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Many of you know that the conventional answer to being overweight—low- calorie dieting—is not an effective solution to the problem. For the vast

majority of people, being overweight is not caused by how much they eat, but by what they eat. It is a myth that people get heavy because they consume too many calories.

When researchers compare overweight and thin people, they find that both groups consume roughly the same amount of calories.6,7,8 _{What makes}

overweight people different is the amount of fat they eat. The facts are that as long as you are eating fatty foods you won't be able to lose weight.

The food our bodies need more than any other is carbohydrate. Our muscle cells and brains are designed to run on the glucose derived from carbohydrate. We need 35 times more carbohydrate than protein for growth and 800 times more carbohydrate than fat. For example, an adult human requires about 20 grams of protein a day to maintain cell replacement and repair, about 700 grams of carbohydrate, and about 3 grams of fat. The average American consumes, daily, about 150 grams of protein-8 times the actual need—and often more than 100 grams of fat.

If your diet is deficient in carbohydrate, you will have to consume a great deal more in an attempt to feel satisfied. Along with that intake of food will come huge quantities of fat if you are eating the typical American diet or are following many other weight-loss plans. The effect is that you'll be overweight, your hunger won't be satisfied, and you'll crave sweets.

Not so long ago, many people believed that complex carbohydrates were fattening. Dieters would avoid starchy foods such as potatoes, beans, and pasta. It turned out that the real culprits were the high-calorie greasy toppings such as butter, sour cream, and high-fat salad dressings. Healthy foods such as vegetables, whole grains, and fruits contain adequate protein and are rich in carbohydrate, but have little fat.

If you wish to commit suicide with food, killing yourself as quickly as possible with a heart attack, cancer, or stroke, focus your diet on fat-based foods such as meats, most dairy products, vegetable oils, and salad dressings rather than on fruits and vegetables—the complex carbohydrates. Fats are the bad guys; carbohydrates are the good guys.

If the body tries to store the energy from carbohydrates it must first convert it to fat, a process that in itself consumes 23 percent of the consumed calories. In contrast, if you eat fat, and the American diet holds about 40 percent of its calories from fat, your body stores it as fat with only 3 percent of its calories burned in the process. This is why calories from fat are more likely to increase body fat than the same number of calories from carbohydrate. To make matters worse, fats in the diet slow down your metabolic rate. In contrast, carbohydrates speed it up.

The way to achieve permanent weight control and a long healthy life—free of the leading chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis—is to base your diet on grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits. These are the most powerful foods for controlling weight, and most people can

eat all they want of them and stay slim and healthy.

What is wrong with every single commercial weight-loss program? They are all too high in fat because they cater to the American love affair with rich, high- fat food. Weight Watchers brand foods contain 24 percent of calories from fat. Lean Cuisine contains 25 percent of calories from fat. All commercial diet plans, since they are not very low in fat, must restrict portion sizes to offer "low- calorie" meals.

You may be able to take fewer breaths per minute for a few minutes, but in about an hour or so you will be hungry for air and will be forced to speed up your respiratory rate. In the same way, it is merely a matter of time before someone on one of these diets, trying to keep portions small, will again increase the amount of food he or she consumes. When this happens, the weight will return with- a vengeance.

Ninety-nine percent of all people who lose weight on a diet gain it back again.9 _{This incredibly high failure rate holds true for all weight-loss schemes,}

programs, and diets. Fasting merely to lose weight, and not coupled with the nutritional guidelines contained in this book, would likewise be a failure for the same reason.

All the diet plans fail because people can't be expected to stay hungry and control their portion sizes forever. The urge to eat more food eventually becomes too great, so the weight is regained. You can't eat out of boxes and consume powdered drinks forever, so though you may lose some weight, you will always gain it right back. Instead, permanent changes in your eating habits must be made. Learning new recipes and different ways to eat will enable you to -maintain your weight loss and your health.

If you desire to lose weight effortlessly, adopt a diet that primarily consists of fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. This is a diet with less than 10 percent of calories from fat. I can assure you that the fat will effortlessly melt away from your body.

When diets attempt to keep your caloric intake very low, your body slows down its metabolic rate because it senses the need to conserve fuel. The more your food intake drops, the harder your body will try to keep from losing its fat. The effect is significant. On a 500-calorie diet your metabolic rate can drop 20 percent below normal. This reaction is frustrating to dieters, who often find that the longer they diet, the harder it becomes to lose weight.

The unfortunate result of denying oneself food as a means of diet control is that when the dieter goes back to eating normally, fat more easily accumulates because of a low metabolic rate. This leads to the familiar yo-yo phenomenon in which dieters lose some weight, only to rebound to a heavier weight than they started with.

In contrast, I tell my patients to eat as much food as they can. In fact, when they are eating foods that are rich in water-soluble fiber but contain less than

10 percent of calories from fat, they can stuff themselves and still enjoy substantial weight loss.

Oils are 100 percent fat. No matter what the type, oil is 100 percent fat. Like all other forms of fat, it contains 9 calories per gram. Carbohydrates hold only 4 calories per gram. That means oil contains more than twice the calories of carbohydrates.

When we put concentrated fat in our diet, the body easily converts it to body fat. This is more important than the total number of calories we consume.

How many baked potatoes do you think you can eat to get the same amount of fat as in 1 teaspoon of olive oil? If you said 70, you are right. Which do you think will make you feel more satisfied, one teaspoon of oil or 70 baked potatoes?