The Dukan Diet (21 page)

However, in practice what seems so simple comes up against the problem of its very simplicity—it is as if breathing were being prescribed! For example, when I ask the straightforward question, “Do you exercise?” I get only vague answers: “I walk a bit like anyone else” or “When you’ve got children you can’t help but be active.” But when I probe more deeply, a very clear division emerges between two types of exercise: exercise with a purpose, when we have to make an effort and move around to achieve practical goals in our daily lives, and exercise for its own sake, dictated by our wish to remain toned, slim, and healthy. It is this wish that make us feel guilty and take out that gym membership. When you realize that people pay to use step machines instead of walking up the stairs to the gym, you can see the paradox.

How can we believe in the virtues of exercising for a purpose in our daily lives when half of the patents for new inventions aim to reduce pure physical effort and gain time, two ingredients that when combined lead to stress and weight problems?

Moreover, walking is almost as basic as breathing, so it is hard to understand its “therapeutic” value, let alone how it can help us lose weight.

Finally, the concept of exercise is not sophisticated or technical enough for doctors to bother with, and when I speak of doctors, I include myself. For years, I thought that patients had not come to see a doctor with umpteen qualifications and years of experience, a specialist in nutrition, to be given a prescription for walking or exercise. How wrong could I be!

As we have come this far together, I am going to try to get you to come a bit further so that you fully understand the challenge involved
in adopting this new concept of being “vitally active”: PRESCRIBED EXERCISE (PE). To do this I will pose two simple questions:

The reply is an overwhelming YES to both questions. Now let’s look at the evidence.

If you open and close your eyes, simply fluttering your eyelids makes you burn up energy. Hardly anything, of course, but energy nonetheless that can be measured in millicalories. The same applies if you think or recall something. More so if you think, reflect, and solve a problem. Much more if you lift one arm, and twice as much if you lift both.

By standing up, you immediately increase calorie combustion as the movement forces the body’s three biggest muscle groups to contract: the quadriceps, the abdominal, and the buttock (gluteal) muscles. Everything you do uses up calories. So far do you agree with me?

Let’s continue. Step outside your front door. Let’s imagine that you live on the fourth floor. By not taking the elevator you will use 6 calories walking down to the street. You have forgotten something and are in a rush, so you run back up the stairs, burning off 14 calories, then another 6 walking down again: 26 calories, gone in a trice.

Let’s move on. It is lunchtime. You have worked for 4 hours seated in front of your computer. You have been breathing, your heart has been beating, and your blood circulating. Simply keeping your body going uses up 1 calorie per minute. Moreover, during these 4 hours you have carried out your work tasks and moved your arms and legs, another 15 calories gone. Your legs now feel numb, so you want to get up and walk; you go out.

And now, to your great surprise I am going to ask you to walk
for 1 hour
! Oh, I realize this is not easy. And why walk when it is possible
not to walk? And apart from anything else, this is an hour out of your work time. Let’s imagine that you agree. If you walk without pushing yourself but without dawdling you will use up 300 calories in 1 hour; since opening your front door you have used up around 340 calories.

If you lived in a different world, the world of the primitive hunter-gatherer whose survival was dictated by shortages directly dependent on the natural environment, things would be quite different. In such a world, where you would have to use up energy to hunt and capture your food, walking for pleasure would carry a risk of needlessly drawing on your precious reserves of fat. You can see how incredibly important exercise is to managing our human energy reserves. These reserves are precisely what you are trying to get rid of and what these first humans held on to for their very survival. Here you have put your finger on the crux of why it is so difficult to lose weight and how much exercise will help and how.

Let’s come back to you. If you are reading this book it is probably because you are overweight. If this is so, each pound of fat you are carrying on your hips and thighs if you are a pear shape, or on your bust and tummy if you are an an apple shape, each one of these pounds that you hate so much stores approximately 3,500 calories. Scientifically this means that you need only walk 1 hour a day, 4 days a week, for 3 weeks to get rid of 1 pound. Take an example: 300 calories × 12 days = 3,600 calories = a little more than 1 pound of your fat. And without changing what you eat. This hour of walking alone could sort out your weight problems. Too good to be true! I can already hear all the objections coming thick and fast. Who has 1 hour a day, 5 times a week? How can you fit this time into a busy working life?

I agree that we all lead busy lives, so I am going to show you how to fit exercise into your schedule and use its impressive firepower, which is and always has been available to us.

Is being active more unpleasant or difficult than dieting? The answer is NO!

Because the Dukan Diet is so successful, I want to add to it what I consider to be no more and no less than a second engine.

I am now going to ask you to follow me into unusual territory, into life’s inner depths, to the place where your first decisions come into being, the place where your reasons for living and not dying take root. This may all seem very far removed from mundane weight problems; in fact, as you will see, it gets right to the very heart of the matter. Come, follow me, and you will not regret it.

If you are overweight, you probably realize that it was not hunger that made you eat and put on those extra pounds. Nowadays, in the United States and Europe, very few people really go hungry. Today people only put on weight because they eat more than their bodies need to function well; they eat more than they need to satisfy their hunger. The woman who eats too much, at the same time cursing the extra pounds that are the outcome, is not after nutrition. She eats while driven by a need greater than her fear of becoming fat. So what exactly is she looking for? What she is trying to do, and often without even realizing it, is to create pleasure with something tangible to compensate for not getting enough pleasure in her daily life. Or she wants to neutralize some pain, or there is too much stress in her life.

The difficulty is that in order to lose weight you have not only to stop using food to make up for whatever is missing in your life, but to go without, to stop eating what you want, thus creating an absence of pleasure, frustration.

This contradiction explains why it is so difficult to lose weight and so easy to put it back on.

And yet there is a path, seldom if ever used, a narrow ridge between two chasms: on the one side you do nothing and suffer in consequence, and on the other you do the wrong thing and fail. The middle path—the one that enables you to lose weight without regaining it—is the one I call “being cured of being overweight.”

Around the fifth week of pregnancy, a cerebral center appears inside the embryo that sends out the first beats of autonomous life and continues doing so until the moment of death. Let us call this neurological center “life’s pulsating heart.” Because of it, we feel a powerful urge to
embrace life, and all our actions focus on protecting life: eating, drinking, sleeping, reproducing, playing, hunting, keeping our bodies working, keeping safe, belonging to a community, and finding our best place in it according to our abilities.

Each living species works in its own particular way to ensure its survival. Everything that makes survival easier generates pleasure, and anything that thwarts survival reaps the opposite. Everything we do, we do either to gain pleasure or to avoid the absence of pleasure. This is why we experience pleasure when our body is dehydrated and we drink, or when our cells have run out of fuel and we eat.

But that is not all. Along with pleasure, another far more vital “food” enters the brain’s neurological pathways; leaving pleasure to the pleasure center, the other continues on its journey until it reaches the pulsating heart in the deepest part of the brain that sends out our life force. The role of this secret passenger is to recharge life’s pulsating heart with energy to strengthen it and keep it sending out our life force.

Often confused with pleasure, this neurological food is of paramount importance. Strangely enough, as far as I know, this vital substance has no name. I have called it “bene-satisfaction,” to combine in a single name the dual notion of
benefit
and
satisfaction
.

Eating is, along with drinking and breathing, what is most necessary for life and is therefore one of the most efficient sources of bene-satisfaction.

You can easily understand how many men and women do not manage to get enough of this precious bene-satisfaction. When we are low on bene-satisfaction, survival’s strident sirens start to blast out, forcing us to get some. And then when this still does not happen, we fall into depression.

In our often subconscious, sometimes urgent quest for bene-satisfaction, the easiest way to get it is quite simply to eat: putting something in our mouths, using food to produce contentment, something that up until now we have been confusing with pleasure.

Medical cerebral imaging allows us to visualize the effects of human behavior, and the one that triggers the most intense intracerebral fireworks is eating delicious food. As far as neurological impact and production of
pleasure, eating is almost as intense as having an orgasm, but it has the added advantage of lasting longer. The reason why it is so easy to put on weight, then, and so difficult to lose it by restricting what we can eat, is because eating is our chief source of bene-satisfaction.

Let’s come back to exercise and how it controls pleasure and bene-satisfaction. For many of us exercise has become a burden, a chore to be avoided. However, for those who want to lose weight, exercise can and must become their principal, most powerful ally and friend. Scientists have found that regular exercise increases the secretion of dopamine and serotonin, both of which increase our feeling of well being.

If people who put on weight overeat knowing full well that doing so will make them overweight, then it is because by overeating, they are seeking to create some bene-satisfaction. This usually happens to men and women particularly prone to comfort eating. For such people, exercise plays a key role in modifying their relation to pleasure and lack of pleasure.

What I am asking you to do is to make an effort to change the way you view exercise. I promise you that you will have no regrets.

To gradually reduce the volume or weight of a container you have two alternatives: you fill it with less or you take out more. The same logic applies to losing weight. Either you reduce your intake—you eat less and have fewer rich foods—or you use up more energy by being more active and burning up more calories. Ideally you will combine the two. Following the same diet, the more active you are, the more weight you will lose.

You must accept that there is an energy conversion principle between food and exercise. The more active you are and the more calories you burn up, the less you need to limit what you eat and the less you suffer.

Sufficient muscular activity triggers the production of endorphins, a neurochemical that gives us a feeling of exhilaration. To produce these endorphins a certain amount of activity is required, but once you start producing them and enjoying their effects, being overweight will no longer be a long-term problem. One of my patients told me that she had never managed to fall in love with a diet but that she had become completely hooked on exercise, “addicted.” I am convinced she will have no trouble maintaining the weight she got down to. One of my mottos (it applies to any activity, action, or behavior but in particular to losing and gaining weight) explains why:

Here we touch on one of the crucial issues in battling against weight problems. When the body experiences weight, loss it sees as a threat, which it is programmed to defend. How does it do this? It has two options: either by using up less energy, or by raiding its fat reserves. The more diets you try, the more your body learns to resist losing weight. This resistance manifests itself in slower weight loss, and the slower your weight loss becomes, the greater the risk of your losing heart and failing becomes.

This situation gives rise to the greatest danger in a diet: the stagnation plateau, a period when, although still following the diet to the letter, you fail to lose any weight. If there is nothing quite as rewarding and encouraging as seeing the pounds slip away, there is nothing as frustrating as watching your scale fail to deliver the reward you long for. Weight stagnation, when long lasting and undeserved, is responsible for the highest diet failure rates.

However—and this is crucial—although your body can adapt to reduced calorie intake and dieting,
it is not equipped to resist calories being
burned through exercise
. You can burn 350 calories by gently jogging for 1 hour a day for months on end, and you will use up the same number of calories on the forty-fifth day as on the first. But if you eat 350 fewer calories a day, within a few weeks your body will have become used to this amount, and you will have to cut out 500 calories if you want to continue losing weight.