Podcast Episode:

108: Secrets From the Eating Lab w/ Traci Mann PhD

This month’s deep dive on the podcast is into the wild and seriously misinformed world of dieting. I appropriately titled the theme of this month’s podcast: The Death of Dieting.

Dieting sucks and more importantly it doesn’t work for the long haul and to better help us understand why that is the case, I have invited Traci Mann to be a guest on the show. Traci is a professor of psychology, founder of the Health and Eating Lab at the University of Minnesota and author of Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower and Why You Should Never Diet Again.

We cover a tremendous amount of ground in today’s interview including:

  • Why diets don’t work.
  • Why you should focus on living on the low end of your set weight range
  • The Myth of willpower
  • Strategies for what will improve your relationship with food
  • Why “obesity will not kill you”
  • The incredible health benefits of exercise and why weight loss should not be the primary goal of exercise

Mentioned in this episode:

The Mann Lab
Secrets from the Eating Lab

Episode 108: Secrets From the Eating Lab w/ Traci Mann PhD

Guest Bio

Dr. Traci Mann

More about today’s guest:

Traci Mann grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, and went to college at the University of Virginia, where she thought she would become a mathematician or engineer. She abandoned those plans after taking her first psychology course, and went on to attain her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1995. She was a professor at UCLA for nine years before moving to the University of Minnesota and founding the Health and Eating Lab. Her research has been funded by the NIH, the USDA, and NASA, and is published in dozens of scholarly journals. She has received teaching awards at Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Minnesota, is the president of the Social Personality and Health (SPH) Network, and is an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, The Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Mann is uniquely qualified to provide the real truth about dieting, eating, obesity, and self-control. She is a widely cited expert, but she does not run a diet clinic or test diets, and she has never taken a penny from commercial diet companies, sat on their boards of directors, or endorsed one of their products. Because of this, her livelihood, research funding, and reputation are not dependent on her reporting that diets work or that obesity is unhealthy. This sets her apart from nearly all diet and obesity researchers and allows her to speak the truth about these topics, which she does with abandon.

Learn more: The Mann LabSecrets from the Eating Lab

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