“I came home weighing exactly the same as when I left, even with a glass or two of wine every day.”

Retired physics and chemistry teacher from St. Peter, Minnesota, Diann Marten sits at a café in France with her French friend and eats dessert. She takes a few bites and shares the rest with her friend. She does this every day for the twelve days she’s on vacation. Before leaving on the trip, her friend asked her what she wanted to do while in France. “Eat dessert every day,” Diann replied.

Diann started overeating when she was five years old, when her baby sister was born. “I could capture the attention of my brothers or my mom by asking for food,” she says. By third grade, Diann was seriously overweight. Kids teased her. Her mother took her to the doctor, who proclaimed her healthy and told her not to worry. Her mother put her on a diet anyway. To escape the food restriction at home, Diann ran over to her grandparents’ house to eat. “Those were the first days of my binging behavior,” she says. “I remember my grandfather giving me a disgusted look as I ate multiple servings of cookies and ice cream.”

Despite her rebellious binging at her grandparents’ house, her mother’s diet worked. By the time she entered middle school, she was normal weight, although she still felt overweight because she was taller and bigger than her friends. “I took it upon myself to diet, sometimes eating only an egg a day,” she says. (Extreme dieting like this can be dangerous and cause health issues.) At five feet, nine inches, she got down to 119 pounds, with a below-normal body mass index of 17.6. “Then I made friends with alcohol and marijuana,” she says. Those friends, combined with partying at college and more binging, brought her weight up to 180 pounds.

Years later, married with two sons, Diann weighed 225 pounds. “I was a successful teacher, working on my master’s degree, but I wasn’t happy,” she says. “My husband had serious anger issues and my binging was the worst it had ever been.” She got divorced and became a single mom.

A new boyfriend encouraged her to lose weight. “He told me, ‘If you really want to lose weight, you’ll have to exercise enough to work up a sweat,’ ” she says. “So, I started running. I ran 10K races, ate sensibly, and got down to 169 pounds.” She completed her master’s degree, was offered a teaching job with better pay and benefits, and moved far enough away that she and her boyfriend broke up.

At her new job, she met the love of her life and married him after nine months of dating. “We celebrated every day with big dinners that included lots of bread and wine,” she says. Her weight gradually increased to 253 pounds, the highest it had ever been. Her knees hurt and she had plantar fasciitis, which made it difficult to walk. “I had everything I ever wanted in life, but I was severely depressed,” she says. “I hid it well, never missed a day of teaching, but, often, I was in bed by eight o’clock. I tried a diet now and then, but nothing worked.”

Then she saw a photo of her taken at her son’s prom. “I cried, because I looked so terrible,” she says. “I knew then that I needed help and that I couldn’t do it alone.” She researched weight-loss programs and decided on Weight Watchers. “I was hesitant because I had tried Weight Watchers once before and really didn’t believe it would work for me,” she says. “But I forced myself to go to a meeting, thinking that if I didn’t like it, at least I tried.”

***

The many proponents of low-carb diets would have the public believe that carbohydrate is poison. The gurus say that carbohydrate is the reason for the obesity epidemic and that people should avoid it like the plague. What an irony it is, then, that carbohydrate, in the form of the sugar glucose, is the body’s preferred and immediate source of energy, with carbohydrate metabolism evolving long before fat metabolism came along.

It may be surprising (and almost certainly thwart their marketing) for those weight-loss gurus to discover that a high-carb, low-fat diet is the rule rather than the exception for the successful weight losers of the NWCR. You read that right—successful weight losers eat a high-carb diet.

Habit 4 of successful weight losers is eating a low-fat, high-carb diet. Table 2 shows the percentage of carbohydrate, fat, and protein the NWCR members consume, from the several studies that have reported it.