Not Your Mother’s Nutrition – Crash Diets that Work

Every year for Christmas my grandma makes a family calendar.  I am lost without this calendar as everyone’s birthdays are recorded.  Grandma crops around the photos Rushmore style so there are at least 25 images per page.  It’s quite fun…until it comes to my birthday month.  To my horror I see multiple pictures of me stuffing food into my face and an unflattering camping picture where I have… a beer belly?

Every person who wants to make a lifestyle change goes through 5 psychological phases:

1-       Pre-contemplation – unaware of the problem.  I.e., I didn’t know I had a beer belly.

2-      Contemplation – awareness of the problem, seriously thinking of overcoming it.  I.e., OMG how am I going to get rid of this beer belly?

3-      Preparation – planning to change within the month.  I.e., I will start dieting on Monday.

4-      Action – behavior modification.  I.e., step away from the cookie.

5-      Maintenance – preventing relapse.  I.e., don’t buy cookies.

Lifestyle change is a mind game.  You can think about dieting for years while still eating cookies but one day something clicks in your mind and you are charged to change.  You want to lose 30 pounds yesterday – which is obviously not always realistic.

BUT (I know you are not supposed to start sentences with conjunctions, BUT…) though I am not a fan of  “crash diets” (as in drink cayenne pepper and lemon water for 10 days, or surgically alter the size of your  stomach) I hate to squelch the fire and motivation of the action phase.  When you are ready to act, you want to see quick results or will relapse and could take years to get back on track.  Also, extra fat (especially around the middle) is DANGEROUS.  When extra weight causes disease such as diabetes and is life-threatening, you need to take more extreme measures to save your life.

Crash diets are so named because you lose weight quickly – but the weight you lost is water or muscle not fat and not healthy.  Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, lost 28 pounds in 18 hours to be in a lower weight class for a wrestling match.  That’s extreme crash dieting.

Though not a proponent of crash-dieting, I am open-minded.  Weight loss is a complex issue, there is more than one way to achieve that goal and rapid fat loss is scientifically possible.  When you are looking into a diet, the MOST IMPORTANT question to ask is, “are the results measureable?”  I want you to be under a licensed practitioner’s care.  That practitioner must be able to objectively measure fat loss such as via Bioelectric Impedance Analysis machine to prove that you are losing fat not muscle?

In my opinion, the two best, most controversial methods around are: Ideal Protein offered at CBP Spine in Windsor and hCG method offered at Boulder Integrative Health.  These are not FDA approved and I am not being paid to advertise these methods.   I have researched the science behind the programs and seen patients get well as a result of loosing fat very quickly.

Isn’t that what it is all about?  Losing fat, beating disease?  Do it!

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Posted by Esther Hansen on Feb 4 2010 Filed under Wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry