Chapter 1
Eating for Quality and Quantity
On any given day, millions of Americans are trying to lose weight. In the United States, more adults are overweight than not (65 percent), and almost a quarter of our kids are already overweight (13-24 percent of kids ages six to nineteen) or are rapidly heading in that direction. Forget about "Generation X." Our kids, teens, and adults are on the fast track to becoming "Generation XXL." Estimates from health economists show us that being overweight increases an individual's personal health-care costs by more than six hundred dollars each year, increases the amount he or she will spend on prescription medications by 77 percent, and reduces his or her average life span by about eight years. In many ways, being overweight will either kill you early or put you in the poor house-or both.
Combine all the statistics for the U.S. and they show that more than two hundred million Americans need to lose weight. It is no surprise, then, that we also see hundreds of different weight-loss programs that promise miraculous results to these millions of dieters (and cost us, as a nation, more than forty billion dollars each year). Unfortunately, while many of those programs will certainly help achieve some measure of weight loss, the weight is typically regained in a very short period of time-and almost certainly within a year-after going "off" the diet.
Hundreds of clinical studies show that if you eat in "X" manner, you'll lose weight-but that weight often comes right back (and it comes back more often than it stays off). There are also millions of personal testimonials to support the weight-loss benefits of the various miracle diets-no matter how bizarre they may seem (including all manner of patches, potions, and pills). Without too much effort, it is easy to find diets that promise weight loss by restricting a person's intake of a particular food (such as those "bad" carbohydrates), and others that restrict intake of all foods except those on a certain "approved food list" (which invariably tends to be an arbitrary list with little basis in credible scientific evidence).
It is exceedingly difficult to find anything that a majority of nutrition experts can agree on, but we all generally agree that limiting intake of highly processed grains and sugars can help you keep off the pounds. After that, however, the dietary-advice field becomes a battleground where the debate happens more often in the media than in the laboratory or clinic. No matter what the advocates of the various diets happen to say, the bottom line (for nutrition professionals) comes down to the science. What the science says, quite clearly, is that any of the popular and highly promoted diets can help you lose weight, that they are particularly effective in the early stages of dieting (when you have more than thirty pounds to lose), but that they become less effective for weight loss as you get closer to your goal weight. Your choice of diet can also help determine how you might die: those choosing a high-fat (low-carb) diet tend to die of heart disease and stroke, while high-carb (low-fat) eaters tend to die of cancer and neurologic diseases.
All Diets Work...for Awhile
Let's reemphasize one very important fact right here at the start: virtually any diet program will help you lose weight. Whether we're talking about Atkins, Protein Power, Zone, Ornish, Pritikin, South Beach, Paleo, or any of the myriad other choices out there, they will all help you lose weight. Why? Because they all restrict total energy intake to about 1,500 calories per day. Do that (restrict calories) on a consistent basis for any length of time (more than a few days), and the vast majority of Americans (or non-Americans eating a "modern American diet") will shed pounds with very little effort.
It's when you get to those "last ten or twenty pounds" that most diets become less effective-and in some cases actually become counterproductive to your weight-loss efforts. Why? Because most of them target only a single aspect of your metabolism to help you lose weight. And while controlling one aspect of metabolism may be sufficient for the early (easy) stages of weight loss, it becomes woefully inadequate in the later (more difficult) stages-when your weight loss begins to plateau, eventually stops, and often starts to reverse toward weight regain.
For example, the majority of the popular low-carbohydrate diets do a terrific job of helping to modulate blood-sugar levels in people with thirty or more pounds to lose (the "thirty-plus club"-where we find more than 70 million American adults). Through a better modulation of blood-sugar levels, appetite is controlled, fat burning is enhanced, and weight loss follows rapidly for people in the "thirty-plus club." (We'll return to the topic of blood-sugar control in Chapter 3.) Unfortunately, just when your low-carb dieting efforts are starting to pay off-and the amount of weight you want to lose falls below twenty pounds (where about 130 million Americans find themselves)-your miracle diet becomes less effective and less miraculous. This is when you hit that dreaded "plateau" where your previous weight loss of several pounds per week slows to one pound or less per week-and you start the familiar "backslide" toward weight regain. The same thing can happen on a low-fat diet.
by Shawn M Talbott, PhD