Finding the Right Diet For You

Dr. Abravanel's Body Type Diet and Lifetime Nutrition Plan
by Elliot D. Abravanel, M.D., Elizabeth King Morrison

The unique body-typing program that teaches you how to:

• Lose weight
• Achieve your ideal body shape
• Target your trouble spots
• Boost your energy
• Eliminate food cravings forever
• Feel better than you ever thought possible

Do you crave coffee and sweets - or a nice thick steak?
Do you get love handles - or jiggly pockets on your thighs?
Are you quick-tempered - or impatient and easily depressed?

Believe it or not, your answers to these and other questions posed in this breakthrough book will help you discover which of the four basic "Body Type" categories you fall into - the first step toward determining what you need to do to lose weight and look and feel better than ever.

More than just a diet, Dr. Abravanel's one-of-a-kind plan is a complete health, fitness, and nutrition program that first teaches you how to determine your body type and then custom-tailors a three-step weight-loss plan and exercise regimen just for you. Using the latest scientific research, Dr. Abravanel has revised and expanded this successful strategy to make it even more effective and easy to follow.

This revolutionary program includes:

• A newly revised Body Type questionnaire you can do at home
• A detailed list of foods you should avoid - and those you must eat
• A four-week eating plan, complete with daily menus and recipes
• A guide to supplements, herbal remedies, and exercise routines for each Body Type
• A Long Weekend of Rejuvenation to purify your system and clear your mind

Now, to find out which Body Type you fall into, turn to the first page....

Chapter 1

Most people today believe that to be slim is necessarily to be healthy. They are mistaken: Most diets are so unhealthy as to be useless in the long run. In fact, most diets aren't even useful in the short run, even for weight loss, because the lost weight invariably comes right back.

Occasionally, a diet will work for some lucky dieter. But for every dieter who loses weight, there are hundreds more who fail. And no one ever explains why a diet works, when it does, or why it fails.

The Body Type Diet answers these questions. Body Type Dieting is not just another peel-away-the-pounds fad. Rather, it is a systematic medical program relating different types of diet to different types of body, in order to enable each individual to find the diet that will be effective, safe, and healthy for him or her.

How I Discovered the Importance of Body Types

I developed the concept of the Body Type Diet and Lifetime Nutrition Plan more than twenty years ago, when I was a young doctor with a busy general practice. Unlike medical specialists, who focus their attention on one system of the body or another, I was a generalist, accustomed to looking at my patients as whole people in whom all parts of the body have to work together for health. Naturally one of the problems often presented to me was the problem of overweight, and I was often asked for advice about diet. Since the importance of maintaining one's ideal weight is, from a health standpoint, beyond dispute, I determined to find a way to help my patients achieve this goal.

But I was not fully satisfied with any of the diets available at that time. What struck me was that while one or two patients would lose weight on one or the other of the many popular diets that exist in the marketplace, most of them either failed to lose, or lost weight and quickly gained it back.

I decided to take a closer look at those of my patients who did lose weight successfully, and to isolate those factors that were the keys to success.

Two patients who happened to come to my office on the same day, illustrated clearly what I discovered. The two were both women, good friends who had decided to diet together for mutual reinforcement. Both had managed to lose about nine pounds; one wanted to lose six more, the other sixteen more pounds. Both had been on a popular diet that was low in protein and fats and high in complex carbohydrates. But there the similarity ended.

The first patient, whom I will call Anna, was the one within six pounds of her weight goal, and she looked very well. She had lost her weight from the right places - her hips and thighs, rather than her face, which had never been fat. She told me that she felt healthy and vigorous even though she was dieting, and she looked that way, too.

The second patient, Joanne, was a contrast to Anna in almost every way. She retained "pockets" of fat on her outer thighs, which, she told me, she'd been unable to lose. Her face was gaunt and she had a pasty, unhealthy color. Moreover, she was having difficulty sticking to her diet, and was constantly suffering from an intense craving for sweets.

What was particularly interesting to me was that both women had followed exactly the same diet. I knew them both, and was confident that Joanne had not been "cheating"; she was highly motivated to lose weight. Obviously, the difference was not in the diet but in the dieter, or rather in the interaction of dieter and diet. The way the diet worked for Anna was obviously not the way it worked for Joanne.

Examining the two women, I discovered that their bodies were indeed very different. Anna had a very steady, strong metabolism. She had excellent digestion, was active all day, and had relatively little variation in her energy level. Joanne was a very different type; she was livelier than Anna, but more given to ups and downs in energy. She had intense nervous energy, but tended to "crash" in the late afternoon if she wasn't careful. She drank a lot of coffee and diet cola to keep herself going. In short, she was more high-strung and more delicate than Anna.

I decided to put Joanne on a completely different diet from the high-carbohydrate one that had seemed to work for Anna. The diet I selected was high in protein, lower in carbohydrates, and eliminated all caffeine drinks. The idea of this diet was to provide a steadying balance for her delicate, high-strung system. Meanwhile, I told Anna to continue as she had been, until she had lost the rest of her excess weight.

© 1999 by Elliot D. Abravanel, Elizabeth A. King.

About the Author

Elliot D. Abravanel, M.D., is known as a founder of holistic medicine. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1969. For many years he served Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as head of medical staff and as Professor of Medicine at Maharishi European Research University, where he pursued reseearch on the relationship between consciousness and ideal health.

Elizabeth King Morrison is a writer and educator who specializes in the creation of individual health and nutrition programs. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of two books on Transcendental Meditation in secondary education. She co-authored all three Body Type books with Dr. Abravanel, and has trained many health professionals in the Body Type System. She lives in Eureka, California, with her husband, the writer Ralph Morrison.