The Z Diet

Trafford Publishing

Contents

Chapter One

All diets work, whether low carb, high carb/low fat, low calorie, very low calorie, the hCG diet, or the Maple Syrup Diet. In reality, the problem in our country is not weight loss. Hundreds and thousands of pounds are lost each day. The problem is that, after they lose the weight, most people tend to turn around and find it again. Our problem is weight loss maintenance.

Diets, or any attempts to better one's health for that matter, come in many forms, fashions, colors, sales pitches, promises, and expenses. They even come with a variety of different delivery systems, including devices and chemicals that go up your backside ... The goal with most of them is to help you get healthier, lose fat, gain strength and vitality, and better your sex life. I could go on, but you have all heard the commercials.

Let me give you a brief synopsis of almost every diet book out there - I call it the Bait, Hook, Reel You In, and Use You as Bait for the Bigger Fish - trick: It starts with a chapter or two of what I refer to as the 'warm-fuzzies'. The warm-fuzzies are soft, sweet words that rip responsibility right out from under you. "It is not your fault you are fat" or "did you know that "x" chemical in your foods is killing you?" The whole purpose is to make you feel good about what you are reading (i.e. the bait). It then convinces you that what you are about to read is the solution to your problems, in particular, your fat (that's not your fault, remember?) i.e the hook. The Reel You In portion of the book gives you a solution for weight loss that, without a doubt, works. ( - mind you) This may be to cut all of your carbohydrates from your diet forever, or to remove all fat of any sort from your diet, or, better yet, remove anything from your diet that at one time walked, crawled, swam, ran, or flew! Whatever that diet book or plan's solution is, it really does work. I am not arguing that it does not. Most of these solutions work for weight loss. Once again - I said weight loss ... not weight loss maintenance! The final strategy of these weight loss plans is the Use You as Bait for the Bigger Fish ploy: This simply throws you back in the water, so you will buy the supplements that are part of the solution, or sets you up to buy the next version of the book. It is quite beautiful, from a monetary stand point (at least for somebody ...) - but does nothing for you in the long run.

One way or another, hidden or open, subtle or obvious, trick or treat - they cut calories or have you burn more with activity. That sit. That is their secret - even if they tell you that you do not have to restrict your calories or exercise more - they get you to do it. No one likes to be limited, or told not to do something - I see no difference in my weight loss patients' attitudes toward limitation than I see in my three year old's. We hate constraint and we hate control (unless we have that control), and diet writers and diet authors know it. Their simple solution: trick you into caloric restriction or increased caloric burn by some other method. I could literally provide you with hundreds of examples, but I am sure, now that you have heard it put like this, that you can see it.

No matter what the ploy, calories come into play and are as important as can be when it comes to dieting, short term weight loss, and long term weight loss maintenance. There are a few situations and developed laws of weight loss that allow some variance with the calories in to calories out standard, as you will soon read, but overall - you must consider calories in weight loss - quick or slow, short or long term.

Are calories all that are important? No. The individual who participates in the diet plan comes into play. By individual, I am referring to one's psychosocial make up, emotional status, genetics, disease states, and the state of their hormones. For example, some people are more sensitive to carbohydrates and therefore do better with a weight loss plan that when restricts some of the carbohydrates - but calories will come into play.

Why short term weight loss programs don't work for long term weight loss maintenance.

I am not going to rehash everything you have ever read about the failure of dieting. We all know dieting does not really work; really being defined as getting to one's goals and maintaining one's goals long term. I am going to tell you why The Z Diet will work for you.

First, let's define weight loss maintenance. Maintenance is hard to define as it is largely a personal perception. Do you consider your weight loss a failure if you gain back one often pounds after a diet? In the world of weight loss medicine, we have a few simple definitions: The Institute of Medicine defines weight loss maintenance as intentional weight loss of 5% or more, maintained for one year. The National Institute of Health defines it as weight loss of 10% or more, maintained for one year. The National Weight Control Registry considers it a weight loss of 30 pounds or more, maintained for at least one year. So who is correct? If you put real numbers into their definitions, it really is not a lot of weight. For example: according to The National Institutes of Health, if you weigh 250 pounds, and you lose 25 pounds and keep it off for a year, you are successful! Health wise, even a few pounds off your hide improves your well-being, so any fat loss is successful by my definition. As for you? Can you come up with what you would consider successful weight loss? I think it is a very personal decision, as long as it is realistic. If you dropped sixty pounds of fat from your body, but then gained thirty back, I would still consider your overall effort a success. Honestly, even if you gained fifty-nine back, you would still have succeeded.

But even with the numbers not being that substantial, why do most diets fail? And if you are able to drop a few pounds, why does your diet not work better?

In an article printed in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in February of 2007, some authors asked the same simple question: Why do obese patients not lose more weight when treated with low-calorie diets? Their answers where based on three fundamentals: 1. Fractional energy absorption; 2. Adaptations in energy expenditure; and, 3. Incomplete patient diet adherence. In English: 1. Fat people absorb more food than the rest of us; 2. Metabolism slows down when you restrict calories; and, 3. People do not follow their diets.

Lets look a teach of these: 1. To my knowledge, there is no study supporting the idea that people absorb different amounts of food. Transit time may differ (how quickly food gets from point A to point Brown) but absorption rate does not. Even if larger people did "absorb more food", it could not account for the lack of weight loss on a low calorie diet, as it would not account for much. 2.1 would absolutely agree that your metabolism slows down when you cut calories, but so does your use of energy. Have you ever been on a low calorie diet and felt fatigued? Did you skip the gym a few times because you were too tired to go while on a low calorie eating plan? Are you more inclined to use the elevator than the stairs while dieting? If the calories are not there (i.e. the energy is not there), your body will, in turn, lessen the energy it expends. Obviously, there is...