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Fiber, Detox & Personality
Diets Reviewed
7/08
Everyone knows someone who is dieting, right? At any given time, a quarter to
half the population is on some form of diet. To pursue their largely
unsuccessful attempts at weight loss,
Americans currently spend over $30 billion a year on diet-related products. To
put that number in perspective, it was only one billion hours ago we were living
in the Stone Age.
As much as we do spend on
food in this country, over $2 billion on Halloween candy alone, the amount we
spend trying to lose excess weight is equally staggering.
What exactly is a person to
do when faced with all of the diverse and often confusing diets available today?
They all seem to promise the moon. Many tout simplicity. And, some are so
complex you’d need a medical degree to understand them.
Whichever diet you decide to
embrace, know this much: There is no magic
bullet. In the end, results vary widely, even among very similar
people on the same diet. Alas, I can’t evaluate every diet out there. That would
take longer than Internet-warped attention spans would permit.
Instead I’ve picked three
diets to review, each with fairly distinct approaches, and added one kat’s
perspective to the mix. Here goes.
THE FIBER 35 DIET
The Fiber35 Diet is written
by Certified Nutritional Consultant (CNC),
Brenda Watson, and Leonard Smith,
M.D. You may remember Cindy mentioning this one in her blog some months back.
The Secret is 35 Grams of Fiber
The idea for The Fiber35
Diet came from Ms. Watson’s decades-long quest to improve her own health. Her
pearl of wisdom from this quest: the secret to weight loss and wellness is 35 grams of fiber a day.
She touts a diet high in fiber as being associated with:
-
Increasing overall nutrition
and immunity through
fiber-rich foods
"Where you do
not find fiber in food (other
than beef, poultry, and fish), you usually find foods that make you
tired, fat, and
unhealthy.”
-
Suppressing appetite
(and thus cravings and calorie intake)
-
Normalizing blood sugar levels
(by slowing conversion of carbs to sugar)
-
Lowering cholesterol
(essentially flushing cholesterol)
Medical studies from
reputable sources are included to support her views.
Watson points out that
because of fiber’s “bulking” effect, humans become satiated sooner than when
eating other foods. She explains the role and effect of
cholecystokinin (CCK), a hormonal messenger that acts as a hunger
suppressant and which is activated
by ingestion of fiber. She cites
UC Davis research on women who showed higher serum levels of cholecystokinin
after eating high-fiber meals (with fiber-rich and high-fat meals yielding
similar satiation results).
Watson goes into great
detail to explain exactly how fiber works, the benefits of both soluble and
insoluble fiber, and includes handy references on fiber content
She
also explains three phases of her fiber diet: accelerated and moderate
weight loss followed by lifetime maintenance. Watson offers several easy-to-use
math formulas to determine how much energy and fuel is required to maintain a
particular lifestyle. Watson recommends an overall diet of 25% protein, 25% fat,
and 50% complex carbohydrates that include fiber supplements. She emphasizes
that “dietary fat is not an
impediment to losing weight” and makes the case for good fats and Omega-3 fatty
a
Other topics covered are
seven metabolic boosters, exercise programs, stress management, supplements
(Watson is big on thermogenic ingredients such as iodine, tyrosine, banaba and
green tea extract
and
CLA for lean
muscle mass to fat ratios). And, of course, there are plenty of high-fiber
recipes (75 pages).
Assessment of
The Fiber35 Diet
Well organized,
The Fiber35 Diet is an easy read and
offers sound recommendations regarding the importance of way more fiber (and
nutrient-dense foods that come with fiber) in your diet. Each chapter has a
summary, so even if you can’t invest the time to read the entire 300-page book,
you can pull the basics out easily.
Rating: Recommended
THE NEW DETOX DIET
Not surprisingly,
The New Detox Diet centers on the
role detoxification plays in diet. Its author,
Elson M. Haas, M.D., even goes by
the nickname of The Detox Doc, an appellation the good doctor has registered as
a trademark. The book is very well laid out and easy to follow, with most
chapters following a format of explanation, recommendation, and action plan.
The Crux is Eliminating Poisonous Toxins
Written by a medical doctor
with 30 years’ experience in healing patients through detoxification, this
book’s credentials are iron clad. Dr. Haas operates an integrated health care
facility in
San Rafael, CA.
Dr. Haas talks about the
importance of gastrointestinal (GI) health, delivering some very interesting
facts about the human digestive tract along the way. Did you know that the GI
mucosal surface is equivalent to the size of a tennis court? Or that there are
more bacteria in a gram of stool than there are stars in the known universe?!
But I digress.
Dr. Haas uses patient case
studies throughout to illustrate the benefits of general detoxification, as well
as more intensive fasting and juice cleansing approaches. He offers up a 3-week
detox diet, which emphasizes the importance of eating organic and whole foods
and alkalinizing the body’s pH (noting disease states correlate to more acid
pH).
The chapter on transitional
diets is especially interesting as the author explains quality animal foods,
sugar alternatives, an anti-yeast diet, and nutritional supplements. Like
Watson, Dr. Haas recommends plenty of fiber at 20-40 grams daily. He’s also big
on vitamin C at up to 4 grams daily and suggests various amino acids, probiotics,
flaxseed oil, chlorophyll, apple cider vinegar, and detox herbs for general
detox needs.
The book spends several
chapters talking about how to detoxify from specific addictions, such as sugar,
nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and chemicals (SNACCs). Non-toxic living is
discussed before the book ends with 42 pages of alkalinizing recipes (without
the most common reactive foods, like wheat and dairy) and 16 pages of very good
resources.
Assessment of
The New Detox Diet
Of the three books reviewed,
this one is in a horse race with the next diet, Dr. Kushner’s Personality Type
Diet. This kat liked the focus on liver-friendly amino acids l-glutamine, l-glycine,
DL methionine, and l-cysteine in the supplements section and found the
physician-supervised niacin-sauna therapy interesting (preliminary results are
good for people affected by herbicides like Agent Orange).
Rating:
Highly Recommended
THE PERSONALITY DIET
Dr. Kushner’s
Personality Type Diet is written by a
husband/wife team based in Chicago, IL. The focus of this diet is to use a
simple quiz to determine a weight loss plan tailored to your individual
personality.
Dr. Kushner is the medical
director of the
Wellness Institute at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the
author of over 100 articles on nutrition and obesity. This background separates
this book’s content from the other two reviewed here.
Understanding Unconscious Eating & Coping
Patterns
There’s plenty here to make
this kat purr. Well written, logically laid out, this book is peppered with
interesting facts about weight loss in pullouts the author calls, “Nibble on
This.”
This book just begs to be
read and used. The first chapter sets the stage for this diet with what Dr.
Kushner calls “Scaling up Syndrome.” This has to do with the idea that given the
incredible abundance in the US, why do so many people sabotage looking and
feeling good by eating so much crap?
Dr. Kushner’s answer has a
lot more to do with “unconscious adaption to the multifaceted pressures of
modern society” than genetics, metabolism, frame size or willpower. He has a
chart for mapping life events to weight changes and environments and behaviors
to timelines for change.
Dr. Kushner’s personality
quiz involves answering 66 questions to yield personality profiles related to
eating, exercise, and coping. Chapters 3-5 use the results of the quiz to help
the reader identify patterns that shaped their eating personality and ways to go
from “mindless” to “conscious.”
In Chapter 4, Dr. Kushner
outlines what determines a person’s exercise personality and how to get back on
track with something called FITTE, an acronym for the “Frequency, Intensity,
Time, Type, and Enjoyment” of whatever exercise program the dieter chooses.
In Chapter 5, Kushner
diverges from the other two diets by addressing a dieter’s coping personality.
This is how emotions, stressors, and personality differences mold a person’s
views on eating, exercising, and weight loss. He offers handy tools for each
personality type. For example, he includes an ABC model to track the “food/mood
behavior chain” for the Emotional Stuffer.
A is for antecedents (emotional triggers that occur before eating), B is for
behavior (the eating itself), and C is for consequences (feelings and attitudes
that follow eating). For the Pessimistic
Thinker personality, he offers a chart for transforming negative
thoughts (I can’t) by reframing them positively (I can).
Chapter 6 outlines ways to
stay on track using fill-in forms to define progress, troubleshoot problem
areas, and take corrective action. Chapter 7 is a stout 78 pages of recipes and
sample menus (including Nutrition Facts panels for each recipe!). The final
chapter discusses how to get help with nutritional and psychological issues
related to dieting. Three appendices cover the BMI, a three-week starter plan
diet, and a list of dieting resources.
Assessment of
The Personality Diet
This book is my first
choice. It’s chock full of great information, diet plans, exercise programs and
plain, old good advice for fat cat humans hoping to drop some pounds. And while
all three books are valuable in different ways, I’ve got to give Dr. Kushner’s
tome my highest tribute. It addresses dieting as about more than great
knowledge (regarding nutrition, detox, etc.), and instead emphasizes a more
sustainable mental, emotional, physical, environmental process.
Rating: Very Highly Recommended
P.S. I won't hold it
against Dr. Kushner that his
bio picture
has a dog in it! ^..^
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