The Dukan Diet (2 page)

Sometimes sugar and fats are found naturally in food. There is a lot of fat in salmon. Sugar is found in the form of lactose in yogurt and dairy products, and in the form of fructose in fruit. However, the sugar added to pickles or canned vegetables, or the fat added to some breads
is neither natural nor useful. These sugars and fats seem necessary to us only because we have become used to eating them. Nowadays, added sugar and fats have become marketing tools. They are messages for our senses that are infinitely more powerful than any advertisement. They operate on our pleasure responses and condition the circuits in our brain that govern attachment and addiction.

Legislation in America and Canada requires strict food labeling for consumer protection, so learn how to make the most use of it. It just takes a few minutes to understand how to decipher any label. You will then discover, for example, that there are indeed sugar-free pickles, sugar-free canned vegetables, and sugar-free mustards out there.

My dear friends, today I am reaching out to you with the certainty that I can help you put an end to the inevitability of weight problems in North America. Now let this mutual journey begin!

—Dr. Pierre Dukan

When I was a very young doctor, I was practicing general medicine in the Montparnasse area in Paris while also specializing in neurology for paraplegic children in Garches, just outside the capital. At that time, one of my patients was an obese, jovial, and tremendously cultivated publisher whom I treated regularly for a very trying case of asthma. One day he came to see me, and once he was seated comfortably in an armchair that creaked under his weight, he said, “Doctor, I have always been satisfied with your treatment. I trust you, and I’ve come to see you today because I want you to make me lose weight.”

In those days, all I knew about nutrition and obesity was what my teachers had passed on at medical school, which amounted to simply suggesting low-calorie diets and miniature-sized meals so tiny that any obese person would laugh and run a mile in the opposite direction. For big eaters, the very idea of having to ration their happiness is preposterous.

I declined, stuttering under the pretext that I knew nothing of the subtleties of weight loss.

“What are you talking about? I have seen every specialist in Paris, every one of whom put me on a starvation diet. Since my teens I’ve lost over seven hundred pounds, and I’ve put it all back on again. I have to admit that I’ve never been deeply motivated and, without realizing it, my wife has done me no great service by loving me despite all my extra pounds. I can’t find any clothes that fit and, if I’m honest, I’m beginning to fear for my life.”

His final sentence changed the course of my professional life: “Put
me on whatever diet you want, deprive me of whatever food you want, anything, but not meat. I like meat too much.”

I can still remember how I replied without the slightest hesitation: “Fine, since you like meat so much, come back tomorrow on an empty stomach and weigh yourself on my scales. Then, for the next 5 days, eat nothing but meat. However, avoid fatty meats like pork, lamb, and the fattier cuts of beef such as ribs or rib eye. Grill your meat and drink as much water as you can. Then come back in 5 days’ time on an empty stomach and weigh yourself again.”

“Okay, you have a deal.”

Five days later, he was back. He had lost almost 12 pounds. I couldn’t believe my eyes and neither could he. I felt somewhat concerned, but he looked great, more jovial than ever, saying he had rediscovered his well-being and had stopped snoring. He brushed aside my hesitations.

“I’ll keep it up. I feel on top of the world. It works and it’s a real treat.”

And so he left for another 5 days of eating meat, promising me he would have blood and urine tests done.

When he came back, he had lost another 5 pounds, and, jubilant, he showed me his test results. His glucose, cholesterol, and uric acid levels were all perfectly normal.

In the meantime I had gone to the medical school library, where I spent time learning more about the nutritional properties of meat and other proteins.

When my patient returned 5 days later, still in tip-top shape and having shed another 4 pounds, I told him to add fish and seafood, which he accepted with good grace because he had explored all that meat had to offer.

When at the end of 20 days the scales registered a loss of 22 pounds, I ordered another blood test, which turned out to be just as reassuring as the first one. Playing my ace, I had him add the remaining categories of protein: dairy products, poultry, and eggs. However, to allay my concerns, I asked him to increase his water intake to 3 quarts—twelve 8-ounce glasses—a day.

He agreed to add vegetables, as I was beginning to worry that they had been absent from his diet for so long.

When he came back 5 days later, he had not lost an ounce. He used this as an argument to go back to his all-protein diet. I let him have his way on the condition that he alternate this regimen with 5-day periods that would include vegetables, arguing that otherwise he risked vitamin deficiency. He did not buy that argument, but he agreed because he was suffering from constipation due to the lack of fiber in his diet.

This is how the first phases of the Dukan Diet were born, as well as my interest in obesity and weight loss. My patient had changed the course of my studies and my professional life. I worked to improve the diet, creating an eating plan that seems to me today to be both the most appropriate for the particular psychological make-up of overweight people and also the most efficient for weight loss based on real food.

However, over the years, I have come to the bitter realization that even effective weight loss diets are not effective in the long term. At best, the dieter slowly and imperceptibly drifts off course; at worst the weight piles back on again, usually because of stress, setbacks, or other problems.

It was seeing how the vast majority of dieters inevitably lose this war against weight that led me to design a plan that protects the accomplishment of reaching the target weight. The job of this Consolidation phase is to reintroduce, in increments, the basic elements of proper eating and to control a body that, stripped of its reserves, would be bent on revenge. To allow enough time for this rebellious phase and to make the transition acceptable, I fixed a precise time limit for the second part of my plan, easy to calculate and in proportion to the weight lost: 5 days for every 1 pound lost.

However, once the Consolidation phase was over, I saw my patients’ old habits gradually creep back, thanks to the pressures of metabolism and the inevitable resurgence of the need to compensate for life’s miseries with those thick, creamy, sweet comfort foods that craftily overwhelm our defenses.

I therefore had to resort to a measure that is hard to even suggest to people, a rule that I dare to call “permanent,” the kind of shackle that all overweight people—the obese or the just plain overweight—detest because it is there for good. However, this rule, which needs to be followed
for the rest of one’s life but which guarantees real weight stabilization, applies to
only a single day a week
—a day that is predetermined, whose structure cannot be changed or negotiated but which bears amazing results.

It was only then that I reached the Promised Land: genuine, long-lasting, unequivocal success built on four successive phases, each decreasing in intensity, which create a supportive and clearly signposted path that allows no escape. A short, strict Attack diet that gives lightning results is followed by a Cruise diet and sustained by a Consolidation phase, whose duration is proportionate to the weight lost. Finally, so that the weight you have achieved with such effort remains stable forever, there is a Stabilization phase, which includes a locking measure that is as specific as it is effective:
a single day a week devoted to dietary redemption
. This measure is designed to keep the rest of the week in balance, provided it stays by your side, like a loyal guard dog, for the rest of your life.

Finally, with these four successive diet phases, I achieved my first real lasting results. Now I no longer had only a fish to offer, but a whole course on how to fish, a comprehensive program that allows overweight people to be autonomous, lose weight quickly, and keep it off for good, and to do this all by themselves.

I have spent thirty-five years creating this beautiful tool for a limited number of people. Today I want a wider public to be able to access my program.

This program is for those of you who have tried everything, who have lost weight often—too often—and who are looking for a way not just to lose weight, but more important, to maintain those hard-earned results and live comfortably with the body you want and deserve.

So I dedicate this book and this method to all my patients, who have made my life as a doctor so fulfilling, and in particular to the very first of them, the overweight publisher.

THE BIRTH
OF A
FOUR-STEP
DIET

The Dukan Diet

Thirty-five years have passed since my life-changing encounter with the obese gentleman. Since then, I have devoted my work to helping thousands of men and women lose pounds and stabilize their weight.

Like all my French medical colleagues, I was trained that calories counted and low-calorie diets were the way to lose weight. Every type of food was allowed in moderate quantities. Nowadays, what I know and practice I have learned through direct daily contact with flesh-and-blood human beings who have constant cravings to eat.

I very quickly realized that it was not by accident that an individual was overweight. Their appetite and their apparent lack of restraint were a camouflage concealing a need to find comfort in food. This need is all the more overwhelming as it is connected to our survival mechanisms, which are as archaic as they are instinctive. It soon became obvious to me that I could not make an overweight person lose weight and stay slim simply by giving sound advice, even if that advice was based on common sense and scientific research.

What overweight individuals are looking for is an outside will, a decision maker who walks ahead of them offering guidance and specific
instructions, because what overweight people most hate and simply cannot do is decide for themselves when and how they are going to deprive themselves of food.

As for managing their weight, overweight individuals will admit without shame—and why should there be any?—that they are powerless when it comes to controlling what they eat. People from every social and economic background have all sat in front of me and described themselves as being astonishingly weak when it comes to food.

Obviously, most of them have found in food an easy “escape valve” through which they can release excess tension, stress, and life’s all too frequent disappointments. Any logical, reasonable, and rational instructions just cannot stand up to those pressures—at least not for long.

During my years of practice, I have seen many diets come and go. From analyzing these diets and the reasons behind their various successes, as well as the efforts of my own patients, I am convinced of the following: Overweight people who want to lose weight need a fast-acting diet that brings immediate results, fast enough to strengthen and maintain their motivation. They also need precise goals, set by an outside instructor, with a series of levels to aim for so that they can see their efforts and compare them with the results expected. However, I have also observed the strength of my patients’ resolve at certain times in their lives and then seen how easily they lose heart when the results do not match their efforts.

Most of the spectacular diets that rocketed to success in recent years did in fact have that fast-off-the-mark effect and delivered the promised results. Unfortunately, their instructions and guidance faded away once the book was closed, leaving the overweight individual once again all alone on the slippery slope of temptations, and the cycle would start all over again. Once the goal was reached, all these diets, even the most original and inventive, abandoned their followers with the same old commonsense advice about moderation and balance that a formerly overweight person will never manage to follow.