthy weight loss. Unfortunately, not all people with eating disorders or weight concerns respond to traditional therapeutic interventions; many continue to suffer significant symptoms even after treatment. What these clients need is an integrated therapeutic approach that will prove effective in the long run-like the scientifically backed methods in this much-needed clinical guide. Edited by Ann F. Hayos, Jason Lillis, Evan M. Forman, and Meghan L. Butryn; and with contributors including Kay Segal, Debra Safer, and Hugo Alberts; Mindfulness and Acceptance for Treating Eating Disorders and Weight Concerns is the first professional resource to incorporate a variety of proven-effective acceptance- and mindfulness-based approaches-such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)-into the treatment of persistent disordered eating, body image issues, and weight problems. With these evidence-based interventions, you'll be ready to help your clients move beyond their problems with disordered eating, body dissatisfaction, and weight management once and for all.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically- based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness processes, and commitment and behavior change processes to produce psychological flexibility. Steven C. Hayes, who helped develop ACT, and co-author Jason Lillis provide an overview of ACT's main influences and its basic principles. In this succinct and understandable survey, the authors show how ACT illuminates the ways that language encourages unhelpful skirmishing in clients' psychic lives, and how to use ACT to help clients accept private experiences, become more mindful of thoughts, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change. The latest edition in the Theories of Psychotherapy series, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy examines the therapy's history and process, evaluates the therapy's evidence base and effectiveness, and suggests future directions in the therapy's development.