Dangers of South Beach, and other popular diets.

[Guest guest]

Introduction – The Tortoise and the Hare

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.” – Benjamin Franklin

 

Source > http://www.ravediet.com/raveintro.htm

 

 

“Food is cheaper now by a long way, more abundantly available, more highly

refined and more pressingly sold to us by very clever advertising companies and

techniques. The remarkable thing is how anybody stays thin.” – Dr. Andrew

Prentice, London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

 

Only in America do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries and a diet

coke.

 

We live in a strange world when it comes to weight loss. Imagine if you

will, someone who’s overweight giving advice on how to lose weight. Sounds

ridiculous, right? Yet, what we have today are a bunch of fat doctors telling

people how to lose weight. In fact, the most successful Diet Doctors seem to be

the most overweight.

 

In the year 2000, long before the controversy about his weight after his

death, Dr. Atkins exceeded federal guidelines for being overweight. One doctor,

who saw him many times over the decades, estimated he was 40 to 60 pounds

overweight.1

Barry Sears, Ph.D., author of the hugely popular Zone diet, was also

overweight in the year 2000. Sears even states he’s overweight in his own book!

2 Yet despite this admission, millions of copies have been sold. Am I missing

something? How can people who want to lose weight follow the advice of someone

who proclaims, in his own book, that he’s overweight?

 

Perhaps the answer lies in some of the statements Sears makes, such as

“You can burn more fat watching TV than by exercising”3 and “About one-third of

Americans are … suffering from protein malnutrition.”4 The last statement5 is

like saying Americans are suffering from fat malnutrition. As a matter of fact,

the average American eats enough protein to fuel a champion weight lifter. (See

Notes – Protein.) But burning fat while watching TV and getting too little

protein are the things Americans love to hear because it justifies eating the

very diet that has made us the heaviest nation on the planet.

 

Recently, we have Dr. Phil, who at 6 foot 4 inches and 240 pounds is at

the upper-end of the overweight category and teetering toward obesity, according

to Harvard’s Body Mass Index (BMI). And yet, he claims he’s at an appropriate

weight for his age and height.6 By whose standard? And stating his weight as

“age appropriate” implies that humans are supposed to gain weight with age, an

obvious invention by Dr. Phil and his publicity machine. Of course, Dr. Phil

also states that just about everyone can benefit from the supplements he’s

selling, particularly Dr. Phil.

 

Then again, there are other Diet Doctors who are just plain terrified of

their own diet. Look at Dr. Agatson, for example, author of the best-selling

South Beach Diet. Here’s a cardiologist who admits to taking an aspirin, fish

oil capsules and a statin drug every day to prevent a heart attack.7

Imagine, if you will, a cardiologist who cannot even design a diet that

will free him of drugs that treat a disease he’s supposed to be an expert at

preventing; a cardiologist who’s incapable of designing a diet to lose weight

and prevent heart disease. A cardiologist who says that eating a candy bar is

healthier than eating a potato.8 And while he tells his readers “Don’t even

think about limiting the amount of food you eat,” his menu plans are, in fact,

severely restricted in phase one. But, of course, if you start to gain weight in

the later phases, you have to go back to his more restricted diet. In other

words, he has a built-in yo-yo cycle within his own diet. And, there are no

secrets. It’s a simple calorie restriction diet, as are the Zone and Atkins

diets. As Dr. Marion Nestle has stated, “What it comes down to is that this is a

standard 1,200- to 1,400-calorie-a-day diet, so of course people are going to

lose weight. " 9

 

Parenthetically, if you follow the South Beach Diet like its author, it’s

going to cost you some $3,000 just in heart medicines, not to mention the

aspirin and fish oil tablets. There are many doctors who design heart-healthy

diets, they keep their total cholesterol well below 150 and they do not take

aspirin, fish oil or any heart medicines, all of which can have serious side

effects. Their healthy hearts are due solely to diet, not drugs. You can achieve

far better results with diet than you can with drugs when it comes to heart

disease, because no drug has ever cured heart disease whereas the RAVE Diet has.

There are a number of things these popular diets have in common. Among

them, they promise immediate weight loss. We’re talking over a pound a day. Now,

if that doesn’t get the attention of someone desperate to lose weight, nothing

will. And these books always have some unique, clever scheme, which is

apparently unknown to the rest of the scientific world.

 

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work that way. Despite claims that

you can eat all you want, if you calculate the menu plans of these popular diet

books, they’re all calorie restriction diets!

After you get past the smoke and mirrors, it boils down to calories in,

calories out. After an exhaustive analysis of some 107 diets, the American

Medical Association found that all these popular diets had nothing to do with

restricting carbohydrates and had everything to do with restricting calories.10

Recently, a study confirmed what everyone should have known in the first place:

the thinnest people in the world eat the highest amount of complex carbohydrates

and the fattest people eat the highest amount of animal protein.11

 

Of course, these popular diets do work in the short-term. But then again,

any calorie-restriction diet will work in the short term. You could eat nothing

but lard and if you had fewer calories coming in than going out, you’d lose

weight. The problem boils down to sticking with these bizarre diets in the long

haul.

It seems when the going gets tough, doctors write diet books in order to

make money. Every few years, the public is subjected to yet another “miracle

diet” with some “secret” that will cause effortless weight loss. You purchase

the book, follow the restricted dietary regimen and – almost miraculously –

you’re losing weight. Voila!

 

You’re so proud of yourself, you tell your friends. And they’re so

impressed with your weight loss, they go out and buy a copy of the book, the

supplements and whatever other gimmicks they’re offering, all in an effort to

save their waists and hiplines from seemingly perpetual expansion. And soon they

begin telling all their friends about the miracle diet that (finally!) took off

those stubborn pounds. And so the circle of dieters grows as fast as the wallets

of the Diet Doctors.

 

Now fast-forward just three years.

No one’s talking any more.

In fact, 95 percent of the people who thought they had been saved from

everlasting weight gain are off these strange diets.12 Not only did the weight

return, but they’re heavier now than when they started the diet and they’ve

increased their percentage of body fat to boot.

Some miracle.

They would have been better off had they never started the diet in the

first place. In fact, research shows that dieters gain more weight in the long

run than those who don't follow any weight-loss diet at all.

Now fast-forward just five years.

 

Virtually everyone who started the miracle diet is off the diet. In fact,

it’s a miracle they could put up with these eating regimens for so long.

The yo-yo diet cycle is nothing new. The first popular “high-protein” diet

book was published in 1864 by an English casket maker named William Banting.

During this same era, P.T. Barnum told Americans “There’s a sucker born every

minute,” and the casket-maker’s diet did, among other things, prove P.T. Barnum

right. The Atkins Diet, Zone Diet, South Beach and other “high-protein” diets

all have their roots in, appropriately enough, a casket maker’s diet because

they all contribute to heart disease, kidney disease, osteoporosis and our

common cancers, not to mention the constipation, gastrointestinal difficulties,

bad breath and other symptoms that are the result of “high protein” diets.

Little wonder the American Dietetic Association has described these diets as “a

nightmare.”13 The phrase “high-protein” is simply a euphemism for “high-fat” to

disguise the fact these diets are plowing an incredibly unhealthy diet down your

throat, with the Atkins diet being up to 60

percent fat.

 

The fact Banting’s diet was all the rage in the late 1800’s and

Atkins-like diets are now the rage over 100 years later shows 1) how little

progress we have made in making people understand such quick fixes don’t work;

2) the power of advertising; and 3) how such diets come into vogue when the

price of meat is cheap. People think Atkins has come up with something new in

the diet field. All he did was popularize a failed diet that was over 100 years

old.

 

Now, take a deep breath because I want you to think about something. Don’t

you think it’s strange – perhaps more than a little embarrassing – that none of

these diet plans work in the long term, yet we keep shelling out money only to

prove that history does repeat itself – at least when it comes to diet plans?

Have Americans become so desperate that common sense has totally gone out the

window?

 

Think about it. We’re in such pathetic shape that the most educated

population on the face of the earth now needs a doctor to tell them how to eat.

In the meantime, billions of “uneducated” people throughout the world are in

better health than most Americans, keep slim figures and many have never even

seen a doctor. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that people were getting

better advice about what they should eat when they were seeing witch doctors.

The goal of weight loss is to reduce the percentage of body fat and you

cannot lose body fat quickly. Any program that promises quick weight loss is not

losing fat, but simply water. Losing weight is not complicated at all. In fact,

it’s quite simple and the Diet Doctors have done more to confuse the issue than

anyone else. (See Notes - Problems With the Glycemic Index, for one example.)

But there’s a method to their madness: the more complicated dieting seems, the

more money there is to be made from all the confusion. And although these diets

don’t work – even for the Diet Doctors – the good doctors are more than willing

to accept your money for the advice they’re selling, advice they can’t even

follow themselves.

 

Why are things so insane? In a word: money. Selling food, supplements and

diet plans is big money. Selling the easy way out is big money. Telling people

they can lose more weight watching TV than exercising is big money.

Once all the fog has lifted, you’ll see just how simple it is to lose

weight. You won’t have to buy expensive supplements or special foods, join

programs, make yourself miserable or participate in any of the money-making

schemes designed to impoverish you. Americans are now spending over $40 billion

dollars a year in their desperate efforts to shed pounds and get thin. What diet

ads should say is “I lost $350 in two week! Ask me how!” And the vast majority

of these bucks flows into the pockets of people with an M.D. or Ph.D. behind

their names – and most should be ashamed of themselves for not telling people

the truth about weight loss, but instead perpetuating a self-enrichment scam.

 

Weight loss involves much more than counting calories and eating the right

foods. Losing weight is not about the body – it’s about the mind. It’s about

changing the way you think about food. It’s also about changing the way you

think about life. Your weight is the most visible reflection of who you are and

losing weight involves nothing short of fundamentally changing your life. Change

your life first, then the weight will come off naturally – and stay off.

We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare. Popular diets are

about the hare that loses weight very fast, but ends up losing the race because

the pounds return over time. The tortoise, on the other hand, is slow but steady

and ends up winning the race by losing weight slowly and surely – and keeping it

off for a lifetime.

 

The RAVE Diet & Lifestyle is a long-term health regimen designed not only

to lose weight, but also to enhance your health and energy level and to prevent

(and even reverse) the common diseases that are ravaging Americans today. Most

diet plans start off with a bang and have you lose 20 pounds in a few months. I

would rather you change your eating habits first and gradually lose those 20

pounds over the course of a year so they will stay off the rest of your life and

never come back.

If you’re reading this book because you’ve tried the Diet Doctors and

failed, take heart because the road to success is usually paved with failure. I

believe that knowledge is power. Just as a good stockbroker uses his knowledge

of stocks to make you a profit, knowledge of food will make you thin and give

you all the benefits that come with such a lifestyle.

 

Being overweight affects all aspects of your life and it becomes

cumulative. Your self-respect declines, you stay in more, you become more

sedentary, you eat for comfort and end up putting on even more weight. If you’re

going to achieve success in weight loss, you are going to have to take an honest

look at yourself, what you’re eating and how you’re living. The purpose of this

book is to help you do just that.

 

We’re in a state of denial about our weight and as our waistlines expand,

we’ve lost sight of what normal weight is. We keep growing bigger and bigger and

think it’s normal because we’ve become used to it. Unfortunately, what’s normal

to Americans in the 21st century is fat. Have you ever looked at those old-time

pictures of working class people living in the 1800s from a weight perspective?

Then compared their bodies to ours now? The only fat people you will see in

those old pictures are wealthy people, who could afford to eat much like

Americans eat today. The average working class American back in those times was

thin because they were doing two things correctly: eating the right foods and

getting exercise.

Being overweight – and especially being obese – can lead to a host of

diseases, among them heart disease. The only scientifically proven diets to

reverse heart disease are RAVE Diets. In fact, the RAVE Diet is a friendlier

version of other diets that are used to reverse heart disease. No other diet can

show actual proof of heart disease reversal. None. And if you eat to prevent

heart disease, you will also prevent the other major chronic diseases that are

plaguing Western nations, including diabetes, our common cancers, as well as

hundreds of other diet-related diseases.

In other words, you will get much, much more out of the RAVE Diet than

just permanent weight loss. You’ll get a lifetime of good health.

 

Diet, Disease & Weight Loss

 

“Most people don’t let their children smoke, yet they regularly take them to

fast-food restaurants and that’s just as risky, in terms of cancer, as if they

had bought them a pack of Marlborough cigarettes.” – B. A. Stoll

 

“There is only one major disease and that is malnutrition. All ailments and

afflictions to which we may fall heir are directly traceable to this major

disease.” – D.W. Cavanaugh, M.D., Cornell University

 

There is an old Indian legend in which six blind men come across an elephant.

Having no idea what an elephant was, they moved in close and started to feel it.

One touched it’s leg and described the elephant as a pillar. Another touched its

tail and declared an elephant was a rope. The third touched its ear and said the

elephant was like a big fan. And so on. The blind men then began to argue about

what an elephant was, based on their experiences – with each insisting he was

correct. The problem, of course, was that none of the blind men could “see” the

entire elephant, only parts of it.

 

Many of the problems Americans have with understanding the relationship of

diet to disease are analogous to this story. Unfortunately, the inability to see

the whole picture is greatly reinforced by so-called “scientific” studies

because they only look at specific parts of the entire picture.

If you would like to read more from the RAVE Diet,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ahhh...imagining that irresistible " new car " smell?

Check outnew cars at Autos.