Hi! I am a mother from New Zealand & author of Foods That Lie. In trying to solve my own overeating issues, I stumbled across a permanent and rather exciting method for ending overeating.
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In my youth, I was an awesome dieter. But after each diet, a huge hunger-wolf took hold of me.
My first serious diet began while at university. I lost 37 pounds (17 kilograms) in three months. Unfortunately, shortly after this, things began to unravel.
Here are just some snippets from the diary entries I made at this time:
Sadly, this was just the beginning of what turned into almost two decades of ‘disordered’ eating behaviors. Somehow, by initiating a strict diet, I had climbed upon an awful roller coaster of dietary hell…and I didn’t know how to climb off.
Even when I abandoned conventional diets and made sustained efforts to eat ‘intuitively’ for years on end, I could not seem to stop overeating. As my weight climbed and the failed diets and ‘non-dieting’ approaches accumulated, my despondency, shame, and self-hatred grew.
As the years passed, the situation began to feel increasingly hopeless, and it became more and more difficult to summon the strength to start again. Efforts to reform my eating became fewer and farther between, even though I desperately wanted to change.
It was evident that something about my behavior mimicked other addictions. I persistently ate an excessive amount and couldn’t seem to permanently sustain a healthy way of eating, no matter what I did. After I had given birth to my second child, I was at my highest weight ever and had an immense tug of war in my brain.
By some miracle, following years of intense research and personal trial and error, scouring scientific papers, blog posts, and online forums – purchasing far more weight loss books than any individual should ever acquire in one lifetime (reading well over 500 books by a conservative estimation), the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place.
Somehow, I stumbled across an exciting and shockingly simple way to stop overeating. The method centers on the concept of intermittent reinforcement (the mechanism at the heart of gambling machines, whereby a reward sometimes appears and sometimes does not) and the impact of misleading flavor. For the first time, I had a clear understanding of precisely what was addictive in the food supply – and had a logical, mathematical explanation for what addiction actually is.
This new insight triggered a complete reorganization of the way I thought about food. In response, I immediately began to eat regular meals of delicious, nourishing, flavor-honest food, eating until completely full and satiated. As a consequence, I steadily returned to a healthy weight in a way that felt almost effortless. Even more miraculous, the food-related obsession that had haunted me for decades lifted, and in its place, an unbelievable peace returned.
The simplicity of these ideas made me want to cry – but also scream from the rooftops with joy. Thus, I began to write the concepts down – standing atop this corner of the internet and pouring thoughts onto the screen in the hope that you, too, might escape.
In November 2024, these ideas eventually culminated in the book: Foods That Lie.
Foods That Lie presents a universal theory of addiction and provides compelling evidence that overeating is driven by deceptive food. It explains how misleading molecular signals are the single root cause of the obesity epidemic, and outlines a simple, practical method for ending overeating. The book also provides a logical way of understanding other addictions and related health conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes.
I have not yet summoned the courage to splash my previously fat physique all over the internet, but I will share a before-and-after image of my hand, so that you can glean some idea of the transformational effect of eating flavor-honest meals.
You can read more about Libby Marama Grace’s method for permanently ending overeating here.