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For 16 years, Rena Greenberg has been teaching people how to control their weight. Now she's written a book, "The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss" (Hay House, $14.95), based on her popular seminars.

Q: What's your degree in?

A: I have a bachelor's in bio-psychology, which is psychology and biofeedback, from City University of New York.

Q: How serious a problem is obesity?

A: It's a huge problem. Not only is obesity on the rise, but diabetes, too, is on the increase. If things keep going the way they're going, diabetes might become one of the leading causes of death. It's attributed to the lifestyle and diet of the American people.

Q: What's different about your weight-loss approach?

A: My approach is a comprehensive approach, a mind, body, spirit approach. Consciously, people know what they should do. They know they should eat smaller portions, eat healthier foods and be more active. But subconsciously, they have pleasurable associations with the wrong foods. So when they don't eat them, they feel deprived. When we feel deprived from any activity, we're going to do it.

Q: So how do we get around that?

A: We change our subconscious association with the foods so we don't want them anymore. That's the point of my book. How do we block that craving so we don't want them anymore, we don't crave them, we don't miss them? The program teaches step-by-step procedures to crave more healthy foods.

Q: But how do we do that?

A: Through self-hypnosis, imaging, visualization and neuro-linguistic programming. Basically, changing the way we store information in the subconscious part of the mind.

Q: For example?

A: Let's say my weakness is brownies. Every time I think about brownies, I imagine how good they smell and taste. There is a big picture of a brownie in my mind. But if I change that image, put a horrible odor over it, see bugs crawling on it . . . we change the mental programming so now that brownie is unappetizing.

Q: How did your program evolve?

A: In my 20s, I ate everything. I didn't concern myself with my health. Then I got sick and wound up in the hospital facing death. My heart rate was in the 30s. But I had a pacemaker put in, and I decided to take a look at my life and make some changes. I had been tired for about a year. I thought it might be my diet and lifestyle. I exercised a lot, but I ate the wrong foods. (That) led me to educating myself about health and nutrition and lifestyle. I'm telling people not to wait until they're forced to change their lifestyle. It's not about willpower. It's the mental programming that's running our lives. It's like a computer program. We don't realize how much control we have over that.

Q: Is behavior modification really that easy?

A: We all want to be happy, healthy and our ideal weight. A lot of it (the failure to achieve that) is the result of a faulty belief system, thinking, "Oh, I have no willpower." What I'm teaching is that we can go right past that. What I'm also suggesting is that deep inside ourselves is a stronger voice that teaches us to have love and compassion for ourselves, a voice of love and wisdom, and I teach a practice called the remembrance, which is about getting in touch with that higher force to follow our heart's yearning. We have everything we need inside of us. It's only about accessing it.