Introduction – The Tortoise and the Hare

 

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.” – Benjamin Franklin

 

 “Food is cheaper now by a long way, more abundantly available, more highly refined and more pressingly sold to us by very clever advertising companies and techniques. The remarkable thing is how anybody stays thin.” – Dr. Andrew Prentice, London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

 

Only in America do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries and a diet coke.

 

    We live in a strange world when it comes to weight loss. Imagine if you will, someone who’s overweight giving advice on how to lose weight. Sounds ridiculous, right? Yet, what we have today are a bunch of fat doctors telling people how to lose weight. In fact, the most successful Diet Doctors seem to be the most overweight.

    In the year 2000, long before the controversy about his weight after his death, Dr. Atkins exceeded federal guidelines for being overweight. One doctor, who saw him many times over the decades, estimated he was 40 to 60 pounds overweight.¹

    Barry Sears, Ph.D., author of the hugely popular Zone diet, was also overweight in the year 2000. Sears even states he’s overweight in his own book! ² Yet despite this admission, millions of copies have been sold. Am I missing something? How can people who want to lose weight follow the advice of someone who proclaims, in his own book, that he’s overweight?

    Perhaps the answer lies in some of the statements Sears makes, such as “You can burn more fat watching TV than by exercising”³ and “About one-third of Americans are … suffering from protein malnutrition.”⁴ The last statement⁵ is like saying Americans are suffering from fat malnutrition. As a matter of fact, the average American eats enough protein to fuel a champion weight lifter. (See Notes – Protein.) But burning fat while watching TV and getting too little protein are the things Americans love to hear because it justifies eating the very diet that has made us the fattest nation on the planet.

    Recently, we have Dr. Phil, who at 6 foot 4 inches and 240 pounds is at the upper-end of the overweight category and teetering toward obesity, according to Harvard’s Body Mass Index (BMI). And yet, he claims he’s at an appropriate weight for his age and height.⁶ By whose standard? And stating his weight as “age appropriate” implies that humans are supposed to gain weight with age, an obvious invention by Dr. Phil and his publicity machine. Of course, Dr. Phil also states that just about everyone can benefit from the supplements he’s selling, particularly Dr. Phil.

    Then again, there are other Diet Doctors who are just plain terrified of their own diet. Look at Dr. Agatson, for example, author of the best-selling South Beach Diet. Here’s a cardiologist who admits to taking an aspirin, fish oil capsules and a statin drug every day to prevent a heart attack.⁷

    Imagine, if you will, a cardiologist who cannot even design a diet that will free him of drugs that treat a disease he’s supposed to be an expert at preventing; a cardiologist who’s incapable of designing a diet to lose weight and prevent heart disease. A cardiologist who says that eating a candy bar is healthier than eating a potato.⁸ And while he tells his readers “Don’t even think about limiting the amount of food you eat,” his menu plans are, in fact, severely restricted in phase one. But, of course, if you start to gain weight in the later phases, you have to go back to his more restricted diet. In other words, he has a built-in yo-yo cycle within his own diet. And, there are no secrets. It’s a simple calorie restriction diet, as are the Zone and Atkins diets. As Dr. Marion Nestle has stated, “What it comes down to is that this is a standard 1,200- to 1,400-calorie-a-day diet, so of course people are going to lose weight."⁹

    Parenthetically, if you follow the South Beach Diet like its author, it’s going to cost you some $3,000 just in heart medicines, not to mention the aspirin and fish oil tablets. There are many doctors who design heart-healthy diets, they keep their total cholesterol well below 150 and they do not take aspirin, fish oil or any heart medicines, all of which can have serious side effects. Their healthy hearts are due solely to diet, not drugs. You can achieve far better results with diet than you can with drugs when it comes to heart disease, because no drug has ever cured heart disease whereas the RAVE Diet has.

    There are a number of things these popular diets have in common. Among them, they promise immediate weight loss. We’re talking over a pound a day. Now, if that doesn’t get the attention of someone desperate to lose weight, nothing will. And these books always have some unique, clever scheme, which is apparently unknown to the rest of the scientific world.

    Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work that way. Despite claims that you can eat all you want, if you calculate the menu plans of these popular diet books, they’re all calorie restriction diets!

    After you get past the smoke and mirrors, it boils down to calories in, calories out. After an exhaustive analysis of some 107 diets, the American Medical Association found that all these popular diets had nothing to do with restricting carbohydrates and had everything to do with restricting calories.¹⁰ Recently, a study confirmed what everyone should have known in the first place: the thinnest people in the world eat the highest amount of complex carbohydrates and the fattest people eat the highest amount of animal protein.¹¹

    Of course, these popular diets do work in the short-term. But then again, any calorie-restriction diet will work in the short term. You could eat nothing but lard and if you had fewer calories coming in than going out, you’d lose weight. The problem boils down to sticking with these bizarre diets in the long haul.

    It seems when the going gets tough, doctors write diet books in order to make money. Every few years, the public is subjected to yet another “miracle diet” with some “secret” that will cause effortless weight loss. You purchase the book, follow the restricted dietary regimen and – almost miraculously – you’re losing weight. Voila!

    You’re so proud of yourself, you tell your friends. And they’re so impressed with your weight loss, they go out and buy a copy of the book, the supplements and whatever other gimmicks they’re offering, all in an effort to save their waists and hiplines from seemingly perpetual expansion. And soon they begin telling all their friends about the miracle diet that (finally!) took off those stubborn pounds. And so the circle of dieters grows as fast as the wallets of the Diet Doctors.

    Now fast-forward just three years.

    No one’s talking any more.

    In fact, 95 percent of the people who thought they had been saved from everlasting weight gain are off these strange diets.¹² Not only did the weight return, but they’re heavier now than when they started the diet and they’ve increased their percentage of body fat to boot.

    Some miracle.

    They would have been better off had they never started the diet in the first place. In fact, research shows that dieters gain more weight in the long run than those who don't follow any weight-loss diet at all.

    Now fast-forward just five years.

    Virtually everyone who started the miracle diet is off the diet. In fact, it’s a miracle they could put up with these eating regimens for so long.

    The yo-yo diet cycle is nothing new. The first popular “high-protein” diet book was published in 1864 by an English casket maker named William Banting. During this same era, P.T. Barnum told Americans “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and the casket-maker’s diet did, among other things, prove P.T. Barnum right. The Atkins Diet, Zone Diet, South Beach and other “high-protein” diets all have their roots in, appropriately enough, a casket maker’s diet because they all contribute to heart disease, kidney disease, osteoporosis and our common cancers, not to mention the constipation, gastrointestinal difficulties, bad breath and other symptoms that are the result of “high protein” diets. Little wonder the American Dietetic Association has described these diets as “a nightmare.”¹³ The phrase “high-protein” is simply a euphemism for “high-fat” to disguise the fact these diets are plowing an incredibly unhealthy diet down your throat, with the Atkins diet being up to 60 percent fat.

    The fact Banting’s diet was all the rage in the late 1800’s and Atkins-like diets are now the rage over 100 years later shows 1) how little progress we have made in making people understand such quick fixes don’t work; 2) the power of advertising; and 3) how such diets come into vogue when the price of meat is cheap. People think Atkins has come up with something new in the diet field. All he did was popularize a failed diet that was over 100 years old.

    Now, take a deep breath because I want you to think about something. Don’t you think it’s strange – perhaps more than a little embarrassing – that none of these diet plans work in the long term, yet we keep shelling out money only to prove that history does repeat itself – at least when it comes to diet plans? Have Americans become so desperate that common sense has totally gone out the window?

    Think about it. We’re in such pathetic shape that the most educated population on the face of the earth now needs a doctor to tell them how to eat. In the meantime, billions of “uneducated” people throughout the world are in better health than most Americans, keep slim figures and many have never even seen a doctor. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that people were getting better advice about what they should eat when they were seeing witch doctors.

    The goal of weight loss is to reduce the percentage of body fat and you cannot lose body fat quickly. Any program that promises quick weight loss is not losing fat, but simply water. Losing weight is not complicated at all. In fact, it’s quite simple and the Diet Doctors have done more to confuse the issue than anyone else. (See Notes - Problems With the Glycemic Index, for one example.) But there’s a method to their madness: the more complicated dieting seems, the more money there is to be made from all the confusion. And although these diets don’t work – even for the Diet Doctors – the good doctors are more than willing to accept your money for the advice they’re selling, advice they can’t even follow themselves.

    Why are things so insane? In a word: money. Selling food, supplements and diet plans is big money. Selling the easy way out is big money. Telling people they can lose more weight watching TV than exercising is big money.

    Once all the fog has lifted, you’ll see just how simple it is to lose weight. You won’t have to buy expensive supplements or special foods, join programs, make yourself miserable or participate in any of the money-making schemes designed to impoverish you. Americans are now spending over $40 billion dollars a year in their desperate efforts to shed pounds and get thin. What diet ads should say is “I lost $350 in two week! Ask me how!” And the vast majority of these bucks flow into the pockets of people with an M.D. or Ph.D. behind their names – and most should be ashamed of themselves for not telling people the truth about weight loss, but instead perpetuating a self-enrichment scam.

    Weight loss involves much more than counting calories and eating the right foods. Losing weight is not about the body – it’s about the mind. It’s about changing the way you think about food. It’s also about changing the way you think about life. Your weight is the most visible reflection of who you are and losing weight involves nothing short of fundamentally changing your life. Change your life first, then the weight will come off naturally – and stay off.

    We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare. Popular diets are about the hare that loses weight very fast, but ends up losing the race because the pounds return over time. The tortoise, on the other hand, is slow but steady and ends up winning the race by losing weight slowly and surely – and keeping it off for a lifetime.

    The RAVE Diet & Lifestyle is a long-term health regimen designed not only to lose weight, but also to enhance your health and energy level and to prevent (and even reverse) the common diseases that are ravaging Americans today. Most diet plans start off with a bang and have you lose 20 pounds in a few months. I would rather you change your eating habits first and gradually lose those 20 pounds over the course of a year so they will stay off the rest of your life and never come back.

    If you’re reading this book because you’ve tried the Diet Doctors and failed, take heart because the road to success is usually paved with failure. I believe that knowledge is power. Just as a good stockbroker uses his knowledge of stocks to make you a profit, knowledge of food will make you thin and give you all the benefits that come with such a lifestyle.

    Being overweight affects all aspects of your life and it becomes cumulative. Your self-respect declines, you stay in more, you become more sedentary, you eat for comfort and end up putting on even more weight. If you’re going to achieve success in weight loss, you are going to have to take an honest look at yourself, what you’re eating and how you’re living. The purpose of this book is to help you do just that.

    We’re in a state of denial about our weight and as our waistlines expand, we’ve lost sight of what normal weight is. We keep growing bigger and bigger and think it’s normal because we’ve become used to it. Unfortunately, what’s normal to Americans in the 21^st century is fat. Have you ever looked at those old-time pictures of working class people living in the 1800s from a weight perspective? Then compared their bodies to ours now? The only fat people you will see in those old pictures are wealthy people, who could afford to eat much like Americans eat today. The average working class American back in those times was thin because they were doing two things correctly: eating the right foods and getting exercise.

    Being overweight – and especially being obese – can lead to a host of diseases, among them heart disease. The only scientifically proven diets to reverse heart disease are RAVE Diets. In fact, the RAVE Diet is a friendlier version of other diets that are used to reverse heart disease. No other diet can show actual proof of heart disease reversal. None. And if you eat to prevent heart disease, you will also prevent the other major chronic diseases that are plaguing Western nations, including diabetes, our common cancers, as well as hundreds of other diet-related diseases.

    In other words, you will get much, much more out of the RAVE Diet than just permanent weight loss. You’ll get a lifetime of good health.