The Road Map to Your Phenotype Diet

Excerpted from
Fat Is Not Your Fate: Outsmart Your Genes and Lose the Weight Forever
By Susan Mitchell, Ph.D., R.D., Catherine Christie, Ph.D.

You've found your phenotype and pinpointed the routine triggers that undermine both your weight and your health. Now it's time to tackle those triggers.

This "how-to-use" section is brief but essential, as it will help you make best use of your phenotype diet, as will the Appendices, Resources, and References. The description that follows explains why we designed the book as we did. It also demonstrates how eating and living differently can immediately increase your control over your genetic destiny. Each phenotype diet includes the following steps.

Step One: Understanding Your Phenotype

This section explores what promotes weight gain in your particular phenotype. It characterizes the challenge that your phenotype-based diet is designed to overcome. Reading it will help you understand the scientific scope of the task ahead of you-"rewiring" your genetic responses to work for rather than against weight loss. It will also inspire you to avoid or manage your weight-related health risks, be they addiction, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, emotional eating, or hormonal changes.

Step Two: Keeping a Food Record

Many studies confirm that dieters who keep a written record of what they eat lose more weight. Those who keep a Food Record also tend to keep it off. This has also been our experience during twenty years of nutrition consulting. Food recording works because it creates a communication loop to reinforce accountability-or self-responsibility, if you will.

When weight problems become chronic, eating can become the source of shame or self-delusion or both. Learning to communicate honestly with yourself about food will disclose where eating and lifestyle habits connect to your family, friends, work, and well being. It will also reveal how they can be improved. As you learn to outsmart your genes, keeping track of your progress will help you cope with your weak areas, better deal with setbacks, and best of all, provide an invaluable measure of your successes.

Step Three: Developing Positive
Nonfood Weight Loss Triggers

You identified the ways in which your environment goads your genes into weight gain in Chapter 2. In your phenotype chapter, Step Three will give you positive triggers to replace those negative triggers. Making deliberate changes to your behavior-changes you seriously consider and consciously initiate-will increase your accountability and contribute to your well-being. By following the suggestions, each geared to your phenotype along with the prescribed diet, you'll achieve the weight loss and better health you have been seeking.

Step Four: Following Your Phenotype Diet

We scientifically crafted your phenotype-specific diet to turn off problematic genes and turn on health-giving genes. It has all the strategies you need for ridding yourself of the three remaining negative weight triggers: toxic food choices, lack of structured meals, and portion distortion. Each chapter's Phenotype Diet is divided as follows:

Focus Foods

Each Phenotype Diet features Focus Foods that work best to recondition that phenotype. This section explains how the dietary chemicals they contain work at a cellular level to prevent the unwanted gene expression that results in weight gain and disease. To help you make these Focus Foods an integral part of your daily and overall diet, the section also provides criteria for Focus Food Frequency. The Focus Foods for your phenotype will make an enormous difference in how you feel and will positively affect your success with weight loss. We've included the various Focus Foods in your sample menus as well as noted them in bold on your food list.

FAST TRACK Two Weeks

Your mental outlook and view of yourself are important to weight loss. Without positive self-esteem, the best weight loss diet can fail. That is why we start the Phenotype Diets with the FAST TRACK Two Weeks. (Phenotype As are an exception. Their health risks do not benefit from the initial FAST TRACK Two Weeks.) You will see a drop in your weight these first two weeks, providing a critical psychological lift and the motivation that you need to make upcoming deliberate lifestyle changes and move forward. Success breeds success. Use this motivation to continue with your Phenotype Diet.

You will lose weight quickly for a number of reasons. First, for these two weeks, you omit the two fist-size portions of "Sweets, Treats, and Alcohol" that you are allowed on the Phenotype Diets. In addition, the FAST TRACK Two Weeks is specifically based on your Phenotype Diet. Why for only two weeks? Because healthy weight loss and healthy eating are not about long-term deprivation nor about lowering your metabolism by eating too few calories for a lengthy period of time.

What's more, should you reach a plateau where you cannot seem to lose any more weight, you can return to the FAST TRACK to jump-start your weight loss again. By going back to the FAST TRACK for a week or two and kicking up your exercise a notch, your body will move past this plateau.

Portion Control

Your diet will tell you the number of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats to have at each meal or snack. The ratios are important because they recalibrate your system to encourage weight loss. To adjust the portions, we've based them on hand sizes. It couldn't be simpler. There's no need to weigh or measure anything. Your hand becomes your measuring tool, since you use your palm, fist, 1/2 fist, and thumb(s) to determine your portions.