The Dukan Diet (31 page)

To do this, we created and patented a new way of communicating, the daily to and fro e-mail system, which works like an interactive loop. It allows me to send out my instructions to each user every morning and for them to send me back their report every evening, which is indispensable for giving them my instructions for the following morning.

This daily interactive monitoring looks after the subscriber from their very first day of the Attack Phase and then never, ever abandons them.

However, I did not want monitoring to stop with Permanent Stabilization, as only in this phase is it possible to know whether the weight loss achieved is lasting: it has been confirmed medically that people who once in their lifetime have gained more than 18 pounds will have altered their natural set point, and that the only way for them not to put weight back on is to adopt protective measures that are as painless as possible but permanent.

I had for a long time been convinced from my work with overweight patients that the vast majority of them had gained their weight because of their natural tendency to cope with life’s difficulties by consoling themselves with food. And it is precisely during such difficult moments that overweight individuals have the most need of a reassuring presence and confident guidelines to help them shore up a positive self-image and self-esteem, so vital if they are to persevere.

Along with the daily to and fro e-mails, I decided to deliver a full 1-hour chat session live every day during which I would personally answer the questions that the men and women being coached ask themselves. Nine times out of ten, they already know the answer themselves, but what actually counts is asking the question, being listened to, and being able to lean upon an outside source of willpower.

In the Dukan Diet, as in any battle, there is a tricky moment when the risk of failure is greater than at any other time, and it occurs in Phase 2, the Cruise phase.

It is these high-risk moments when their effort is not being rewarded that my patients call their “stagnation.”

There are many different reasons for stagnation. To start with, there are people who make mistakes with their diet without realizing it or without specifying it in their evening reports. There are women about to have their period who retain enough water to conceal the weight they have lost. Others take in too much salt or do not drink enough water or drink too much sparkling water with a high sodium content. Then there are people who take anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis or back pain and those on antidepressants or tranquilizers.

There are also people who, having followed so many diets, have lost and regained so much weight that their metabolism now requires far less energy and their body has become resistant to dieting. Then there are those people who become constipated when dieting and who for a short time gain weight as they are not eliminating sufficiently. Perimenopausal women are at the time in their lives when the risk of weight gain is the highest because of a slowdown in their metabolism. Lastly, the reason for the longest and most resistant stagnation is an underactive thyroid, which must be quickly diagnosed and treated.

And it is especially
here
, during these times when the risk of giving up is high, that a listening ear and a reassuring voice are welcome. Coaching and personalized monitoring find their true vocation here. The reason for stagnation has to be identified, explained, understood, and acknowledged, and everything must be put in place to get the wheels of the weight loss machine turning again.

Return to the Attack phase for a few days, increase or reduce fluid intake according to your individual needs; stop eating oversalty foods for the time being; be more physically active; add a 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, or 60-minute walk; correct constipation with a gentle laxative or stool softener, or by drinking mineral water rich in magnesium on an empty stomach; add some stomach muscle toning sessions.

During a period of weight loss stagnation you have to learn how to tame the passing time and make it your friend. You have to realize that not
gaining
weight is in itself a feat. Giving in and eating what you shouldn’t allows your body to regain the upper hand at the very moment when it was so close to giving up and relinquishing more pounds!

This is the sort of message someone who is having doubts and is succumbing to temptation expects: a promise, a stage, a milestone, hope, and a voice that is both assertive and reassuring.

Being overweight is a sickness of our civilization, and I set up my interactive website because I firmly believe that the Internet holds the future for our fight against weight problems

I have confidence in the Dukan Diet. I have tested it thoroughly and on many patients. Millions of people have lost weight by reading the book you are holding, and many of them have stabilized their weight.

Unfortunately, too many other people have not succeeded. Some of my readers were not sufficiently motivated to even get started, others stopped partway through, and far too many put weight back on again after losing it.

To score a real and wide-ranging victory in the war against weight
problems, having a method that works is not enough. We need a method that works and that people follow … right to the very end.

Losing weight is seldom simple or easy. For the vast majority of people, it is an ordeal. Here is not the time or place to tell you about my theory of happiness and what it takes to understand it and make it happen. My theory is born out of close contact with so many of my patients who talk to me openly about their lives, knowing that I am there not to judge but to help them. It became clear to me that overeating was often compensation for a temporary or lasting lack of satisfaction in my patients’ lives. They found satisfaction in food knowing full well that this would make them fat.

My belief is that a person’s relationship with their food, their self-image, and their weight as well as their self-esteem can be entirely explained by the structure of their primitive brain and how it operates.

In the oldest part of the brain is the hypothalamus. Its function is basic and essential: to ensure behavior that will guarantee our survival—to eat, fight, reproduce, and live and cooperate with others of our kind. To achieve this, the hypothalamus uses two small centers of extraordinary importance: one controlling reward and pleasure and the other punishment and discomfort. These structures appear in creatures as primitive as reptiles; hence it is sometimes called “the lizard brain.” We share these primal urges with our cold-blooded neighbors; we all welcome and are drawn by pleasure, and do our best to avoid pain and discomfort.

The overweight person who uses a surfeit of food to neutralize discomfort or some suffering needs a strategy that connects displeasure into the circuit of pleasure.

Let me explain. When you try to lose weight and you make yourself do without that pleasurable moment of eating that makes your day a good one, you produce a negative or upsetting feeling. However, the following day when you get up and see that you have lost ½ pound or so, your body produces a pleasure response, you feel contentment. In fact, you are placing a layer of pleasure over a layer of displeasure. Hope is born, a wall of resistance forms between you and temptation, and there you are on your way.

However, to keep moving forward, you have to maintain this connection
with pleasure. Ideally you should be able to tell someone about your progress, and this person will share your satisfaction. All it takes are words of congratulation to link yesterday’s satisfaction with this morning’s feelings of accomplishment and pleasure.

Only this kind of feedback loop can be given the name of close coaching, and only the Internet is capable of providing it to millions of people at the same time. This is the reason why I set up this coaching site on the Internet in France in May 2008, and it is my pride and joy. Since then I have established sites in six countries, and an online community of millions.

When you reach the Dukan Diet website’s home page (
www.dukandiet.com
), the first thing you will see is a True Weight calculator.

Your True Weight, as I have already said, is a weight that is both attainable and maintainable. I see too many patients chase after an unrealistically low weight, become frustrated, and abandon their efforts when they had in fact already achieved a perfectly “normal” weight. In fact there is no normal weight for everyone, but there is a normal weight for
you
, and that is
your
True Weight. How is it calculated?

1. Age
   . We put on weight with age. After age 20, each decade adds around a couple of pounds: 1.75 pounds if you are a woman, 2.6 pounds if you are a man.
   
2. Gender
   . Women do not tolerate weight gain as well as men, and I take this into account in my calculations.
   
3. The most you have ever weighed in your life, apart from when pregnant
   . Your body has a biological memory, and it remembers its highest weight.
   
4. The least you weighed after age 20
   . Between these two extreme
   weights is what I call the “weight range.” For example: if your maximum weight is 189 pounds and your minimum weight 128 pounds, the range is 61 pounds,
   
5. The weight YOU would like to be at
   . The more ambitious you are, even if deep down you are not sure that you could attain and maintain this “ideal” weight, the more you will rebel at the idea of a “sensible” weight.
   
6. Your “cruise” weight
   . This is the weight you have stayed at the longest during your life, a weight at which, or close to which, your body has long felt cozy and at which it likes to stay.
   
7. Heredity
   . Is its influence strong, average, or nonexistent? If there is a tendency in your family to put on weight, then it is best not to aim for an unrealistically low weight. You will only be fighting against forces mightier than yourself.
   
8. The number of pregnancies
   . Depending on the woman and the number of children, each child adds two pounds to the True Weight.
   
9. The thickness of your skeleton
   . A heavy skeleton adds
   x
   and a light one subtracts
   y
   from the sum.
   

Next comes the moment when we compare our targets, the weight you would like to get down to and the True Weight I consider to be the weight you stand the best chance of attaining
and
maintaining.

Ideally both our targets will be the same or be very similar. However, quite often we do not agree.

Patients or website users seldom ask to weigh more than their True Weight. If you were to surprise me with this, I would be the first to applaud, as I know that you have the best chance of both attaining and, most of all, maintaining the right weight.

However, I never agree to supervise any weight loss that is not maintainable, because one of the chief factors why dieting fails to work is that people attempt to slim down to unrealistic levels. Usually my Internet patients trust me and go along with this weight. There are some who
as they approach their target make a final attempt to get me to shift my position. Occasionally I agree to adjust their goal for a couple or a few more pounds while reexamining their progress.

Sometimes people have a confused mental image of their body. When this happens, losing weight will not turn a negative self-image into a positive one but will only exacerbate their issues when their efforts do not meet their ideal.

When we agree on your target weight, you will receive the following proposal:

ATTACK PHASE

“If you decide to start today, day 1 of your treatment, you will start with an Attack phase that will last the right number of days for you and takes the weight to be lost and your specific features into account.”

Let’s take the example of a 40-year-old woman, 5 foot 5 inches tall, who weighs 154 pounds, whose True Weight is 132 pounds, and who has therefore 22 pounds to lose. Adapting my program for her would mean a 4-day Attack phase and a loss of 4 pounds.

CRUISE PHASE

“Day 5 of your treatment, you will go into the second phase, the Cruise phase. How long this lasts depends on how much weight remains to be lost.”