The Dukan Diet (32 page)

Using the previous example, the Cruise phase should last 8 weeks. If this were you, at the end of 8 weeks you would have lost 22 pounds, and you would have gotten down to your True Weight on the date set when you subscribed.

Our site statistics for the first three years show that

• 70 percent of subscribers who are coached reach their True Weight on the date predicted on day 1.
  
• 25 percent get there, but with an average delay ranging from between 1 week and 3 months, depending on the difficulties encountered.
  
• 5 percent fail or disappear from sight without giving any explanation.
  

This is a success rate practically unmatched in the world of medical nutrition, especially given that two-thirds of these people had already followed more than four weight loss diets without any success at all.

CONSOLIDATION PHASE

The day after you achieve your True Weight, you receive the first e-mail for the new Consolidation Phase, which lasts 5 days for every pound lost.

Sticking with the example of a weight loss of 22 pounds, you will need 110 days to “consolidate” the weight you originally got down to.

From this moment onward, for the rest of your life, all you need concentrate your efforts on are three measures: protein Thursdays, giving up elevators and escalators, and eating 3 tablespoonfuls of oat bran per day.

PERMANENT STABILIZATION PHASE

The fourth phase, the Permanent Stabilization phase, starts the day after the Consolidation phase ends. It is designed to last for the rest of your life. And it’s the stabilized weight that alone signals that an overweight person has been “cured” and can be removed from weight problems statistics.

Online stabilization begins once the Consolidation phase is at an end. It introduces twice-weekly monitoring, an e-mail with instructions for
protein Thursdays, and a second e-mail on Mondays to manage the “six other days of freedom,” What does it offer and how?

First of all,
my presence through the instructions and my daily, live personal chat sessions
.

Permanent supervision
, watching to monitor any weight gain, and
a system of alerts
that enable us to take action as soon as a subscriber goes over the limit. Each time you have a 1 percentile weight gain, I send you out a new counterattack.

Let us consider the woman who lost 22 pounds. For her, each 2 pounds that she gains represents 1 percentile. Depending on how many percentiles are exceeded, she will require both more supervision and more encouragement to lose the additional weight. The aim is to get you to regain control as quickly as possible, because it is easier to lose weight you have just put on than it is to lose longer-established pounds.

Once you know your True Weight and course of treatment, you can sign up at any time. As soon as you join, you will receive two extremely useful tools: your summary report and your “apartment.” Let’s start with the summary report.

In order for us to draw up this summary report, once you have signed up for coaching you will answer eighty questions that will allow us to see your weak points, your strong points, and the habits and behavior patterns responsible for your weight problem.

You receive back a confidential summary report of about twenty pages long. I would recommend that you show this to your doctor. This summary report helps you understand your situation better, and it gives me the means to show you how my method can be adapted to suit you, and you alone.

Your “apartment” is a safe place with virtual rooms. Here you will find all the tools and structure you need to lose weight effectively:

• Your digital fridge
  containing the 100 foods for your Attack and Cruise phases: 72 proteins and 28 vegetables, with their nutritional values. A simple click, and you’ll know all there is to know about the food you’ve chosen.
  
• The store cupboard
  contains 58 grocery products that accompany the diet, such as canned fish, smoked products, vinegars, mustards, teas, oat and wheat brans, sauces, spices, reduced-fat cocoa, corn flour. Take a look before you do your shopping.
  
• Your dining room
  , with a thick book on the table containing the 600 most popular recipes of our website users. If you are creative, send me your recipes and I’ll reply in person with a small surprise gift.
  
• Your lounge
  with
  

• The gym
  and its 20 videos, each one tackling a different muscle area: pectoral muscles, deltoids, stomach and buttock muscles, and so on. For extra body shaping, you can choose exercises from these videos to supplement your minimum compulsory program and the exercise instructions I send you every morning.
  
• Your pharmacy
  is in your bathroom cabinet. Here you’ll find all the diet aids useful when trying to lose weight. They too come with a review to guide you, as there are thousands of different sorts over the world, and just how useful they are can vary enormously depending on their quality, effectiveness, and price.
  

For a long time we have known that regular exercise releases endorphins, giving us pleasure from being physically active.

However, it has now been discovered that this action is infinitely more essential, as being active releases dopamine and serotonin, two neurotransmitters involved in the human brain’s highest functions.

Dopamine increases the level of vital energy, motivation, feeling well, joy in being alive, and the desire to live life to the fullest, to plan projects and carry them out.

Serotonin supplies joy and pleasure in being alive.

Recent large-scale studies have shown that with serious depression, exercise was at least as effective as the most active antidepressants. This is especially important given that overweight people suffer from depression two to three times more frequently than the rest of the population.

Again, what makes the coaching website and the service provided so completely innovative is that here you are treated as an individual by having a personalized relationship and dialogue. Furthermore, your progress is supported by our daily dialogue: your evening e-mail tells me how your day went, and I reply the following morning with my e-mail drawing up your daily instructions, which are adapted to your unique requirements.

My very first e-mail will present you with a panoramic view of your whole treatment, showing what happens in the four phases based on your personal situation.

In my second e-mail, I will set out your Attack Phase and the number of days you’ll need to follow it.

As you go into the three other phases, I’ll again send you an e-mail explaining their purpose and what you and I should expect from them.

From then onward, every morning, you’ll receive your e-mail with instructions, written for you in reply to your report from the previous evening.

The information your evening feedback report provides me is my eyes and ears. Without it I cannot help you at all since I have
absolutely no way
of knowing what you did with my instructions. This report is short, and you can fill it out with only six clicks:

1. Your weight for the day.
   
2. Anything you may have eaten that you shouldn’t have, graded according to a scale related to the food you lapsed with. You create this list just by clicking on ready-made categories, such as bread, cooked meats, cake, fats, alcohol, chocolate, and so on. Later on, if you don’t understand why on a particular day your weight curve suddenly shot up when it was going down on a regular basis, all you need do is to click on your weight for that day, and the foods will be displayed that caused your odd gain.
   
3. Your motivation—you’ll score this on a scale of 1 to 5, from euphoria to wanting to give up.
   
4. Your report of the exercise done.
   
5. Your degree of frustration on a scale of 1 to 5.
   
6. The food you have missed most in the day. When you start wanting the same food too much, I’ll send you backup to help you keep going.
   

Decisions about you are taken based on these six parameters, and your instructions for the following morning can then be assembled and written. This is why I ask you not to forget about your evening report.

Your daily morning e-mail is my personal messenger and has three sections:

• Your eating instructions
  
• Your exercise instructions
  
• Motivational support
  

Your eating instructions will give you a wide choice of breakfasts, three lunches, and three dinners, a quick snack, and two menus—a more substantial one and a more elaborate one. If you don’t fancy anything, you can always dip into the recipes on the website or try a dish again that you enjoyed before.

Your exercise instructions will give you the compulsory program with walking to match your phase (20 minutes in the Attack phase, 30 minutes in the Cruise phase, 25 minutes in the Consolidation phase, and 20 minutes in the Permanent Stabilization phase), the four basic exercises, and the weight loss habits you need to follow.

There is also an optional program, which depends on how your treatment, your weight, and your habits are progressing.

Every day you will receive motivational support as you get my feedback about how your previous day went and your weight, as well as my reactions to your lapses or self-control.

When everything is going well, I will tell you so. The satisfaction you give me I will share with you, and I will encourage you to keep going. Each step forward makes you want to take another, bigger step.