Jean Nidetch

“If you're going to lose weight, you have to do it by changing your way of thinking about food. It cannot be the highlight of your life.”

“It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.”

“All you need is one person in a group to be honest, and then slowly, very slowly, everyone else starts telling the truth. That's why our lecturers must be former members of Weight Watchers. They must have lost weight our way.”

“You take away the handicap of obesity, and this person becomes someone else. Take a jolly fat man for instance. You talk to him, and his heart is breaking. He wants to be thin.”

“I would work every day if I could.”

“Food is not your remedy for problems. Food is not going to change your life. If you are lonely, food is not going to be your company. If you are sad, food is not going to give you solace.”

“I'm an FFH: a Formerly Fat Housewife.”

“Thin people release the fork, and they chew the food with the fork on the table. They chew their food slowly. They look around at each other or the wall or a picture. They listen to the music. They sit back and take a breath. They do something other than concentrate on shoving the food into their body.”

“You have to make the decision to lose weight in your head, not your stomach.”

“When you're trying to lose weight, one of the most important things you can do is eat three decent meals a day so that you're not so hungry that you can't get food off your mind. Habit and hunger have long been the basic, insidious enemies of the overweight. We can't fight hunger, but we can fight habit.”

“For the first few years after I lost weight, I would feel for my hip bones every morning when I woke up so I would know I wasn't fat. It was like pinching myself so I'd know I wasn't dreaming.”

“Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.”

“We ourselves hold the instrument that makes us fat. I just shake my head when I see someone eating cake and saying, 'Oh, I wish I wasn't heavy.' But they keep eating the cake!”

“I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat. I'm sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn't go out, or I wasn't invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better.”

“At the age of thirty-seven, I was fat, and since the age of thirty-eight, I have never been fat again. That's the whole idea of effective weight loss - it's permanent because it's part of your lifestyle and the way you think about yourself, with pride and a sense of accomplishment. The goal you achieve is your own - you own it.”

“Compulsive eating is an emotional problem, and we use an emotional approach to its solution.”

“I'm sure that my compulsive eating habits began when I was a baby.”

“I was fat, so I have the right to tell other fat people not only that they should lose weight, but also that they must lose weight because I was fat, and I lost weight, and I saw the difference.”