The 17 Day Diet (2 page)

But you do have to accept that this won’t be a pleasure diet. You’ve got to stop eating unhealthy crap. You’ve got to eat vegetables, fruit and lean meat. I’m not going to ask you to probe your inner eater and uncover hidden emotional reasons for why you’re fat. But I am going to ask you to keep your portions down, cut your intake of fatty, sugary, salty foods, and move your butt. You won’t be faint with hunger or found in the kitchen at midnight, feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough. You can do this, because anyone can do anything for 17 days.

MISTER M.D., CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME

But won’t a lot of the weight I lose be water weight?

Yes! And that’s awesome, because water is weight too. Never dismiss those extra pounds as only “water weight”; this is a self-defeating attitude. Cosmetically, water weight can hide fat loss and be particularly frustrating. Healthwise, fluid retention can put a strain on your heart. When your body holds water, this means there’s more water in your blood. Your heart has to work harder to pump all that extra volume. Once all that excess fluid has disappeared, so will your bloat and puffiness. You’ll start looking visibly thinner in three or four days. And chances are, you’ll feel much lighter and be more motivated to watch what you eat.

The beauty of this program is that you won’t get discouraged or bored by the prospect of staying on a diet for what seems like forever. It can yield results that will stand the test of time just as well as those long-term diets that emphasize depressingly slow incremental drops in weight. You’ll love the fact that in 7, 10 or 17 days, you’ll be slimmer. And chances are, you’ll feel a lot lighter and have an absurd amount of energy.

The 17 Day Diet is doable and easy—unlike so many other diets, which are slightly less complicated than the checklist for a shuttle launch.

SCIENCE SAYS: Slow Isn’t Necessarily Better

C
onventional wisdom says that rapid weight loss leads to rapid weight regain. A new generation of science, however, shows that slow isn’t necessarily better.

Shape Up the Fast Way.
A 2010 study from the University of Florida suggests that the key to long-term weight loss and maintenance is to lose weight quickly, not gradually. Among 262 obese middle-aged women, fast weight losers were those who shed more than 2 pounds a week. Compared to more gradual losers, fast weight losers lost more weight overall, maintained their weight loss longer and were less likely to put weight back on. The findings were published in the
International Journal of Behavioral Medicine
.

Trim Belly Fat.
We pack on two forms of belly fat. One type collects around internal organs (also known as visceral fat). This type of fat raises blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and increases the risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s and even some cancers. Visceral fat is far more sinister than fat elsewhere in the body.

The other type sits just under the skin and is known as subcutaneous abdominal fat. It causes a hard-to-get-rid-of belly pouch. In a Finnish study published in the
International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders
, a rapid weight loss diet followed for 6 weeks trimmed visceral abdominal fat by 25 percent and abdominal subcutaneous fat by 16 percent.

So can you just give me 17 days?

If you can, congratulations! You won’t be disappointed.

What Lies Ahead?

So what is this 17 Day Diet? I’ll go into depth in the next few chapters, but as a very quick summary, the 17 Day Diet is a fun, fantastic way of eating designed to take off weight quickly. It’s based on some very simple principles, one of which is eating foods that favor fat-burning and are friendly to your digestive system.

I want to emphasize that excess weight is always a sign of nutritional and metabolic imbalance. Contrary to popular assumption, it’s not strictly a question of how much exercise you do or how much food you eat. Rather, it’s also a question of what types of foods are eaten, and how they are digested, assimilated and metabolized. If any of these components of good nutrition are compromised, then the body will not be adequately nourished at the cellular level, metabolic function will be impaired and toxins will accumulate. Thus, to lose weight fast we need to optimize digestion and metabolism. That’s what the 17 Day Diet does.

Trust me, you’ll love the rapid loss of a few pounds so much that you’ll decide to keep on going. After the first 17 days, there’s another 17 days, and another—3 total Cycles and a maintenance Cycle in which you get to eat whatever the heck you want, mainly on weekends. Here’s an overview:

Quick and Easy Overview of the 17 Day Diet

Cycle 1:
Accelerate (17 days)

Purpose
: To promote rapid weight loss by improving digestive health. It helps clear sugar from the blood to boost fat-burning and discourage fat storage.

Cycle 2:
Activate (17 days)

Purpose
: To reset your metabolism through a strategy that involves increasing and decreasing your caloric consumption to stimulate fat-burning and to help prevent plateaus.

Cycle 3:
Achieve (17 days)

Purpose
: To develop good eating habits through the re-introduction of additional foods and move you closer to your goal weight.

Cycle 4:
Arrive (ongoing)

Purpose
: To keep you at your goal weight through a program of eating that lets you enjoy your favorite foods on weekends, while eating healthfully during the week.

Once we’re through with all the basics, I’m going to talk to you about how to follow the diet. I can’t wait to show you all of its wonderful components and start you on your way to looking fit and fabulous. Take it one step at a time so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Your Appointment with Me

I might as well take a moment here to introduce myself. I’m a family practice doctor. Under America’s health insurance system, most people go first to a doctor like me for all complaints, from infections to chronic illnesses. I love the diversity of family practice. One moment, I’m treating an 18-year-old guy with the flu; the next, a 90-year-old woman with joint pain.

I became a doctor for the reasons most people do—because I wanted to save lives, pure and simple. In my heart of hearts, I believe a doctor is so much more than a person who dispenses medication or marks off symptoms like a checklist at a sushi bar. He or she should treat the whole person. I make it a point to get to know each patient as a person before I put a stethoscope to his or her chest.

I run my office a little differently than most places. Nowadays, you spend more time waiting in the examining room than you did in the waiting room. In fact, you spend more time in the examining room than the person who decorated it. It’s almost like going to a restaurant and being told that, even though you have a reservation, you have to sit at the bar for a while. The only difference is that in the doctor’s office, no one offers you a cocktail, and you have to wear a boxy blue paper exam gown that opens in the front.

The next time you have to wait in the examining room, do some fun things to pass the time. Glue the tongue depressors together into coasters and sell them to other patients. Or peel off all the wallpaper without disturbing any of the diplomas.

I do things differently in my office. My patients don’t wait forever. My patients oftentimes don’t even sit on the examining table when I talk to them. I sit on the examining table and they get the comfortable chair. The butcher paper upholstering the examining table is wonderful to draw on. Sometimes I hop off the table and start drawing pictures of organs to explain things to patients.

I’m responsible for 2,000 patients, though not all in one day. Many of them are women, and 80 percent of my new patients are overweight. Most know it. One of the things I’ve always found interesting is that my patients often come in with a complaint of back pain, or knee pain or just plain old fatigue. Before I can get a word out, they say, “I know it’s because I’m fat.” Patients are smart.

Ever since I became a doctor, I’ve always been concerned with prevention. Prevention is the doorway to longevity. I hate shoving medications at problems that can be fixed with simple changes in lifestyle.

A good example is a patient I’ll call Sharon, age 60. Sharon has type 2 diabetes. When I first started seeing her, she was taking oral diabetes medication. Once she changed to a healthier diet and started walking regularly with a friend, she was able to get off all her meds. What a triumph that was!

Then about a year ago, Sharon came in for her regular appointment. We reviewed the results of her latest blood work. Her sugars were through the roof. Her A1C test, which reflects a patient’s blood sugar over the past 90 days, was suddenly out of range.

What on earth had happened?

As we talked, Sharon told me that she no longer had a walking partner so she quit exercising altogether.

“I’ll walk with you!” I volunteered. I couldn’t bear to see her health slip. And so I became her walking partner. Before long, others joined us. Our walking group became affectionately known as
Walk with Your Doc
and has swelled to sometimes more than 50 people of all ages. We walk every Tuesday and Thursday morning without fail. I love it, because I thrive on helping people live full, healthy, active lives.

Of course, a huge part of prevention is weight management. You see, the death toll racked up by heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes, and all the other fat-related diseases is scary. Studies even associate obesity with poor immune function. That makes overweight people more susceptible to infections and cancer. Obesity will kill far more Americans each year than any terrorist would dare dream of taking out.

Everybody knows this. I’m just bringing it up again to remind you that tubs of ice cream and bags full of chips are not worth shortening your life over.

MISTER M.D., CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME

Do I have to exercise while on the 17 Day Diet?

Yes, but I won’t be asking you to sweat to golden oldies, pump it up or feel the burn. In other words—no overexercising. Since you’ll be scaling back on calories, you should do less exercising, or else you’ll get too run down and sore, especially during the first two Cycles. I will ask you, however, to do just 17 minutes a day of easy exercising like walking.

The 17 Day Diet has a companion exercise DVD called the 17 Minute Workout that you can purchase from our website,
www.the17daydiet.com
. It’s cardio-based and geared toward pure fat-burning.

So put down this book. Do this workout, or go outside and walk around your neighborhood for 17 minutes. Then come back and pick up where you left off.

We’re already in so much trouble with trans fats, cheap sugars, excess sodium, and unpronounceable additives jazzing up junk food—stuff that causes your arteries to clog up like rusty pipes. With everything plaguing the American diet, I had to concentrate on creating a program that would be safe, effective and produce quick but lasting results. People had to get the weight off, then learn how to keep it off. I didn’t want to tell my patients to go on this diet or that diet because many diets out there are nutritionally unbalanced, hard to follow, or just don’t work fast enough to keep you motivated.

Thus, the 17 Day Diet evolved. It uses the latest medical knowledge on nutrition, foods and what the body needs for successful weight loss and good health.

Let me add here: You should check with your own physician before starting this program. Your doctor knows what’s best for you. Based on my experience with my own patients, most people who have gotten out of shape over the years can follow the 17 Day Diet and do very well on it, though results can vary.

There Is More to Love about the 17 Day Diet …

Whether you’ve got 10 pounds to lose or a hundred, being overweight is one of life’s lesser joys. It affects every aspect of your life, maybe some things you never thought about. When you lose weight, practically everything in your life will change for the better. Let’s talk about this now.

Get a Healthy Bod

You’re going to be focused on losing pounds and inches. Some days, you might get a little discouraged if the scale doesn’t move down fast enough, even though this diet does help prevent plateaus. But there’s absolutely nothing to be discouraged about. There are other wonderful things happening inside your body that won’t be reflected on the scale, like your blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol decreasing.

Okay, I realize that right now you might not care about these things. You just want to slip into that sexy black number hanging in your closet … you know, the one that used to fit years ago. But it’s important to understand that your weight and health are not separate issues. Being overweight is a symptom of being unhealthy. Focus on your weight and your health will improve—instantly. Consider what the results of various research studies say about the rather immediate effects of healthy nutrition on the body: