I created this page so you could learn a little more about me before purchasing my book.

I wrote an earlier version of the The Straight Scoop About Dieting in the early 1980s.

Here is how my publisher (Dodd, Mead & Company) described the 1983 edition on the cover flap.

"This outspoken, compassionate book speaks for the millions of women who have dieted unsuccessfully all their lives and have lost their self-esteem --- but no weight. It explodes the myths and fallacies of dieting and exposes the cruelty, discrimination, and injustice society directs at fat people.

For twenty-fife years Sharon Green Patton was on a dieting merry-go-round that brought her nothing but grief. Not only did she not lose weight, but she realized that dieting only made her fatter. Finally one day Ms. Patton just stopped dieting. For the first time she began to really enjoy food and to accept the body size and weight nature intended her to have. Gradually she lost her obsessive relationship with food and began to eat normally. She ate what she wanted, when she wanted, and in the amounts that truly satisfied her – and, surprisingly, lost weight.

In Stop Dieting – Start Living! Ms. Patton discusses why dieting makes you fat; why will power does not and cannot work; why food is neither moral nor immoral; how nature has programmed us to be a certain weight; the destructive psychological, physical, and emotional effects of starting and stopping diets; the difficulties of maintaining your self-respect in a world that demands every woman to be certain size; and the problems of sex and sexism faced by overweight women.

Based on extensive research and interviews, Stop Dieting – Start Living! offers a way to self-acceptance and personal happiness that will be welcomed by every overweight woman in America."

Yes, prior to 1980, I was a compulsive dieter. I began dieting at 13 even though I wasn’t fat. I bought into the advertising and weight loss industries’ message that I had to be “thin,” and from that point on, everything I did and everything I achieved was colored by my battle with weight. Trying to understand why dieting didn’t work and why I spent so much of my life chasing the illusion of being thin, I spent several years doing research and learning as much as I could about dieting and weight loss. The first edition of this book was the result of that research and my realization that not only does dieting not work, it actually makes you fat and destroys your mind, body and soul.

Sadly, what I wrote in the early 1980s is as true now as it was then. In fact, the problems have become worse. More people are dieting and a higher percentage of the population is overweight. Surprisingly, the overwhelming evidence suggests the first trend has caused the second – yet diets continue to be the dominant prescription for weight loss.

Despite the success of my book when it was published, my message (and the research upon which it was based) has been overshadowed by the vast propaganda of the profit-driven weight-loss industry. As a result, my book went out of print and I pretty much gave up hope that the truths about dieting and weight loss would ever be broadly understood.

That all changed when I was contacted in 2006 by Allen Oelschlaeger, the author of Finally, the Straight Scoop About Weight, Nutrition, and Fitness. Al had read my book in doing research for his comprehensive home-study program and wanted to republish it – in an updated edition – as a companion volume to his course.

This edition, re-titled as The Straight Scoop About Dieting, is the outcome of his call. I read his course and became convinced that, through our combined work, Al and I could bring a revolution to the understanding of weight loss so that people would never have to struggle with their weight ever again.

Besides my research and writing about dieting, I have worked as a writer, editor and a university teacher. I have a BA and a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and I taught writing and literature at San Francisco State University for several years. I also was editor of a national magazine in Washington, DC, and worked as a writer and editor in New York City and San Francisco.

My husband, Jim Patton owns a consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, and our daughter Kate, who has been a constant joy in our lives for all her 22 years, is now attending San Francisco State University where I used to teach. She is a theater major and very talented.

To contact me for any reason, click here.

To place your order,
please CLICK HERE.

To return to the home page, click here.