Authors: Pierre Dukan
The Dukan Diet (12 page)
Overall result: 22 pounds in 2½ months using the alternating protein diet.
If your body has developed a resistance to dieting because you followed poor diets badly in the past, the Dukan Diet is your best selection. The Attack phase acts like a bulldozer, pushing aside all resistance. You, too,
will lose 12 pounds during the first 3 weeks, but if you follow the Cruise phase instructions precisely, you will also continue to lose weight without interruption until you actually lose almost 45 pounds in 6 months on the alternating protein diet. And if you regain some of the weight you have lost, you can always return to the Attack phase later without any risk of developing resistance.
If you are in perimenopause or menopause, you are facing that time in your life when you are most at risk of putting on weight, and especially so if you already have some extra pounds. Even losing the first few pounds in the Attack phase is a major undertaking. That is why it is vital for you to get your hormone balance under control before starting this program. Doing so is a matter for the gynecologist or family doctor.
Keep in mind that weight gained during menopause is not irreversible, though it is a difficult period to go through. You will, if armed and ready, get past this difficult stage in 6 months to a year. Well-managed hormone replacement therapy will give you the best basis for losing weight effectively. Without supervised hormone therapy, it can take up to a year to lose around 45 pounds.
If by following my program, you reach this point on your road map, you will have achieved your True Weight—well done.
However, going by my statistics, it is my duty to tell you that:
- 50 percent of readers stop here; they consider themselves cured. They forget that there are still two other phases to finish to ensure that their new weight is maintained over the long term. All those who are impatient will, without exception,
put the weight back on or get caught up in eating patterns that can only end in failure. So you have been warned. - The other 50 percent of my readers do not stop here but rather follow me into the Consolidation phase; 85 percent of these go right to the end. This is better, but not good enough.
- Only those who go on into the fourth and final Permanent Stabilization phase, and follow it, achieve the single goal that counts: being cured of being overweight.
- I hope with all my heart, dear reader, that you will not stop here and that you will continue to the very end of our joint undertaking. Otherwise I will have done what other diets have done for the past sixty years: I will have brought you with me into the desert and abandoned you just before you reach the oasis.
CRUISE DIET SUMMARY
Keep eating all the Attack diet foods and add the following vegetables, raw or cooked, without restricting quantities, combinations, or time of day: tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, spinach, asparagus, leeks, string beans, cabbage, mushrooms, celery, fennel, Swiss chard, eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, peppers, and all salad greens, including chicory. You can even include carrots, beets, and artichokes, provided you do not eat them at every meal. These three vegetables contain a little more sugar than the others allowed in the alternating protein diet, but you can eat them liberally while you’re losing weight at a normal rate. However, if your weight loss slows or you reach a plateau, reduce or eliminate their consumption until your weight loss resumes.
Throughout this Cruise phase, you will alternate periods of proteins with vegetables with periods without any vegetables until you reach your desired weight.
The Transition Diet
You have now arrived at your True Weight, or at the weight you considered acceptable and set as your goal at the start—or at a weight you want to settle for as acceptable or a half victory, because you know that the effort involved in going further is too much and risks jeopardizing what you have achieved so far.
The time of rigorous constraints is over, and you are at last on flat terrain. You and your body have made a prolonged effort, and you have been rewarded. But to rest on your laurels now is very dangerous. You have reached a weight that suits you, but this weight that you have achieved does not really quite belong to you yet. Get rid of the illusion that you have at last finally taken care of your weight problem and can now go back to your old ways. That would be catastrophic, because in no time at all you will be back to your old weight. I do not mean that you have to continue forever with the aggressive diet that you have just followed. Who would agree to that?
The extra pounds that made you follow this diet in the first place,
especially if they were a substantial—or worse, a recurring—problem, were certainly no accident. Whether these pounds were due to your genes or were an acquired habit, there is something written inside you, a bit like the information on a hard disk, that will not disappear.
There is a way of keeping your new weight, and it will be the theme of the fourth phase of the program, the Permanent Stabilization phase. But you are not there yet because you are still predisposed to gain weight, and this tendency is now actually heightened by your body’s defense impulse, as it thinks that it has been robbed of its reserves.
What you need to do is to make peace with your body, which is just waiting for the opportunity to replenish those reserves. This is the objective of this next phase—the Consolidation phase in which you consolidate the weight lost and which, when completed, will open the door to every dieter’s dream: permanent weight stabilization at little cost.
But to be completely ready to start this Consolidation phase, you must understand why you are still too vulnerable, and your body too prone to weight rebound, for you to move straight to the Permanent Stabilization phase. After this brief but vital theoretical introduction, I will explain to you in detail how to follow this Consolidation phase in practice, the new foods it involves, and how long it lasts.
When a body has lost a good number of pounds through effective dieting, several reactions conspire to put the weight back on. To understand them, you need to know that the buildup of fat reserves means that the body has surplus calories available in case of any future food shortage.
Fat was the simple solution nature came up with to conserve and store energy; it is the most concentrated form known in the animal kingdom (1 gram of fat = 9 calories). Nowadays, when food is completely and easily accessible, we may well ask ourselves what use storing fat is to our bodies.
But, again, you have to remember that our biological system was not
designed for the modern world; it came into being at a time when access to food was hazardous and unpredictable and required struggle and hard work. Being fat was a precious survival tool for the first humans. The human body, whose biological programming has remained unchanged, still bestows the same importance on what it considers as its vital reserves and does not like to see them being plundered.
A body that is losing weight risks being left with no resources if there is the slightest interruption in its food supply. That is why it reacts—because it feels threatened biologically. All its reactions have one sole objective: to recover all the fat it has lost as soon as possible. Your body has three very effective ways of doing this:
• The first is to trigger hunger pangs and sharpen your appetite to encourage you to eat more; the more unsatisfying your previous diet was before you embarked on the Dukan Diet, the stronger this reaction will be.
• Your body’s second strategy is to reduce its energy consumption. If you earn less money, you tend to spend less. Biological organisms react in a similar way. This is why many people complain about feeling cold during weight loss diets; your body is using less energy to keep you warm.
The same goes for tiredness: when we feel tired, we avoid any unnecessary effort, excessive activity becomes difficult, and everything slows down. Memory and intellectual effort, which require a lot of energy, are also affected. The need for sleep and rest, which save energy, also increases. Hair and nails grow less rapidly. In short, in order to adapt to a long period of losing weight, the body goes into a kind of hibernation.
• Finally, the body’s third reaction is the most efficient and the most dangerous one, whether you are trying to lose weight or are already stabilizing, as it consists in assimilating the calories from your food more efficiently. An individual who ordinarily gets 100 calories from a slice of bread will end up, at the end of the diet, assimilating 120 to 130 calories from the same slice. Each morsel is sifted through, and everything
possible is absorbed. This increase in calorie extraction takes place in the small intestine.
Increase in appetite, reduction in energy used, and maximum extraction of calories consumed all combine to transform the overweight body that has just lost weight into a calorie sponge. This is usually the moment when you are so happy with your results that you assume you can lower your guard and return to your old habits. This is the most frequent and natural cause for those pounds quickly piling back on again.
So, after you have carefully followed a diet and attained your desired weight, this is the time to be most careful. It is called the rebound period; like a ball that has just touched the ground, weight has a tendency to bounce back.
There is still no natural or therapeutic method today to counter rebound. The best way to protect yourself against it is to know how long it will last so that during this time you can fight it with the correct eating strategy. Over time I have observed rebound effects in my patients and have concluded that the high-risk period for regaining weight lasts about 5 days for every pound lost—for example, 30 days for 6 to 7 pounds lost, or 100 days for 18 to 20 pounds lost.
I attach great importance to this rule because, here again, it is the lack of precise information that puts you at greatest risk when you have lost weight and finished dieting. Understanding the dangers and how long they last really helps you to get through the Consolidation phase and also to more easily accept the additional but crucial effort you will need to make to neutralize the rebound.
The simple passage of time during the Consolidation phase allows your system, which is on alert to conserve weight, to settle down and relax. Here my Stabilization diet awaits, with its three simple, concrete, and painless measures, including protein Thursdays.
Meanwhile, you must follow a new, more open Transition diet that offers freedom within limits. It is not a weight loss diet, but it is not yet a diet free from all constraints.
It is hard to maintain your new weight—even if you are set on doing everything you can to never regain the pounds you have fought so hard to lose—without having a precise weight target and without having defined a future weight objective that is both satisfying and realistic. I have witnessed too many failures, due in the most part to an unrealistic choice of stabilization weight.
Many formulas exist to define a person’s ideal weight according to height, age, gender, and bone structure. All these formulas are theoretically applicable, but I am wary of them because they are about statistical individuals who in reality do not exist.
So, in place of a theoretical ideal weight, I tend to use the more realistic notion of a weight at which you can comfortably stabilize. The best way to calculate a good stabilization weight is to ask yourself what weight you can most easily achieve and at which you will feel good. There are two reasons for basing your stabilization weight on these factors.
Every mammal, including man, is biologically programmed to store as fat excess food consumed and not used. This fat is a strategic energy reserve necessary for survival when food is scarce. Today we live in a land of plenty and our problem is not finding food, but refusing it. However, your body’s programming to store fat in case of a food shortage has remained the same.
As you lose weight, your body goes into alert mode, trying to protect its fat reserves. It becomes more efficient at using the food you give it so weight loss slows. At this point, you reach what I call a plateau of stagnation.
Trying to stabilize your weight when it has plateaued is doomed to fail, because the effort required is disproportionate to the result obtained. If
you try anyway, it would require so much effort it would be unbearable in the long run.
Furthermore, please know that for people who were substantially overweight to start with, I place far greater emphasis on well-being than on the symbolic value of an abstract and supposedly “normal” weight. If you are predisposed to being overweight, you are not just “the average person,” and you should not set a goal that does not suit who you are. What you need is to be able to live normally and happily; not burdened by the stress of an unrealistic goal. Stabilizing at this weight will be a remarkable feat in itself.
Finally, you have to bear in mind the maximum and minimum weights you have reached in all your weight fluctuations over the years, because no matter how long your maximum weight lasted, it is that weight your body will have forever recorded in its biological memory.
As an example of what I mean by the effect of your body’s biological memory, let’s imagine a woman 5 feet 6 inches tall who has, on just one day of her life, weighed over 210 pounds. It is an absolute impossibility that such a woman could ever hope to stabilize at around 112 pounds, as some theoretical tables suggest. Her body retains the biological memory of her maximum weight, and this memory can never be erased. To recommend that she stabilize her weight at 150 pounds is more sensible, at least on paper—but only if she already feels comfortable at that weight.
