Fine, so what do you do? For the next two or three weeks you eliminate the hamburger and replace it with a salad which contains less calories and less fat, one which you know to be generally 'healthier' and less fattening than the hamburger. Your breakfast remains the same. Your dinner remains the same. And you still snack between meals and don't exercise.

Over the next two to three weeks you're probably not going to lose any weight, but on the good side, it will not be all too that difficult to do. You're still eating pretty much what you want the rest of the day. You might even put on weight. A friend of yours who might, at the same time, be on some other diet or exercise program and ask you what you are doing. You respond by saying, if you want to respond, that you're training your mind not to have to have a hamburger for lunch. But you're doing it in such a way that it's not putting you out that much. If you feel slighted or annoyed at lunch, you know you can at least look forward to snacking before dinner or to your usual hefty dinner.

In two to three weeks time you should have gotten used to substituting the salad for the hamburger, or it should at least be getting easier. Depending upon your own circumstances, you might cut the two to three weeks down to one week, or make it longer and run into four weeks or so.

If you don't at least get used to the substitution--I didn't say you'd love it--you're probably not human and this method is not for you.

Example 2: Let's say you simply want to eliminate snacking between lunch and dinner. By now you should know that all you have to do for the next two to three weeks is cut out that particular snack, and leave everything else pretty much the same.

Remember, you're conditioning your mind to eliminate or add or otherwise change a habit. At this stage of the program you're not intending to lose weight or get into shape. Instead, you're attempting to recondition your mind.
...Conditioning is supposed to be easier for you to do. That's the idea. It's difficult to fight 'head-on' drives and habits you've accumulated over a lifetime. Most diet and other programs try to do this. With them you might lose weight for a month or two or longer, but then almost always go right back to where you came from, and worse, because you tried to change your drives by hitting them 'head-on.'
...Again, that's not what you're doing here, wherein you're 'slowly' learning to recondition your mind.

Example 3: Let's say your long range objective is to cut down on the amount of food you are eating. To simply begin eating less, as one might do on a diet, one would continue feeling the drive of being hungry.
---The idea would be to recondition the hunger drive so that when eating less, the reconditioned person would not be feeling the hunger drive from the new restricted way of wating. One way, of many, of doing this might be by the daily postponment of the time to begin having lunch from let's say 1 PM to 2 PM.
---In other words, from the person's having normally felt hunger pangs close to 1 PM, after two to three weeks of 'getting used to' eating at 2 PM, the hunger pangs will likewise eventually be postponed and only begin until close till 2 PM. Whatever electrochemical and neurological and microscopic changes might have been needed to postpone the hunger pangs will have simply been performed automatically by Nature through repetition of the stress of delaying the time for lunch!
---In other words, after a period of weeks one might have progressively adapted and lengthened the time between breakfast and lunch by one hour. Having accomplished the one hour delay, the interval might then be pushed to 3 PM, and the hunger drive delay will eventually and similarly be delayed.
---The point is, through this form of conditioning the individual will not be feeling any psychological or physical ill effects from the progressive delay (or restriction of food), since the actual drives will have been changed. By going suddenly on a diet and trying to buck the hunger drive, one will be feeling the hunger drive as intense as ever and eventually give in to it and rebound back off the diet.
---With reconditioning of the mind, the food restriction or new interval of time between meals will become a natural way of life and incur no feeling of stress, and, as a matter of fact, the individual will eventually be feeling better for it, and ironically eventually 'feel' like eating less!

Example 4: Let's say a person who is overweight and hates to exercise decides to first progressively adapt exercise as a way of life, and not food. That person might elect a certain small period of time every other day, let's say fifteen minutes, wherein he or she might go for a walk or slow jog. Or perhaps they might have an exercise machine in the house and do their regular, every other day fifteen minute exercise session using that machine.
---You see, if doesn't really matter at first what exercise is used since the idea would be to make those fifteen minute periods a part of one's lifestyle, no different than just getting used to brushing one's teeth every morning. The idea is not to use the fifteen minute exercise session to lose weight, which is what almost everybody else would be doing, and eventually fail at. The idea would be to recondition the mind toward 'getting used to' and eventually 'liking' to exercise.

---For example, the exercise sessions can be increased in time from fifteen to thirty minutes, or be repeated daily instead of every other day, or anoterh food might be added to the daily diet, or removed over another time interval of two to three weeks or thereabouts, whtaever time interval it takes for that given individual to get used to that given activity.

---Eventually, the person's overall lifestyle becomes decidedly different, but psychologically 'okay' with the individual because he or she will have 'gotten used to it'!