Lose weight by acting differently
I first read about this in New Scientist a couple years ago. Apparently a doctor in Britain ran an experiment where he had participants choose a different behavior from a list of 15 opposite pairs (examples given are reactive/proactive and intro/extroverted). The idea is that by making people adopt behaviors and actions that they typically don't follow makes them think more about the decisions they make, which in turn affects decision making in other parts of their lives. Essentially by adding a component of conscious behavior to one's routine, it helps to break habits and other components of behavior that occur autonomically (or is it autonomously??). Either way, people ended up losing weight and keeping it off even though they weren't trying to do it. They weren't even told to change or even think about their dietary habits; that behavior emerged on its own.
It's a neat idea and I'm impressed that he even developed it. I wonder how it will work in practice though. In this case, the participants weren't really aware of what was going on (as far as I can tell). They were just told to pick one of the behaviors and to do something new a couple times a week (such listen to a different radio station or read a different newspaper). This then had knock-on effects with positive results.
But if this behavioral chioce system gets marketed or adopted as a "no-diet" (it's already being referred to as that), people might be able to avoid the results. If they believe that all they have to do is just read a different newspaper and they'll get thin, the effect may not translate to other aspects of their life. Hopefully his book outlines the system appropriately.
I can see it having a lot more positive benefits than just weight loss as well. Imagine if everyone started actually thinking about their behavior!