Guests at the institute often ask, “Will I lose weight on the Hippocrates diet?” Some want to lose extra pounds; others worry that they’ll lose more than they want or need to. The surprising truth is this: the Hippocrates diet can meet the needs of those who are overweight, underweight, and normal weight. The nourishment of living foods fuels the body with the energy needed to maintain optimal health and body size—no more, no less. So if you are overweight, you will lose all your excess weight on this program. If you are slender, you will maintain the weight and body size you now have. If you are underweight, the Hippocrates Health Program can help you put on the additional pounds you need in order to achieve robust health.
Let’s take a quick look at our fascination with dieting during this century:
It’s been a long road to the Hippocrates diet. Now with objective distance, we can more easily see what was hype, what was dangerous, and why most weight-loss diets were ultimately dismal failures.
Ordinary slimming diets are notoriously poor nutritionally. The grapefruit diet, fasting diets, and the thousands of “Seven-Day Diets” heralded from the covers of women’s magazines starve the body of more than just calories and fat. They restrict the very life-giving fuel the human body needs to function.
Because these diets are short on vitamins, minerals, and other essential nutrients, the body (in desperate bid for nutritional satisfaction) demands more and more calories. So when starvation can no longer be ignored and the diet is discarded, the dieter overeats. This bingeing on non-nutritional foods produces poisonous wastes that the body can’t get rid of. As a survival technique, the body stores the excess waste in the layer of fat under the skin. The body’s need for more energy than most slimming diets provide triggers bingeing, bad eating habits, and more weight gain.
Fasting is another popular but dangerous and counterproductive weight-loss strategy. Without a steady supply of glucose from carbohydrates, the body turns to its own protein and fat to meet its energy needs. Protein is borrowed from tissues, muscles, and organs, converted into glucose, and burned for fuel. By the end of a long fast, huge amounts of protein along with smaller quantities of fat, have been used by the body for energy. The result can be a total weakening of the organs and body tissues—damage that may take years to rebuild, and even then only if the maintenance diet used is adequate in carbohydrates for energy and in vitamins, minerals, proteins, and enzymes for assimilation. Adding insult to injury, the body is more prone to weight gain after a fast due to its weakened condition.
Merely counting calories is another sure way to sabotage a diet because reducing or increasing calories alone results in a faulty system of weight management. It is not the calories in a food that wholly determine if the body will store it as fat. In many cases, nutritious foods have a higher caloric value than junk foods, but only the nutritious foods (being rich in enzymes, oxygen, trace minerals, and nutrients) are going to be absorbed and utilized by the body without causing weight gain. The lower-calorie piece of junk food is not absorbed or easily eliminated and it remains in the body as stored fat. Because calories are not the focus of healthy weight maintenance, you’ll note that in this chapter, the Hippocrates Program does not use the word “calorie” but rather uses the word “energy.” This more aptly describes what we gain from our food.
The Atkins, Scarsdale, and Stillman diets of the 1970s put a new spin on weight reduction. They were formulated by medical physicians and supposedly based on the nutritional needs of the body. Hundreds of thousands of people bought their books, went to their workshops, and contributed much time and effort to these weight-loss programs. Still, most failed in the long run.
In 1972, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution hit the bookstores with great acclaim. The diet guaranteed weight loss by counteracting the metabolic imbalance that causes people to get fat in the first place. It’s true that metabolic imbalances contribute to weight gain, but Atkins tried to find a balance by cutting out carbohydrates. (As we now know, carbohydrates promote weight loss by burning efficiently and cleanly, breaking down to safe water and carbon dioxide.) He also ignored (or did not at that time fully understand) the destructive potential of high-fat foods. Happy to assure dieters that they could lose weight without counting calories, Atkins bragged that others who followed his diet had “lost weight on bacon and eggs for breakfast, on heavy cream in their coffee, on mayonnaise in their salads, butter sauce on their lobster, on spareribs, roast duck, and pastrami.” Exactly where did Atkins expect the excess fat from this kind of diet to go? Disillusioned dieters found that it was stored in their bodies.
In 1974, Dr. Stillman’s 14-Day Shape Up Program was published.This popular book advocated the combination of diet and exercise for weight loss. This was a sound and proven idea, but Stillman’s guarantee of a “miracle” weight loss of twenty-five pounds or more in just fourteen days on his Protein-PLUS diet (high protein low-carbohydrate) and just ten minutes of exercise a day was too good to be true. Stillman assured readers that they could return to their normal diet after the fourteen-day program. Yes, the weight dropped off on this diet, which was 80 percent to 90 percent protein and only 5 percent carbohydrate and 5 percent fat. But that kind of weight loss can be sustained for no more than fourteen days; the diet’s end brought a quick return of any lost weight.
In 1978, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet was written by Dr. Herman Tarnower. This highly restrictive diet reduced carbohydrate consumption to 34.5 percent of daily intake (with protein up at 43 percent) and put great emphasis on calorie counting. Dieters were limited to one thousand calories a day and strict adherence to a detailed daily menu with the warning, “Eat exactly what is assigned. Don’t substitute.” Tarnower may not have fully understood the psychology of deprivation that sabotages any diet, but he should have known that any man or woman, whether active or inactive, needs more than a thousand calories a day to survive without extreme fatigue and eventual malnourishment. Again, thousands of dieters struggled through the program feeling tired, light-headed, and generally ill and tried to ignore the body’s cry for fuel.
The Atkins, Stillman, and Scarsdale diets all boasted that they caused increased body-fat metabolism and the production of ketones. Ketones are the waste products of partially burned (or metabolized) fat. “If you are producing ketones,” stated Tarnower, “it is a sign that your body is burning off fat at an accelerated rate; you are enjoying Fast Fat Metabolism. And this is what we want.” Apparently, Atkins, Tarnower, and Stillman did not know how dangerous ketones can be. Being acidic, they can change the nearly neutral pH of the blood. We’ve already seen in chapter 3 what happens to the health of the body when the blood levels turn acidic. In addition, a sudden change of diet can produce a rapid rise in the acid level, producing a diabetic-like state. The ultimate danger of excessive ketones is ketoacidosis, which can be fatal.
The Atkins, Scarsdale, and Stillman diets all recommended high-protein intake. This is the reason for the dramatic stories of successful weight loss. As the body attempts to dilute the toxic by-products of the excess protein ingested, large amounts of water are lost from the body tissues shortly after the diet is begun. Then weight is lost quickly with the elimination of the water and the toxins it carries out of the body. But a week or so into the diet, the dieter hits a plateau. When the diet is discontinued, the dieter gains weight rapidly. In Dr. Atkins’ own words, “I concede that the worst feature about this diet is the rapidity with which you gain if you abandon it.”
Rapid weight gain is not really the worst feature. High-protein or liquid protein (like Oprah’s Optifast) diets cause physical damage to the body. They might cause kidney damage through ketosis; might bring on gout; might increase cholesterol and triglyceride levels, stressing the heart; might damage the liver; might cause constipation due to the excessive use of fiber-poor animal foods; might wash minerals and vitamins out of the body, causing tiredness, bone damage, and tooth decay; and might increase the risk of certain types of cancer. It’s now clear that not only do high-protein diets fail to keep weight off—they are dangerous.
In 1979, Nathan Pritikin wrote The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise. This was the first diet system to make a declaration of war against processed foods, fats, sugars, proteins, salt, caffeine, and alcohol. Pritikin recommended a lowfat, low-protein, and high carbohydrate diet that restricted meat and fish to under a quarter pound daily. Pritikin declared, “Foods high in complex carbohydrates—grains, vegetables, and fruits—are the best foods you can eat.” He threw away the calorie counting and starvation that seemed synonymous with the word “diet.” He offered medical proof that good health depended on appropriate body weight and sound nutritional diet plan. He also added exercise to the diet formula. Although Pritikin did not acknowledge that there is a psychological component to the reason why people overeat (in fact he ridiculed the idea), his work brought international attention to a high-carbohydrate weight-management program that legitimately promised weight loss and good health.
Nathan Pritikin brought us more than a new way of dieting; he gave us new reasons for losing weight. The vanity and social pressure that fueled the diets of earlier years were now nudged from the foreground by health concerns. Pritikin demonstrated that a healthy diet and appropriate body weight directly influenced one’s health.
Today, we know that overweight people do not live as long as lean people, and they are a lot less healthy while they are alive. Obesity increases the risks of developing diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, arteriosclerosis, gall bladder disease, and certain types of cancer. It aggravates gouty arthritis, damages the liver, increases the risk of hernias, and causes difficulty in pregnancy and childbirth.
Putting more food into the body than is needed results in stress to the heart and blood vessels. Blood and lymph circulation slows and causes blood pressure to rise. If you are a man between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, your chance of developing heart disease increases by 30 percent for each ten pounds you gain above your ideal weight.
Obesity, defined as being more than 20 percent over ideal weight, causes twenty million new illnesses in the U.S. every year and kills 300,000 people. “We are literally in the midst of an obesity epidemic,” says Judith Stern, vice president of the American Obesity Association. While thousands diet to drop their excess pounds, almost all of the few who succeed regain the weight within five years. No wonder so many have given up hope.
The more we find reasons for maintaining an appropriate body weight, the more excuses emerge for not losing weight:
“I diet constantly, but I never lose any weight.”
Excess weight is not caused by eating too much food. It’s caused by eating the wrong foods. The typical diet we eat today is high in fat and low in carbohydrates. Processing has removed the low-calorie fiber and bulk from most foods. What is left is unbalanced, condensed, and fattening food that can’t be absorbed or eliminated from the body. It is stored as fat deposits and can cause obesity.
“I have a medical problem that keeps me from losing weight.”
Some say they have an underactive thyroid that causes their weight problem. The fact is, hypothyroidism as a cause of weight gain is rare and can be treated easily. Others argue that their pituitary gland fails to respond to the body’s signals that hunger is abated, and so they continue to eat. In rare cases, this may be true. But for most of us, it probably is not.
“Fat runs in my family.”
Some look to genetics for answers to their problem with excess weight. It’s true that certain body types hold more weight, but that doesn’t mean they can’t become lean. Most people who have been fat since birth have a normal number of fat cells, but an abnormal amount of fat in them. A regulated metabolism (which can be developed through the Hippocrates Program) is the key to maintaining a healthy body weight.
Modern science has found a way to let us keep our excuses and lose weight too. In 1996, Procter & Gamble received FDA approval for a fat substitute called Olestra. Olestra is a synthetic product made from sugar and fatty acids, and because it passes through the body without being absorbed, it has no calories. Olestra also has a property known as “mouth feel,” which makes fat-free food seem rich and creamy. It has been approved for use in salted snacks such as chips, popcorn, and crackers, and other uses are expected in the near future.
The FDA acknowledges that Olestra is not without negative side-effects. Products containing Olestra must carry a warning label reading: “This product contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping.… Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients. Vitamins A, D, E, and K have been added.” If the whole truth be known, the warning label should be much longer. Dr. Sheldon Margen, a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dale A. Ogar, the managing editor of the university’s Wellness Letter have reported these additional concerns in their syndicated column “Nutrition & You”:
The effort to create products that let us have our cake and eat it too cater to all the excuses we make for not watching our weight. But the fact remains that a truly healthful and fit lifestyle requires some effort and knowledge of what the body really needs to maintain its proper weight. The Hippocrates diet needs no warning label.
So, you’re wondering, how does the Hippocrates Health Program fit into this emerging picture of diet plans? The answer is simple and straightforward: The Hippocrates Health Program is unbeatable for safe, effective, long-lasting weight loss, gain, or maintenance. It combines a healthful diet with exercise; it acknowledges the psychological factors involved in dieting, and comes up with a no-fail program.
The Hippocrates diet is high in carbohydrates, rich in vitamins and minerals, and low in fat—similar to the best working examples of modern weight loss plans (like the Pritikin diet). But the Hippocrates diet has a unique feature—enzymes. Enzymes break down the excess fat that needs to be eliminated in weight loss. An examination of the fat deposits of individuals weighing between three hundred pounds and five hundred pounds reveals decreased levels of fat-splitting lipase enzymes. Only enzymes do the work of breaking up fat deposits and eliminating them, so a diet void of enzyme-rich food (no matter how restrictive or low-calorie) is bound to frustrate dieters in the long run. Most diets, even the best ones, fail to get results because of the absence of enzymes in them. Cooked, enzymeless food is fattening; the same amounts of raw food are not.
The Hippocrates approach to dieting works with nature rather than against it. A living-foods diet does not mean starvation—it means supernutrition and slow, steady, healthy weight loss. You do not have to count calories or weigh out bird-size portions on kitchen scales or feel deprived when you do not eat and guilty when you do. The same living-foods diet that nourishes and heals those with diabetes and arthritis works wonders for the overweight.
The Hippocrates diet helps you lose weight by working with the body’s natural digestive mechanisms to do the following:
After a few weeks of eating living foods, you will naturally tend to eat less. You will feel more full on raw foods because they contain a lot of fiber and essential nutrients. Your body will not constantly cry out for more. Those awful cravings that lead to excessive eating and obesity belong to cooked diets.
The bottom line is this: The rate of obesity is rising because we eat too much high-calorie food without enzymes or fiber, and not enough uncooked, unprocessed whole fruits, vegetables, sprouts, beans, and grains. Processed foods are too dense in calories and provide little energy. It takes thirty ears of corn to make the oil needed to fry an average serving of French fries. Two pounds of beets are needed to produce the sugar that flavors the fruit pie and soft drink in a typical fast-food meal. These items, and other overrefined and concentrated foods, have less fiber to fill up space in your stomach than do foods in their whole state. You can eat more processed foods than whole foods (and get their extra calories) and still feel less full. If you balance lower and higher-energy whole living foods, you cannot fit enough food in your stomach in three satisfying meals to become obese! It’s that simple.
At the institute, I have worked with thousands of overweight people, nearly all of whom have had immediate weight reductions on the Hippocrates diet. Most of the raw fruits and vegetables used in salads are fat-free foods and are rich sources of vitamins and minerals. A mistake some people make when they leave the institute is to eat plenty of fat-free salads, but then turn to cooked foods to get the bulk of their diet. For best results, the majority of the energy units in your diet should come from raw foods.
When trying to lose weight on the Hippocrates diet, high-energy raw foods such as sprouted beans, vegetables, sprouted grains, some fruits, and nuts (and recipes made from them) should be used each day. These foods are richly nourishing; they will fill you up, but not out. They will also supply you with plenty of energy.
These foods are also rich in enzymes, which guarantee efficient and total digestion. The food enzymes in the Hippocrates diet attack stores of fat and unwanted tissue, breaking them down cell by cell and eliminating them. Remember: only enzymes can do the work of breaking up fat cells and eliminating their waste. Living foods and juices require less of your digestive juices than cooked foods do. This allows your body’s internal “house cleaning crew” to use all of its enzyme strength to break down and eliminate unwanted fat cells. In people eating cooked foods, this enzyme strength is tied up by the digestive system and is unable to help break down the excess fat unless they literally starve themselves. On the Hippocrates diet, you can eat living, fresh foods to your heart’s content, and still lose weight safely and surely.
You can maximize your weight loss if you periodically eat mostly living foods that adjust your metabolism and are naturally low in calories—especially grain and bean sprouts, greens, and sliced vegetables in salads, with plenty of sprout juices. A week every month of this low-calorie diet will be often enough. But for the other three weeks of the month, follow the standard Hippocrates diet, using all the different foods and food groups, including those higher in energy units. The higher-calorie living foods will help you feel satisfied.
If you are overweight and stay physically active (see “Weight Loss and Exercise,” this page), you should easily drop one to three pounds a week if you stick to the diet. Don’t try to lose weight too rapidly, though. Shedding pounds too quickly can lead to loss of muscle and body protein, dehydration, acidosis, menstrual troubles, back pains, and hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Eat! For breakfast have watermelon juice or dilute one-third fruit juice to two-thirds water. If you need more, try grain cereal with rice milk. At lunch, eat a big salad with all kinds of sprouts and a seed, avocado, or vegetable dressing; a handful of sprouted almonds; or some bread with sprouted bean spread. For dinner, try soup, grain crisps, vegetable loaf, and occasionally, two hours after your meal, a piece of raw fruit pie. There’s no need to make dieting a drag and starve yourself, when all it takes is a little creativity, time, and effort to really enjoy your new diet.
You can’t rely on exercise alone to slough off extra pounds—if excess waste and cooked and processed foods continue to stream into the body, even the ardent exerciser will lose hardly any weight. But when combined with the Hippocrates diet, even light exercise will help shed pounds. A half hour or more of light exercise such as brisk walking also stimulates the secretion of epinephrine, or adrenaline, which helps to suppress the appetite. Conversely, activity below a certain level can increase the appetite, so the “right amount” of exercise certainly belongs in your weight-loss program.
We used to think that high-impact aerobic exercises were the best kind of exercise for weight loss. But we now understand that the jolt of these exercises to the skeletal structure is very stressful and can even displace organs and contribute to the formation of wrinkles. A better kind of aerobic exercise is found in passive, but high-energy, activities such as vigorous walking, swimming, bicycling, and skating. Gyms and spas offer workouts on treadmills, bike machines, Nordic-Tracks, stair climbers, ski machines, and even machines that duplicate swimming exercise without water! There are lots of ways to enjoy an active lifestyle that help you drop pounds.
Exercise is indeed the dieter’s best friend, not just because it burns calories, but also because physiologically it is the fastest way to change metabolism, to cause a shift in the amount of food that is converted to energy and muscle rather than to fat. Moreover, exercise not only burns energy, but it keeps your metabolic rate high for up to four hours after you have finished. This means you are still expending energy long after you have finished your workout. To convert food and stored fat to energy, we need the oxygen derived from exercise. Without it, we feel tired and lazy because we cannot produce enough energy.
The kind and amount of exercise needed to knock off excess weight varies from person to person. A standard recommendation is to exercise five days a week at a level that will increase your heart rate for thirty minutes.
Now that you’ve found the Hippocrates Program, the nonsense is over. You can stop playing the diet yo-yo game, paying hundreds of dollars each year and risking your health on fad diets that allow you plenty of fattening and disease-promoting foods. What you need is nourishment and enzymes, not starvation. The Hippocrates Program will change the quality of what you eat by letting whole vegetables, fruits, sprouts, and greens replace fattening foods such as butter, cheese, eggs, red meats, and refined oils and sugar, as well as many high-fat vegetarian foods. And it will make exercise a natural part of your life and weight-loss program.
Discussions of weight control tend to focus on weight loss and ignore the fact that there are thousands of people with lean body builds who don’t want to lose weight and many more who are underweight or who have lost weight after an extended illness. The Hippocrates Health Program addresses these needs also. One should eat heavier living foods and develop muscle mass through resistance exercise.
If you have a body size that you feel is just right for your age and height, the Hippocrates diet will supply you with the daily energy needed to maintain that weight. You may find, however, that you lose some weight during the first few weeks. This happens because the body is getting rid of waste weight: fat, calcium deposits, and toxins. Cleaning out the junk can cause a reduction in weight. But then, as the muscles begin to redevelop through healthy nutrition and resistance exercises, you’ll see your body weight return to normal (with improved body shape!). During this period, you may want to follow the guidelines for gaining weight described below until your normal weight returns and stabilizes.
After the initial period of detoxification that occurs when you first begin the Hippocrates diet (see chapter 6 for details about detoxification), the Hippocrates Program can help you gain weight—and build up your body strength and vitality at the same time. Too many underweight people feast on high-fat foods hoping to gain extra pounds, and thus good health. But they don’t realize that the body can’t regain vitality if no nutrients are in these foods and if the cell’s ability to absorb nutrients is diminished by lack of enzymes and oxygen in the food.
Weight gain on the Hippocrates Program is based on a two-part plan: increased energy unit intake and resistance exercises. You’ll want to make sure that your daily diet includes hefty portions of nutritious, high-energy foods such as avocados, sprouted grains and beans, seeds, and nuts. Select recipes in chapter 11 that include these ingredients. (Be sure to try sprouted grain breads and bean meals.) The foods’ high-energy quotient and high nutrition will give your body what it needs to gain weight.
When weight gain is your goal, aerobic exercise is not your friend. You don’t want to burn energy while you exercise—you want to build strong body muscle. That’s why strength training (also called resistance training) should be part of your daily health program. Today, free weights (such as barbells) and/or resistance equipment (such as Nautilus or Universal equipment) are common in virtually all gyms and spas. Other forms of resistance exercises such as swimming against a current or with water weights and fins, isometrics, and Callanetics let you vary your routine for enjoyment and body growth.
You can also use your own body weight for resistance exercises. Push-ups, pull-ups, abdominal exercises, back extensions, and jumping rope are simple ways to effectively build body strength. These exercises build the muscles in the torso, legs, arms, and back by using gravity and functional movements. When doing resistance exercises briskly—with a count of four or five seconds in-between them—you also gain aerobic benefits without weight loss.
The benefits of resistance exercises are well worth the effort. They include the following:
This list is not complete, of course, without mention of increased body weight. The firm, strengthened muscle weighs more than the weak flabby one. So without putting on more fat, you can increase your weight and improve your appearance.
Resistance exercises are best performed three times a week for thirty minutes each time. Begin using light weights with rapid movements; then slowly increase the weight.
Thousands of weight-loss and weight-gain diets have failed because they did not take into account the mental and emotional connection we all have to food. It’s too simple to say, “Just eat less and you’ll lose weight.” If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be a billion-dollar industry built up around people’s battle with food. Food symbolizes many things to different people—love, reward, solace, celebration, a family bond, and so on. All of these emotional factors influence how we deal with our body weight and image. In addition to its recommendations regarding diet and exercise, The Hippocrates Health Program adds this psychological component to its weight management plan.
For overeaters, the need to eat often comes not from a physical hunger but from an emotional hunger. It’s our hearts that need the nourishment, our souls that need to be fed. We swallow our disappointments, we swallow our hurt, we swallow our anger, we swallow our pride. We eat when we’re excited. We eat when we’re sad, when we have too much to do or not enough to do. When our pain is intense, eating soothes us, or so we think. But it doesn’t. It creates a pain all its own. It only prolongs the misery. But we blot this out, obsessed only with the very real, transitory pleasure it offers. Undereaters, on the other hand, “treat” their pain by dieting, yet only end up with a body that is weak and thin.
The Hippocrates Program doesn’t ask you to change your personality or to stop eating. But it does give you the information you need to see food in a positive, life-sustaining and enhancing way. It reinforces that all-important premise that food is not the enemy—it is our ally in pursuit of health and longevity. On the Hippocrates Program, you will support your body in its effort to return to its healthy, vibrant shape by cleansing your body of toxins; by giving yourself permission to deal with your emotions (through relaxation techniques, psychological strengthening, and exercise); by using food for life-giving nourishment, not abusing it for emotional needs; and by feeding your body pure, unadulterated food that can be easily transformed into the nutrients you’ve been starving for. By living on living foods, you’ll be able to abandon the debilitating body-image consciousness. Old eating habits will be broken. Emotions will no longer dictate what and how much you eat.
If weight management is one of your reasons for seeking a new diet and lifestyle, you can meet your goals by following the Hippocrates Program outlined in this book. Eat any of the foods recommended in chapters 6 and 8, make up a batch of the sprouts and green juices recommended in chapter 9, and enjoy any recipe in chapter 11. The same program that gives general wellness also offers superior weight management.