There are four areas or key part to TMM: Food, Fitness, Focus and Freedom.

• Food - What you eat, when you eat, how much and how you eat.
  It turns out how we eat plays a huge role in why, when and how much we eat.
• Fitness - How many calories are you burning vs. taking in, how are you burning them and are there ways to burn more efficiently.
• Focus - Developing, maintaining and integrating your TMM plan into your daily life. TMM is flexible, it is designed to adapt to your daily schedule but you have to make it a priority - not a top priority, but able to compete with all the other daily activities going on every day. Think of focus as internal awareness. If you keep TMM principles in mind, you'll find it is easy to slip TMM into your daily life.
• Freedom - Freedom to choose to lose, to choose what days are more restrained than others, freedom to continue to live in the real world while taking the steps along your weight management plan. We don't gain weight all at once, we won't lose it all at once either. (We didn't plan to gain the weight but we will definitely have a plan to lose it - permanently!)

Too often, weight loss plans and diets fail to either reduce the weight initially or keep it off in the long run. We've heard countless stories of diets that didn't work or diets that worked for a while but were too restrictive and the weight comes back in a few months. That's why TMM is a method, an approach, a weight management plan - not a diet or weight loss system.

Freedom plays a key role in TMM - freedom to choose the steps, freedom to eat what the circumstances allow and freedom to backslide without giving up.

Freedom to choose foods that we still run into during our daily lives - but be able to choose more wisely - combines the strength of freedom and food choices.

Freedom to take steps to improve fitness is another key. It doesn't mean a dedicated gym workout ever day (unless you choose that), it means you control how much attention fitness gets. Some Mandrites avoid fitness altogether at first and focus only on food controls and improvements. Then, after they've lost a few pounds, fitness isn't so daunting and they choose to integrate some of the easier fitness steps.

In time, most people take steps across all three areas but at their own pace, their own schedule and always (always!) because they wanted to and were ready for it.