In the introduction, I described a research study in which a group of women who had long been struggling with weight problems suddenly found themselves losing weight easily. Without any calorie limits at all, body fat melted away day after day. More than two years later, their weight had not come back. It was as if their bodies had somehow been reprogrammed.
One of our participants, named Jean, lived in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. As a child, she had not been overweight. After high school, she married and started raising her family, and that’s when everything changed. Her first pregnancy left her with an extra ten pounds, and she continued to gain weight through her twenties. Between her work and family responsibilities, she found it hard to focus on healthy foods or exercise. By the time she was thirty, she was significantly overweight.
She enrolled in a commercial weight loss program near her house that prescribed a specific nutrition system using specially packaged foods. It ended up costing more than she had bargained for, and she had little to show for it. She bought a book that advocated a low-carbohydrate diet and lost weight for the first couple of weeks. But the diet was boring and the recommended foods seemed unhealthy. After a loss of energy and a painful bout of constipation, she abandoned the diet. The lost weight promptly came back, and she felt that she really no longer knew what to eat.
As her weight continued to climb, she got scared. This was certainly not what she wanted, but she did not know what to do. Years of on-again, off-again dieting followed, but nothing got her on track.
Fast-forward to Jean’s fiftieth birthday. Paging through a newspaper, she saw an advertisement about our research study. She decided this might be the answer, and she came in to volunteer. We explained the diet program and showed her how it works. The study began, and she jumped in.
Two weeks later, she had already lost five pounds. That was a start. As the weeks went by, she kept losing more and more. It wasn’t tremendously fast, but it was steady.
After the first year, she had lost nearly forty pounds and looked like a different person. She was energetic and filled with life. And she lost even more in the following year.
During one of our research meetings, where our volunteers got together for cooking classes and general discussion, Jean asked a pointed question. She started by describing what she had eaten on the previous day. Breakfast had been blueberry pancakes with maple syrup (something her low-carb diet book had forbidden), with veggie sausage links on the side. Lunch was a bowl of split-pea soup, toast, and a big salad. For dinner, she’d had an artichoke appetizer, garlic bread, spinach lasagna from a recipe we had given her, and steamed broccoli, with peach sorbet for dessert. The quantity of food seemed much too generous. And yet there was no denying that her bathroom scale was getting friendlier day by day.
“So why does this work?” she asked. “It obviously does work, but what does the body actually do with all that food, so that you eat so much, and still lose weight?”
She had put her finger on one of the key reasons for our study. We wanted to test our theory that foods can actually control the appetite and ramp up metabolism, so that weight loss is almost automatic.
To put our theory to the test, we asked Jean and all the other participants to keep a detailed list of everything they ate. And we added up the calories. They kept track before the study began, and again after they had been in the study for several weeks.
When we added up the calories, the difference was a real eye-opener. Even though they were eating delicious food and were free to have as much as they wanted, it turned out that they were actually eating hundreds of calories less than before.
And here was what was most surprising: They were not aware of the difference. It seemed like they were eating the same amount as before. They liked the tastes, aromas, and everything else. As Jean pointed out, the meals seemed generous, and she was not even remotely hungry. Somehow, the participants’ appetites were satisfied much earlier than before.
Rosa had a similar experience: “The weight was coming off on its own. I never felt hungry, because you’re eating things that fill you up.”
We have repeated this assessment many times. And every time, we have found the same result: Weight seems to come off almost automatically.
Another research participant, named Mary Ann, said how wonderful it was to lose so much weight that friends barely recognized her. And yet she did this without the slightest sense of deprivation. Everything she was eating was good for her, and it completely changed her self-image. Food was no longer the enemy. Food was actually helping her slim down and get healthy.
Imagine if you could turn a switch so that you not only really liked the foods you ate, but felt totally satisfied without any desire to overeat. In essence, that’s what the foods that I’m going to tell you about actually do.
First of all, it’s clear that thin people don’t count calories. They don’t restrict portion sizes, and they don’t buy diet drinks. Those are things that overweight people do, hoping they will help.
If you aim to trim away weight, there are four specific keys to controlling your appetite naturally. I’ll share them here, and then I’ll show you how they work with real foods.
Fiber means plant roughage. It is in beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Of course, advertisers brag about the fiber in their breakfast cereals, breads, snack bars, and supplements, and how it keeps people regular and even trims cholesterol. But one of fiber’s greatest attributes is its ability to tackle your appetite. Fiber signals your brain that you’re full.
Here’s how it works: In your stomach, fiber holds water, so it’s heavy enough to trick your stomach into thinking you have eaten quite a lot. But fiber has virtually no calories. In other words, it alerts your brain that you’re full long before you’ve eaten too many calories.
You’ll find it in foods from plants. There is plenty of fiber in whole-grain bread, split-pea and lentil soups, vegetable stir-fries, and any fruit you can name. The same is true of thousands of other foods from plant sources. But you won’t find any fiber at all in meats, dairy products, or eggs. They are not plants, so they don’t have plant roughage.
Here’s what this means in the kitchen:
Let’s make chili. The usual way to make it would be to use ground beef, sometimes with added oil for stir-frying. Since beef has no fiber at all, you would likely get quite a few calories before your appetite was satisfied.
A better way would be to let beans, tomatoes, and vegetables play the starring roles, and to skip meat, cheese, and oils. It could be the most delicious chili ever served at a backyard picnic. But since it now has plenty of fiber, each bite does its part to satisfy your appetite before very many calories kick in.
If you eat meat chili, you’ll get extra calories before you feel full, because there’s no fiber to turn down your appetite. But if you have bean-and-vegetable chili, you’ll feel satisfied before you’ve overdone it on calories.
You can put this same principle to work with stews, soups, salads, main dishes, side dishes, desserts, and just about everything else. Here are some examples:
In each case, the high-fiber food satisfies your appetite with fewer calories. And you would soon notice something remarkable: You’re getting lighter day by day. Nothing feels quite as good as losing weight while eating well.
Let me emphasize that you don’t need to watch the calories. If your plate is filled with vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans, you’ll get loads of healthy fiber, and the calories will take care of themselves.
It pays huge dividends to avoid fatty foods. This is most important. Let me explain:
When a chicken eats a bit too much, those extra calories are stored as chicken fat. When a cow eats too much, those calories are stored as fat, too. It’s the same for pigs, goats, lambs, fish, and, of course, people. That’s the whole point of body fat. Nature designed it to store calories. If you eat animal fat, you’re eating an animal’s calorie-storage organ.
Just one gram of fat—from a chicken, a cow, a fish, or any other source—holds nine calories. Now, a gram of fat isn’t much—it doesn’t even fill a thimble. But every last fat gram packs nine calories.
For contrast, look at potatoes, bread, beans, and pasta. These foods have a lot of carbohydrate. But any kind of carbohydrate has only four calories per gram—less than half the calories lurking in fat.
It turns out that fats pack in the calories, while carbohydrates don’t. So why did carbohydrates get a reputation for being fattening? Well, just think about how people eat them: A potato is very low in fat and naturally low in calories. But it ends up being topped with butter, sour cream, or bacon bits—all fatty toppings. Mashed potatoes have milk whipped into them and butter or gravy dribbled on top. Toast—which has very few calories on its own—is spread with butter, or maybe margarine, both more or less pure fat. Each of these foods serves mainly as a vehicle for fatty toppings that pack in the calories. If we skip the fatty additions, the foods themselves are fine.
Now let’s look at things from your stomach’s point of view. You’ve finished your day’s work and are at home, having your dinner. You are talking with your family, watching television, or doing whatever it is that you normally do at dinnertime.
But your stomach has a mind of its own. Your stomach is not distracted by conversation, and it could not care less what is on television. What it is focused on is how much you’ve eaten. With an elaborate network of nerves, your stomach can detect how heavy and bulky your foods are. Eventually, your stomach reaches the point it has been waiting for. This is the satiety point—the point when you are full. Your stomach sends a signal to your brain’s appetite centers that you have had enough. You put down your fork, and eventually you get up from the table.
Let’s say you were to swallow a forkful of chicken. Well, your stomach knows it’s there, but it’s not especially impressed. The fact is, that bite of chicken does not weigh very much, and it’s not very bulky, either. It is not filling you up. So you have another bite, and another. Eventually, your stomach reaches the satiety point. But all the while, each bite of chicken has been carrying in fat and calories (even without the skin, about a quarter of its calories are nothing but fat, which is why your hands feel greasy after touching it). By the time you reach the satiety point, you’ve gotten more calories than you bargained for.
Let’s take another scenario. Let’s say you have a bite of cheese. It’s not very big, either. So you’ll have another, and another. Even though it is not filling, about 70 percent of the calories in typical cheeses come from plain old fat. So it really packs in the calories. By the time you’re full, you’ve eaten lots of fat and far too many calories.
Now, other foods are not like this at all. A bean, for example, is completely different from chicken fat. It is not designed for storing calories. It’s just a seed, and it can’t overeat. A fruit is similar. An apple, for example, has just enough calories to give apple seeds a start in life. There is no greasy fat layer on these foods. You’ve never seen a bean or an apple marbled with fat.
Your stomach is completely impressed with these foods. They have lots of fiber, of course, which means they hold water so your stomach’s nerve network really can’t miss them. But because they are so modest in fat, they are really low in calories. As a group, vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes (beans, peas, and lentils) are naturally very low in fat. So they tend to be low in calories. With loads of fiber and very little fat, they satisfy your appetite long before you’ve overdone it on calories.
When you eat foods from animals, you inevitably get stored fat. When you eat foods from plants, you don’t. Yes, it really is that simple!
Animal Products Versus Plant Products: What a Difference!
| ANIMAL PRODUCTS | PLANT PRODUCTS | ||||
| Fat (%)* | Fiber | Fat (%)* | Fiber | ||
| Atlantic salmon* | 40% | 0 | Apple, 1 medium | 3% | 4 g |
| Beef, top sirloin, lean | 29% | 0 | Beans, navy, ½ cup, cooked | 4% | 10 g |
| Chicken, white meat, skinless | 23% | 0 | Broccoli, 1 cup, cooked | 4% | 3 g |
| Egg, 1, boiled | 61% | 0 | Lentils, ½ cup, cooked | 3% | 8 g |
| Cheddar cheese, 2 ounces | 74% | 0 | Rice, brown, 1 cup, cooked | 7% | 3.5 g |
To avoid fat, it pays to skip animal products; most of them, including salmon, tuna, turkey, and chicken, have more fat than is healthful. You will also want to be aware of the sources of vegetable fat: added oils, fried foods, and oily salad dressings, for starters. Also, there’s quite a lot of fat in nuts, seeds, olives, avocados, and some soy products.
By now you might be wondering, If I leave these foods out of my diet, will I really feel satisfied? And the answer is that you’re actually replacing foods—bringing in healthful foods that can elbow the unhealthful ones out of the way. So you’ll find that your new way of eating is actually more satisfying than the way you are eating now. As you’ll see, this is built in to the Kickstart program.
You now have two powerful keys for appetite control. By (1) sticking with high-fiber foods—that means healthful plant-based foods—and (2) avoiding fatty foods, you are likely to experience powerful and continued weight loss. You don’t need to bother with counting calories, portions, or anything else. You’re eating delicious food, and having as much as you want. And the calories take care of themselves.
Let’s look at two breakfasts:
Which breakfast has more calories?
If you guessed that the pancake breakfast must be loaded with calories, think again. At 484 calories, it has about 50 calories less than the egg-and-bacon breakfast (535 calories). And it has no cholesterol at all, unlike the egg-and-bacon breakfast, which has 452 milligrams of cholesterol—an astronomical amount.
If you’d like an even lower-calorie breakfast, go with old-fashioned oatmeal, along with two slices of toast, and you’ll get only 440 calories.
The idea is not to actually track the calories, of course. These are just illustrations to show that when you pick foods that are high in fiber and low in fat, you may think you’re getting tons of calories, but in reality these are low-calorie foods.
Okay, how about lunch? Let’s say you’re pressed for time and are stopping in at a Burger King. You can choose the chicken sandwich or the BK veggie burger, hold the cheese and mayo. How do they compare?
Like day and night. The chicken sandwich has 643 calories. The veggie burger is just as filling, but has only 340 calories. And it has six grams of fiber, compared with only two in the chicken sandwich.
For dinner, let’s compare three different options:
Each one of these is a typical dinner, and they would all fill you up. But here’s how they compare: The salmon dinner has 434 calories, and the pork chop dinner has 629. But the spinach lasagna dinner fills you up with only 285 calories.
Once again, I’ve revealed the calories in these foods just so you know what is happening inside your body. If you stick with the plant-based options and keep it low-fat, you don’t have to worry about calories ever again. They will take care of themselves. All you will notice is the beautiful change on the scale.
Which brings us back to Jean. She was luxuriating in blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, veggie sausage links, split-pea soup with toast, a garden salad, artichoke appetizer, garlic bread, spinach lasagna, steamed broccoli, and peach sorbet, and wondering how in heaven’s name it was possible to eat so much and still lose weight.
It’s just a miracle, I might have said. But the numbers tell the real story. When I took out my calculator, her entire day’s meals—delicious and filling as they were—barely reached twelve hundred calories.
So, bottom line: This is not rocket science. It is basic biology. High-fiber, low-fat foods make you feel like you’re pigging out. You’ll love the taste, and will lean back, slapping your belly with satisfaction. But you’ll notice that your belly is shrinking, practically before your very eyes.
Smart choices signal your brain that you are satisfied. And weight loss is essentially automatic.
Okay, so you are ramping up your fiber, and you’re avoiding fatty foods. Those two steps are very powerful for appetite control. The guidelines, menus, and recipes in this book put these simple keys to work so you will feel naturally satisfied with the foods you eat and will lose weight easily.
Even so, some people need a bit more help. They find that temptations and cravings sometimes get them in their grip. It can be an uncomfortable feeling, to say the least.
Why do cravings happen? Well, some foods have specific chemical properties that make them almost addictive—rather like drugs. Other times, cravings have nothing to do with the food in front of you; rather, the cravings are triggered by a drop in your blood sugar.
Let me show you what is going on and give you two more keys that will give you extra power if you need it.
If you could monitor how much sugar is in your blood minute by minute, you would notice something striking: It is a roller coaster. Your blood sugar goes up. It goes down. It fluctuates even when you haven’t eaten anything at all.
Now, your brain runs on sugar—that is, glucose. And when your blood sugar starts to run low, your brain reacts immediately. Like a highway motorist whose gas gauge is well into the “E” zone and is frantically looking for a gas station—any gas station—your brain goes bananas when your blood sugar runs low. Your appetite ramps up, your nerves will be on edge, and like it or not you are going to eat something—anything—to get your blood sugar back up. Your body insists on it.
A plunging blood sugar sparks overeating.
It turns out that this whole scenario starts with food. That is, certain foods cause blood sugar swings. White bread, for example, causes your blood sugar to rise quickly. And what goes up must come down. As your blood sugar descends, it can sometimes fall too low, triggering your appetite. And that causes the whole cycle to start again, with more rising and falling blood sugar.
Junk food can wreak havoc with your blood sugar, which in turn affects your appetite. While some people eat white bread and occasional sugary foods with no problem at all, others end up with a roller-coaster blood sugar and continual cravings. However you are affected, the answer is very simple: Use the glycemic index.
The glycemic index, or GI, is an ingenious system for rating the effect foods have on blood sugar. Some foods, like white bread, make your blood sugar climb rapidly. So these are referred to as high-GI foods. In contrast, beans have much less effect on blood sugar. They are a low-GI food.
The glycemic index was invented in 1981 by David Jenkins, a pioneering physician and researcher at the University of Toronto. Today research teams around the world test the GI values of various foods. And if you have food cravings, low-GI foods are your best friends. They tend to smooth out your blood sugar, reducing cravings. Going low-GI is also helpful for people with diabetes or high triglycerides.
So which foods have a low GI? Many books and websites provide complicated lists showing you the GI values for many different foods. But let me simplify things:
Especially good low-GI choices include beans, peas, lentils, most fruits, pasta, and all green, yellow, and orange vegetables. The main high-GI foods, and healthier replacements, are shown in the chart below.
| HIGH-GI FOODS | LOW-GI REPLACEMENTS |
| Sugar | Most fruits |
| Wheat breads (white or whole wheat) | Rye or pumpernickel breads |
| White potatoes | Yams or sweet potatoes |
| Most cold cereals | Oatmeal and bran cereals |
It might surprise you to see white and whole wheat bread lumped together. Whole wheat is much better, of course, from the standpoint of fiber. Whole wheat retains its fiber, while white bread has had its fiber stripped away. But both types have about the same effect on blood sugar. Both have a much higher GI than rye or pumpernickel bread.
And you might also be surprised to see that pasta has a low GI. Even though white bread and white pasta are both made from flour, white bread has a high GI and pasta is much lower.
Let me explain what’s going on: Bread is made by combining flour, water, and yeast. Yeast, of course, causes dough to rise by creating many tiny air pockets. When you eat bread, stomach acid and digestive enzymes rush into those air pockets, quickly breaking the bread apart and releasing the natural sugars it contains.
Pasta is not made with yeast, so it does not rise. It remains compacted. No matter how much you chew it, it never breaks apart as easily as white bread. So that’s really all there is to it: One food sends sugar into your bloodstream quickly, while the other does not.
At the University of Sydney in Australia, Jennie Brand-Miller has developed a comprehensive website devoted to the glycemic index, along with reliable values for the GI of many foods. You’ll find it at www.glycemicindex.com.
Les attended a lecture I gave in Chicago. He arrived early and asked if we could talk for a few minutes. He said that he already knew what healthy foods were. His problem was cravings. Every evening, around eight or nine o’clock, he had an intense craving for sugar, and especially chocolate. As cravings kicked in, he became a passenger while his stomach led him to his car for a trip to a convenience store, where he often bought one or two chocolate bars, along with a soda, and gulped it all down. He told himself that he would soon be asleep and he didn’t really need his late-night binge. But he was not in control. So, his question was, is this a food addiction, and what could he possibly do about it?
It’s true that some foods seem to call our names more loudly than others. Sugar and chocolate, for example. We don’t eat them because we are hungry; we eat them because, for some reason, they are sending us a very insistent message.
For some people, it’s cheese. For a surprising number of people, this is the one food that—damn the fat and calories—they just cannot live without.
For other people, men especially, a big chunk of meat is the food that makes them ignore their cardiologist’s pleadings.
Let’s face it: No one ever went to a convenience store at nine at night to buy cauliflower—or apples, oranges, or split-pea soup, for that matter. And no one ever said, “I’m so mad, I’m going to steam some green beans!” or “I’m feeling lonely; I’ll go peel a grapefruit.” These foods just don’t hit the brain the same way that sugar, chocolate, cheese, and meat do.
What’s going on? It turns out that each of these foods has a specific chemical effect within the brain. In 1992, researchers at the University of Michigan did a fascinating test using the drug naloxone.1 Normally, this drug is used to treat heroin overdose. It blocks heroin and other opiates from attaching to receptors within the brain. The Michigan researchers wanted to see what naloxone would do, not for people addicted to heroin, but for people who binge on chocolate. They gave twenty-six volunteers a naloxone infusion intravenously, and then offered them a tray filled with various chocolate candies. And to everyone’s surprise, the chocolate tended to stay on the tray. The volunteers found that it still tasted like chocolate, it smelled like chocolate, and it had the usual mouth-feel that chocolate provides. But somehow, it just was not as appealing as before.
I am not suggesting that naloxone be a treatment for chocolate addiction (although some researchers have suggested exactly that). Rather, it is a research tool that proves that taste and mouth-feel are not all there is to our attraction. Chocolate affects the brain—stimulating the same receptors that heroin reaches—and when we take away that brain effect with naloxone, much of its appeal vanishes.
Mild drug-like effects have been demonstrated, not just for chocolate, but also for sugar, cheese, and meat. And that keeps you coming back for more.
So it’s not your imagination. These foods really can get you hooked. But it isn’t terribly difficult to break free. On here, I’ll show you how.
So far, you have learned how to easily control your appetite. And when you start the Kickstart program, this will pay off for you handsomely. But there is more to weight loss. In the next chapter, we’ll go a step further and enhance your metabolism, so that more of the calories you take in are turned to energy, rather than being stored as fat. The combination of appetite control and burn enhancement is very powerful.