According to the American Obesity Association, an astounding 64.5 percent of adult Americans (about 127 million) are categorized as obese or overweight. According to the website’s statistics, obesity causes at least 300,000 excess deaths and is responsible for 100 million dollars in healthcare costs each year for obese and overweight Americans. A very real and often devastating problem for so many, obesity should be considered a healthcare crisis and given the utmost attention.
And one would think that with all the fad diets and personal weight loss programs promoting quick and easy weight loss that those numbers would be much lower or at least in decline. The problem is that Americans are fat. And we are getting fatter. Diet after diet comes along and yet we can’t seem to lose the weight and keep it off. Is there a solution, finally , to the crisis?
According to Dr. Michael Smith there is, and it has to do with focus. Perhaps everyone has been attacking the wrong problem.
In his ebook entitled, How to Make Your Diet Work, Dr. Smith, a graduate of UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, believes that the challenge facing the overweight person is not losing weight. Rather, the problem is in gaining weight. He states adamantly that for too long we have focused research and product development on the “how to lose weight problem” when we should have been focusing on the factors that make people gain weight in the first place.
According to Dr. Smith, the typical overweight person tries the latest fad diet. Most fad dietsl promote quick weight loss through an initial, drastic reduction in calories, carbohydrates, or fat. There is some initial success, but the drastic change in food intake causes the body to go into a state that Smith calls Diet Shock.
Diet Shock is when the body has suddenly been deprived of it’s usual intake of food (calories, carbohydrates, etc.) and then begins to store energy as fat at a higher rate to compensate for the loss. In other words, the body thinks it is starving, so it goes to work to turn what is left as well as future intake into fat so the body won’t be lacking.
This is what Smith believes to be the crucial problem. For example, in a typical fad diet a dieter drastically reduces her intake of carbohydrates for two weeks or some period of time . They see initial success by losing a few pounds, but then usually hit a weight loss barrier. They then give up and go back to their old ways. They then cycle back to their former weight. Then at some point in the future, they try another diet and repeat the process over and over again.
This cycle, often called yo-yo dieting, is not only an ineffective way to lose weight and keep it off, but it is also hazardous to the health of those who are on and off the diets. Unfortunately, the fad diets are responsible, albeit unintentionally, for the yo-yo dieting which leads to frustration, a sense of failure, and continued obesity.
Dr. Smith has been working in the field of diet and nutrition for several years. He wrote Make Your Diet Work to reveal a revolutionary way of thinking based on his years of interaction with his patients and his research. The main idea of his work is that anyone can lose weight and actually keep it off no matter which diet program you use.
In other words, whether you use a low carb, or low cal, or low fat approach, Make Your Diet Work will show you how to make that diet work for you by maximizing the diet’s strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. He will help you lose weight using the diet you choose, and the principles illustrated in Make Your Diet Work will also help you keep weight off… for good.
Make Your Diet Work accomplishes this through what Dr. Smith calls Five Simple Science Solutions. Implement these solutions and use them with the diet of your choice, and you will be successful he says. And each solution helps prevent weight regain. What are they?
First, to make your diet work and prevent weight regain, you must stabilize an active metabolic rate. Simply put, Dr. Smith shows the dieter how to increase your metabolic rate and as a result increase the rate your body burns fat.
Second, the dieter must sustain a negative energy balance. This solution gives the dieter ways to create and sustain a negative energy balance. Weight regain will occur as long as you have a positive energy balance (when you aren’t burning more calories than you are taking in).
The third solution attacks the problem of false or faux weight loss. Most diets today lead to your body burning more protein (muscle) than fat. So those initial pounds that come off do not constitute healthy weight loss. You are losing muscle and not fat (or perhaps volume depletion is occurring). In any event losing muscle is unhealthy. This solution will help you sustain and even increase your muscle mass while burning fat.
Fourth, Dr. Smith effectively and succinctly attacks the problem of food cravings. He asserts that people do not fail diets because they do not lose weight. They fail diets because they regain the weight they lost. By curbing cravings, especially those that occur in the middle of the day, a major contributing factor in weight regain has it’s legs cut out from underneath it and is rendered ineffective.
Lastly, the fifth solution gives the dieter the know how to implement a weight maintenance program. Without a weight maintenance plan, which is where most diets fail according to Dr. Smith, the dieter will not keep the weight off. Solution five leads the dieter to an ongoing diet of 40% protein, 30% carbohydrates, and 30% fat.
One thing that permeates Make Your Diet Work is Dr. Smith’s firm belief that all weight loss should be healthy weight loss and should occur without inducing Diet Shock. There is NOTHING drastic, unhealthy, or expensive in Make Your Diet Work. It should give the dieter a sense of comfort and confidence in knowing that a medical doctor, trained at one of the most highly respected medical schools in the world, designed this plan with the reader’s overall health in mind, not just producing fast weight loss results.
When you purchase Make Your Diet Work, you will notice quickly that this is not just another fad diet program. Far from it. The Five Simple Science Solutions can be used with the diet of your choice. So Smith is not trying to decry any diet on the market. Instead, he gives very clear action steps that enable you to modify easily your diet of choice, making it safer and far more successful in the long run.
And don’t think you’re going to have to do lots of study and conversions and extrapolations to figure out how to do this. Nor will you need to purchase memberships, special foods, nor additional books. Dr. Smith has included easy-to-read charts which tell you exactly what you need to do to make your diet work.
In addition, Dr. Smith has included a Diet Mentor, a sort of interactive diet coach. The Diet Mentor summarizes key principles, reduces some of the more difficult ideas to easy-to-understand action steps, easily links back to the main volume by simply pointing and clicking on topic you want to review, and provides some encouragement along the way. The Mentor can be used as a sort of quick reference help as well.
There is another powerful and user friendly tool Dr. Smith has developed for you that comes with Make Your Diet Work. Suppose you haven’t chosen one of the popular diets or you don’t even know where to begin. Then you can use the step-by-step, point and click guide that so easily assists you in setting up your own diet plan instead of using one of the fad diets on the market today. Again, Dr. Smith has provided you with the tool you need.
Just click on whether you want a Three Week or Five Week initial startup plan. Then you will be guided to click on either a low carb, low cal, or low fat plan. Then choose the method of how you will work on establishing a higher metabolic rate. Do you want to use resistance training or a walking program? You continue to point and click along these lines until you have set up your own customized diet plan.
And you can rest assured that it is a plan that is designed to help you lose weight, avoid Diet Shock, prevent Weight Regain, and do it all in a manner that is safe and effective.
Now, when you purchase and download Make Your Diet Work, you will have to wade through a minimal amount of scientific jargon. But no more that you would normally expect from a physician. After all, they aren’t always known for their bedside manner. But in my opinion, working through these sections that attempt to illustrate the scientific underpinnings of what Smith is trying to say is more than worth the effort. You don’t have to understand the jargon. All you have to do is follow the Five Simple Solutions!
The only other thing Dr. Smith could have added to Make Your Diet Work is an expanded list of resources for the dieter. Specifically, obese and overweight people who have tried diet after diet could use a guide that leads them to different forums and support groups which are often crucial to long term weight loss success.
But those are minor deficiencies in a work that, in my opinion, constitutes a welcome paradigm shift in the way we should think about and approach dieting and the obesity problem. It’s not about losing weight. It’s about a healthy diet and lifestyle that keeps the weight off!
Make Your Diet Work is listed at www.weight-loss-professional.com/make-your-diet-work.html for $24.99 with a 30-day, money-back-guarantee. Keep in mind that what the dieter gets includes the main volume (which includes sound recordings throughout by Dr. Smith himself), the Diet Mentor, the Diet Planner (which helps you set up your own customized low cal, low carb, or low fat plan), and two other ebooks which are definitely must reads.
One, entitled Diet Deception, deals with deceptive internet marketing in the health, diet, fitness, and nutrition world. The other ebook, entitled Double Down, gives the reader concrete and specific ways to develop better and more consistent sleep patterns which will exponentially improve your chances of losing weight and keeping it off.
In addition the buyer will get the benefit of future upgrades and additions, as well as a year’s worth of Medical Alerts and Cooking and Recipe tips sent directly to his or her email inbox each week.
As always, consult your physician before beginning any diet program. If you or someone you know needs to get serious about losing weight, I unreservedly recommend Make Your Diet Work. Dieting will never be the same again, and I am glad!
Mark A. Fuqua
http://www.weight-loss-professional.com
With 3 earned degrees and more than 16 years of experience as spiritual leader, pastor, director of marketing and investment banker, Mark Fuqua brings to the discussion table a breadth and depth of unique experience coupled with academic acumen. He is Consultant and Chief Editor of Diet Basics, a website dedicated to healthy weight loss success.
