About this item
A provocative expose of the dieting industry from one of the nation's leading researchers in self-control and the psychology of weight loss that offers proven strategies for sustainable weight loss.From her office in the University of Minnesota's Health and Eating Lab, professor Traci Mann researches self-control and dieting. And what she has discovered is groundbreaking. Not only do diets not work; they often result in weight gain. Americans are losing the battle of the bulge because our bodies and brains are not hardwired to resist food - the very idea of it works against our biological imperative to survive.In Secrets From the Eating Lab, Mann challenges assumptions - including those that make up the very foundation of the weight loss industry - about how diets work and why they fail.
About the Author
Traci Mann grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and went to college at the University of Virginia, where she thought she would become a mathematician or engineer. She abandoned those plans after taking her first psychology course, and went on to attain her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1995. She was a professor at UCLA for nine years before moving to the University of Minnesota and founding the Health and Eating Lab. Her research has been funded by the NIH, the USDA, and NASA, and is published in dozens of scholarly journals. She has received teaching awards at Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Minnesota, is the president of the Social Personality and Health (SPH) Network, and is an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, The Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Mann is uniquely qualified to provide the real truth about dieting, eating, obesity, and self-control. She is a widely cited expert, but she does not run a diet clinic or test diets, and she has never taken a penny from commercial diet companies, sat on their boards of directors, or endorsed one of their products. Because of this, her livelihood, research funding, and reputation are not dependent on her reporting that diets work or that obesity is unhealthy. This sets her apart from nearly all diet and obesity researchers and allows her to speak the truth about these topics, which she does with abandon.
She lives with her husband, Stephen Engel (who is also a professor at the University of Minnesota) , and two Engelmann boys, in Edina, Minnesota.
