DR.FOX’S FAT BLOCKER PROGRAM
Author: admin
Winter’s snow has barely melted, and we’ve already begun to think of summer with mixed anticipation and dread. Sweaters and heavy clothes will soon be shed to reveal the pounds that have been put on since last bikini season. During these early months of the New Year, many people begin to dust off their diet books or scan the newspaper ads for the latest wonder diet. Thus begins the latest round in the diet derby, a brutal pastime in which there are no winners.
Dana B. is typical of those who race through the diet derby, unknowingly courting disaster. This attractive, 36-year-old banker came to my office saying, “If you examine me and write a letter that says I’m healthy, I can go on this special fast that guarantees that I’ll lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks.”
This didn’t particularly surprise me. I knew that she probably could lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks on a fast. I’ve seen people lose lots of weight quickly on various diets. I’ve also seen people lose their health, just as quickly, on some of these crazy diets because they’re nutritionally unbalanced and they force the dieter to drop the pounds too quickly. (Simply losing too much too fast can be deadly.) And even if these diets weren’t health threatening, the fast weight loss and subsequent weight gain that they cause can result in saggy, drooping skin.
For Dana and many others, the diet derby is a way of life, unfortunately. Come March or April, they eagerly try the latest miracle diet, not really understanding the possible health
consequences. But sensible eating should be a way of life. Dieting as an annual knock-’em-down ritual is uncomfortable, unhealthy, and unproductive. Consequently, our permanent diets should consist of the food we eat every day of the year, not the food we forgo. Our diets should also include a reasonable amount of exercise and lifestyle habits that are sensible and easy to stick to. I tell my patients that diets should be considered everyday blueprints for health.
The problem is that if looking slim and healthy while wearing nothing but a bikini, shades, and sunscreen only required a fairly easy regimen of moderate, nutritional eating coupled with a doable amount of exercise and a positive mental attitude, we would all look like movie stars. But, of course, we all know that life is not like that. If you see those stars in real life, you would see that not even they look like movie stars! Sensible eating and reasonable exercise are essential to looking good and feeling healthy. But, unfortunately, that’s often not enough. Even if we are reasonable, many of us still tend to gain an unhealthy amount of body fat as we age.
The reason is, of course, that there is more to losing weight than merely eating less. While no weight-loss program is likely to succeed if caloric intake is not reduced, it does not follow that such a reduction inevitably causes weight loss. This is because our bodies are remarkably adaptable. If less food is taken in, the body recognizes this and quickly reorders its behavior: It starts to use less energy and to metabolize the food more efficiently, thus spending fewer calories. After several days of a reduced calorie diet, most people report that their rate of weight loss slows severely or stops.
The traditional way to overcome this problem—the way virtually every diet book and doctor recommends—is to step up the amount of exercise. That has the dual advantage of using up
more calories as the fuel for the exercise, and of fooling the body into maintaining its metabolic rate because it believes that it cannot afford to reduce its energy output. Obviously, if the metabolism keeps operating at full tilt, exercise burns up more calories, and caloric intake is reduced, then weight loss is inevitable.
The only trouble is that this is theory, not practice. In practice what happens is that the slowdown in food intake causes the body to want to reduce the amount of energy it puts out. So, in order to conserve energy, our clever bodies command our brains to reduce the amount of exercise we do. That is why when we do go on a diet; one common reaction is that we don’t feel like
exercising.
To some extent, of course, we can overcome that tendency to avoid exercise. After all, we are gifted with free will. Our brains are capable of being strong disciplinarians. But now we are being asked to fight on two fronts at the same time: We should eat less food than our bodies are programmed to crave and exercise more at just the time when our bodies figure they should be conserving energy. In the vast majority of cases, our brains can only hold out for a while. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, we drop off our diet, ignore some or all of our exercise program, and quickly regain the weight we lost.
That’s when, often in desperation, we turn to the fad diets. We cannot keep up a draconian regimen of never eating enough and always wearing ourselves out with exercise. When we are merely sensible, we gain weight. So we make the extra effort of going on a crash diet in the hope that that will solve our
problem.
But the odds are stacked against us. So, what actually happens is that our weight loss is strictly temporary, and we risk our health as we waste our time, money, energy, and well-being on the diet derby.
*48\29\2*
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