Eat, Move, Think: The Path to a Healthier, Stronger, Happier You - Softcover

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Shaun Francis is the Chair and CEO of Medcan. He serves on numerous boards and is the chair of the True Patriot Love Foundation, which he founded to benefit Canada’s military families.

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Eat, Move, Think

1

WHAT’S THE BEST DIET?

How about no diet at all? Research has shown that people aren’t able to sustain most diets over the long term. That’s especially true for the strict, single-nutrient-based diets that have become so popular in the last few decades, whether they’re based on low fat, low carb, or high protein intake. In fact, such plans open the door to possibly harmful unintended consequences.

How many people who were following the Atkins diet in the 1990s continue to do so today? What about those who, a few years back, opted to go gluten free for reasons besides celiac disease? Rather than demonizing or lauding any single food group, we’re much better off enjoying a wide variety of whole and minimally processed foods. But if you’re the type of person who absolutely needs a food plan to provide you with direction on making healthier food choices, I’d suggest using one of three protocols that are almost like antidiets: the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet, or a melding of the two approaches that encourages eaters to employ something called a MIND score.

Most diets focus on pounds lost, rather than the development of healthy eating strategies. The dieter devotes all his or her energies to following the plan, and then one of two things happens: the dieter meets the goal, returns to previous eating patterns, and gains the weight back; or the dieter gives up, feels bad about him- or herself, and gains the weight back.

Like many people, I’ve grappled with the difficulty of weight loss. Until my twenties, I ate whatever I wanted. That’s when I graduated from the US Naval Academy and began working a desk job—and over the next decade I gained 25 pounds. The wake-up call came in my early thirties, when my primary care practitioner, Dr. Timothy Devlin, told me I needed to lose some weight. Too many soft drinks, it seemed, had caught up with me. It took me a good decade to drop the pounds required to get back to a healthy weight.

During that process, I learned that my “set point” never seemed to have increased past what it was in my early twenties. The set point is a concept used by professionals to describe the body’s natural size. It explains why long-term weight loss is so difficult. If you drop too much, going far under your set point, your body uses the tactics humans evolved over millions of years to ward off starvation: it holds on to energy at a greater rate, a process known as adaptive thermogenesis, and deploys hormones that ramp up your hunger and delay a feeling of satiety until you’ve gained it all back. Basically, your body refuses to let you starve.

Nature can be cruel.

Lots of scientific studies have shown that dieting doesn’t work as a weight loss strategy. In one of the most interesting ones, National Institutes of Health researchers followed up on fourteen men and women who had lost substantial amounts of weight on The Biggest Loser. At an average weight of 328 pounds, these people had been heavier than most at the program’s beginning. They’d been provided with state-of-the-art interventions, fitness training, and weight loss techniques designed to maintain the weight loss over the long term. During the program, they’d lost an average of 129 pounds each, or 39 percent of their body weight. Six years later, the researchers found that on average they had gained back 70 percent of the weight they’d lost. More troublingly, that adaptive thermogenesis I mentioned earlier still affected the subjects, resulting in their burning 500 fewer calories per day compared to the average level for people of their weight and size. In other words, their bodies were still trying to gain back more weight.

By now we know the routine with diets. The media gloms onto a food craze, distils the message into a single phrase—gluten free, high fat, 30-day detox—and suddenly all our friends are asking the waiter to make all sorts of menu exceptions because of their latest dietary restrictions.

But many single-nutrient food fads fail to provide what they promise. Rather than promoting a healthy relationship with food in which you listen to your body, they encourage you to focus on some narrow category of food, which can lead to an inadequate mix of nutrients in your meals. Those who avoid carbohydrates, for example, leave themselves susceptible to deficiencies in fiber, folate, and thiamine.

So avoid fad diets and any single-nutrient approach. Which brings up a problem: How can you identify one? Most fad diets can be recognized by asking three questions:

DOES IT PROMISE EXTREME WEIGHT LOSS?

It doesn’t matter whether you encounter the approach on a YouTube channel, in a magazine article, or in a book: if it features promotional language that promises to “melt” fat or “shed” pounds, or if it guarantees the loss of a certain amount of weight, whether that’s 10, 20, or 30 pounds or even more, do yourself a favor and pass on it. Any diet that promotes itself with the promise of a steep descent in the number that stares up at you from the scale is likely a fad diet. The goal of proper nutrition should be to use what you eat as a lever to promote health and wellness—not to ensure that you’ll look good in an outfit at a party.

DOES IT DEMONIZE AN ENTIRE SWATH OF THE GROCERY STORE?

The three macronutrients in a healthy, nutritious diet are fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. All meals should consist of a mix of all three nutrients. But that’s not always the case if you follow a fad diet. The ketogenic diet says you should consume lots of fat and few carbs. The Atkins diet emphasizes protein. Neither provides the balanced mix of nutrients your body needs. Rather than artificially elevating the levels of this or that macronutrient, concentrate on enjoying a balanced diet of whole foods.

DOES IT HAVE AN EXPIRY DATE?

The 30-Day Detox, the 15-Day Cleanse, the 7-Day Reset. Wait a second: Shouldn’t your approach to food be about eating well for life? Long-term good health and nutrition should be your focus. Paying attention to what you eat is a rational strategy for remaining healthy. We’re trying to keep ourselves healthy for the long haul. You can’t do that by crashing your weight down to an artificially low number for a short time and then going back to your old habits; there’s no finish line. Instead, focus on evolving behaviors that will ensure that you make reasonable and rational food decisions for the remaining time that you’re on Earth. Rather than making radical changes to your diet that will last only a few weeks, concentrate on developing healthier food behaviors that you can continue for the rest of your life.

If you come across a nutrition fad that responds “yes” to any of the above questions, you’re probably better off avoiding it. Such restrictive approaches to eating can prevent you from developing the good habits that will keep you healthy for the rest of your life.

Many times a day, we make decisions to regulate what goes into our mouths and when. Those decisions impact our overall health, affecting our risk for developing everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and, of course, obesity.

We now know that fad diets aren’t helpful in reaching or maintaining our health goals. In general, the best diet involves eating wholesome and...