You have now arrived at your True Weight, or at the weight you considered acceptable and set as your goal at the start—or at a weight you want to settle for as acceptable or a half victory, because you know that the effort involved in going further is too much and risks jeopardizing what you have achieved so far.

The time of rigorous constraints is over, and you are at last on flat terrain. You and your body have made a prolonged effort, and you have been rewarded. But to rest on your laurels now is very dangerous. You have reached a weight that suits you, but this weight that you have achieved does not really quite belong to you yet. Get rid of the illusion that you have at last finally taken care of your weight problem and can now go back to your old ways. That would be catastrophic, because in no time at all you will be back to your old weight. I do not mean that you have to continue forever with the aggressive diet that you have just followed. Who would agree to that?

The extra pounds that made you follow this diet in the first place, especially if they were a substantial—or worse, a recurring— problem, were certainly no accident. Whether these pounds were due to your genes or were an acquired habit, there is something written inside you, a bit like the information on a hard disk, that will not disappear.

There is a way of keeping your new weight, and it will be the theme of the fourth phase of the program, the Permanent

thirdstage. But you are not there yet because you are still predisposed to gain weight, and this tendency is now actually heightened by your body’s defense impulse, as it thinks that it has been robbed of its reserves.

What you need to do is to make peace with your body, which is just waiting for the opportunity to replenish those reserves. This is the objective of this next phase—the Consolidation phase in which you consolidate the weight lost and which, when completed, will open the door to every dieter’s dream: permanent weight stabilization at little cost.

But to be completely ready to start this second stage, you must understand why you are still too vulnerable, and your body too prone to weight rebound, for you to move straight to the third stage. After this brief but vital theoretical introduction, I will explain to you in detail how to follow this second stage in practice, the new foods it involves, and how long it lasts.