Take a look in the dieting rear view mirror and you’ll see some interesting sights.
There’s the grapefruit diet, the cookie diet, the water diet, the low calorie diet and, my favourite, the low fat diet.
They’re all wrong; they’re all based on erroneous science and they’ll all make you gain weight ultimately, not lose it.
In the 1950s there was a major study in the US between two physiologists – Ancel Keys and John Yudkin. Keys argued saturated fat should be eliminated from the diet and Yudkin argued the culprit in weight gain was sugar.
Keys’ hypothesis was supposedly proven but only because he looked at sympathetic research from around the world, not the research that disproved his claim. Even though it was later determined that Yudkin was correct, it stayed in people’s minds for the rest of the 20th century, and beyond, that all fat was bad.
When my book, Fat or Fiction, came out 20 years ago I was slammed for misleading people and setting off heart attacks around the country. Of course now, everyone agrees with me, that healthy fats are a crucial part of a balanced diet.
Then there’s calories – they were developed in the 1820s by a French physicist measuring the heat in steam trains. Sure, it was updated in the 1880’s in the US where a scientist decided to apply that equation to food by measuring a person’s excrement against food intake but, of course, every food has a different impact on insulin which is what really matters in the weight loss quest.
To this day, calories are still listed on food packaging but they really don’t matter.
What does matter is the time you eat – making sure there’s a five hour gap between meals and a 12 hour gap between dinner and breakfast. You also have to cut the snacking, sugar, processed foods and fill your diet with whole foods instead.
It really is that simple.
There’s no magic pill to take that will wipe off your weight and all of your health challenges. You can’t take a pill and expect to eat rubbish without getting a chronic disease. The science just doesn’t work like that.
Let’s look in that rear view mirror and learn from our mistakes, open our minds to the simple truth that you have to manage your metabolic response to foods by regulating your insulin levels. That means thinking about what and when you eat.
