By: Dr. David Friedman

It’s January 2022 and time to focus on that New Year’s resolution of improving your health and losing weight!  Unfortunately, 95% will give up on their New Year’s resolution by March 1st.  Why do so many of us experience failure when trying to achieve our optimal weight?  The word diet  is derived from the Greek word diatia, which means “way of living.” Sadly, most people think the definition of diet means counting calories, drinking meal-replacement shakes, and taking a handful of the latest weight-loss pills.  Doing these things will only bring temporary results because they do not address the real meaning of the word diet.

On my radio show, I’ve been asked many times to weigh in and throw down the gauntlet on which diet works and what philosophy is most sound. I can honestly tell you,  “They ALL work!” Whether it’s eating for your blood type, Atkins, Paleo, Keto, South Beach, Vegan, Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers, or any variation that exists now or in the future, if you stick to the program, you will experience weight loss… initially.

One of the main reasons why so many different diets work is because they all have one thing in common—they change a person’s routine. They all promote eating different foods in different ways at different times. Whether it’s eating just grapefruits or steak every day, counting calories, changing your portion sizes, or going vegan; when you mix up your daily routine, you will alter your metabolism, change your blood glucose levels and pH, which in turn, can lead to a weight loss. Unfortunately, most of the time, the results are just temporary.

If you’ve tried one of the many weight-loss plans or followed a fad diet, you know this to be true. The majority of you lost the most weight in the first thirty days, continued to lose weight in month two, and only lost a minimal amount of weight after day ninety. By the fourth month, you reached a plateau and became frustrated, which made you walk away from the diet you were on that “was” working.  What are you supposed to do then? Continue buying tickets to ride a merry-go-round of fad diets and make the same New Year’s resolution next year and the year after that? 

Changing your routine leads to initial weight loss but changing your lifestyle will bring permanent weight loss.  In my book, Food Sanity, how to eat in a world of fads and fiction,  I set the record straight and share how you can finally lose weight and keep it off!  I reveal the obstacles of permanent weight loss, and (brace yourself)… more exercise is not the answer!  

If losing weight is your New Year’s resolution (once again,) but this time you would like to follow through and keep the pounds off, here are the guidelines to help you say goodbye to those unwanted pounds!  

Exercise Makes Losing Weight Difficult!

More people join a gym in January than all the other eleven months combined! The truth is exercise is important and necessary for a healthy body, but if you want to lose weight, changing your diet is far more effective. It takes 750 jumping jacks to burn off 150 calories. However, eliminating one soda subtracts 150 calories. Which has a greater impact? Considering the average person consumes three to five sodas every day, it seems pretty obvious that you can’t spend every day doing four thousand jumping jacks to erase your lousy dietary choices.

Have you noticed, the more you exercise, the hungrier you get? That’s because exercise actually stimulates hunger! This causes you to crave more food and eat more, which in turn, negates the weight-loss benefits of exercise. The truth is exercise makes losing weight more difficult! The peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, published a study comparing overweight women that don’t exercise regularly to those that do. Women were placed into four groups. Three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer, for six months. Women in the fourth group were the controls—they maintained their normal daily activity routines and did not exercise. None of the women in any of the groups changed their dietary habits. Those who exercised with a trainer several days a week for six months maintained more weight than the control subjects. In fact, the study found that the women who exercised ended up eating more calories than they did before they started the experiment. Those who exercised intensively with a trainer lost less weight.[16]

The Journal of Obesity Research published a study conducted by a Columbia University team, which showed a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared to two calories that a pound of fat burns.[17] This means, if you worked out enough to burn off 10 pounds of fat, you would be able to eat only an extra forty calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain the weight back. So, if after a vigorous workout you drank a 20-ounce bottle of Gatorade (130 calories), your hard workout would be futile because the caloric expenditure from the workout and your caloric intake becomes a wash. As you can see, because your body is starving after a workout, a vicious cycle ensues. That old wives’ tale “you lose weight by burning more calories than you eat” is wrong. No matter how many jumping jacks you do or how long you ride that stationary bike, you can’t unrun your fork!  People lose weight in the kitchen and get toned in the gym.  If your goal is to lose weight, focus on your diet, not exercise.  

Don’t Count Calories! 

Fad diets come and go, but the most popular diet of the last century is calorie counting. It’s become the standard methodology for people wanting to lose weight. But even as far back as 1924, prominent medical doctor Dr. Phillip Norman questioned the value of calorie counting, “The conception of the calorie has retarded logical and rational reasoning in regard to diet, more so than any single other factor.”[18] The problem with a calorie-counting diet is that it can put your body into a “famine” mode that causes you to gain back your original weight and sometimes even more. This is why calorie-counting diets are often referred to as “yo-yo diets.” By definition, a calorie is a measurement of heat. It’s the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water through one degree Celsius. A calorie is heat! If heat caused weight gain, everyone living in the southern hemisphere would be obese. But actually, they’re leaner.[19]

The biggest calorie-counting organization in the world is called Weight Watchers. They’ve been having people count calories for more than fifty years! Interestingly in 2011 David Kirshaw, CEO of Weight Watchers, said in a Time magazine interview, “Calorie counting has become unhelpful. When we have a 100-calorie apple in one hand and a 100-calorie pack of cookies in the other, to view them as being ‘the same’ makes no sense.”[20] For Weight Watchers to make a statement like that really puts into perspective the lack of success calorie counting has when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off. Calorie counting diets simply do not work! It also means having to become a mathematician and that takes the enjoyment out of eating. Instead of counting calories, make your calories count!  Eat wholesome foods from nature and put away your calculator.  

Skip White Foods!

While so many fad diets have come and gone, for three decades I’ve recommended the same eating plan for my patients. It has helped thousands balance their blood sugar, increase their energy levels, and lose unwanted pounds. You too can achieve this by simply living by the mantra, “If it’s white, keep it out of sight!” When I say white, I’m referring to foods that are white in color and have been processed and refined like milk, flour, rice, pasta, bread, crackers, cereal, and anything sweetened with table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. There are a few natural exceptions to this rule: cauliflower, garlic, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, bananas, white fish, and white poultry meat.

The other white foods contain a high concentration of simple carbohydrates that will make your blood sugar spike and then drop, causing you to overeat and gain weight. Public enemy #1 on the “no white” list is sugar!  The average person consumes 160 pounds of refined sugar every year! That is a lot of sugar—especially when you compare it to how much we consumed in the past. Eighty years ago, the average intake of sugar was only about 4 pounds per person per year. That’s a 4,000 percent increase in sugar consumption today! 

Sugar is a major cause of our obesity epidemic. If you are not one to add table sugar to your food or beverages, you are probably still consuming too much sugar. This sweetener can be hidden in foods like canned or jarred tomato sauce (15 grams of sugar per half-cup serving), granola bars (12 grams of sugar), Greek yogurt (17 to 33 grams of sugar per 8-ounce serving), and Vitamin Water (one 20-ounce bottle has about 32 grams of added sugar)!

Also, stay clear of processed grains like pasta because even though you won’t see a lot of “sugar” listed on the label, it increases your blood sugar and triggers a release of insulin. By eating more whole grains like brown rice, oats, barley, rye, and quinoa, you are getting a great source of fiber, which creates a slower absorption rate and keeps you feeling full longer. For people suffering from celiac disease or gluten sensitivity,  the best choice is buckwheat.

If you want to sweeten your coffee, tea, or if a recipe requires sugar, you can use pure raw honey, organic coconut sugar, organic maple syrup, yacón syrup, stevia, or monk fruit.