Geneen Roth, internationally renowned diet expert and author of several bestsellers, including Appetites, Breaking Free From Compuslive Eating and Feeding The Hungry Heart, offers a new series of Bay Area workshops, Diet For The 21st Century.

Usually, by the time people come to me, they have tried many other ways to lose weight, and they are in a lot of pain. It's hard to know which is stronger: the desire to lose weight, or the desire to end the pain.

If people simply want to lose weight, I tell them that I am probably not the best person for them to be working with; there are a lot easier and faster ways to lose weight. Other people might have serious health issues to which losing weight is critical. Again, my books and workshops are not for them.

Many people, however, want to lose weight simply because they believe it will make them happy and stop their pain. So it's not so much the weight they want to lose, but the pain. They are the main audience for my work. At every workshop I ask, "How many people have lost weight before?" Everybody raises their hand. "How many of you were ecstatically happy after you lost weight?" Two people raise their hands. "How many people believe that, when you lose weight again, you will be ecstatically happy?" Everybody raises their hand again.

In order to lose weight through the approach I teach, you have to be mindful of a few guidelines. These guidelines include not eating when you're distracted, such as in the car, or while doing something else; paying careful attention to the bodily sensations that you recognize as hunger, and stopping when you've had enough....

Most emotional eaters not only eat to distract themselves, they distract themselves while they eat. Every time they eat, there's a sense of guilt. People feel they are not allowed to eat. They are ashamed to actually sit down and give themselves what they want.