Successful weight loss

Now that the New Year is upon us, thousands of people around the world have promised to lose those extra pound. Few will succeed. Already, by Jan. 6, many have given up. How about you?

I had a few extra pounds that I was trying to get rid of for years. As I moved through my 30s I began to put on a little extra weight around the middle. I tried everything to get rid of it—increasing my exercise, limiting the number of times I went back to the buffet line, switching from soda to water—but nothing seemed to work.

Then, two years ago, a miracle. I adopted a radical change in my diet, and within twelve weeks, I had lost 25 pounds and was back down to my high school weight. Within the first three weeks my cholesterol came down from a dangerously high 205 to a very safe 153. I didn’t have to exercise much. And I was never hungry. The diet is one detailed in the book Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and it’s one that I recommend to anyone who is serious about losing weight, gaining health, and adopting a healthier lifestyle.

One of the things that I learned by researching all kinds of diet plans, is that no matter what, you have to change what you’re doing now. It may seem like an elementary concept, but I think that we often delude ourselves into thinking we want to lose weight, without really accepting that it will take some change in lifestyle. The other thing that I learned is that it’s actually easier to be successful making a radical change in lifestyle rather than trying to make minor adjustments to the way things are. With only minor changes, it’s just too easy to slip back.

Why did I like Eat to Live? It makes total sense medically. The human body was not designed to go hungry, and any diet that has you hungry is going to fail. “Eat to Live” is not so much a diet as it is a dietary lifestyle. I tell my patients that with “Eat to Live” you can eat as much as you want as often as you want. But, you cannot eat whatever you want. You will be giving up certain foods, probably some foods that you really like (which is why you’ve gotten fat in the first place), but the overall rewards are great. It’s based upon eating foods that are high in nutritional value and very filling but low in calories. The first couple of weeks on the diet can be difficult; after all, it’s all about change, and change is always hard. But amazingly, the weight just starts to melt off. I really couldn’t believe it. Every week I would get on the scale and be shocked to find that the pounds just kept coming off. In those 12 weeks, I lost seven inches from my belly. I was never hungry, and I didn’t need to exercise more than 20 minutes every other day. In fact, the whole purpose of the exercise is not so much to burn calories, but to keep your metabolic rate up so that your body doesn’t slow down as it tries to conserve its calories.

The best thing about Eat to Live is that it actually works. And it doesn’t require anything fancy. Everything you need is right here at the grocery store. I’ve been recommending it with such success that the bookstore has difficulty keeping it in stock. If you have trouble finding it at the bookstore, we have copies of Eat to Live available at our office, Marianas Eye Institute. Let this be the year that you succeed in losing those extra pounds and keeping them off. In three months from now, on March 6, you could be 25 pounds lighter and on your way to better living.

(David Khorram, M.D. is a board certified ophthalmologist, and director of Marianas Eye Institute. Questions and comments are welcome. Call 235-9090 or email eye@vzpacifica.net. Copyright © 2006 David Khorram.)