Yes, you read that headline correctly: Eat MORE to lose weight! I know the ‘Eat Less, Move More’ mantra has been drilled into you, but it suffers from one fatal flaw: it doesn’t work. While it’s true that regularly gorging on high-calorie food will make you gain fat, and is probably the only way to become morbidly obese (defined as having a body mass index – calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in metres, squared – over 40), that simply isn’t the way that most people become overweight.
Instead, the average person packs on excess pounds by eating insufficient high-nutrient, low kilojoule foods, which means they’re filling up on low-nutrient, high-kilojoule foods. The results of this imbalance are not just weight gain, but a downward spiral of low energy, poor immunity, and stress on every organ system in the body leading to chronic diseases of all descriptions – type 2 diabetes, degenerative arthritis, dementia, heart disease , cancer, depression and a host of other maladies.
This ‘high calorie malnutrition’ as it’s been dubbed, will never be solved by just ‘eating less’, that is, cutting back on portion sizes. Instead, the focus needs to be on eating MORE of the right foods so that they literally crowd out the wrong foods.
On my recent trip to the US, I had the enormous privilege of sitting in on the weekly doctors meeting at TrueNorth Health Center, in which the health histories and progress of the current program participants were discussed. The meeting was held at lunch time, which gave me the opportunity to check out what each staff member had on their plate. TrueNorth has the largest dinner plates I’ve ever seen in my life, and program participants who aren’t fasting or on prescribed diets are encouraged to eat as much as they like from the salad bar and hot meal selection.
The staff take the ‘eat as much as you like’ advice pretty seriously too. As I looked around the room, a striking correlation emerged between how high the food was piled on each plate, and how slim the eater was! Long-term staff such as Dr Michael Klaper, Peter Sultana, Erwin Linzner and Doug Lisle are all lean and vital-looking, with no signs of ‘middle-aged spread’; on the other hand, some of the interns who had only been exposed to the centre’s food philosophy (and dining room!) for a few weeks looked more like typical Americans – built for comfort, not for speed, as a colleague of mine is fond of saying ;-).
Closer examination of the contents of their plates revealed that those boasting slim bodies were actually eating more than the stouter ones.. but it was what they were eating that made all the difference. A plate piled high with salad, fresh fruit, cooked vegetables and starches such as potatoes and brown rice may look like a lot of food, but actually contains less calories than a plate with a lower overall volume of food but more nuts and dried fruit.
Paula, a graduate of The LEAN Program is a shining example of how effective this approach is. For the 6-week duration of The LEAN Program, Paula focused on including G-BOMBS – the 6 power foods for vibrant health and effortless weight loss – in every meal. She found that she was so full after eating her G-BOMBS, she had no room for anything else! She thoroughly enjoyed her G-BOMBS-based meals and ate as much as she wanted. At the end of the 6 week program, Paula was delighted to discover that she had lost over 8 kilograms – without even trying to ‘diet’.
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