The Dukan Diet (20 page)

• A recent weight gain
  . If you have taken no precautions and have recently gained weight, but it is not yet threatening, I recommend starting with 3 days of the Attack diet followed by the Cruise diet, alternating 1 day of pure proteins with 1 day of proteins + vegetables. Once you are back to your correct weight, use the protective Consolidation diet and the Permanent Stabilization diet.
  
• Overweight for quite a while
  . If you already have a tendency to gain weight or have been overweight for a long period of time, I would advise you to follow the Attack diet to the letter, starting 5 days of pure proteins, or even 7 days if you have
  put on a significant amount of weight. Then move on to the Cruise diet, the 5/5 version, alternating 5 days of pure proteins with 5 days of proteins + vegetables. You may instead use a 1/1 version if your weight gain is not so great or if you are able to lose it more easily. Once you reach your desired weight, continue with the Consolidation diet for as many days as our rule requires—that is, 5 days for every pound lost. Finally, keep to the Permanent Stabilization diet for the rest of your life.
  

When I am asked which is more dangerous to one’s health, being overweight or smoking, I say smoking. So what is the best strategy to take against these two dangers?

Many people hesitate, justifiably so, to give up smoking for fear that they will put on weight. There are also people who, having managed to give up smoking, see their weight shoot up in reaction, so they start smoking again in the mistaken belief that by doing so they will lose this weight, only to sacrifice the marvelous benefits of their hard work and compound their problems.

You need to realize that the extra pounds that come from giving up smoking are due to two related factors: the need for oral satisfaction and changes in your metabolism when you give up smoking.

The ex-smoker needs to find other forms of oral satisfaction. From this comes the need to put something in your mouth, the need to nibble between meals on snacks of intense and pleasant flavors that increase your calorie intake.

While the need for new sensations brings extra calories, your metabolism, previously elevated by nicotine, slows down, and fewer calories are burned.

The combination of these sensory and metabolic factors means that ex-smokers can put on an average of 10 and sometimes as many as 20 or 30 pounds.

Weight gained while giving up tobacco will not disappear spontaneously if you start smoking again. So it is vital to hold on to the extraordinary achievement of overcoming dependency on a drug as dangerous as tobacco.

Remember, too, that the risk of putting on weight through giving up smoking is a one-time thing and limited to 6 months, so the effort required to fight any weight gain is also limited in time. Once past this period, your metabolism returns to normal, reactions to oral satisfaction diminish, and weight control becomes much easier.

Let’s look now at a smoker of normal weight who has no personal predisposition or family history of weight gain and has never dieted in the past.

The best strategy for a light smoker who smokes fewer than 10 cigarettes a day or who does not inhale is to follow the Permanent Stabilization diet with its pure protein Thursdays, stairs only, and 3 tablespoons of oat bran a day for 6 months.

For a heavy smoker who goes through over 20 cigarettes a day the Consolidation diet is better and should be followed to the letter in the first 4 months after giving up smoking, followed by the Permanent Stabilization diet for the next 4 months.

If you have a predisposition to weight gain or have other risk factors, such as diabetes, respiratory, or heart problems, my advice is that as soon as you give up smoking you should begin the Cruise diet 1/1 version—that is, alternating 1 day of proteins with 1 day of proteins + vegetables for the first full month, which is precisely when the risk of putting on weight is the greatest. Then move on to the Consolidation diet for 5 months, and afterward use the Permanent Stabilization diet for a minimum of 6 months.

If you are obese, putting on any extra pounds will aggravate an already dangerous situation. Preexisting obesity shows that weight gain is easy for you and that smoking and nicotine did nothing to keep off the pounds. In giving up smoking, you may therefore face the risk of an explosion in snacking and cravings for oral satisfaction.

Nevertheless, the benefits of giving up smoking at the same time as you embark on losing weight are equal to the difficulty because for the seriously overweight person, giving up smoking combined with weight loss frees the body from the double threat of cardiovascular disease and lung cancer.

This extremely hard and treacherous road necessitates very strong motivation and both medical and psychological support from a doctor, who may prescribe medication to ease the lifestyle transition.

In such cases, I prescribe my program in its strictest version, starting with the pure proteins Attack phase for 5 to 7 days, followed by a Cruise diet in the 1/1 pattern, the Consolidation diet for 5 days for every pound lost, and finally the Permanent Stabilization diet, to be followed for life.

If you have completely achieved your goal of giving up smoking but have gained extra weight in doing so, it is important to avoid at any price the temptation to start smoking again.

This situation can be tackled by using the Dukan Diet in its most powerful form: 5 days of the Attack phase, followed by a Cruise phase 1/1 pattern, and the Consolidation phase for 5 days for every pound lost. The Permanent Stabilization diet should then be followed for at least 8 months, or for the rest of your life if you have put on a lot of weight (over 30 pounds) and if you used to smoke more than one pack of cigarettes a day.

Dear reader,

If you
really
want to lose weight,

If you
really
want to never again put weight back on, you must
totally
change how you view exercise.

This chapter gives you the means to increase twofold the effectiveness and permanence of the results you can achieve with my diet program.

I do not know how many of the millions of people who have already bought this book went on to follow the diet suggested or how many achieved their True Weight after following it. Nor do I know, and this is most important to me, how many managed to maintain their True Weight. However, I do know two things of which I am certain and which I can guarantee you:

• First, I do not know anyone who has
  not
  lost weight having followed this diet as it is prescribed. Their results may vary depending on their gender, age, how long they were overweight, hereditary factors, or the number of diets already tried. But anyone who has followed the diet has lost weight.
  
• I also know that a considerable number of the people who have read and used my method have consolidated and stabilized their weight in the long term—that is, for over three years. I know this because my readers regularly write and tell me.
  

Nevertheless, I also receive letters and e-mails from people who, having achieved their True Weight, followed the Consolidation phase, and started their Permanent Stabilization phase, managed to keep going for a while but then lost their way and regained some of the weight they had lost. Why? I know about all the reasons for such setbacks as I come across them in my consultations. I have analyzed and categorized them thus:

• Some people are not motivated to start the program. The book is on a shelf, unopened.
  
• Some people have started the program but stopped because they did not have the motivation or energy required to attain their True Weight.
  
• Others at certain ages or critical times in their lives have found themselves up against physiological resistance from their hormones, or they have suffered from depression and their medication has had an impact on their weight. With all these difficulties, they are vulnerable to stagnation plateaus, brief or lengthy. When they hit such a plateau without support, they abandon the diet.
  
• The same goes for people who have tried too many diets without achieving results or stabilization. Diets that are too restrictive, too tiring, too lacking in certain nutrients, too inconsistent, that do not work or are not followed properly are the very diets that lead to repeated weight regain—that is,
  bad diets. These diets have made their bodies resistant to losing weight, and they also tend to regain their lost weight more quickly when they abandon their diets. Even on as effective a program as the Dukan Diet, people can become discouraged. We also find people who, despite not overeating, still gain weight easily because of hereditary factors and genes.
  
• Finally, and this is the biggest group, are people who while losing weight, in whatever phase, encounter personal difficulties: disappointment in love, divorce, overwork, workplace problems, or any one of life’s many other painful events. When in emotional distress, very few can resist the urge to reach out for food as a comfort, especially those who eat as a natural defense against stress and lack of pleasure and security, a habit acquired early on in childhood.
  

It was for these high-risk dieters and anyone coping with life’s troubles that I eventually concluded that prescribing my diet on its own was not enough. I therefore opened a second front—exercise—to step up the attack and, with a pincer movement, trap my old enemy.

Before getting to the core of this chapter. I would like to start by reminding you why the Dukan Diet is successful:

1. The effectiveness of proteins.
   
2. The speed with which the Attack phase creates results.
   
3. Total freedom regarding quantities, thus avoiding the frustration of feeling racked by hunger.
   
4. The simplicity of its instructions: 100 foods that can be eaten any time, in any quantity.
   
5. A strong internal framework: the four phases are structured and signposted, from the strictest to the most flexible, each one with its own purpose, rhythm, and bench marks.
   
6. The diet teaches you about weight loss while you are losing weight. The order in which foods are introduced records in your body’s memory their relative importance, starting off with what is vital (proteins), then essential (vegetables), necessary
   (fruits), important (100 percent whole grain bread), useful (starchy foods), rewarding (cheese), and pleasure giving (celebration meals).
   
7. Two out of the four phases, Consolidation and Permanent Stabilization (the latter lasting for the rest of your life), aim to ensure you not only lose weight but are “cured of being overweight.”
   
8. An approach that through empathy and active support helps you manage your motivation.
   
9. Lastly, and this is the purpose of this chapter, a final point that is perhaps more crucial than all the others:
   exercise
   .
   

Exercise is the second general in my army in this fight against weight problems—just as important as dieting.

I have always known that exercise plays a key part in leading a healthy life and keeping weight under control, and I belong to a generation for whom being active was a natural part of life. Being active has always been part of my nature and culture, and because of this I must confess that it took me a while to realize the extent to which being inactive and reluctant to make any effort is a hindrance to rapid, effective, and long-lasting weight loss.

It was a trivial incident that brought this home to me. I was waiting in line at a Spanish travel agency where three employees were dealing with customers at the counter. All had comfortable chairs on casters, which meant they could move about without getting up. Two of them seemed to enjoy propelling themselves around, sometimes fetching files that were several yards away. The third employee always got up and walked to get what he needed. He was slim, whereas the other two, despite their youth, already had a paunch.

From that day, I changed the way I approached the fight against weight problems, realizing how crucial it was to incorporate exercise into my program. Not by giving simple commonsense advice, but by
recommending and structuring it with as much force and determination as I did with the Dukan Diet. I told myself that if I, a hardened warrior who had devoted his career to fighting weight problems, had not fully understood the extent to which we are currently neglecting our bodies, I could imagine how much my patients and readers might also have underestimated its importance.

If it is true that we all know in theory that being active burns up calories, it has not been transformed into conviction or action. So I started not just recommending exercise, as I had always done—instead I
prescribed
it, just like medicine.