Excerpt: 'Total Wellbeing Diet'

The Total Wellbeing Diet

why lose weight?

It's important to be concerned about how much you weigh. The health implications of being overweight and inactive are many: heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, osteoporosis, infertility, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes (a condition that is rapidly increasing as America gets fatter; see page 20) can all be traced to carrying excess pounds. And apart from the wider health considerations, being within your healthy weight range helps you look and feel better all round. It's also not rocket science that exercise is good for your health.

You don't need us to tell you that being overweight doesn't feel great. But you don't need to be skinny to be healthy—just a little thinner than you are now will make a big difference. Unrealistic expectations are just demoralizing. Always set your sights on losing the first few pounds and look at it as a great success if you keep them off for a year or more. If you do better than that, brilliant! But don't give yourself a hard time if you don't make it immediately. Be forgiving.

Depending on your weight, losing just a few pounds can make a huge difference to the way your body functions. Even a weight loss as small as 7–9 pounds, if it is maintained in the long term, can help prevent type 2 diabetes. Well before the scales have started to register a downward movement, your body has responded to eating less. Within 24 hours of cutting down, there are already significant improvements in your blood pressure, blood glucose levels, blood insulin levels, and cholesterol levels.

Eating less can also slow down aging, heart disease and many other chronic diseases. This is because eating too much can cause damage to our DNA. The ability of our bodies to repair this damage is even more compromised if we don't eat enough protective foods. No one yet understands quite how this happens, but we know enough to say that putting on weight is harming us in more ways than we originally thought! Isn't slowing down the aging process a great incentive to be a little more choosy about how much and what we eat?
Losing weight, whether you need to lose a few pounds or a lot, doesn't have to be a battle. It should be about eating well and incorporating more exercise into your life. The Total Wellbeing Diet is a nutritionally balanced eating plan that has been medically and scientifically tested. Not only that, we have designed it so that you can tailor your daily calorie intake to achieve your personal weight-loss goals. As we said before, it's not a "one diet fits all" program.

what sets the Total Wellbeing Diet apart?

First of all, it's important to note that the Total Wellbeing Diet is a protein-plus, low-fat diet and bears virtually no resemblance to other popular high-protein diets you may have heard about.
The Total Wellbeing Diet is not a very low-carb diet. In fact it contains moderate lower amounts of slow-release carbohydrates (the ones with a low GI; see page 53) that are essential for energy and for maintaining your blood glucose levels. It is nutritionally balanced and can be maintained effectively in the long term.

What sets the Total Wellbeing Diet apart is that it has been tested on hundreds of people since 1997 and is more than just a weight-loss strategy; it is a protein-plus, low-fat eating plan that can help you lose weight and keep it off.

We based our diet on clinically tested research information that clearly indicated protein foods are more satisfying than fats or carbohydrate, are helpful in maintaining muscle, and are good for heart health. Although we built the menus for your daily calorie needs around protein foods, we also included plenty of grains, fruits and vegetables, and "good" fats, to pack as much healthy eating as possible into your daily calorie allowance. Although protein foods are a rich source of nutrients, the additional foods were vital in adding fiber, vitamin C and B vitamins, along with a host of free-radical-fighting antioxidants.

So although you may be eating less when you are on the Total Wellbeing Diet than you usually do, you shouldn't feel too many hunger pangs, and your body will reap the health benefits. Take a look opposite at the snapshot of how just one day on our protein-plus, low-fat eating plan looks. No need for a vitamin pill here. Each food has been carefully chosen to provide you with maximum nutrition.

Reprinted from The Total Wellbeing Diet by Dr. Manny Noakes with Dr. Peter Clifton by arrangement with New American Library, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) 2005 by CSIRO. Previously published in Australia as The CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet by Penguin Group (Australia), a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.