If you’re determined to lose weight this year, good for you. It’s a beautiful goal. It’s a new year. A new beginning. The holidays are behind us. All that’s left is to choose a diet that will work for you and your lifestyle, and away you go. Right? Wrong!!
Studies continually show that most people who diet will lose weight while dieting, but within a short time, they’ll regain the lost weight and end up heavier than when they started. (1)
To Succeed at Weight Loss, Let’s be Clear – There’s absolutely NOTHING you need to buy.
Remember this: It’s Your Fat You Want to Lose, Not Your Money
The weight-loss industry claims we need to eat less. The food industry says we need to move more. The pharmaceutical people say obesity’s a disease we must combat with supplements and drugs. If you listen to these guys long enough, you’ll faint from going around in circles so many times.
For over 50 years, we’ve been wasting billions of dollars a year on bogus diets, supplements, specialty foods, and an endless stream of weight-loss gimmicks that have all proven to be spectacularly ineffective. If you doubt that, consider this; in 2021, Americans alone spent over $70 billion (2) on weight-loss products and services, and obesity rose yet again, just like it has every year since the mid-’70s.
Forget Everything You’ve Been TOLD & SOLD!
To Lose Weight Healthily and Permanently, You Need to Feed Your Body, Not Starve it!
If that strikes you as counterintuitive, it’s because we’ve been thoroughly conditioned to blame weight gain on everything but the actual cause … which is our horrific Western diet of highly processed, nutrient-void, fiberless garbage. Most people today are getting more than 60% of their total calories from fast, packaged, and ready-to-eat frozen foods (ultra-processed foods), and if that describes your diet, you’re suffering from malnutrition.
Food is the foundation upon which our health is built, and since we’re not eating enough “real” food, the only possible result is premature aging, ill health and obesity.
So here’s the million-dollar question; Is eating ultra-processed food (UPF) really that bad?
It’s actually worse than you can imagine, which is why the first time Dr. Kevin Hall
heard the claim that ultra-processed food caused obesity, he thought it was a nonsensical exaggeration. Everything he read about the dangers of ultra-processed food in science journals was nothing but innuendo and correlation. There wasn’t a shred of sound science to show causation. So, he decided to run an experiment to prove, once and for all, that ultra-processed foods were not behind our obesity epidemic. (3)
In 2018, he recruited 20 healthy men and women to spend 28 days living at 
his Metabolic Research Facility to determine the effect of ultra-processed foods on obesity. For two weeks, ten of the participants ate non-processed foods (think home-prepared meals), while the other ten ate a similar menu of ultra-processed foods. The key to the experiment’s validity was that all meals in both diets were perfectly matched for total calories, macronutrients, fibre, sugar, sodium and even taste! In fact, both groups liked the taste of either menu equally well
DAY ONE: SAMPLE DIET
Processed Breakfast
Honey Nut Cheerios (General Mills); whole milk with NutriSource fiber; blueberry muffin (Otis Spunkmeyer); margarine (Glenview Farms)
Whole Food Breakfast
Greek yogurt (Fage) parfait with strawberries, bananas, walnuts (Diamond), salt and olive oil; apple slices with fresh squeezed lemon
Processed Lunch
Beef ravioli (Chef Boyardee); Parmesan cheese (Roseli); white bread (Ottenberg); margarine (Glenview Farms); diet lemonade (Crystal Light) with NutriSource fiber; oatmeal raisin cookies (Otis Spunkmeyer)
Whole Food Lunch
Spinach salad with chicken breast, apple slices, bulgur (Bob’s Red Mill), sunflower seeds and grapes; vinaigrette made with olive oil, fresh squeezed lemon juice, apple cider vinegar (Giant), ground mustard seed, black pepper and salt
Processed Dinner
Steak (Tyson); gravy (McCormick); mashed potatoes (Basic American Foods); margarine (Glenview Farms); corn (canned, Giant); diet lemonade (Crystal Light) with NutriSource fiber; low-fat chocolate milk (Nesquik) with NutriSource fiber
Whole Food Dinner
Beef tender roast (Tyson); rice pilaf (Roland), garlic, onions, sweet peppers and olive oil); steamed broccoli; salad (green leaf lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers) with balsamic vinaigrette (Nature’s Promise); orange slices; pecans, salt & pepper
After just two weeks, the results were astonishing. The group on the “real food” diet lost a full two pounds and saw marked improvements in all their biomarkers, including a rise in their satiety hormones. The group on the ultra-processed diet gained two pounds and increased their body fat by almost a full pound, and saw a marked increase in their hunger hormones. It was no wonder, even though both groups could eat as much as they wanted, those on the processed diet averaged an additional 508 calories per day!
When the subjects switched diets for the second two-week period, everything reversed – including the change in hormones. The group who had started on the whole foods diet and lost weight soon regained it. The group who gained weight in the first two weeks soon lost it by getting off the UPF diet. At the end of the study, Dr. Hall admitted that he was shocked at the results because it was not what he expected. Still, nonetheless, the results were indisputable, ultra-processed foods drive overweight and obesity.
Here’s the 2023 formula to lose excess fat and keep it off for good without dieting, calorie counting or food restriction of any kind … eat real food! Do that, and no food is off-limits. In fact, you can eat burgers, fries, pizza, wings and anything else you like, just as long as it’s not highly processed. The more you cut back on engineered pseudo-food, the more you feed your body. In fact, reduce your consumption of UPF by 10%, and you reduce your chances of obesity by 10%, and all this begins to happen in just a few days. (4)
Instead of dieting and starving your body, feed it. How? Before you consume any food, ask this simple question: “Am I getting calories or nutrients?” Your answer to that question will determine your health and weight.
References
- Grodstein F, Levine R, Troy L, Spencer T, Colditz GA, Stampfer MJ. “Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program. Can you keep it off?,” Arch Intern Med. 1996 Jun 24;156(12):1302-6
- Martínez SteeleE, Baraldi LG, Louzada MLDC, et al., “Ultra-processed Foods and Added Sugars in the US Diet: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Cross-sectional Study,” BMJ Open 2016;6:e009892
- Hall K., et al., “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake,” Cell Metabolism, July 2, 2019, Vol. 30:67-77
- Mazin, A., “Interview, Prof. Albert-Lászlo Barabási on Network Medicine,” Lifespan.IO, August 15, 2022