In advance of the reloaded edition of The Carb Nite Solution we’ll be releasing later on this year, we’ve decided to treat you to a few excerpts. Here’s the first installment:
We’ve All Been There
Nearly all of us have battled with our weight. For some of us, this started as early as our teens. For others, it began in adulthood. We’ve tried every new diet, adhered to every rule, and attempted to squeeze every last promise from all the texts we’ve bought. Daily menus are earnestly followed. We purchase exotic foods, take up life-altering exercise programs, and—perhaps most burdensome of all—we buy every recommended supplement. The religious fervor of few monks can compare with the zeal of our dieting discipline.
Fueled by nearly instantaneous weight loss, we fly through these first few weeks. Confidence rises, excitement takes hold, and we press forward. Everything, however, eventually comes to a screeching halt. Almost as quickly as we shed the initial weight, our progress stalls. We’re no longer losing weight, the food choices are monotonous, we’re feeling weak, and we’re drooling over decadent treats as though we haven’t seen food in months. Believing we’re doing something wrong, we return to the pages of our current dieting bible and look for the missing details that can put us back on track.
It’s hard to understand. We’re doing everything right. Calories are in the allowable range, there’s not too much fat or too many carbs, and we’re getting plenty of exercise. What’s going wrong? Frustration replaces confidence, then quickly makes way for desperation. We cut calories. We ratchet up the exercise. We cut the fat. We cut out sugar. We cut out more fat. Still, little progress is made.
Disgruntled and disheartened, we finally throw our hands up and quit. Clearly, the diet didn’t live up to its claims—but we blame ourselves for the disappointment. We figure we’ll give it another try further down the road when there’s more time—as though we haven’t sacrificed enough precious time already. Even after we gain all the weight back, we’ll defend our diet like brainwashed disciples, claiming, “It really worked for me.”
***
Millions experience this situation every year. Many popular diets are excellent for achieving health goals like lowering cholesterol and triglyceride levels, or managing conditions like insulin resistance. Problems arise, however, when you use these popular diets to achieve a goal for which they were never intended: fat loss. Manipulating the different aspects of the body responsible for fat loss—metabolism, hormones, fat cells, and enzymes—defies conventional methods, requiring a radically different approach. These popular diet plans improve specific aspects of heath and assist weight maintenance. Their utility, however, ends there. Don’t misunderstand me here—good health is always a concern, but if your goal is weight loss and, in particular, fat loss—getting rid of cellulite, flabby butts, beer bellies and love handles—you’ve been using the wrong tools.
The Puzzle
Unlike most in this field, I’m not a medical doctor or nutritionist to the stars. I’m a physicist. Like you, spending years trying to conquer my problem with body fat left me tired and frustrated. I’ve tried every diet imaginable—low-fat, low-carb, high-protein, zones, phases, and everything else—while attempting to erase the stigma that first began when, in the middle of sixth grade, another kid looked me square in the eyes and said, “You’re fat.”
In the years that followed, committing to weight loss was no small task. The late 1980s witnessed a flood of discoveries about hormones, food, metabolism, and fat cells that overwhelmed experts in the fields of health, nutrition, and weight loss. Faced with a million scattered puzzle pieces, all coming from the same box, experts began arranging pieces to form their own images. There was a problem, though: nobody knew what the final picture should look like.
Beginning with relatively few pieces that fit together nicely, they expanded to broader and broader topics. As pressure mounted to explain the growing number of discoveries, interpreting study results liberally, and often incorrectly, became commonplace—and pieces that didn’t quite fit were pounded into place. Rather than clear, crisp images, these randomly created mosaics fueled an eruption of new and speculative diets. Unfortunately, these contained gaping holes and incorporated only a fraction of the pieces.
This surge of research and speculation, fortunately, set a renaissance of sorts into motion. Diet books, with their new theories, needed support, and authors began including citations. This diet industry renaissance coincided with my growing interest in weight loss. Living within minutes of a world-class medical library, my curiosity led me to examine the offered proof by consulting the original scientific papers.
I spent months, and years, reading journal articles. It took time to learn the technology, but within months, I’d made my first startling discovery: the research available, even some of the research that was cited, didn’t support even one author’s theory. The citations consisted primarily of nicely fitting studies, along with a few results twisted beyond recognition—the obvious smashed-to-fit pieces. These authors ignored or belittled everything else.
Insatiably, I began checking the validity of other diets over the following years, accumulating vast stores of research in the process. I eventually abandoned these pseudo-scientific diet books and began seeking my own answers. I wanted to know why it seemed impossible to lose my body fat, and why so many others were having the same trouble. Was losing the extra pounds really hopeless? Or did some method of stripping fat from the body—something effective for everyone, not just the extremely obese—exist? If such a method did exist, I was going to find it—and if I didn’t, at least I’d know enough to never get duped into trying another fad diet.
Being a physicist gave me a different perspective than most in the field of diet and weight loss. Relying on the research of others when pursuing your own work is essential to success in the academic world of physics. You can never assume anything if you expect to be successful. You need scientific proof, so I applied these same principles as I searched for a solution.
The mind-boggling amount of information and numerous considerations gave me the exact same million-piece puzzle others had already grappled with without having the slightest idea of the final picture. I refused, however, to throw valid pieces away or distort results to my own ends, even if only a quick glance at the answer was possible. After reading over 20,000 peer-reviewed research articles, a stroke of luck turned out to provide the desperately needed glimpse of the completed picture. A single event helped pull together years of research, and The Carb Nite Solution emerged.
To be continued…
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