NEW RELEASE and GIVEAWAY
The Diet Dropout's Guide to Natural Weight Loss: Find Your Easiest Path
to Naturally Thin
by
Stan Spencer, PhD
You're in for a treat. You have the chance of winning a paperback copy of this book. Enter the GIVEAWAY below for your chance to win. Thanks to Dr Stan Spencer for donating this awesome prize.
Description
This book isn't
about the latest celebrity diet, wonder food, or miracle supplement. It's about
creating a personalized weight loss plan - your own easiest path to naturally
thin. While you can lose weight with almost any diet, keeping the weight off is
much more difficult, requiring permanent changes in eating and exercise habits.
This book provides a science-based approach for making those changes in a way
that works best for you, without wasting time, money, or effort.
Dr. Spencer explains
why we gain weight and why the fat lost by dieting almost always comes back. He
then presents an array of practical weight loss tools for controlling emotional
eating, calming cravings, boosting metabolism, and improving nutrition and
exercise. In the final chapter he has you create a natural weight loss plan
based on your unique set of needs, abilities, and preferences. Simple recipes
are provided for weight loss foods that reduce cravings and prolong
satisfaction.
What this book
offers is a solid approach to weight loss - self-directed, gradual, and lasting
- in contrast to the quick but fleeting weight loss offered by most
one-size-fits-all diet plans.
Excerpt
If
this were the early 1960s instead of the 2010s, you might not need a weight
loss book. Most people were thin then.
Not
now. Even with all the dieting we do, more than two thirds of US adults are now
overweight, and the rate of obesity has almost tripled since 1960.
The
extra weight isn’t natural, nor is it healthy. It not only affects our looks
and physical abilities, it increases our risks of developing diabetes, heart
disease, stroke, high blood pressure, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis,
sleep apnea, high cholesterol, complications of pregnancy, menstrual
irregularities, and cancers of the uterus, breast, colon, and kidney.
So
what is behind this weight gain epidemic?
A
Less-Active Lifestyle
Our
bodies are designed for manual labor and long-distance walking. Many of us,
however, enjoy door-to-door motorized transportation to and from a desk job
followed by hours of television or other passive entertainment. Such a
lifestyle not only burns few calories but can also encourage us to eat more
than we would if we were busy with physical activities.
The
Fattening Food Environment
Before
processed foods became the norm, our ancestors filled their dinner plates with
minimally processed vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Meats were
unprocessed and lean. These natural foods, combined with an active lifestyle,
promoted a slim, healthy body.
In
contrast to the healthy foods enjoyed by our ancestors, the foods on our
grocery store shelves today are often highly processed and have added fat and
sugar. These processed foods are packed with calories and are so convenient and
tempting that it’s easy to eat too much of them. As a result, the average adult
today eats more calories than in past decades, with most of the extra calories
coming from carbohydrate-rich foods such as sweets, soft drinks, potato
products, pizza, bread, pasta, and white rice.
There
are ten important aspects of our food environment that encourage us to eat too
much.
Foods
that Don’t Satisfy
Food
processing produces calorie-heavy, low-nutrient, low-fiber foods that digest
quickly. These foods leave us with loads of calories, soon-empty stomachs, and
cravings for more.
Highly
Palatable Foods
Highly
palatable is a term used by scientists for foods that taste so good that we are
tempted to eat them even when our stomachs are full. Most of these are
processed foods high in fat, sugar, or refined flour. Such foods have become
more abundant and affordable in recent decades, resulting in greater
temptations to overeat. We often eat these foods for comfort or pleasure, not
because we are hungry.
Highly
palatable foods affect the parts of the brain that are responsible for drug
addiction and cravings. The authors of a scientific study of the brain's
response to highly palatable foods concluded that “overconsumption of palatable
food triggers addiction-like responses in brain reward circuits and drives the
development of compulsive eating.” In other words, junk food can be addictive.
Calorie-Heavy
Foods
While
the vegetables, fresh fruits, and whole grains our ancestors ate were high in
nutrients and low in calories, the processed foods that fill our grocery store
shelves are just the opposite — high in calories and low in nutrients. The
result is that a typical meal of modern processed foods has more calories than
we need and often too few nutrients. Calorie-heavy foods are believed to be a
major factor in the weight gain epidemic.
Cheap,
Convenient Food
There
is inexpensive, ready-to-eat food almost everywhere we go. We have candy jars
at work and cookie jars at home. We stock our refrigerators with soft drinks
and our pantries with packaged snacks. Just seeing junk food can make us
hungry, and food within easy reach is harder to resist than food that requires
a little more effort to obtain. Eating too much has never been easier.
Large
Portions
In
the US, portion sizes of many foods have increased two- to five-fold since the
1970s.11 We tend to keep eating until the portion in front of us is gone, no
matter what its size. Similarly, we tend to eat more when eating a snack food
directly out of a large package (such as a bag of potato chips) than when
served individual portions.
Passive
Entertainment
Watching
television or movies burns very few calories. It also encourages needless
eating. If we eat during such entertainment, our distraction with the storyline
can cause us to continue eating past the point at which we would normally be
satisfied.
Convenient
Substitutes for Water
Sports
drinks, sugary soft drinks, fruit juices, and alcoholic drinks are readily
available in our homes and elsewhere. These drinks quickly add calories without
lasting satisfaction. Their consumption is believed to be a major factor in the
weight gain epidemic.
Misleading
Labels and Advertising
A
picture of a slender athlete on a package of fresh fruit might make sense. The
same picture on an “energy bar” consisting mostly of corn syrup and puffed rice
does not. Advertisements often inaccurately depict the health benefits of the
foods they are promoting.
Unhealthy
Snack Foods
Common
snack foods tend to be higher in calories and lower in nutrients than the kinds
of foods usually eaten with meals. They are quick to add calories but slow to
satisfy.
Restaurants
We
eat out more now than in decades past. Restaurant food tends to be higher in
calories and served in larger portions than food cooked at home. As a result,
one restaurant meal might have enough calories for an entire day.
The
Solution
Think
of excess fat as a collection of bad habits. Lose the fat-promoting habits, and
you will lose the excess fat. Each time you give up one of these bad habits
(all other things being equal), you will lose fat until your body naturally
settles at a lower weight. At that point you will need to give up another bad
habit to lose more weight and keep it off.
Permanent
weight loss requires permanent lifestyle changes. The information in this book
will help you replace bad habits with good ones and make the lifestyle changes
required for lasting weight loss. You will learn how small adjustments in your
eating and exercise habits can result in a big difference in body fat over
time, why many of the things you hear about gaining or losing weight are false,
and why popular diets rarely produce permanent weight loss. You will also learn
how to change your personal environment so it’s no longer fattening, boost your
metabolism without drugs or supplements, give your body the exercise it needs
without wasting time, eat fewer calories without counting them or going hungry,
and beat temptation with the willpower you already have.
Often, the hardest part
of forming new habits is just getting started. Watch for the QuickStart Tips as
you read through the book. They will prompt you to pause and take solid steps
down the path to your naturally thin potential.
Review
Being married to an
amateur health guru who writes her own health blog, I have read countless
articles, books, magazines and watched innumerable documentaries on the topic
of health. In that span of time, I have learned about diets (and why they don't
work), sleep, exercise and their effects on overall health. But it was not
until I read this book that I found so many high-level concepts reduced to a
simple language with specific tactics that make taking up a healthy lifestyle
so practical, without being gimmicky in the least.
The beauty of this
piece is that it deals with weight from every angle - cognitive, emotional and
physical. So many works on the market deal with just one at a time, but Dr.
Spencer's work provides a blueprint with tactics to manage all three at once to
make simple yet effective and lasting change in the reader's life. It also
comes in a book that can be read in an afternoon and the reader can start down
their new path today.
The concepts Spencer
addresses in the book need not only apply to those looking to manage their
weight - they provide a foundation for anyone wanting to live a healthy
lifestyle. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever tried a diet and
not gotten the results they were looking for, as well as anyone who is serious
about leading a healthy life.
About the Author
Stan Spencer, PhD, was born in Mexico and grew up in Utah, USA. He is a
biological consultant and former research scientist. Stan has conducted
laboratory studies in biochemistry at Brigham Young University, in botany and
evolution at Claremont Graduate University, and in genetics at the Smithsonian
Institution. Stan lives in southern California his wife, Amy, and a varying
number of their seven children. He blogs on natural weight loss techniques at Fat Loss Science.
