Surely, if there was a safe, simple, side-effect-free solution to the obesity epidemic, we would know about it by now, right? I’m not so sure. It may take an average of seventeen years before research evidence makes it into day-to-day clinical practice.1
Take one example that was particularly poignant for my family: heart disease. Decades ago, Dr Dean Ornish and his colleagues published evidence in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world that our leading cause of death could be reversed with diet and lifestyle changes alone2 – yet hardly anything changed.3 Even now, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to needlessly die each year from what we learned decades ago was a reversible condition.
I had seen it with my own eyes. My grandmother was cured of her end-stage heart disease by one of Dr Ornish’s contemporaries, Nathan Pritikin, using similar methods. She had been given her medical death sentence at age sixty-five after one too many open-heart surgeries, but thanks to a healthy diet was able to live another thirty-one years – until she was ninety-six – to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.
So, if effectively the cure to our number one killer of men and women could get lost down a rabbit hole and ignored, what else might there be buried in the medical literature that could help my patients but just didn’t have a corporate budget driving its promotion?
I made it my life’s mission to find out.
That’s why I became a doctor in the first place and why I started my nonprofit site, NutritionFacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships. It’s strictly noncommercial; nothing is for sale. I launched it as a public service, as a labour of love, as a tribute to my grandmother. New videos and articles are uploaded almost every day on the latest in evidence-based nutrition.
So, what does the science show is the best way to lose weight?
I’m so sick and tired of the nutritional nonsense that comes out of the diet industry, feeding us an endless parade of quick-fix fads that always sell because they always fail. Repeat customers are their whole business model, yet people just line right back up to be fooled again.
The weight-loss industry is so corrupted by financial and ideological conflicts of interest that you can never know who to trust. Too often in diet books, the rule is to obfuscate rather than illuminate, cherry-picking facts to push some pet theory and ignoring the rest to promote their own agenda. It’s the opposite of science. In true scholarship, your conclusions follow from the evidence, not the other way around.
I’m not interested in offering duelling anecdotes, and the last thing we need is more dietary dogma. What I am interested in is the science. When it comes to making life-and-death decisions as important as what to feed yourself and your family, as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one question: What does the best available balance of evidence say right now?
My goal was to create the oxymoron: an evidence-based diet book.
The problem is that even just sticking to peer-reviewed medical literature is not enough as, concluded a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, ‘False and scientifically unsupported beliefs about obesity are pervasive’4 – even in scientific journals. The only way to get at the truth, then, is to dive deep into the primary literature and read all the original studies. Who’s got time for that, though? There are more than half a million scientific papers on the subject with a hundred new ones published every day. Even researchers in the field might not be able to keep track of what’s going on beyond their narrow domain. But that’s what we do at NutritionFacts.org. We comb through tens of thousands of studies a year, so you and your doctors don’t have to.
Diets don’t work by definition. Going on a diet implies that, at some point, you will go off the diet. Short-term fixes are no match for long-term problems. Lifelong weight control requires lifelong lifestyle changes.
First, a diet has to be sustainable. Consider water-only fasting. No diet works better. It’s 100 per cent effective, but also 100 per cent fatal if you manage to stick with it. This is why an optimal diet needs additional building blocks to ensure long-term viability.
Along with being efficacious and sustainable, it needs to be safe. Books touting liquid protein diets in the 1970s sold millions of copies, but the diets started killing people. Safety is about losing weight without losing your health.
Any long-term eating pattern must also be nutritionally complete, containing all essential vitamins and minerals, and finally, our chosen diet should be life-extending. In the very least, what we eat shouldn’t cut our life short and ideally should be healthy enough to improve our life spans. There’s no point in losing weight if it causes you to lose it all.
After diving deep into the medical literature, I identified seventeen key ingredients to the ideal weight-loss diet and dedicated a chapter in my book How Not to Diet to each. The foods we eat and, in fact, our meals and entire dietary patterns should be anti-inflammatory; free from industrial pollutants; high in fibre and water; and low in high-glycemic and addictive foods, added fat and sugar, calorie density, meat, refined grains, and salt. They should also be low insulin index, friendly to our friendly gut flora, particularly satiating, and rich in fruits and vegetables as well as legumes.
We should eat real food that grows out of the ground; natural foods that come from fields, not factories; from gardens, not garbage; a diet centred on whole plant foods.
It turns out the healthiest diet also appears to be the most effective diet for weight loss. Indeed, we have experimental confirmation: a whole food, plant-based diet was found to be the single most effective weight-loss intervention ever published in the medical literature, proven in a randomized controlled trial with no portion control, no calorie counting, no exercise component – the most effective ever.5
I didn’t stop there, though. I spent the second half of How Not to Diet on all the tools I had unearthed in my research to drive further weight loss for any stubborn pounds that remain.
In the first half of the book, we learned that a calorie is not necessarily a calorie. One hundred calories of chickpeas have a different impact than one hundred calories of chicken or chocolate, based on their different effects on such factors as absorption, appetite or our microbiome. In the second half, I went a step further and explained how even the exact same foods eaten differently can have different effects. It’s not only what we eat, but how and when.
The one piece of advice that probably best sums up my recommended weight-loss boosters would be to wall off your calories. Animal cells are encased only in easily digestible membranes, which allow the enzymes in our gut to effortlessly liberate the calories within a steak, for example. Plant cells, on the other hand, have cell walls that are made out of fibre which acts as an indigestible physical barrier, so many of the calories remain trapped. Processed plant foods, however, such as fruit juice, sugar, refined grains, and even whole grains if they’ve been powdered into flour, have had their cellular structure destroyed and their cell walls cracked open, so their calories are free for the taking. When you eat structurally intact plant foods, though, you can chew all you want, but you’ll still end up with calories completely encapsulated by fibre, which then blunts the glycemic impact, activates what’s called the ileal brake that dials down appetite, and delivers sustenance to your friendly flora.
So, try to make sure as many of your calories – whether from protein, carbs or fat – are encased in cell walls. In other words, get as many of your calories from whole, intact plant foods.
I went into this project with the goal of creating a distillation of all the best science, but, to my delight, I discovered all sorts of exciting new tools and tricks along the way, a treasure trove of buried data, such as simple spices proven in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to accelerate weight loss for pennies a day. With so little profit potential, it’s no wonder those studies never saw the light of day. And I was even able to traverse beyond the existing evidence base to propose a new method to eliminate body fat. It can’t be monetized, either, but the only profiting I care about is your health.
What appears to be the most effective weight-loss diet just so happens to be the only diet ever proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients,6 including my own beloved grandma.
If that’s all a plant-based diet could do – reverse the number one killer of men and women – shouldn’t that be the default diet until proven otherwise? And the fact that it can also be effective in treating, arresting, and even reversing other leading killers, such as type 2 diabetes7 and high blood pressure, would seem to make the case for plant-based eating simply overwhelming.
Only one diet has ever been shown to do all that: a diet centered on whole plant foods. We don’t have to mortgage our health to lose weight. The single healthiest diet also appears to be the most effective diet for weight loss.
After all, permanent weight loss requires permanent dietary change. Healthier habits just need to become a way of life. And if it’s going to be lifelong, you want it to lead to a long life. Thankfully, the single best diet proven for weight loss may just so happen to be the safest and most inexpensive way to eat for the longest, healthiest life.
I donate to charity 100 per cent of the proceeds I get from my books – including this cookbook, How Not to Diet, and my best-selling How Not to Die, where I tackle the top fifteen killers and introduce my Daily Dozen. I don’t get a single penny from my books, but I get something better – the satisfaction of helping so many people with this life-changing, lifesaving information.
I hope The How Not to Diet Cookbook inspires you to create delicious, healthy, sustaining meals for yourself and your family. Each recipe in this collection maximizes weight-loss potential without ever sacrificing flavour and satisfaction. And, if that weren’t enough, every dish is bursting with the very foods that can play a vital role in preventing, arresting, or reversing the fifteen leading causes of death. So, get into the kitchen and cook as if your life depends on it because it very well may.
My original intention with How Not to Diet, consonant with the title, was to have chapters offering critical analysis on each of the leading popular diets, but I realized that would be like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole.
I’m a member of the U.S. News & World Report Best Diets expert panel, tasked with scoring dozens of trending diets based on set criteria, so I’m especially aware how many new diets pop up every year. I didn’t want my book to be out of date before it even came out.
Thus, rather than taking a reactionary tack and wasting page space on Dr Quack’s here-today-gone-tomorrow New Snake Oil Diet (now with added tricksy pixie dust!), I decided upon a more timeless, proactive approach: to build an optimal weight-loss diet from the ground up. On the basis of the most compelling evidence my research team and I could find, I sought to generate a list of dietary attributes and components most effectual for weight loss. The best ingredients, if you will.
I distilled this research into a list of seventeen key ingredients for an ideal weight-loss diet. These components could then be used to construct a portfolio of dietary changes to attack excess body fat on multiple fronts, as well as offer a template by which to compare any new diet that comes down the pike.
As a physician, my priority is getting (and keeping) people healthy, but when people are surveyed about their motivation for dieting, disturbingly, ‘health’ may come in last.8 Dieters want results – they want weight to come off.
So, that became my challenge. If I were to construct the ideal weight-loss diet, what characteristics would it have? My research team and I dove headfirst into the nearly half-million papers published in the English-language peer-reviewed medical literature on weight management and certainly ran into some surprises on the way. What follows is my distilled list of seventeen key ingredients – dietary attributes that could be used to create the most effective eating plan for losing weight.
On the next page are the seventeen ingredients for an optimum weight-loss diet laid out in worksheet form.
In that first blank column, you can place a dietary pattern, a meal or even an individual food. Try pencilling in some of the diets you’ve heard about. How do they rate? How many boxes can you tick off? A paleo diet, for example, might nail the fruit-and-vegetables box but fail the legumes one.
The next time you sit down for supper, look at your meal and see how many checkmarks it earns. You can imagine how a typical fast-food meal might get a big goose egg – zero out of seventeen – whereas a healthy Mediterranean meal might hit eleven or more due to its vegetable-centric nature. A traditional Mediterranean bean-and-vegetable stew would be anti-inflammatory, low on the food chain, and high in fibre, trapped water and veggies; have a low glycemic load and insulin index; be free of habit-forming ultraprocessed foods; and could be low in added fat, sugar, meat, salt and refined grains. The beans check off legumes and microbiome-building, and soups are particularly satiating and low in calorie density. So, that one stew could potentially check off all seventeen optimal weight-loss ingredients. If you had it with bread dipped in oil, though, the meal as a whole might fail to meet the glycemic and insulin response criteria as well as the added fat, refined grains and sodium conditions, but it would still be better than most meals people eat.
Every meal is a new opportunity to tick as many checkmarks as you can. Imagine looking over a Chinese takeout menu. Some items, like General Tso’s chicken – deep-fried meat served in a sugary sauce atop white rice – may not include any of the optimum weight-loss ingredients, whereas a dish from the vegetable section, such as broccoli with garlic sauce, might incorporate at least half of them. At a quick-service Mexican restaurant, a bean burrito bowl salad could let you tick off most of them, especially if you hold the white rice, but nothing beats the control you have at home to prepare a healthy dish without added salt, sugar, and fat.
To reverse-engineer the optimal weight-loss diet, we can figure out what constitutes the ideal meal by ranking individual foods – and the more boxes they check, the better. Most fruits and vegetables would top the list at sixteen out of seventeen. By my count, legumes, whole grains, and nuts and seeds together would hit fifteen, fourteen and thirteen, respectively, but refined grains and animal products would slip down into single digits. Ultraprocessed fatty and sugary snacks might only score one or two, and a product that’s both, such as sweet-flavoured jerky, might completely flop.
Note that some of these criteria are much more important than others. For example, while the value of eating anti-inflammatory foods remains theoretical, there are multiple randomized controlled trials validating the benefits of reducing calorie density. Read through How Not to Diet and decide which are most convincing to you and may be easiest to fit into your daily routine.
To varying degrees, any one of these criteria alone may facilitate weight loss. Even just cutting out added sugars without making any other changes at all, for example, could cause you to lose weight.
Now imagine if you tried putting them all together.
In How Not to Die, I compiled the healthiest of the Green Light foods – foods of plant origin from which nothing bad has been added and nothing good has been taken away – into my Daily Dozen checklist of foods I encourage people to try to fit into their daily routines. I made it into a free app, Dr Greger’s Daily Dozen, available for iPhone and Android, so anyone and everyone can try to check off all the boxes every day and track their progress over time.
As the feedback poured in from people using the app, two themes of complaints arose. The first was that it was just too much food. There was no way they could eat all that food in one day. In response, I explained that the Daily Dozen was aspirational, something to shoot for, just a tool to inspire people to include some of the healthiest of healthy foods into their daily diet. The vast volume of food I prescribed was on purpose. I was hoping that by telling people to eat so much healthy stuff, it would naturally crowd out some of the less healthy stuff. After checking off all twenty-four servings in the Daily Dozen, there’s only so much room left for a pepperoni pizza.
Dr Greger’s Daily Dozen
✓✓✓ BEANS
✓ BERRIES
✓✓✓ OTHER FRUITS
✓ CRUCIFEROUS VEGETABLES
✓✓ GREENS
✓✓ OTHER VEGETABLES
✓ FLAXSEEDS
✓ NUTS AND SEEDS
✓ HERBS AND SPICES
✓✓✓ WHOLE GRAINS
✓✓✓✓✓ BEVERAGES
✓ EXERCISE
Here is the Daily Dozen and the number of servings I recommend for each one. For years, I had this list on a little dry-erase board on our refrigerator. Feel free to cut this one out (or make your own copy) and do the same. It’s also useful to take with you when you go shopping to guide you through your healthiest choices. And remember, it’s just about doing your best. There are times, especially when I am travelling, that I only hit a quarter of my goals. When that happens, I just try to make up for it the next day. The same goes for you: If one day you only get a few of these foods into your diet, the next day, do your best to get more!
Ironically, the second major complaint we got is that it doesn’t have enough calories. I had to explain that the Daily Dozen just represented the minimum I encourage people to eat, not the maximum, and that, certainly, training athletes requiring thousands more calories would have to eat much more. This all got me thinking, though. Too much food but too few calories? Sounds like the perfect weight-loss diet!
The Daily Dozen is by definition all Green Light foods, all whole plant foods, so that right there bakes in all seventeen of the ideal weight-loss diet ingredients listed on here. What about the calorie count? A systematic review of successful weight-loss strategies concluded that given the metabolic slowing and increased appetite that accompanies weight loss, to achieve significant weight loss, calorie counts may need to drop as low as 1,200 calories a day for women and 1,500 calories a day for men.9 I set up a spreadsheet and tried a bunch of common foods in each of the categories, and what do you know: the Daily Dozen averages about 1,200 calories, with the higher-calorie food choices nailing 1,500 calories.
How is my Green Light category in How Not to Die different from my recommendation in How Not to Diet to wall off your calories, to ensure your protein, carbs, and fat are trapped within cell walls? After all, only plants have cell walls. (Animals are made up of cells with fluid membranes, requiring bones to hold them up, whereas plants have rigid cell walls made out of fibre.) So, isn’t walling off calories the same as choosing whole plant foods? The difference becomes apparent with examples of formless foods, such as powdered whole grains. Imagine a whole-grain wheat cereal with one ingredient: 100% whole wheat. Or almond butter with one ingredient: almonds. Green Light, right? Plant foods from which nothing bad has been added and nothing good has been taken away. But now we know something good has been taken away: the structure.
Eating whole grains is good, but eating whole-grain kernels is better. Former Harvard nutrition chair Walter Willett has argued that the term whole grain should probably be reserved for only whole, intact grain kernels.10 So, eat the wholiest of grains: intact grains, also known as groats.
Take oats, for example. They’re found out in the fields as oat groats and then have their inedible outer husks removed during processing.11 Groats can then be sliced into two to four pieces to make steel-cut (also known as pinhead or Irish) oats, coarsely ground into Scottish oatmeal, or steamed and flattened into ‘old-fashioned’ rolled oats.12 Quick-cooking oats are just old-fashioned oats rolled even thinner, and instant oats are steamed longer and rolled even more thinly.13 Then, at the bottom of the list, the most processed would be powdered oats, which you might find in oat-based breakfast cereals. Instead of buying boxed breakfast cereals, make oatmeal out of whole, intact oats. They’re gr-r-oat!
With all the new data on the importance of food form, I’m starting to sour on flour, so I advise not living by bread alone. The new structure created by the pasta-making process can mediate these effects, though, so you don’t have to say basta to pasta.
A typical Green Light foods breakfast that would check off a few of the Daily Dozen boxes would be a big bowl of oatmeal sweetened with raisins. On the basis of what we learned in the Low in Calorie Density, High in Water-Rich Foods, Eating Rate, and Wall Off Your Calories sections of How Not to Diet, though, we could optimize that meal for weight loss by making the oatmeal from steel-cut or whole groats rather than rolled or instant, cooking it thick, and switching the dried fruit for fresh – for example, swapping in strawberries for the raisins. If we did want to use dried, as we learned in the Amping AMPK and Inflammation Quenchers sections, barberries or gojis might be a better choice.
Similarly, when choosing vegetables, we can steer toward aboveground veggies highest on the water scale. Peppers have that nicotine edge I described in Amping AMPK, and uncooked vegetables in general offer more orosensory stimulation. If you want to go underground, on the basis of what we learned about glycemic load, sweet potatoes would be preferable to white. We certainly want to mix it up, though, to take advantage of our built-in striving for variety, and since vegetables represent the healthiest class of foods with the fewest calories, we should aim to eat them earlier in the meal.
In the Appetite Suppression section, we learned yet another reason to include ground flaxseeds in our daily diet. Nuts are a great complement to greens to boost the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients, but, ideally, they should be eaten raw and whole or coarsely chopped rather than blended into butters. This is not to say something like almond butter or tahini is unhealthy by any stretch, but for weight-loss acceleration, structurally intact nuts and seeds would be better.
Offering maximum nutrition with minimum calories, a diet centered on whole, healthy plant foods is the best form of girth control. Whole food, plant-based nutrition best checks off the criteria for the optimal slimming diet. It’s the tried-and-true recipe with the most ideal weight-loss diet ingredients – so why wasn’t that the end of How Not to Diet?
Just eating healthfully enough should do it. Obese individuals randomized to eat plant-based at home lose nearly a cubic inch of deep visceral belly fat a week.14 Start packing your diet with real food that grows out of the ground, and the pounds should come off naturally, taking you down toward your ideal weight. The average person eating completely plant-based has a body mass index (BMI) down around the perfect range,15 but there is a bell curve. Even if the average is on target, some people naturally fall to either side, so I wanted to offer an array of tools that can drive or boost further weight loss for any stubborn pounds that remain.
That was the reason all the chapters in How Not to Die on the leading killer diseases were longer than just the three words: eat more plants. Yes, those who go all in should end up with perfect blood pressure and perfect cholesterol levels on average, for example, but if you’re doing everything right and your numbers are still off, I wanted to go through all the dietary tweaks you could use to optimize your condition. That way, you could create a portfolio of specific foods to help with each specific condition. I wanted to do the same thing with How Not to Diet.
My hope is to give you an arsenal of weapons in your fight against fat.
The average, purely plant-based person has an ideal BMI, which greatly incentivizes sticking with that way of eating, but if that’s not where you end up or if you just want to get there quicker, are there specific plants that have an edge? And not some tabloid-y, fat-busting ‘breakthrough’ extrapolated from test-tube data or mouse models but from actual randomized, controlled, clinical trials showing objective outcomes?
Yes, there are specific foods shown in interventional studies to cause you to burn more fat, suppress your appetite, rev up your metabolism, block the absorption of calories and effectively take away even more calories than they provide. What’s more, the context in which we eat matters, too. The same number of calories eaten at a different time of the day, in a different meal distribution or after different amounts of sleep can translate into different amounts of body fat. Distinct forms of the exact same foods can be distinctly fattening. Combining certain foods together can have a different effect from eating them apart.
What we eat matters most, but how we eat and when can also make a difference. Even the exact same foods eaten differently can have different effects.
Importantly, these tricks and tweaks serve to supplement a healthy, lifelong eating pattern, not replace it. Eliminating obesity requires treating the cause, the underlying diet, but my weight-loss boosters are for those who want all the extra help they can get.
My free Dr Greger’s Daily Dozen app released soon after publication of How Not to Die had become so popular that I decided to completely revamp it with new features for How Not to Diet. I incorporated all these tweaks to the Daily Dozen to optimize it for weight control. Now, you can not only track your progress, graphing your momentum day to day and month to month to see how well you’re nailing each of the Daily Dozen, but since so many seemed to really appreciate having a list of reminders to check off throughout the day, I added an entirely new checklist to capture the weight-loss boosters I documented in How Not to Diet. With the new, expanded version of the app, you can track your weight and make a game out of how many of the new fat-busting boosters you can squeeze in every day, along with your Daily Dozen checkboxes.
Dr Greger’s 21 Tweaks
AT EACH MEAL
✓✓✓ PRELOAD WITH WATER
✓✓✓ PRELOAD WITH ‘NEGATIVE CALORIE’ FOODS
✓✓✓ INCORPORATE VINEGAR ( 2 tsp with each meal )
✓✓✓ ENJOY UNDISTRACTED MEALS
✓✓✓ FOLLOW THE 20-MINUTE RULE
EVERY DAY
TAKE YOUR DAILY DOSES
✓ NIGELLA SEEDS (¼ tsp)
✓ GARLIC POWDER (¼ tsp)
✓ GROUND GINGER (1 tsp) or CAYENNE PEPPER (½ tsp)
✓ NUTRITIONAL YEAST (2 tsp)
✓ CUMIN (½ tsp with lunch and dinner)
✓ GREEN TEA ( 3 cups tea)
✓ STAY HYDRATED
✓ DEFLOUR YOUR DIET
✓ FRONT-LOAD CALORIES
✓ TIME-RESTRICT YOUR EATING
✓ OPTIMIZE EXCERCISE TIMING
✓✓ WEIGH YOURSELF TWICE A DAY
✓✓✓ COMPLETE YOUR IMPLEMENTATION INTENTIONS
EVERY NIGHT
✓ FAST AFTER 7:00 PM
✓ GET SUFFICIENT SLEEP
✓ EXPERIMENT WITH MILD TRENDELENBURG
Some of the weight-loss boosters are automatically taken care of with the Daily Dozen. For example, fat-blocking thylakoids and calcium are covered with my recommendation to eat lots of low-oxalate greens. But for the others, I developed my Twenty-One Tweaks, practical takeaways from the boosters collected into one simple list.
You may have noticed that not all the strategies I covered in part 4 of How Not to Diet are included in the list. Some only apply to certain individuals. For example, asking people to get into the NEAT habit of using steppers, fidget bars, or bouncing their knees during prolonged sitting may only apply to those with desk jobs. Other accelerants may be too risky for general consumption. For example, while the 25:5 modified fasting shows promise, you probably shouldn’t drop below 1,000 calories a day for more than twenty-four hours without medical supervision.16 Finally, there are options that show theoretical promise but haven’t been sufficiently vetted in clinical trials, such as pistachios for circadian synchronization or mixing peppermint oil into hand lotion to facilitate brown adipose tissue (BAT) activation.
So, here’s the list of strategies that made the cut – broadly applicable, relatively safe, and evidence based. See how many of these easily actionable tweaks you can incorporate into your daily routine.
Time a metabolism-boosting 2 glasses (about 500ml) of cool or cold unflavoured water before each meal to take advantage of its preload benefits.
As the first course, start each meal with an apple or a Green Light soup or salad containing fewer than 100 calories per cup (around 250ml or 200g, depending on ingredients). Soups and salads that fit this criterion are marked throughout the cookbook.
Never drink vinegar straight. Instead, flavour meals or dress a side salad with any of the sweet or savoury vinegars out there. If you want to drink it, make sure to mix it in a glass of water, and afterwards, be sure to rinse your mouth out with water to protect your tooth enamel.
Don’t eat while watching TV or playing on your phone. Give yourself a check for each meal you’re able to eat without distraction.
Whether through increasing viscosity or the number of chews or decreasing bite size and eating rate, dozens of studies have demonstrated that no matter how we boost the amount of time food is in our mouths, it can result in lower caloric intake. So, extend meal duration to at least twenty minutes to allow your natural satiety signals to take full effect. How? By choosing foods that take longer to eat and eating them in a way that prolongs the time they stay in your mouth. Think bulkier, harder, chewier foods in smaller, well-chewed bites.
Nigella Seeds (Nigella sativa) (¼ teaspoon) As noted in the Appetite Suppression section of How Not to Diet, a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled weight-loss trials found that about ¼ teaspoon of nigella seed powder every day appears to reduce body mass index within a span of a couple of months.
Garlic Powder (¼ teaspoon) Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies have found that as little as a daily ¼ teaspoon of garlic powder can reduce body fat at a cost of a few pence a day.
Ground Ginger (1 teaspoon) or Cayenne (½ teaspoon) Randomized controlled trials have found that ¼ to 1½ teaspoons a day of ground ginger significantly decreased body weight for just pennies a day. It can be as easy as stirring the ground spice into a cup of hot water. Ginger may work better in the morning than evening, and consider chai tea as a tasty way to combine the green tea and ginger tricks into a single beverage.
Alternately, for BAT activation, you can add one raw jalapeño pepper or ½ teaspoon of red pepper powder (or, presumably, crushed red pepper flakes) into your daily diet. To help beat the heat, you can very thinly slice or finely chop the jalapeño to reduce its bite to little prickles, or mix the red pepper into soup or the whole food vegetable smoothie featured in one of my cooking videos on NutritionFacts.org.17
Nutritional Yeast (2 teaspoons) Two teaspoons of baker’s, brewer’s, or nutritional yeast contain roughly the amount of beta 1,3/1,6 glucans found in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to facilitate weight loss.
Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) (½ teaspoon with lunch and dinner) Overweight women randomized to add ½ teaspoon of ground cumin to each lunch and dinner beat the control group by four more pounds and an extra inch off their waist. There is also evidence to support the use of the spice saffron, but a pinch a day would cost a lot, whereas a teaspoon of cumin costs very little.
Green Tea (3 cups) Drink 3 cups a day between meals (waiting at least an hour after a meal so as to not interfere with iron absorption). During meals, drink water, black coffee or hibiscus tea mixed 6:1 with lemon verbena, but never exceed 3 cups of fluid per hour. This is important, given my water preloading advice.
Take advantage of the reinforcing effect of caffeine by drinking your green tea along with something healthy you wish you liked more, but don’t consume large amounts of caffeine within six hours of bedtime. Taking your tea without sweetener is best, but if you typically sweeten your tea with honey or sugar, try yacón syrup instead.
Check this box if your urine never appears darker than a pale yellow. Note that if you’re eating riboflavin-fortified foods (such as nutritional yeast), then base this instead on getting 9 cups of unsweetened beverages a day for women (which would be taken care of by the green tea and water preloading recommendations) or 13 cups a day for men. If you have heart or kidney issues, don’t increase fluid intake at all without first talking with your doctor. Remember, diet soda may be calorie free, but it’s not consequence free, as we learned in the Low in Added Sugar section of How Not to Diet.
Check this box every day your whole-grain servings are in the form of intact grains. The powdering of even 100% whole grains robs our microbiome of the starch that would otherwise be ferried down to our colon enclosed in unbroken cell walls.
There are metabolic benefits to distributing more calories to earlier in the day, so make breakfast (ideally) or lunch your largest meal of the day in true king/prince/pauper style.
Confine eating to a daily window of time of your choosing under twelve hours in length that you can stick to consistently, seven days a week. Given the circadian benefits of reducing evening food intake, the window should end before 7:00 p.m.
The Daily Dozen’s recommendation for optimum exercise duration for longevity is ninety minutes of moderately intense activity a day, which is also the optimum exercise duration for weight loss. Anytime is good, and the more the better, but there may be an advantage to exercising in a fasted state, at least six hours after your last meal. Typically, this would mean before breakfast, but if you timed it right, you could exercise midday before a late lunch or, if lunch is eaten early enough, before dinner. This is the timing for nondiabetics.
Diabetics and prediabetics should instead start exercising thirty minutes after the start of a meal and ideally go for at least an hour to completely straddle the blood sugar peak. If you had to choose a single meal to exercise after, it would be dinner, due to the circadian rhythm of blood sugar control that wanes throughout the day. Ideally, though, breakfast would be the largest meal of the day, and you’d exercise after that – or, even better, after every meal.
Regular self-weighing is considered crucial for long-term weight control, but there is insufficient evidence to support a specific frequency of weighing. My recommendation is based on the one study that found that twice daily – upon waking and right before bed – appeared superior to once a day (about 6 versus 2 pounds of weight loss over 12 weeks).
Every two months, create three new implementation intentions – ‘if X, then Y’ plans to perform a particular behavior in a specific context – and check each one of them off as you complete them every day.
Because of our circadian rhythm, food eaten at night is more fattening than the exact same food eaten earlier in the day, so fast every night for at least twelve hours starting before 7:00 p.m. The fewer calories after sundown, the better.
Check this box if you get at least seven hours of sleep at your regular bedtime.
Try spending at least four hours a night lying with your body tilted head-down 6 degrees by elevating the posts at the foot of your bed by 20 cm (or by 25 cm if your bed is extra long). Be extremely careful when you get out of bed, as this may cause orthostatic intolerance, even if you’re young and healthy – meaning if you get up too fast, you can feel dizzy, faint or light-headed and could fall and hurt yourself. So, get up slowly. Drinking a large glass of cold water (around 500ml) thirty minutes before rising may also help prevent this potentially hazardous side effect.
IMPORTANT: Do not try this at home at all if you have any heart or lung issues, acid reflux, or problems with your brain (e.g., head trauma) or eyes (even a family history of glaucoma disqualifies you). Also do not try this until you ask your doctor whether he or she thinks it’s safe for you to sleep in mild Trendelenburg.
Between the twenty-four checkoffs in the Daily Dozen and the thirty-four new checkoffs in the Tweaks, you may feel a bit overwhelmed, but it’s easy to knock off a bunch at a time. For example, starting a meal with a tomato salad sprinkled with some nigella seeds, garlic powder and balsamic vinegar hits five boxes right there, including the ‘Preload with “Negative Calorie” Foods’ tweak and the Daily Dozen box for ‘Other Vegetables’. And if that was one of your implementation intentions, make that six! Ten per cent of your boxes nailed with a single appetizer.
Of course, you don’t have to hit all the booster boxes every day. You don’t even have to hit any. A healthy diet, as encapsulated by the Daily Dozen, should be all you need to lose as much weight as you want, but the more of these extra tweaks you can hit, the more successful you may be.
The How Not to Diet Cookbook fits as many of these combinations together into delicious recipes and hearty meal plans, and please feel free to download the free, updated Dr Greger’s Daily Dozen app on your Android or iPhone. Start experimenting with a few of the Twenty-One Tweaks and see which ones work for you. My goal is to just provide you with the broadest palette of tools to choose from.
Remember, it’s not what you eat today that matters, or tomorrow, or next week, but rather what you eat over the next months, years, and decades, so you have to find lifestyle changes that fit into your lifestyle.