DIETING                 

 "These principles will help you master yourself, make you strong, give you hope, and put you on the path to greatness."

Joe Weider Trainer of Champions

FOCUS ON YOUR GOAL WEIGHT 

FOCUS ON YOUR GOAL SIZE AND SHAPE 

FOCUS ON YOUR EATING PLAN 

DON'T DEFOCUS 

Strive for excellence_______ Exceed yourself 

Love your friend______ Speak the truth 

Practice fidelity_____ Honor your mother and father 

Dieting is a metaphor for living a virtuous and a grateful life. You show your gratitude for the life you have been given by taking care of yourself and eating well. Dieting is a battle ground for learning patience. Don't snack tonight. Wait until breakfast. Dieting is a process that calls for honesty and no cheating. If you cheat on your diet you get pinched and go to fat jail. Dieting is a way to learn responsibility and develop eating skill. You can eat like a kid and eat what you feel like and not eat what you don't feel like eating. You can be as irresponsible as you like and you will find out the consequences that await bad choices and irresponsible behavior. You will feel happy and enjoy life the most when you are healthy. You will not feel good when you get sick from bad eating habits. You will learn to educate yourself about what to eat, which foods and how much. That is your parents responsibility to some point and then it is yours. Or you can eat like a dummy and eat in the car after a visit to the drive-through window while talking on your cell phone. You can express your reverence for life by eating right and making good choices. You can be profane and vulgar and low and eat like a slob. The choices are yours. It is only good to get what you want if what you want is good for you and your family and your society. Other than that, getting what you want just makes you an addict and a slave to the people who control what you want. 

Dieting is a word that we say to describe what we are doing about the feeling that we are too fat and that our clothes do not fit very well. If you have "The Problem", dieting alone, on your own by yourself has nothing to do with weight loss. It is something you say you are going to do when you feel guilty about overeating; which occurs frequently. 

We need to enter a treatment relationship with a program or a skilled professional to make it real and make it work. This is a blow to the ego that most of us do not like to accept. So we wait until we are good and demoralized before we get into treatment. Demoralization occurs when we realize that we have failed repeatedly in our attempts to lose weight and cannot do it on our own. Most of us see someone else who is losing weight and ask them how they are doing it and then we go to where they are in treatment and get into that treatment program. This is a very embarrassing moment for most of us. 

These are some of the basic facts you need to get in order to get into treatment. It is mostly a calorie problem for you, even though obesity is a complex genetically controlled biopsychosocial problem. You need to learn to eat 10 times your desired weight in calories in order to get to your goal weight and goal size. If you want to weigh 120 pounds you can eat 1200 calories a day. If you want to weigh 150 pounds you can eat 1500 calories a day. If you want to weigh 200 pounds you can eat 2000 calories a day. Sometimes, after you have been on a calorie restricted diet for awhile, it seems harder to lose weight and you have to eat even less. 

I am sorry to say that, in my opinion, all the writing about "thermogenesis", "we will change your metabolic rate", and "lose while you snooze" are simple marketing lies. Flat out bald faced lies. The issue of how ephedra sinica works to help people lose weight is complex and interesting. Ephedra products really work best if you make money by selling them to others. 

I am personally not impressed by the value of exercise in weight loss programs. Walking is a good thing. Beyond that strenuous exercise is a stress and my patients all overeat when they feel stressed. What benefit you get from exercise is undone by the fact that it makes you hungry and you eat more. Most of the exercise spas in my area have an eating place. They serve bagels and cream cheese there. You will not lose a lot of weight if you eat bagels and cream cheese as your reward for exercising. If you are 5'2" tall and weigh 210 pounds I do not see how you can exercise without overexerting yourself. Exercise is good for your heart and for stress relief and for longevity and for a lot of things and it is not very helpful for weight loss. So be careful about that. Exercise should be done in a treatment program with a good personal trainer who can evaluate you and prescribe a good program for you. On your own, by yourself, exercising will do about as much good as dieting on your own. 0. 

The percentages of foods you can eat is a subject of lively controversy. The low fat diets, represented by Pritikin and Ornish like you to eat 10% fat, 15 percent protein, and 75% complex carbohydrates. That is a vegetarian diet and is good for people with heart disease. The high protein diets represented by "Protein Power" and "The Zone Diet" suggest 30% fat, 30% protein and 40% carbohydrate. Many succeed with that diet. The low carbohydrate diet, less than 10 grams of lettuce a day with all the meat you want to eat, is called The Atkins diet. Men like it because they can lose weight fast. Then they brag a lot about how superior they are to their wife who has only lost 8 pounds in 3 months. Then they eat some bread and gain all their weight back in a rush. The low carbohydrate folks say it does not increase your cholesterol. They do not say what good that fat is for your colon cancer and your prostate gland cancer. Most women do not like the low carbohydrate approach and can only tolerate it for a short time. I have some patients who gained 25 pounds on the low carbohydrate diet. I favor 20% fat, 20 percent protein and 60% carbohydrate. 

It works out like this on a 1200 calorie diet. 20% fat = 240 fat calories. 20% protein = 240 protein calories. 60% carbohydrates = 720 of carbohydrate calories. Now there are about 4 calories in a gram of protein, 4 calories in a gram of carbohydrate and 9 calories in a gram of fat. So you can have 27 grams of fat, 60 grams of protein, and 180 grams of carbohydrates a day on a 20%fat, 20 % protein and 60% carbohydrate, 1200 calorie diet. That unravels the mystery of reading the labels.

I feel that eating causes hunger and the more we eat the hungrier we get. I feel the main problem we all share is that once we start eating we can't stop. We are under visual control and we eat until it is all gone and we can't see any more to eat. This is the behavior of a sugar addict who is under food control. I feel that it is difficult to split 1200 calories into 3 meals a day (though some of my best patients can do that with the help of medication) and encourage my patients to eat twice a day. For some it is even better to learn to eat once a day. Since we all snack at night and that is how we got fat, I think it is o.k. to eat one meal late at night and do a liquid fast all day. This idea is for people who have "The Problem" not for rational people who do not have a sugar addiction. Drink 8 glasses of water a day 

Dieting is real tight and you cannot stray far from 10 times your desired weight in calories. If you eat an extra 100 calories a day, sneaking snacks in the kitchen while standing up, you eat an extra 3000 calories a month. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So with an extra 100 calories a night you will be putting on about 10 pounds a year.

An extra 100 calories a day = 10 pounds a year!

Yes!! One glass of wine a day is 120 calories and is about 12 pounds of weight on you a year. If you want to lose weight you do not drink alcohol. Of course, the same people who stop taking their diet medication so they can enjoy a food binge, stop taking their diet medications because they fear the meds do not go well with their drinks!!! If you drink alcohol you lose control, your insulin level goes up, only to then make your blood sugar go way down and then you are eating chocolate chip cookies 1.5 hours after you have "just a few drinks". The reason the French can drink wine and not get very fat is because they are genetically similar, they eat like gourmets instead of gourmands, and they do not have twenty restaurants and 15 grocery stores within 5 minutes of their house like Americans do. 

It's a thrilling experience to get into shape and lose weight. You feel better and are less depressed (too much food makes us sleepy and depressed, and we get depressed from looking terrible and having no clothes that fit). At some point you need to shift off of the scale goal into a size goal and then become aware of the size and shape of your body. You need to stay in a support group treatment program for life if you have "The Problem" and diet medications only work when you take them. If you drop out of treatment you will relapse (usually after about a year and the relapse often occurs at Halloween with "just one little candy bar"" and then you go back up to your top weight again. Somehow we all do this about four or five times in the course of our life. Obesity is a real serious problem with real serious consequences and a very bad hangover of several types. So get in treatment and stay in treatment and then pick up a personal physical trainer and get into your best shape and stay there. Health is a great virtue and in your struggle to become a more grateful and more virtuous person you need to struggle to become and stay as healthy as you can. Nothing tastes and feels as good as healthy. Nothing feels as bad as sick. Show your gratitude for what you have been given by taking care of your health and your beauty and your form. That is the basis of the attitude of gratitude. Go for it. Hunger is your best friend. It means you are slimming. 

So call us at  1-847-236-9999   and make an appointment today. We look forward to helping you achieve your goals.