The Dukan Diet (7 page)

This being the case, if during your diet you cannot avoid a professional dinner engagement or a family celebration that will force you to put aside the rules of the Dukan Diet, then at least avoid eating salty foods and drinking too much alcohol. And do not weigh yourself the next morning, because a sudden increase in weight may discourage you and undermine your determination and confidence. Wait until the following day—or, even better, 2 days—while returning to the diet, drinking mineral water with a low mineral content, and cutting back on salt. These three simple measures should be enough to get you back on track.

Salt Increases Appetite—Decreasing Your Salt Intake Decreases Your Appetite
This is a simple observation. Salty foods increase salivation and gastric acidity, which in turn increase your appetite. Conversely, lightly salted foods have only a slight effect on digestive secretions and no effect on appetite. Unfortunately, the absence of salt reduces thirst, and thus when you follow the Dukan Diet, you need to accept that during the first days you will have to make yourself drink a large amount of liquid so that you boost your need for water and reestablish your natural thirst.

The pure protein diet, the initial and principal driving force behind the four integrated diets that make up my program, is not like other diets. It is the only one to use just a single food group and one well-established category of foods with the highest protein content.

During the pure protein diet and throughout the whole program, any mention of calories and of calorie counting is to be avoided. Whether a few or many calories are eaten has little effect on the results; what counts is eating only the prescribed foods. So the actual secret of the program’s first two weight loss phases is to eat a lot, even to eat in anticipation, before the hunger pangs take over. Hunger that turns into an uncontrollable craving that can no longer be appeased by pure proteins leads the careless dieter toward comfort foods with little nutritional value—sugary, creamy, rich, and destabilizing foods that nevertheless have a strong emotional power.

By following the Dukan Diet, you have replaced a calories system with a categories system. There is absolutely no need for you to count calories; all you need do is stay within the categories. But if you stray away from the list of permitted foods, you are no longer allowed to eat any quantity you like, and you will have to start counting how many calories you eat.

So this is a diet you cannot follow in half measures. It relies on the all-or-nothing law, which explains not only its metabolic effectiveness, but also its amazing impact on the psychology of an overweight person.

With a temperament that goes from one extreme to another, just as determined when making an effort and as easygoing when giving up, overweight people find in each of the four stages of my program an approach to suit them perfectly.

These affinities between the individual’s psychological profile and the diet’s structure create a synergy that is decisive for the dieter.

THE
DUKAN DIET
IN
PRACTICE

However much weight is to be lost over whatever length of time, my program always starts with the pure protein diet, which creates a psychological trigger and a first decisive weight loss.

I will now review in detail all the foods you will use in this first phase, adding some advice to the description to make your personal choice easier.

How long does this initial Attack phase have to last? There is no standard reply for this extremely important question; how long it lasts depends on each individual. It primarily depends on how much weight you want to lose, but also on your age, how many previous diets you have tried, how motivated you are, and how you feel about proteins.

I will also give you very precise information about the results you can expect from the Attack diet, which obviously rely on the diet’s being followed to the letter and for the correct length of time.

Finally, I will outline the various reactions you might encounter during this initial period.

During the Attack phase, which can last from 2 to 7 days, you are allowed to eat foods from the eleven categories on the following list.

From these categories, you can eat as much as you want or as much as suits you, with no limit and at whatever time of day you feel hungry. You may also freely combine foods from any of these categories.

You can just select the foods you like, leaving the others aside, or in extreme cases, you can eat from a single category in 1 single meal or for 1 day.

The essential thing is to stick to this precisely defined list. Remember that I have been prescribing it to people for many years and that I have not left anything out. You must also realize that succumbing to any other foods, as small as the lapse may be, will be like puncturing a balloon with a needle.

An apparently harmless lapse will be enough for you to lose all the benefits of this precious freedom of being able to eat all you want. For just a tiny gain in variety, you will be forced for the rest of that day to count your calories and restrict what you eat.

In short, the rule is simple and non-negotiable: You are allowed everything on the following list, with complete freedom. Anything that is not on the list is forbidden, so forget about it for now, knowing that in the near future you will again be eating all the foods that have been removed.

By lean meat, I mean beef, veal, lean pork, and game.

• Beef: All roasts or grilled beef are allowed—namely, steaks, tenderloin, sirloin, and roast beef; you must carefully avoid all types of ribs as they are too fatty.
  
• Veal: Recommended are veal cutlets and roast veal; veal chops are allowed as long as you trim all the fat.
  
• Buffalo and venison are permitted.
  
• Pork: Lean cuts are permitted, such as tenderloin, loin roast, or well-trimmed center-cut chops.
  
• Lamb is not allowed in the Attack phase.
  

You can prepare all these meats as you like but without using any butter, oil, or cream, not even low-fat versions. However, if using a nonstick pan, you can rub the surface with a few drops of oil on a piece of paper towel to keep the flavor of the cooked meat without additional fat.

I recommend that you grill your meat, but these meats can also be roasted in the oven, cooked on a rotisserie, or even boiled. How well done or not you like your meat is up to you. But do remember that the longer the meat is cooked, the less fat there is, which comes closest to the Dukan Diet’s ideal of pure protein.

You can also use lean ground meat prepared as burgers or as meatballs mixed with an egg, spices, capers, or pickles, and grilled or cooked in the oven. Raw meat is allowed (if you are completely confident of the source), tartare or carpaccio style, but it must be prepared without oil. Frozen beef burgers are allowed, but make sure that the fat content does not exceed 10 percent—15 percent is too rich for the Attack phase. You would do better to grind some lean meat yourself in your food processor, or cook the burger until most of the fat runs off.

I will remind you again that you can eat as much as you want.

Only liver (beef, veal, or poultry), kidneys, and tongue are allowed. Liver is rich in vitamins, which is very useful during a diet. Unfortunately, liver is also high in cholesterol, so it should be avoided if you have any cardiovascular problems.

There is no restriction or limitation with this family of foods. All fish are allowed: lean or fat; white or oily; fresh, frozen, dried, or smoked; or canned (but not in oil or sauce containing fat).

• All fatty fish and oily fish are allowed, such as sardines, mackerel, bluefish, tuna, and salmon.
  
• All white and lean fish are also allowed, such as sole, halibut, cod, sea bass, mahi-mahi, tilapia, orange roughy, catfish, perch, skate, trout, flounder, and monkfish, as well as many other lesser-known varieties.
  
• Smoked fish is permitted, too. Smoked salmon, although greasy looking, is less fatty than a 90 percent fat-free steak. The same goes for smoked trout, tuna, eel, and haddock.
  
• Canned fish, very handy for quick meals or picnics, is allowed if it is in brine or water, such as tuna, salmon, mackerel, or sardines. Canned sardines in tomato sauce are also permitted.
  
• Finally, you are allowed to have surimi. Originally from Japan, these imitation crab sticks are made with very lean white-fleshed fish that has been pulverized and flavored with crab sauce and a little sugar. Many of my readers have an unfavorable opinion of this product. It is true that it is a processed food, but having researched into how it is produced, I have seen that it is of high nutritional quality, prepared from small white-fleshed fish on factory ships on the open sea. Others have pointed out to me that the labels mention carbohydrates. This is true but does not rule the product out, as the carbohydrates are starch that can be tolerated because of surimi’s other qualities. The fat content is in fact very low.