If there are no naturally thin people, then the system collapses.  On the one hand, that means there is nothing wrong with you, the non-thin person.  I have met a lot of thin people, and they are not on any kind of higher moral plane.  You can be a mess and stay thin.  

On the other hand, if there are no naturally thin people, doesn’t that make you a failure who can’t stay thin?  Maybe you are just in a place in your life where being thin is hard?  The Doctor rejects this view and so should you.  What is missing is the mental transformation.  Understand what thin people value and see the world the way they do.  If you want to be thin, that is how you think thin – not by forcing yourself to eat less food.  That can’t be borne and you will quit and feel like a failure.  Saying you can become thin by eating less food only works for prisoners or rats in a lab whose diet and behavior are under external control.  Eating less food has to be part of a successful and rewarding system of living, or else why do it?  

(Actually, there is a famous Dilbert cartoon where the character Dogbert advertises how to get thin by eating less food.  The author, Scott Adams, is on record agreeing that the systems approach is a great way to weight loss.  But that is his system.)

What would this system of rewards look like?  Here’s one: I cook most of my meals.  Today is a bad example of that.  I had pre-packaged breakfast, restaurant lunch, and store-bought cookies for tea.  But it was very rewarding.  Each meal was worth the wait, worth getting hungry for.  I always tell people that a little hunger, at the right time, makes the reward more enjoyable and worthwhile.  Soon you will be looking forward to getting hungry just so you can have the pleasure of sating it with a favorite food (in a measured amount).  Anyway, by cooking my own food, I make sure it is at its best when I eat it; I anticipate it and dramatize that with plannning, buying ingredients, cooking, and portioning.  That turns out to be very rewarding.  You wouldn’t go to all that trouble otherwise.  

What do thin people value?  I have thought about that a lot.  On one level, it is really simple.  Thin people value being thin.  Is that a duh?  Duh, you say!  But consider this: overweight people don’t value being overweight.  That isn’t their goal.  Thin people value being thin and that is their goal.  When they eat anything, they are asking: how will this impact my weight?  Now, when you are thin, you get to value other things too; I recall one very thin woman who liked ice cream more than anything.  She basically survived on raw vegetables and hummus all day so she could have ice cream for dinner.  Would that work for me?  No!  But she paid a heavy price for her ice cream, since her goal was to stay thin.  

Frankly, when I was gaining weight, if I wanted ice cream, I just ate it.  It didn’t matter to me what else I had eaten that day, or what I weighed, or how I would feel in the morning.  My goal was to enjoy some ice cream.  More ice cream, more enjoyment.  Now it is different.  I would anticipate the ice cream all day, and just when I started to feel hungry, I would eat a measured amount.  The pleasure of the first few bites of the anticipated and best-loved food, when you are just getting hungry, is worthwhile and satisfying, and makes eating a lot of ice cream seem kind of shallow and unfulfilling.  

Do you see it is your system of values and how you live them out that separates a thin person from an overweight one?  

-The Doctor