Alisa is a doctoral researcher in clinical health psychology at UCL who has taught and given talks across the country. Her work covers new areas of eating disorder research at the intersection of the conscious and the unconscious. Seven years of experience in journalism has lent itself to an interest in public engagement and the bridging of the gap between the scientific community and the public at large. Her core interest is in understanding how we eat, what we believe about weight loss, and how a "diet" is just "die" with a T.

Talk: Why we must stop ignoring the psychology of weight loss.

"Losing weight is really easy; you eat less and exercise more!" But this is simply not true; as many of us may know, most diets only result in temporary weight loss. We often ignore the psychology of eating, and internalizing wrong beliefs causes us to fail at losing weight. The problem should be tackled as a psychological one: unrealistic expectations should be abandoned, and the stigma attributed to weight loss needs to be abandoned. Contrary to suspicious ads and promises of weight loss without effort, the psychology of eating really can give us important insights.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx