The 20/20 Diet (3 page)

rageous statements.

I think these seven gut check claims are valid, and I want you

to be armed with them too. Don’t be a sucker for ridiculous prod-

ucts designed to do nothing but cost you money, and sometimes

even your health. Beware of weight loss products that claim to:

1. cause weight loss of two pound
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s or more a week for a

month or more without dieting or exercise;

2. cause substantial weight loss no matter what or how much

the consumer eats;

3. cause permanent weight loss even after the consumer stops

using the product;

4. block the absorption of fat or calories to enable consumers

to lose substantial weight;

5. safely enabl
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e consumers to lose more than three pounds per

week for more than four weeks;

6. cause substantial weight loss for all users; or

7. cause substantial weight loss by wearing a product on the

body or rubbing it into the skin.

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If you hear someone make any of these claims for a weight loss

product, supplement, drug, patch, cream, wrap, and so on, you are

being ripped off. There is no magic bul et for weight loss, no overnight cure. If it doesn’t involve a healthy, balanced diet and a reasonable exercise regimen, it will not lead to safe weight loss. End of story!

8 | The 20/20 Diet

easier than it comes off, and if you find a diet that works, then you

will lose weight while you’re on it. Now ask yourself if you’re really

going to spend the rest of your life on one of those ridiculous diets.

The honest answer is, no, you won’t. So, that means you might lose

weight while you’re on it, but you’ll probably gain it back when you’re

off it because you haven’t made any real lifestyle changes.

My goal is to get you to stop chasing diet mirages an
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d finally get

yourself on the right path, with the habits you should follow for life

to achieve permanent weight loss. Bottom line: if it sounds too good

to be true, it is. Yes, there’s a lot of noise out there; there’s literally a new “diet of the week” every week! But now is the time to quit being

a sheep and a sucker.

Now, I’m not saying that every diet and exercise plan on the

market is some kind of con. There are plenty of viable (and healthy)

weight loss systems out there. But maybe you’ve faced failure even

with the
healthy
ones. Why? That’
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s what I wanted to know when I

began researching this book, because knowing why something
doesn’t

work is equally as important as knowing why it does. You remem-

ber the story about Thomas Edison creating the light bulb? It took

him a thousand or more tries, but as he famously said, “I have not

failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Then he used

that information to find out what
did
work. Bingo, let there be light.

If ever there was a man who learned from his 20/20 hindsight, it was

him! And you’re about to embark on a similar path as you learn from

your own past, f
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ailures and all.

If you’re fighting a weight problem and you bought this book, you’ve

probably been overweight for a long time and you’ve probably tried to lose it more times than you can remember. I conducted a national survey of

my viewers, social media fol owers, and others that garnered thousands of responses, and now we’ve all got the opportunity to learn from each other’
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s histories. I found out that 40.3 percent of you have lost weight on diets and gained 100% of it back within 90 days to one year. I real y wanted

to know—why do people fail on diets so much of the time? So we asked

people what got in their way. When you watch those commercials on TV,

they don’t tell you why you’re going to fail; they just tell you how great everything’s going to be. But you deserve the truth, so I set out to find it.

Introduction | 9

Sure enough, I found seven reasons why people failed to lose weight

that I thought I could help you with in this diet. Here they are:

1.
Hunger:
You get tired of feeling hungry all the time. So you

rebel.

2.
Cravings:
You consistently crave certain tastes like salty,

sweet, or tart. So you rebel.

3.
Feelings of restriction:
You feel like you can’t eat o
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ut, go

anywhere, or do anything because you’re on a diet. Plus,

you’re so panicked about what you can and can’t eat and

when you should or shouldn’t eat it that your focus on food

becomes all-consuming. So you rebel.

4.
Impracticality and expense:
Between your job, the kids,

stress, and life—you feel like you just can’t get it all done
and

stick to a diet, especially one that’s too complicated, expen-

sive, and requires you to count calories or nutritional values.

So you rebel.

5.
Boredom:
You get sick of eatin
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g the same foods day in and

day out. So you rebel.

6.
Temptations:
Because your environment isn’t fail-safe, you

are overwhelmed by your desire for the tempting food all

around you. So you rebel.

7.
Inconsistent results and plateaus:
You get discouraged

because the weight loss is not consistent. Or you lose weight

for a whil
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e but then your progress comes to a screeching halt.

So you rebel.

Now, that’s a lot of rebellion! I knew if you and I were going to get

along, then I had to solve these seven problems for you. I had to design a plan that would not be sabotaged by these seven flaws that have caused many others to fail to reach their weight loss goals. And that’s exactly wha
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t this diet is designed to do. I knew that if you were going to suc-

ceed, this diet had to find solutions to these seven “rebellion triggers” so that your experience would include:


Decreased hunger


Decreased cravings

10 | The 20/20 Diet


No sense of restriction


A diet you can live with


No boredom


A no-fail environment


Consistent weight loss and a system to help you address

plateaus

How is all that possible? As I said, since
The Ulti
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mate Weight

Solution
came out over 10 years ago, new research and theories have emerged that allow me to do an even more effective job of helping you

solve these seven problems. This is really exciting: research continues

to provide us with important new theories about how certain foods

and activities affect our bodies and brains. In this book, I’ve harnessed this information and provided you with practical tips that I think you

can easily incorporate into your lifestyle to help you with your weight

loss journey today and for the rest o
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f your life.

For starters, you will be eating 20 key foods called the 20/20

Foods, which developing research suggests may:

  

Help increase your body’s thermogenesis
.

  

Help you feel ful er
when you eat them so that you feel satisfied and you’re not leaving the table hungry. If you are so hungry

your stomach is barbequing your ribs, guess what? You
will

rebel!
If you don’t feel that way,
you won’t
.

  

Have a “ti
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me-release” effect
, which means they can help you

feel full for longer
after
eating them, so you’re not starving to death and craving every doughnut you see.

And that’s just the beginning. On top of this, you’ll be doing a

type of exercise that recent research and theories suggest is fast, efficien
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t, and can help keep you on track to meet your weight loss goals.

We’ll talk more about the nuts and bolts of this plan and the research

behind all of it a little later.

So, my job in this book is to address these seven problems, and

your job is to get real about why you’re overeating and to start believ-

ing that you deserve to lose weight and be healthy. Because if you

Introduction | 11

believe
, and I mean really believe, that you deserve better, you will
create
better for yourself. If you don’t believe you deserve better, then you won’t get better. That’s why I started this introduction with this

statement:
you create the results in life that you believe you deserve
.

What I want to do in this book is tell you the truth. You’ve read

the rest, now here’s the best. You can go try all those other products

and programs that promise weight loss without diet and e
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xercise all

you want and feel really good in the moment, but six months from

now, you’re likely going to weigh the same as you do right now—or

more—and you know it. Or you can let me tell you what you should

do cognitively, behaviorally, environmentally, socially, and nutrition-

ally, and you can adopt these habits for a lifetime of healthy weight.

You can choose to see your goal with 20/20 accuracy, and when you

can see a goal that clearly, you can achieve it.

We’re in this together, so let’s get going.

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STREET

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12 | The 20/20 Diet

1

WHAT MAKES THIS

DIET DIFFERENT

Great things are not done by impulse,

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but by a series of small things brought together.

—Vincent Van Gogh

There are no two ways about it: managing weight is frustrating.

Unless you are one of those “ge
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ne pool lottery winners” who got

the metabolism and body type of a greyhound on speed, then you

(and I, by the way) have to contend with the tendency to gain weight.

I can practically just walk by French fries or smell a chocolate cake

and gain 10 pounds! And that’s not totally in jest, because I am genet-

ically predisposed to be overweight and the experts tell me that if I

even smell certain foods, my brain reacts in a way that impacts the

efficiency with which my body processes food. I am a classic “weight

loss resistant” patient, and you may be too. (Even if you are among

the small percen
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tage of people who fit the bill, it is NOT an excuse

to be overweight; it just means you have a somewhat different set of

challenges. You can expect much, much more on that later.) But either

way, medically weight loss resistant or not, I’m betting you feel like

you’ve been on a chaotic, never-ending merry-go-round of diets and

you just can’t get your body to cooperate. Am I right?

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If you just got stupid one day and hopped in an airplane cockpit,

somehow got the plane to take off, instantly crashed, hopped back

in (BIG stupid), took off, and instantly crashed again, then contin-

ued to do it over and over—at some point limping away from your

wreck of an airplane with a broken propeller under one arm and a

tree branch under the other, wouldn’t you eventually say to yourself,

13

“Hey, dummy, you might want to take the time and
learn to fly
before you do this again!” You may be “hopping in” but you are damn sure

“limping away”! The pattern is clear: all you know how to do is crash.

Are you doing the same thing in your attempts at losing weight—

hopping into diet after diet and crashing? Maybe that’s really why

they call them “crash diets”! Ha! Well, I want you to stop being a

crasher and start being a winner. If you figure out
why
you’
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re crashing

and use that 20/20 hindsight to your advantage, chances are pretty

good you will stop doing whatever it is that isn’t working, even if
not
crashing is harder to do. I have often said that the difference between

winners and losers is that winners do things losers just don’t want to

do. It’s hard, no question. And it takes a big commitment. It is time

to choose winning.

We already know that you’ve got to stop chasing after get-thin-

quick diet mirages, but now let’s take a close look at precisely why they fail you. These are the Top Seven “Ugl
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y Truths” about Dieting derived

from the survey we discussed in the introduction, where people just like you told us exactly why they failed again and again. After each ugly

truth, I will show you exactly how I am going to help you overcome it

once and for all with habits to last a lifetime.

The Top Seven “Ugly Truths” about Dieting

Hunger

Fact: Hungry peo
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ple eat. You leave the table feeling unsatisfied and

by the time evening rolls around, you’re ready to eat the paint off

the walls. So what happens? You binge. Hungry people are eventually

going to eat, and eat with a vengeance! We are programmed to eat

so we can survive as a species, for Pete’s sake. Come on, a diet that

starves you, one that leaves you hungry all or even most of the time,

is jus
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