Traci Mann is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and was on the faculty at UCLA before moving to the U and founding the Health and Eating Lab in 2007. Mann is uniquely qualified to provide the truth about dieting, eating, obesity, and self-control. She does not run a diet clinic or test diets, and she has never taken a penny from commercial diet companies, sat on their boards of directors, or endorsed one of their products. Because of this, her livelihood, research funding, and reputation are not dependent on her reporting that diets work or that obesity is unhealthy. This sets her apart from nearly all diet and obesity researchers and allows her to speak the truth about these topics, which she does with abandon.