Dr. Phil's diet is laid out in his book _The Ultimate Weight Loss Solution_. It concerns itself with the emotional reasons that people are overweight. There isn't really a meal plan per se for this diet. There's no "eat grapefruit only!" admonitions. You need to read the book (or listen to the audiotapes while you commute) and fill out the quizzes (hard to do while commuting, I found). Once you do that, if you actually put the effort in, you will find some reasons why you are overweight. What your "payoff" is for failing at your diets. Once you figure out what's keeping you fat, you can come up with a plan to attack that, then following a diet and exercise plan becomes much simpler. At that point, you can easily eat less, move more, and find yourself losing weight. The real difficult part to any diet is following it and not sabotaging yourself (or letting other people or events sabotage you). So, Dr. Phil's approach is to figure out where that sabotage is going to come from and either get rid of it (like the candy dish at the office) or have a plan to deal with it (like your Aunt Tillie who always makes you a special dessert when you go over there). It works about as well as any other diet. If you follow his directions, and you do the emotional work, it becomes much easier to lose weight.