Weight versus Risk
There is a major concern regarding the increase in weight which is becoming pervasive in our society. We now categorize these as Overweight, Obesity, and Morbid Obesity. Millions are on diets – Atkins, South Beach, low carb, high carb, low fat, no sugar and many self designed “starvation” approaches. Programs like weight watchers are having a major resurgence. Several medications are available and more are in the pipeline. Several have been taken off the market for dangerous side effects. Three are in the FDA pipeline; the first of which received a negative recommendation from the review panel.
The problem is, all of these “diets” result in short term weight loss, but none result in long term weight loss. The very reason for that seems obvious when you stop and think about it. Most people diet for a specific short term goal such as looking good at an upcoming special event. Almost by definition, a diet is a short term undertaking to lose a certain number of pounds. When you get to your goal, you end the diet and return to your old eating habits. Guess what? You gain the weight back. No surprise.
Several points need to be made.
#1 You should not make weight loss your goal. Excess weight causes you problems by raising your blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol. These lead to “vascular” disease which affects the arteries in your body producing heart attacks, strokes and other crippling diseases. Diabetes also prevails. Prevention of these diseases by controlling your risk factors should be your primary goal. That is an important focus because:
a. It does take a lot of weight loss to reduce risk factors
b. It is extremely difficult to lose a lot of weight
The way in which you achieve risk factor reduction/normalization is straight forward. It involves TWO things – modification of your current eating habits to make them “heart healthy” AND DAILY aerobic exercise.
For this article, let’s talk about modifying your eating habits. The real culprits are SATURATED and TRANS fat in terms of risk factors. The secondary factors are other types of fat – the many unsaturated or healthy fats. I advise reducing all fats initially because all fats are very calorie dense (9 calories/gram) versus carbohydrates and proteins (4 calories/gram). The combination of these two nutritional changes along with daily exercise will produce dramatic results. When you reach your weight goal, you can liberalize your healthy fats and maintain your new way of eating FOREVER. Why does this work? Because YOU are going to modify YOUR current eating habits to make them heart healthy by removing or substituting the high fat items. And since your modified eating pattern will be similar to how you now eat, it is easy to sustain as opposed to a DIET.
This is described in great detail in the Nutrition chapters of my book.
Gerald L. Evans, M.D.
Dr. Evans, is there any credence to the idea that eating late at night makes one more likely to gain weight? How does that figure into the whole notion that simply reducing calories makes weight loss happen? Is there anything about HOW one eats that matters?
Love your point. This issue was actually brought to light in the 1960s by researchers at the Joslin Clinic and is widely accepted today. I’ve never seen a good scientific explanation for why what time of day you eat matters, but it does. I have always preached the philosophy that you should eat a breakfast for a king, a lunch for a prince, and a dinner for a pauper if you want to be trim and healthy. GLE
That makes sense to me as you work off daytime calories before you go to bed; the late evening calories get stored.
That is the oft stated reason, and may well be true, but does not seem logical when you think of total calories in and total expenditure out should determine the outcome.
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First of all, great looking site you have here and great post too. I would like to keep up with your posts but having problem subscribing to your rss. RSS feed checked and is working fine; problem must be elsewhere. GLE
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