De-Stress, Weigh Less: A Six-Step No-Diet Plan For Relaxing Your Way To Permanent Weight Loss

INTRODUCTION

Why Diets and Diet Pills Won’t Work and May Even Harm You

If you’re reading this book, chances are that you want to lose weight. Congratulations! You may be about to take a giant step toward health. We’ll be right beside you, advising and encouraging you as you work your way toward your goal.

In these pages, you’ll learn a fantastic new way to lose weight and keep it off, a way that’s not a diet and not a pill. We’re not going to tell you that you have to eat only this or that or that you must take a pill every day to lose weight.

HOW THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT

Whatever your reason for wanting to lose weight, De-Stress, Weigh Less will help. You’ll learn how to stop dieting and lose weight permanently. The secret is reducing physiological and psychological stress. It’s as simple as reducing your intake of foods when stressed, getting away from binge eating and overzealous exercise programs, and halting other life stressors. We’ll show you how, step by step, so that when you’re finished reading this book you will not only be losing weight, but you’ll also have discovered a prescription for lifelong weight maintenance.

WHO WE ARE AND WHY WE WANTED TO WRITE THIS BOOK

You may want to know more about who we are and why we wanted to write this book. I’m Paul J. Rosch, a medical doctor and president of the American Institute of Stress and clinical professor of medicine and psychiatry at New York Medical College. I studied with Hans Selye, who coined the term stress.

I’m Carolyn Chambers Clark, an advanced registered nurse practitioner with a master’s degree in mental health nursing and a doctorate in education from Columbia University. I am on the doctoral faculty for the Health Sciences Program at Walden University and have maintained a private wellness education practice for more than thirty years, helping people just like you lose weight and keep it off.

Because we both have an interest in and many years of experience with weight loss, we want to help you learn what you need to know to lose weight and keep it off forever. To help you remember that you are not alone, throughout this book we will be sharing case studies that come from our own practices. Of course, the names and some of the details have been changed, but the basic facts are the same. Join us on this life-changing journey. It may be the best decision you’ve ever made!

DIETS DON’T WORK AND THEY’RE VERY STRESSFUL

The first stop on our journey together is to take a look at why diets don’t work. Does the case study that follows bear any similarity to your situation?

Nancy is a twenty-eight-year-old administrative assistant who always dreamed of fitting into a bikini and looking really good in it. She’s tried just about every diet invented, but none of them got her to the size she wanted to be. Sure, she lost a few pounds, sometimes many pounds, but as soon as she stopped dieting the weight always crept back on, until she weighed even more than she had before she started the diet! In desperation, Nancy tried a diet pill. Within two weeks, she had shed ten pounds, but she was so irritable her friends stopped calling and she couldn’t sleep. To her, it was worth it. Just when Nancy thought she was getting somewhere, she developed high blood pressure and constant diarrhea from the diet pills. It was then she decided to try a safer and healthier way of losing weight and began the plan found in this book.

Despite your thinking that the latest crash diet will do it for you, there is solid research that shows it won’t. Recent research reported in Obesity Research¹ found that frequent dieters showed significantly more weight regain than less frequent dieters. Research published in the Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology in 1999² found that even among young girls, those who dieted were more likely to weigh more and that obesity was strongly associated with attempts to control weight. Each increase in appetite suppressant and laxative use was reflected in an 85 percent increased risk of obesity. These researchers concluded that weight-reducing efforts can lead to dysregulation of the normal appetite system, resulting in weight gain from erratic eating behaviors and decreased metabolism efficiency.

We know how easy it is to latch on to some new fad diet or diet pill in the hope that this will be the one that works! None of them do—at least not for long—and you do run the risk of nasty side effects.

WHY DIETS CAN HURT YOU

The low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet that is currently in vogue is hardly new but is just a resurrection of the regimen introduced two decades ago, which goes back to the Civil War era, when it was proposed by William Banting, a London undertaker. It has also periodically resurfaced as the Pennington, Canadian Air Force, Calories Don’t Count, Drinking Man’s, Stilman, and Scarsdale Diets. Each of these diets allow you to stuff yourself with all the ice cream, eggs, and meat you want. It’s fun at first, but very quickly it becomes a boring way to eat and makes you feel awful.

But the real concern is that high-protein diets may also be unhealthy because they don’t contain enough nutrients to keep you healthy or to help your body processes work efficiently so you can take weight off and keep it off.³, ⁴ Also, researchers warn that by limiting what you eat you may cause yourself to have significantly less bone mineral density and less bone mineral content than if you eat healthily.⁵, ⁶ The ketones that accumulate when you eat too much protein and fat can also be damaging to your kidneys and give you headaches and bad breath and even make you feel dizzy. Because these diets don’t contain enough fiber, they can also lead to constipation.

Even more frightening, the high saturated fat content allowed in these diets is one of the major risk factors for heart attacks, strokes, and certain cancers. Worse, you will increase your risk for cancer and heart disease even more because you will be restricting the very foods that research has shown will protect you from these conditions—vegetables, fruits, and grains.⁷

The proponents of these diets claim they are safe, but we cannot agree. For your best health and weight loss, stay away from these and other fad diets—they aren’t healthy and, for long-term weight loss, they just don’t work.

The fact is no diet works and yo-yo dieting or weight cycling, where weight is quickly lost and then gained back again, is very stressful.⁷ This kind of temporary weight loss can increase the risk of gallstones and boosts the need for gallbladder surgery. A study published in a 1999 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine⁸ showed that women with moderate weight fluctuations (ten- to nineteen-pound weight loss) had a 31 percent greater risk of gallstones and gallbladder surgery, while women with severe weight cycling (twenty-pound or more weight loss) had a 68 percent greater risk.

Weight cycling is also bad for the heart. Although there may be some benefits from the effects of losing weight, these benefits are quickly offset by the rebound phenomenon that occurs when weight is regained, including increased blood pressure, disturbances in heart rhythm, and defects in heart function and blood pressure. Weight cycling tends to redistribute fat to the abdomen, and the resulting increased waist:hip ratio is a factor for risk of heart attack. Recent research confirms that repeated dieting for weight loss increases deaths due to cardiovascular causes.⁷ In fact, a 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association⁹ showed that yo-yo dieting and its resultant weight fluctuation increased death rates by more than 50 percent.

Dieting can also be stressful for your body, because it can lead to eating fewer sources of natural antioxidants that fight the free radicals that can cause cellular damage. Excess free radicals are found in pesticides, acid rain, artificial preservatives and additives, and a whole host of environmental pollutants. Just taking a vitamin pill isn’t going to provide the antioxidant protection that fresh fruits and vegetables do. Research has shown that these foods contain other substances that potentiate protection from free radicals.¹⁰, ¹¹ For some reason, yet unknown, eating a small amount of foods rich in antioxidants can protect you much better than thousands of units of a vitamin.

HOW DIETING PUTS ON WEIGHT AND HURTS YOU IN OTHER WAYS

Dieting leads to the Dieter’s Dilemma, a term first coined by William Bennett at Harvard University. The dilemma proceeds as follows: due to a desire to be thin, eating is restricted; this results in cravings and reduced self-control, which leads to a loss of control and overeating, which in turn leads to regained weight and a need to repeat the cycle. Again, diets actually cause weight gain, not weight loss.

The results of a University of Toronto study, published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders,¹² found that dieting leads to false hope that fuels dieter attempts on one diet after another even through failure and depression because the new diet that doesn’t work is just around the corner. Think back to your dieting experiences. At first, you may have gotten a rush of hope at the thought of a new diet. You may have even felt hopeful of your potential success but also more depressed, thinking, Here I go again. This diet is never going to work. Guess what? It’s not.

Dieting is also harmful because it leads to binge eating and is correlated with dangerous medical conditions such as bulimia. As tension builds from feeling deprived while dieting, binge eating steps in. A study published in a 1999 issue of the Journal of Eating Disorders¹³ found that the women most apt to binge were the ones who had been on one or more diets in the past year. The more these women tried to restrict their food, the more they binged and exercised excessively and the more likely they were to be bulimic. Even if bulimia was not reported, women who binged were also more likely to drop out of weight management programs, possibly making them feel even more desperate and like more of a failure. Research published in a 1997 issue of the International Journal of Eating Disorders¹⁴ found that despite ethnic background, binge eaters reported going on more diets and having more restrictive attitudes about their weight and shape and higher levels of depression.

Dieting can also make you feel dopey, irritable, and tired, and can slow your reaction speed and mental performance. This research, published in a 1998 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology,¹⁵ found that participants on diets invariably had reaction and mental performance deficits comparable to those caused by having had two alcoholic drinks. The culprit was not the lower caloric intake but the stress of dieting. The ones who did the worst on the performance tests were on diets and weren’t losing weight. So not only do diets not work and put unhealthy stress on your body, but the emotional stress of constantly worrying about what to eat can also impair your mental performance. Instead of going on yet another diet that can make you feel terrible and ensure that you will regain any weight you do lose, read on.

BUT WHAT ABOUT WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS?

Diet drugs don’t work, either. Some amphetamines, such as Benzedrine and Dexedrine, have been banned because they can cause excess stimulation and addiction. Phenylpropanol amine, a common ingredient of nonprescription cold and weight loss medicines (Dexatrim, Acutrim) was just banned because of stroke risk. Sales of fenfluramine, a serotonin booster, exploded a few years ago when it was reported to be safe and effective. It was withdrawn from the market when serious—even fatal—side effects occurred. Since then, numerous weight loss pills have been developed and approved, but none of them has been proven effective for the long term and all cause problems and have side effects that range from annoying to serious. Even herbal weight loss products, such as Metabolife, have not been tested for their long-term weight loss effectiveness and undesirable effects.

It’s only human nature to want a magic bullet that will take away the fat and keep it off, but that just isn’t possible. So read on! De-Stress, Weigh Less will give you a doable alternative to dieting that uses approaches that are safe and that work.

REFERENCES

  1. Pasman, W. J., W. H. Saris, and M. S. Westerterp-Plantenga. 1999. Predictors of weight maintenance. Obesity Research 7(1): 43–50.

  2. Stice, E., R. P. Cameron, and C. Hayward. 1999. Naturalistic weight-reduction efforts prospectively predict growth in relative weight and onset of obesity among female adolescents. Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology 67: