Why America Can't Stay Thin

Exposing the Myths Behind Dieting and Uncovering the Mystery Behind How Our Bodies Work

As we enter the twenty-first century, the United States has become one of the most overweight nations on earth. Currently, 59.4 percent of the adult population, approximately 97 million people, are overweight or obese. In other words, more than one out of every two people-every other person that you see-has a weight problem. This figure has increased by 8 percent in the last ten years-and is continuing to rise with no end in sight. Of that number, 12.5 million are severely overweight and 2 million are morbidly obese, meaning that they are severely at risk for life-threatening health conditions such as heart disease, cancers, stroke, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. And these figures represent only adults over the age of 20. During the last couple of decades, childhood obesity has also been on the rise. At present, 27.1 percent of children ages 6 to 11 are obese, as are 21.9 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18.

Back in 1900, only 5 percent of Americans were obese. This figure is amazing when one considers that never before have people spent so much time, money, and energy trying to find out what causes them to be overweight and how to take off unwanted fat. We have more diet books, food programs, and health and exercise books to choose from than ever before. At any given time, 40 percent of all women and 25 percent of all men are dieting, and about one in three of these people are trying to maintain their weight. But according to the American College of Sports Medicine, people who diet gain back 67 percent of their lost weight within a year, and the remainder within a five-year period. These individuals spend approximately $30 billion per year on commercial weight-loss programs and about $6 billion on weight-loss products. If you add to this the money spent on medical treatments and work days lost due to obesity-related illnesses, the total cost to society surpasses $100 billion per year.

In spite of the huge sums of money invested in weight loss and health care for the obese, each year Americans, as a whole, continue to become more overweight and unhealthier, not less so. While ten years ago only a quarter of the population was obese, now that figure has risen to a third. In fact, since 1943, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company has had to change their height-and-weight tables three times to accommodate the changing state of American weight. More than 250,000 deaths a year are due to obesity-related health problems, making this the second-greatest preventable cause of death in the United States.

These figures prove that there are widespread misconceptions about how we become overweight in the first place, what constitutes proper nutrition, and the relationship between exercise and body composition. All of us start out on an even playing field as infants, instinctively knowing that we have to eat regularly to fuel our metabolisms. When a baby is hungry, it cries until that need is satisfied. But as we get older, we become inculturated with the idea that hunger is a positive thing; we begin to associate the pain of wanting food as something that is good for us because it will keep or make us thin. Therefore, we eat less and develop inconsistent caloric patterns. But one day we wake up and see an overweight man or woman staring out at us from the mirror, and we don't have a clue about how we really got that way in the first place. We do not realize that the cultural effects of how we have been fueling ourselves have had an adverse metabolic impact on our bodies. We wound up getting fat because we did not provide our bodies with the right nutritional management system.

The bottom line is that the diet and food-management programs currently available to us are not working. If they were, the people who follow these food programs would become fit, lean, and healthy-and they would stay that way. But they aren't and they don't. The saddest part of all is that every one of us who has been on a diet and gained back the weight-and who hasn't?-feels that he or she has failed. It is not uncommon for my clients to tell me that they have tried four or five different diets in their attempt to lose weight and to get healthier.

A very successful 38-year-old man named Paul told me at our first meeting that he had been on numerous diets over the last few years. Paul is 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 275 pounds. He had tried almost every popular diet program, including the Zone, the Atkins Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, and ultra-low-calorie programs, such as Optifast and Medifast. While he had lost many pounds in the short term, the extreme caloric deprivation coupled with the emotional and physical stresses of all these diet programs caused him not only to gain back the lost weight, but to gain even more. By the time he came to me for nutritional counseling, he was completely confused about the proper nutritional choices for his performance level, weight loss, and future health.

There is only one way to experience permanent weight loss, greater energy, vibrant health, and improved quality of life: Adopt a food program based on one's metabolic type and unique nutritional requirements, and couple it with the appropriate exercise program. Proper nutrition is not something a person can figure out by looking at the current diet fads and marketing strategies that are being used as a ploy to get us to buy low-fat, low-sugar, and low-calorie products. We must be taught about foods and how they affect our bodies. We must learn how to chose reliable teachers and how to become “coach-able” regarding food management and proper exercise. We need to get onto the playing field of nutrition and see how certain concepts can dramatically improve our daily performance.

Myths and Misconceptions About Why We
Can't Keep Off the Weight

As I have worked with thousands of clients over the last eighteen years, from professional actors and athletes to housewives and attorneys, counseling them on the varying principles of normal, therapeutic, and sports nutrition, I have noticed that there are certain specific misconceptions about food that many people hold as fact. Your body is a magnificent chemical factory governed by rules of cause and effect: what you put into it is what you get out of it metabolically. It has been evolving and interacting with its environment for hundreds of thousands of years, and many of the ways it responds to food-such as hoarding fat-have developed as survival strategies during times of food scarcity and physical trauma. But your average person has no idea how all these finely tuned processes work together to create health and fitness. To really understand why we have become so fat, it is necessary to look closely at some of the myths and misconceptions about how foods affect the body.

Myth 1: All Metabolisms Are Created Equal

Even though the great majority of diet books on the market operate as if this axiom were true, all metabolisms are not created equal. We all do not utilize fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in the same manner. There are three basic and very different metabolic types, each with its own unique nutritional requirements. The first, the fat-and-protein-efficient type, makes up about 74 percent of the population. People in this group can most easily metabolize and utilize fats and proteins, but are the most carbohydrate sensitive of the three types. Ideally, they should eat 50 percent protein, 25 percent fat, and 25 percent carbohydrate. The second, the carbohydrate-efficient type, which comprises approximately 23 percent of the population, metabolizes carbohydrates with great ease and, therefore, has a strong, stable insulin response. These individuals should ideally ingest 20 percent protein, 12 percent fat, and 68 percent carbohydrate. The third metabolic type is the dual metabolism, about 3 percent of the population. People in this group metabolize fats, proteins, and carbohydrates with equal efficiency, so their ideal daily diet should consist of 33.3 percent of each of these food groups.

Identifying your metabolic type and eating accordingly will decrease unwanted scale weight, improve your fat-to-lean-muscle ratio, increase your energy level, and improve your health and well-being. Understanding your metabolism is truly the cornerstone to a successful weight-management program and unlocking the mystery of how to spearhead the development of a youthful future.

Myth 2: All Calories Are Created Equal

Since the use you get from calories depends upon your ability to metabolize them, it is important to look at not only how many calories you are ingesting, but at what kinds of calories make up your daily food plan. For example, if you have a fat-and-protein-efficient metabolism but eat mostly carbohydrate-rich foods, the type of calories you are ingesting will not efficiently repair and fuel your body.

At present, Americans are obsessed with the idea of low-fat/no-fat. They have confused excess body fat with the fats found naturally in foods. The fats in foods are much needed nutrients that provide us with energy, strengthen cell membranes, and support nerve and hormone function in the body. The issue is not to avoid fats, but to eat them in the proper dietary proportions in support of one's individual metabolic type.

A certain amount of body fat is necessary for survival. While there is a healthy and unhealthy percentage of body fat for each individual, based upon frame size, in general, men should have between 15 percent and 17 percent body fat and women should have between 18 percent and 22 percent.

People do not realize that when fats are removed from processed foods, sugars are added in their place-otherwise, there would be no flavor. Since three out of four people are fat-and-protein-efficient, and, therefore, cannot efficiently utilize large amounts of sugars, eating tremendous amounts of low-fat foods will actually cause the body to store sugar as unwanted body fat while elevating triglycerides. Many people also avoid eating a lot of protein because they are afraid of fat. Again, three out of four people are cutting themselves off from the food source that they can metabolize most efficiently, the nutrients they most need to repair and fuel their bodies. Since adequate protein intake is the foundation of a strong immune system, they are also lowering their resistance to disease and potentially causing a severe decay in their future health.

Myth 3: Carbohydrates Are Better for You
Because They Are Easier to Digest Than Fats

One reason that many diets and nutritional programs are low in fats is because, in general, people tend to believe that fats are harder to digest than carbohydrates and, therefore, get stored more easily as excess weight. How you utilize fats and carbohydrates has little to do with which one digests quicker. If you are a carbohydrate-efficient individual, you will always be able to utilize foods from that group more efficiently than fats. If you are a fat-and-protein-efficient individual, you will metabolize fats and proteins with more effectiveness than carbohydrates. If you have a dual metabolism, you will be able to utilize fats, proteins, and carbohydrates with equal ease. Digestion is not the issue; the issue is what happens after digestion.

Myth 4: You Must Reduce Your Caloric Intake
in Order to Lose Weight

Along with the misconceptions about low-fat and sugar-free foods, people also believe that foods labeled “low calorie” are generally healthier choices than ordinary foods. The danger in this case is that low-cal also means “empty calories”-a lot of food volume with limited food value. While eating reduced-calorie foods may temporarily satisfy your appetite, in many cases they do not adequately support your body's nutritional needs. To understand why this is so, it's important to take a look at the definition of a calorie.

A calorie is a heat-energy unit that the body uses either as an energy source or to repair tissue. Each person has a particular daily caloric requirement, based upon the minimum amount of calories that his or her body needs to function properly. When you do not ingest enough calories to efficiently fuel your metabolism, you will lose some superficial weight over the short term. But eventually your metabolism-as a result of reduced caloric heat-will cool down to the point at which it will stop utilizing calories efficiently and your weight loss will stop. If your body does not have enough calories to adequately fuel and repair itself, it will be forced to cannibalize its own muscle tissue for energy, gradually increasing your fat-to-lean-muscle ratio. In fact, I have found that most of the people who come to me with weight and health problems are usually already ingesting far fewer calories than they should in order to efficiently fuel their bodies. Therefore, their metabolism, the body's calorie-burning furnace, is already running 25 percent to 60 percent below its ideal metabolic-efficiency level. In turn, the body is storing much of the limited amounts of food these individuals eat as fat and wasting muscle tissue as an adaptive mechanism to create an alternative energy source.

Most people have an adversarial relationship to food. They see calories as the enemy that has created their unwanted body fat. Fat has become the thing they fear-it has reduced their self-esteem and made them feel self-conscious and undesirable. The idea of increasing caloric intake to lose weight not only goes against what they have been told, it is also downright frightening to them. Recently, a client named Eric, who weighed 285 pounds, came to my office for nutritional counseling. Eric was eating only 1,200 calories a day-two meals and three pieces of fruit. Yet he was unable to lose any weight. When I started him on Stage One of his food program, a 2,800-calorie nutritional plan designed for his metabolic type, he was scared to death. “I can't eat all this food,” he told me. “Food is what made me fat in the first place. If I eat all this, I will gain weight, not lose it.”

I told Eric what I tell all of my clients: that he needed to simply have the goodwill to give the program a try. “You've already been on several other diets,” I said. “What would it be worth to you for this to be the last food program you were ever on? What would you give to know that you didn't have to feel hungry every day to be lean, healthy, and strong? Relax. Be coach-able.”

Eric agreed to try the program. This was a huge step of trust on his part because years of evening news, television talk shows, magazines, and books had sent a message that he was fat because he was eating too much. In seven days, Eric lost five pounds. His metabolism was being stimulated for the first time in decades. When he got off the scale, he was ecstatic.

Since then Eric has continued to lose scale weight. Over a ten-month period, he has gone from 285 pounds to 253. Most important, he has lost considerable body fat and gained several pounds of lean muscle. He started off with 38 percent body fat and dropped to 23.5 percent, a loss of 14.5 percent.

If I break this dramatic physique change down according to weight, it looks like this: Eric began his food program with 108.4 pounds of body fat and 176.6 pounds of lean muscle on his frame. He ended up with 59.5 pounds of total body fat and 193.5 of lean muscle. This means that he lost 48.8 pounds of fat and gained 16.8 pounds of lean muscle. While his scale weight change was only 32 pounds, he experienced a total body conversion of 65.6 pounds!

Even though it goes against what we have been taught, the bottom line is this: No one can lose fat and keep it off without giving the body the appropriate caloric support needed to create an efficient metabolism. The key to losing inches and improving body composition is to eat enough of the right kinds of foods for your metabolic type, and to eat enough so that your metabolism is at peak efficiency, burning red hot. Proper food programming is not about caloric restriction, but about consistent, healthy caloric management.

Myth 5: Americans Have Become Fat Because
We Are Overeating and Underexercising

It is simply not true that everyone who is overweight or obese is a couch potato. In my experience, people are exercising more than they ever have. There have never been more gym enrollments; more clubs for running, walking, or mall walking; more people participating in things like yoga or Pilates; more classes for spinning, aerobics, or stair stepping. Two years ago, the number one product sold on an infomercial was Billy Blank's Tae-Bo video, breaking sales records worldwide.

But exercise is not the key to weight management. If it were, then those of us who are consistently exercising would not be overweight. And it is not the amount of exercise that a person does that changes his or her physique-a physical workout merely breaks down muscle tissue, creating the potential for physique change. The key to changing the physique is proper nutrition-the foods a person eats to repair that broken-down muscle tissue. You can't change your weight and body composition for the better unless you add appropriate nutrition to your exercise program. In the long run, exercise without proper nutritional support for your metabolic type often does more harm than good, creating a wasting effect on the body. I often ask new clients to stop exercising for a week or so to give their food program time to repair the long-term damage to their tissues.

As I mentioned previously, most clients who come to my office for nutritional counseling are eating far fewer calories than they need in order to maintain an efficient metabolic temperature for their physiological structure. I have also observed that many of them are exercising a great deal. In fact, a national survey of methods people employ for weight loss found that 84 percent of women were eating fewer calories and 60 to 63 percent were increasing the level of their physical activity. The same is true for men: 76 to 78 percent were eating fewer calories and 60 to 62 percent were increasing their physical activity. Yet obesity is still on the rise.

Sarah, a fat-and-protein-efficient woman, noticed that she was becoming very sturdy and muscular when she exercised. Because she wanted to be slender and willowy, she decided to severely drop her caloric intake, to cut most of the protein from her diet, and to increase her exercise regimen to two and a half to three hours per day. Instead of getting firmer and leaner, however, she started becoming soft and “mushy.” Reducing her caloric intake and the types of nutrients she needed made it metabolically impossible for her body to adequately repair her muscle tissue. When she came to me for nutritional counseling, I increased her protein intake to a point that would properly nourish her but would not add an excessive amount of muscle to her frame, and I reduced her exercise regimen to about an hour per day. I explained to her that she simply could not exercise for three hours a day unless she wanted to eat like a bodybuilder-and look like one.

Even though Ted weighed only 148 pounds, he decided that he wanted to get rid of the fat around his waist. To accomplish this, he severely decreased his caloric intake and increased his exercise levels. He, too, began exercising about two hours a day, taking spinning, aerobic, and yoga classes, and lifting weights. But instead of getting rid of his fat, Ted found that his body began wasting muscle tissue and hoarding fat. After assessing his nutritional needs, I increased his daily caloric intake and decreased his exercise level. As a result of eating a metabolically appropriate food program, Ted's body fat dropped and his lean muscle increased.

One of the first steps to losing unwanted weight and improving health and quality of life is to learn to separate nutritional fact from fiction.

“Science” That Has Led Us Astray

Where do these myths come from? Why do people believe in them so faithfully in spite of the obvious evidence that these dietary strategies do not help them to achieve any long-term weight loss or greater health benefits? Part of the problem is our steadfast belief in the power of science to always provide us with the correct answers. Most of the clients who come to me have been searching for years for answers to their questions about weight loss and health, and they have taken much of what they have read or heard in the media as scientific fact. The inherent problem is that much of this information does not work for them, or only works if they have a particular metabolic type that randomly matches the nutritional findings of the study. For example, there is a lot of information out there about high-carbohydrate diets, yet 74 percent of people in America are fat-and-protein-efficient and require 25 percent fat, 50 percent protein, and 25 percent carbohydrate in their daily diet in order to adequately fuel their bodies metabolically. With diabetes on the rise (a 33 percent increase over the last decade alone), it is clear that people are not receiving accurate information about how to manage carbohydrates in their food plan.

In the scientific research I have read over the last couple of decades, I have found many inconsistencies and half-truths in what is presented to the general public as “science.” All too often the results of nutritional research are based upon original faulty premises or test groups that are too small or limited in range. Here are some of the most common studies and theories, as well as their inherent inconsistencies and flaws.