(In our appendices, we’ll explore the medical options for dealing with weight issues—for times when you may plateau, and for those people whose weight problems have led to major medical problems.)
Now, with all the diet information that’s circulating today, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right, and sometimes it’s hard to remember what to do even if it is. That’s why we feel that while the program is important, how you learn it—how you ingrain it as part of your lifestyle—is just as vital. As we travel through the four parts of the book, you’ll notice various ways you’ll learn about your body and how to change it. These are the five main elements we’ll use along the way:
YOU-REKA IMP
YOU-reka Moments! Like Einstein suddenly realizing that E = mc2 you’ll develop deep insights that challenge your preconceptions about diets, about fat, and about your body. In the margin, you’ll see our YOU-reka imp—the signal that we’re about to come upon a moment of enlightenment by busting a myth or explaining something to you about diets that may seem 180 degrees from what you believe is true.
YOUR Body: In parts 2 and 3, as we explore the biology of your body, we’ll start each chapter by giving quick biology lessons about what really happens inside your body. We ask that you put on your metaphorical scrubs and gloves as you whiz through your arteries, travel through your intestines, and hang out in your stomach. We’ll get up close to your fat so we can see how your body handles it and how it manipulates your body. We believe that by learning about how the inside of your body works, you’ll develop the smarts you need to change how the outside looks.
YOU Tests. Through interactive quizzes and measurements, you’ll establish baselines for such vital statistics as your ideal body size and your eating personality. And you’ll also be able to test for the secret things that could be contributing to a weight problem (get a load of our tongue test on page 70). You can start in a few pages by taking the Fat Facts Test on page 17.
YOU Tips: After we explore the biology of your body to show you what bad things can happen if you make the wrong choice or have cross-wired genetics, we’ll immediately give you actions that can help turn your body around. At the end of each chapter, we’ll outline intelligent strategies—big and small—for living, eating, and moving in a more healthful way.
The YOU Diet and Activity Plan: In Part 4 (on page 191) we’ll detail the specific and simple strategies, recipes, and exercises that will lead you to the body you want—for the rest of your life. The fourteen-day YOU Diet (it’s actually so easy that we crafted a seven-day plan that you do twice) and the no-weights-required YOU Workout provide all the tools and instructions you’ll need. Best of all, they don’t take a lot of time, and they’re so easy that you can incorporate them into your life today.
So where do we start? With our first YOU-reka! moment: Your body naturally wants to take you to your optimum weight, as long as you don’t get in its way.
That’s right. For almost everyone, no matter what your genetics, the systems, organs, and processes of your body all want you to function at an ideal weight and size. With the following few principles that we’ll develop throughout the book, we’re going to teach you how you can make that happen without having to bludgeon yourself in frustration with a butter knife. These are our major principles of achieving your very best and very healthiest body.
YOU Will Choose Elegance over Force
Most dieters try to defeat their Oreo/Cheeze Doodle/custard pie infatuations with will, with deprivation, with sweat, with a “my-brain-is-stronger-than-your-crust” attitude. But trying to beat your body with mind power alone may be more painful than passing a melon-size kidney stone. Instead, you have to learn about the systems and actions that influence hunger, satiety, fat storing, and fat burning to fine-tune your corporeal vehicle so it runs on autopilot and takes you to your ultimate destination: a healthy, ideal body. (For those who want to skip ahead, you’ve probably already peeked at Part 4; however, getting to know the nuances of your body is what will help you achieve and maintain a truly healthy-size body.)
FACTOID
When you lose weight without exercise, you lose both muscle and fat, but when you gain weight without exercise, you gain only fat. It’s much easier to gain fat weight than it is to gain muscle weight which is one of the reasons why yo-yo dieting fails so miserably: When you continually gain and lose and gain and lose, you end up gaining proportionally even more fat, because of the muscle loss that takes place every time you lose.
YOU Will Learn How Your Body Thinks
True body improvement is about science. It’s about making the leap from witchcraft to hard data, from alchemy to chemistry, from speculation about what works for your body to explanations of how your body actually works. The only way you’ll understand the way calories and fat travel from that 2,000-calorie onion loaf to the back of your arm is by bringing alive the physiology of hormones, blood, organs, and muscles—by explaining the processes of digestion, starvation, fat storage, and muscle movements. When you understand the magic of physiology and the fun of biology, you’ll know what actions to take—and why you’re taking them—to reboot your body back to where it wants to be. Just as when you’re trying to help a tantruming toddler or kick-start a frozen computer, you can’t fix it unless you know what’s wrong. Know the why, and it’s much easier to handle the how—when you need to. Let’s face it, we’re not going to be sitting next to you at 10:30 p.m. when you’re pilfering a Pop-Tart. So you need to be equipped with knowledge of how your body works and reacts to that Pop-Tart so that you can defend against the little sugar-coated bugger.
YOU Will Challenge Your Beliefs about Diets
Throughout our lives, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if one thing is good for us, then more of it must be better. If you eliminate 100 calories from your daily diet, then eliminating 400 must qualify you for size 2. If you walk to lose weight, then running a marathon must nuke the fat right off your body. Well, neither idea is true. Worse, not only aren’t they true, but many of the diet myths perpetuated today actually hurt our bodies. Food deprivation, for example, drops your metabolism and makes your body want to store fat. Many of the rules, ideas, and principles you may believe about dieting—that you assume work when dieting—simply aren’t true and can very well contribute to weight issues because they keep the vicious cycle of fat loss and fat gain revolving faster than Lance Armstrong’s front wheel.
FACTOID
In men, the supplement L-carnitine-at a dose of 3 grams a day-helps muscles use carbohydrates, but it is also good for blood vessel function in both men and women.
In a way, we live on the two extremes of a pendulum. Either we swing all the way in one direction (strict, tedious dieting with a draconian low daily calorie intake), or we swing all the way in the other direction (popping cream-cheese-smothered bagels like grapes). We have to stop swinging so much and start living in the middle of that pendulum by striking a balance and avoiding the periods of extreme “ons” and “offs.”
One of the reasons why most so-called diets fail is because of a psychological and behavioral flaw that many dieters have. We desperately want to believe the simple, comforting promises that diets make—that doing A always gets us B. Because once we see that A (eating wheat germ 24–7) doesn’t always equal B (the cover of Vogue), then we get frustrated and angry, and give in to the gods of cream-filled baked goods.
Unfortunately, your body and