No, because overweight is a metabolic issue and not a behavioral one.
It's currently the fashion to believe that overweight people suffer from sloth and gluttony; however, adipose tissue is not the result of character defects but rather of metabolic function. As it turns out, the obese don't consume more calories than the lean.
“Most studies comparing normal and overweight people suggest that those who are overweight eat fewer calories than those of normal weight.” [National Academy of Sciences, Diet and Health]
Not all calories are created equal. The body metabolizes them differently. The current belief is that:
A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. Lost in this distillation is the fact that the effects of these different nutrients on metabolism and hormone secretion are so radically different, as is the manner in which the body employs the nutrients, that the energetic equivalence of the calories themselves is largely irrelevant to why we gain weight. As Rubner suggested more than a century ago, “the effect of specific nutritional substances upon the glands” may be the more relevant factor. [Taubes, Gary (2007). Good Calories, Bad Calories (p. 276). Anchor.]
Insulin regulates body fat. Modern diets are full of refined carbohydrates that cause excessively high blood glucose, and this in turn causes the pancreas to secrete insulin to force the tissues store it as fat.
To lose fat, keep the blood sugar under control by avoiding refined carbohydrates like white sugar, white flour, potatoes, beer, and white rice. You don't need to force yourself to eat slowly. (The research doesn't yet exist for me toI can't prove this assertion, but here is a great list of the current state of research.)
The current wisdom is that to lose weight, one must eat less and exercise more (as if the human body were a car, and all food was petrol), and yet anyone who has ever tried this approach knows it's uncomfortable at best. However, it's beginning to appear that changing the types of calories we consume rather than the quantity is actually more appropriate:
We're beginning to see meta studies as well:
An even more recent meta-study of randomized controlled studies that compared low-carbohydrate diets to low-fat/low-calorie diets found that measurements of weight, HDL cholesterol, triglyceride levels and systolic blood pressure were significantly better in groups that followed low-carbohydrate diets. The authors also found a higher rate of attrition in groups with low-fat diets. They conclude that "Evidence from this systematic review demonstrates that low-carbohydrate/high-protein diets are more effective at 6 months and are as effective, if not more, as low-fat diets in reducing weight and cardiovascular disease risk up to 1 year."
