Why is it that even though we might maintain our high school weight, few of us maintain our high school belt size?

In your twenties and thirties, the layers of fat on top of your abs were the problem - but once you reach middle-age, the enemy shifts. The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle is the first book to deal specifically with the issues we face in the next stage of life, providing a plan for eliminating the unhealthy fat that accumulates around the organs - visceral fat - that is the true cause of the middle-aged bulge.

The good news is that with the right diet, visceral fat can be quickly reduced and eliminated, enhancing both your looks and your health. Even after twenty years researching and refining the science of weight loss and management, bestselling authors Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades fell victim to the middle-aged middle themselves. Although otherwise fit and healthy, both lost the flat belly that signals youth. In The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, they share the simple dietary program they created to shed the weight.

Discover:

• How eating saturated fat can actively trim your middle
• Why the "eat less, exercise more" prescription fails - and what to do about it
• Why "inner" and "outer" tube fat measurements are important to your health
• How to fight the fat stored inside your liver that leads to hard-to-lose middle-body flab

With The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle the doctor duo that brought you to the low-carb lifestyle shows you how to regain in midlife the figure of sleek, flat-bellied youth.

Bob Hope famously quipped that middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle, and the audience always obliged him with a hearty laugh. But for millions of adults the sad irony of the middle-aged middle is anything but funny. Except for a select few metabolically gifted individuals, crossing the threshold into middle age heralds the beginning of a battle of the bulge that seemingly never ends. Granted some reach that threshold sooner than others; some acquiesce to the larger belt and the broader silhouette with some degree of aplomb, while others rail against time and fate. They take up and discard first one diet and exercise program and then the next in a frustrating quest to recapture the slender waist they can still recall, but no longer see in the mirror.

We've spent the majority of our medical careers helping people of every description with just this battle, combating overweight and weigh related health issues. Although some were in their teens and twenties, and some were in their seventies and eighties, the vast bulk of the many thousands of patients we guided to better health and lower weights were in middle age. What we learned from these many years in the diet trenches is that middle-aged weight is stubborn; it's different to deal with; it doesn't respond readily to modest dietary changes or the incremental increases in exercise usually recommended by the purveyors of received medical and nutritional wisdom. The factors driving middle-aged weight gain - which really does go straight to the middle - are like a perfect storm, metabolically speaking. A confluence of changes in hormones, stress, lack of sleep, alcohol intake, medications, fat and cholesterol phobias, and a mountain of nutritional misinformation combine to create a mid-life tsunami that seems to swamp the metabolism and fill every nook and cranny of the middle of the body with fat.

For more than twenty years we have researched this area of science, refining the tools to deal with it effectively, writing about it, and lecturing on it, so you'd think that our expertise would protect us from the tsunami, if it came our way. But it didn't. Like everyone else, when the middle-age wave hit, we found ourselves floundering in the tide, paddling as fast as we could, and still not making much headway. At least not until we dug back into the medical bag of tricks we had used with success in our middle-aged patients and applied them to ourselves. Here's how it all began.

Mike's Story

Our wake-up call came the morning we walked onto the set to film the pilot for our TV cooking show. Years before, I had gained a tremendous amount of weight while pursuing my career as a busy, practicing physician, then lost it on a diet I cobbled together from information I got rereading my old medical school texts and delving into the medical literature. My weight loss did not go unnoticed by my patients, and soon many were clamoring for me to put them on the same diet I had developed for myself. I did so with great success. In short order my practice changed. My wife, Mary Dan, left her busy family practice and joined me in what became a huge bariatric (the treatment of obesity) practice. We refined the original diet and wrote about our methods in Protein Power, a book that sold over 4 million copies. During the never-ending promotion of the book, we met a producer who proposed that we star in a TV cooking show designed around the precepts of our diet and a cookbook we had written. We said. "Let's do it." He put the deal together and set the shooting schedule for the pilot.

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Copyright © 2009 by Michael R. Eades.

Tags: Diets and Weight Loss, Midlife

About the Author

Michael R. Eades, M.D., and Mary Dan Eades, M.D. pioneered the field of metabolic medicine. They are on the faculty of Colorado State University in the Department of Health and Exercise Science. They are the authors of Protein Power/i>, which sold over 3 million copies and spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Protein Power Lifeplan. Michael R. Eades, M.D. received his engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University and his medical degree from the University of Arkansas. Along with his wife, he has been in the exclusive private practice of bariatric (weight loss) and nutritional medicine for the last 10 years. More

Mary Dan Eades, M.D. received her undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry as well as her medical degree from the University of Arkansas. She joined her husband in the exclusive practice of bariatric and nutritional medicine in 1992, having previously practiced family and general medicine. More