He offers excellent insights and suggestions on ways to regain your communication with your body so that you can learn to pay attention to the most knowledgeable person of all when it comes to deciding what and when you should eat-- yourself.
No one asks the person with a fever to "just stop that elevated temperature" and yet most diet and weight control "experts" repeatedly tell people with elevated weight to "just lose that weight." I sometimes fantasize about smashing a cheesecake in their faces.
Dr Levy, a Canadian, is far more intelligent, realistic, and interested in his patients than any American MD of my experience, far more sensitive and sympathetic than American shrinks. He does not seem to have his time squeezed into teeny, pressurized encounters that prevent him from communicating with and coming to understand his patients. Over a long period -- years -- of trial-and-error explorations, he and his patient gradually discover what problems prevent the patient from eating self-responsively, and address them one by one as they show up.
Just reading this book is extraordinary. You get a glimpse of what medicine might have been, had it not been hijacked by the forces that want to force everything into a business mold, however bad the fit, however horrible the resulting nightmare, and however much MORE rather than LESS expensive the results.
But even if all U.S. MDs WERE forced to read this book, it would not help, since they are no longer free to practice medicine. Patients, however, can benefit enormously from studying the book, working up their OWN case histories, and sorting out, as Dr Levy indicates is necessary in such cases, one by one, the problems like sleep apnea or other sleep disorders, mood disorders, predatory families, etc., which result in the disordered eating of which obesity is symptomatic. Unlike the cruel diet clubs that put overweight people through a weight loss process they know is bogus and will only revert to a heavier weight in time, this very methodic and gradual approach respects the obese individual, sticks to reality, and really helps. No other book is like it. Nowadays, it is rare to find a doctor even BOTHERING with obesity. People prefer to write about anorexia and bulimia. This is a terrific book by an impressive medical doctor.