Healthy Weight Loss Healthy Life!

Healthy Weight Loss
Healthy Life © Copyright 2006 Stuart J. Adams
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Healthy Weight Loss Healthy Life!
The essential guide to long-term healthy weight loss for Australian adults
Stuart J. Adams
B.App.Sc (Nutrition & Food)

Stuart J. Adams is a consultant nutritionist and a regular guest speaker
for various private, corporate, government and community functions. He
has been interviewed about nutrition related topics on television and
radio including Today Tonight, Radio 4BC, 4OUR as well as a regular
program on Sydney radio 92.1FM. He has authored multiple articles for
various magazines and writes a regular nutrition column in 2 Sydney
newspapers. He currently serves on the committee for the NSW division
of Nutrition Australia, (the most respected authority on Nutrition in the
country) and runs a private nutritional counselling service in the Western
Sydney area where he resides with his wife and 4 dogs.

© Copyright 2006, Stuart Adams
This publication is copyright. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including email, photocopying, recording, or by an information retrieval system, under any circumstances.
Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in prosecution, litigation and other nasty things - so don’t do it.
Disclaimer
The information contained in this publication is for education purposes only and should not replace medical advice. Readers
should consult a medical practitioner before making any adjustments to their diet or exercise regime. Don’t try to diagnose or
treat yourself of any medical condition either – that would be silly.

Special thanks to Stephen Cheng, B.Sc (Hons) and Nancy Ortiz, R.D. for donating
your time to help edit this book.


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Healthy Life © Copyright 2006 Stuart J. Adams
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Index
Part 1: Introduction and background information
Introduction








5
Chapter 1: Get your priorities straight




9
Chapter 2: A medical disaster





11
Chapter
3:
We’re
getting
fatter
14
Chapter 4: Why are we getting fatter?




15
Chapter 5: The Body Mass Index (BMI)



16
Chapter 6: Why me?






17
Chapter
7:
Slow
and
steady
18
Part 2: Some basic concepts you need to understand
Chapter 8: Weight loss: A simple concept



23
Chapter
9:
A
healthy
diet
24
Chapter 10: Protein: The body’s most important macronutrient 34
Chapter 11: Carbohydrate: The body’s preferred fuel source
36
Chapter 12: Fat: Is it really that bad?




39
Chapter 13: What about the ratios?




42
Summary of Concepts






46


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Part 3: Putting it into practice
Chapter 14: Show me the Calories!




48

Chapter 15: Healthy and practical ways to cut back on Calories 56
Chapter 16: Make your grains take up less of the meal

58
Chapter17: Drink water






61
Chapter 18: Eat small, frequent meals




64
Chapter 19: Choose low glycemic load (LG) foods


66
Chapter
20:
Fill
up
on
fibre
73
Chapter 21: Choose bran cereals for breakfast


75
Chapter 22: Snack on fruit





75
Chapter
23:
Choose
whole
grains
78
Chapter 24: Getting into the habit (and staying in it)

80
Chapter
25:
Avoid
temptations 89
Chapter 26: Exercise






92
Part 4: Be warned: A critical look at some popular weight loss
fads
Chapter 27: Over the counter weight loss supplements

106
Chapter 28: Meal replacement schemes



114
Chapter
29:
Other
commercial
schemes
120
Chapter 30: What about other popular (fad) diets?

125
Chapter 31. You’re going to need support 130

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Healthy Life © Copyright 2006 Stuart J. Adams
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Part 1


Introduction and Background
Information










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Introduction
The purpose
Here we go again; yet another weight loss book. The health section of the local bookstore is
cluttered up with weight loss books enough already isn’t it; why do we need another one? That’s
the question I’m sure a lot of people will be asking me when I tell them that I’ve written a book
about weight loss, especially given that I am known to be outspoken in my criticism of
commercial weight loss schemes, books, products and down-right scams.
The actual idea for this book came about when I began to cover weight loss issues on a weekly
radio program I used to do. Because there are so many very different weight loss schemes,
products and books out there, people started asking me which were the best, and which I’d
recommend. I had to have a good think about this, and went down to my local bookstore to start
rifling through the shelves to try and sus out which ones I thought contained reliable information
to help people with long term, healthy weight loss. Despite pouring desperately through the
pages of just about every book I could find buried amongst the shelves, my hopes of finding at
least one which I could consider credible enough to recommend, came crashing into
disappointment to realize that there were none.
During my little expedition through the bookshelves, I did however manage to discover a few
common trends that weight loss books apparently share. These trends are presumably designed
to provide their authors with a competitive marketing advantage, the importance of which
seemed apparently more significant than providing honest, reliable and scientifically accurate
information (so much so in fact that I started to wonder whether I had accidentally wandered
into the fiction section).
Anyway, it seems pretty clear that to write a best selling weight loss book, there are 3 fairly
obvious marketing strategies you need to employ.
Something new
The first marketing strategy is to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.
When you think about it, why would you bother reading about old news? The type of people who
buy lots of different diet books are typically what we call “yo-yo dieters”; people who go from diet
to diet and try everything new before failing and moving onto the next one. For authors, this
means that unless you can come up with some kind of new, miraculous, break-through diet
“revolution”, your chances of making the best sellers seem pretty slim.
Here’s the problem. Science is pretty slow. It takes a long time before we learn new things, and in
the last decade or so, scientists haven’t really learnt all that much about successful weight loss
than what they already knew; at least not enough to write a whole book about. The unfortunate
truth is that there are no new and exciting weight loss breakthroughs.
Whilst it may be great marketing, if someone is trying to sell you something that’s significantly
different to the good old (but boring) principles recommended by reputable health authorities
(such as Nutrition Australia) then it’s probably something you’d be best to do without. If it’s a
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book we’re talking about, and it has the words “breakthrough”, “revolution”, “secrets” or “the
[insert trendy name here] diet” in its title, then there’s a good chance that it’s not much more
than a work of fiction and should probably be left on the shelf.
Simplicity
The second marketing principle that will pretty much guarantee you a successful diet book or
weight loss scheme is the concept of “simplicity”. People generally don’t want to have to go to any
extra effort to do something if there is something or someone else out there who can take all the
effort out of it for them. Nobody really wants to have to worry about complex scientific issues
and have to go and learn new food choosing skills if they don’t have to. Basically, the simpler the
weight loss scheme is, the more money it will generate.
The simplest schemes of all are weight loss pills, (it doesn’t get much easier than popping a pill to
fix all your problems) though meal replacement shakes have become another popular way of
getting people to lose more money than weight. The other common strategies that weight loss
promoters and authors often use is to actually write out a specific dietary formulation which, if
followed precisely, will help you lose weight. Some of the popular commercial companies (such
as Jenny Craig) do this, and their diets are usually pretty healthy, unlike many of those written
out in popular diet books; the nutritional quality of which is surely questionable.
The simplicity of these strategies is that they tell you precisely what to eat and when to eat it.
Usually, they tell you what to eat for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, etc – and may even have
different meals for different days of the week, or may even change from week to week. This
seems to be the most common kind of strategy, especially used by diet book authors, though
other more simplified versions just tell you to avoid certain food groups (like all cereals / grains
and sugar containing foods; a typical simplified approach used by low-carb proponents) or
combinations of them (such as avoiding carbs and proteins in the same meal; a silly approach
used by food separation / combining proponents)
By following these types of plans, you don’t need to think much about what you are doing, and
you certainly don’t need to worry about how to balance your diet by yourself, read labels and all
the other seemingly complex skills you would need to be able to chose your own foods, yet still
lose weight and do so in a healthy manner. Unfortunately, offering to teach someone how to
learn these skills just doesn’t sell books. It’s like the old saying “if you give a man a fish, you feed
him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”. If we compared this
analogy to weight loss, the fish markets are raking in much more than the fishing teachers, as it’s
a lot easier for people to just go and buy the damned things, and leave it up to someone else to
worry about how to catch them.
Rapid Weight Loss
The third marketing strategy that weight loss promoters also use to help put their kids through
private schools is the concept of rapid weight loss. Weight loss pushers will often promote that
their products, schemes or books will make you lose “10 kilos in 10 weeks” or words to that effect
(I often come across flyers sticky taped to telegraph poles announcing “lose 15kg’s fast!” As
obviously silly as that sounds, It never fails to amaze me to always see plenty of the phone
number tags torn off by the skeptically deficient) Some schemes will even guarantee that you
will lose a certain number of kilos in a certain number of weeks, or your money back! (Market
research shows that people ripped off by money-back guarantee scams rarely actually ask for
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their money back because they are too embarrassed) Likewise, it’s not uncommon for weight loss
authors to tell us all how fast you can lose weight on their program by putting it in the actual
title, like “7 days to strip fat forever” or “burn fat in 30 minutes a day” or something along these
lines.
Whilst speedy weight loss and quick results may be a great marketing strategy, it is not only
unhealthy and potentially dangerous but it is typical of a fad which is probably doomed to fail. If
you are losing weight that rapidly, then it’s more than likely that whatever you are doing is
outstandingly different and radical to what your normal eating or exercise habits are. Although
you may have gotten all excited and motivated about starting a new weight loss regime, after a
while (maybe 2, 3 or up to 6 months or so) the motivation is going to wear off (it always does).
Once it does, (and it will) the further away your new activities are from your old ones, the more
likely you are to crash back down into your old ways. Old habits die hard as they say! (More
about this topic in Chapter 7)
Changing your habits: a gradual process.
The key to long-term, healthy weight loss is to develop subtle changes in your pre-existing habits
instead of trying to suddenly adopt totally new and completely different practices to what you’re
used to. Adopting subtle changes to the habits you already have might not make the scales show
your kilos rolling off overnight, but it is a lot more likely to mean long term success. To do this
however, you need to learn a few facts, a few scientific concepts and above all, you need to learn a
bunch of new skills. These skills will enable you to go out there into the big wide world and fill
your shopping trolley up with foods by choosing them for yourself, without having to rely on
simplified instructions from weight loss guides.
Being able to do this requires a bit more motivation that what you would need if you were simply
trying to rely on a simplified scheme which supposedly takes all the confusion and fuss out of
weight loss for you, by trying to sell you a quick fix or tell you what to eat and when to eat it (the
“feeding a man for a day” technique). This is not going to be a simple process, and whilst I will
try to explain these concepts in as simple-to-understand terms as I can, if you were looking for
simplicity, you are reading the wrong book.
Speaking of which, that brings me back to the beginning, and why it is that I’ve bothered to write
this book when there are already so many other books on the same topic. Whilst most of the
books I have looked at focus largely on providing something radical and revolutionary, basing it
on simplicity (i.e., telling you precisely what to eat or which food groups to avoid) and promise
rapid results, I have been thus far unable to find any books which give you the plain old facts, (as
boring and non-revolutionary as they may be) which aim for slow, gradual weight loss and which
do so by teaching you how to fish for yourself so to speak, instead of offering some kind of quick
fix solution tainted with scientific inaccuracy. Basically, it seems like the boring old facts have
become so untrendy that they’ve completely disappeared from popular view, creating a bloody
big hole that I figured I’d try patching up a bit with this book.
Healthy Weight Loss
There are two focuses of this book, as suggested by its title. The first is “healthy weight loss”.
As great for your health that losing weight will be, not all methods are going to do so in a healthy
manner. In reality, you could probably lose weight by eating dirt and cockroaches (they’re low in
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Calories, so would inevitably lead to weight loss). You could lose weight by starving yourself, by
removing part of your digestive tract or by undertaking just about any of the plethora of schemes
which are based on simplicity and speed.
Just because it makes you lose weight however, doesn’t mean that it’s a healthy way of doing it.
Unfortunately, most of the popular weight loss books or commercial schemes range from being
sub-optimally healthy because they are unbalanced (they may contain inadequate proportions of
dairy foods, meats, grain etc) or being not much better than eating dirt and cockroaches (the
nutritional inadequacy of meal replacement shakes comes to mind.)
No matter what weight loss dietary intervention you use, if you are serious about your health,
then it needs to be comprised of a healthy, well balanced diet that includes optimal proportions
of fruits, veggies and whole grains with a healthy balance of lean meats and dairy. The best
recommendations to explain what a healthy balanced diet should consist of is accurately
described by the Dietary Guidelines created by the Department of Health’s National Health and
Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and also well illustrated by the Healthy Eating Pyramid,
created by Nutrition Australia.
Whilst Nutrition Australia and the NHMRC may not have had rapid weight loss in mind when
they created these guidelines, they were thinking of long term health benefits. Both the Healthy
Eating Pyramid and the Dietary Guidelines are designed to minimize the risk of diet related
diseases, which include (but are not limited to) heart disease, stroke, cancer, type 2 diabetes and
yes, even obesity. These recommendations are based on many years of intense scientific
research; an explanation of which is fairly long and complicated.
Suffice it to say, that people whose diets are balanced in the proportions described by these
recommendations, have a statistically better chance of leading a longer and healthier life by
decreasing their risk of these serious diseases which are statistically more likely to kill us than
any other. (Cancer accounts for 30% of all deaths, Heart Disease for 25% and Stroke for 15%) If
your health is truly what you are concerned about, then you need to think about things in the
long term, not just how you’re going to benefit in the next few months. By looking at long term
health, you need to ensure your diet is balanced to include healthy proportions of foods with
disease fighting abilities.
Unfortunately, most weight loss schemes are primarily focused on weight loss and weight loss
only. Other than for aesthetic purposes, what’s the point of losing weight if you’re not doing so
healthfully?
Healthy Life!
The other major focus of this book is to help ensure that the habits you will adopt over the next
few weeks or months, will last you your entire life. This is perhaps the hardest part, because it
requires two things, only one of which I can give you (that will last a long time at least). The first
is to provide you with some basic knowledge of some complex concepts and teach you the skills
you will need to go out into the big wide world and know how to choose which foods to put in the
shopping trolley and which ones to leave behind.
This is not going to be terribly easy, but once you have gained the necessary knowledge and
skills, I can assure you that you won’t be forgetting them in a hurry. Whether you continue to
apply them for weeks, months or years however is up to you, and requires a bit of habit
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correction, a bit of motivation and a lot of hard work. If you were expecting this to be easy, I’m
sorry to disappoint you, but it isn’t. If you are looking for a quick fix, then you’ve come to the
wrong place.


1. Get your priorities straight
Health is popular
It pleases me to see that an ever increasing number of people are beginning to pay particular
attention to their health, and therefore go out of their way to do (or not do) certain things which
they believe will affect the quality of their health and their risk of disease. In other words, health
is becoming more popular. I’m glad.
One thing that never fails to surprise me however is the number of people who have decided to
pay special attention to their health by focusing on some silly, nonsensical fad which in reality,
probably has no real significant impact on their health at all. There seems to be no end to the
plethora of people who go out of their way or spend huge amounts of money on things like
bottled water (or even magnetic water!), organic foods, special supplements that are supposed to
be far superior to others, and all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas that I’m sure sound great,
but probably make no real difference to their actual quality or quantity of life.
Of all the things in your life that may influence how long you will live and how healthy your life
will be, there’s really not that many that will really make such an enormous impact. Eating a
good quality diet which includes a variety of foods in the healthiest proportions (illustrated by
the healthy eating pyramid) and keeping physically active are certainly going to be significant,
but it’s not likely that a single food or food group is going to increase or decrease your risk of a
disease by any more than about 10%, with the exception of perhaps alcohol, which can increase
it by a lot depending on how much of it you consume (why are the good things always so damn
bad!?)
Other than smoking, perhaps the most significant modifiable factor (that which we have control
over) that will influence your life expectancy and quality of health is your body fat. People often
don’t’ realize that obesity can wreak almost as much havoc with your health as what smoking
can. Despite this, there seems to be a never ending supply of people who want to ask me if the
$60 a month supplement they are taking will be better for them than the very similar $20 a
month one, or insist that they have to drink only bottled or filtered water, or who believe in the
magical power of juices from Noni or Goji berries (which although are not really more healthy
than ordinary fruit juice, cost about 100 times more)….the list goes on. Sometimes the most
unusual thing (and the thing that I find the most mind-boggling) is that many of these people are
often overweight.


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