Americans face every January with renewed resolutions to fight the fat, battle the bulge, handle the love handles. And yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that our obesity rates increase each year. What's wrong with this picture?
Dr. Will Clower, author of The Fat Fallacy: The French Diet Secrets to Permanent Weight Loss
and founder of The PATH Curriculum simplifies the complexities of healthy eating, boiling complicated ideas into easily digestible bites, always with a sense of humor.
He has released for his list of the "Top Ten Tips" for royally screwing up the diet in the coming year, with the hope that all of us fail miserably:
1. Follow the fad.
Be on the lookout for the newest of all the new diets - the more esoteric and absurd the better. Think cabbage soup, peanut butter and fat-be-gone rings. Statistically speaking, these have failed so often that sooner or later they must finally work.
2. Master speed eating.
Speed-eat so food spends more time in the gullet than in the mouth. Otherwise, you'll taste your low-whatever, cardboard-flavored food product. Remember, the goal is to do anything but enjoy food, so be sure to gobble it down in 10 minutes or less.
3. Find the food condoms.
Plastic-wrapped food is what to look for. If it's found in a pre-packaged form, eat it. If you have no idea how long it has been on a shelf, eat it. If all of the items in the case look exactly the same, like they are all stamped out of the same food widget mold - go for it.
4. Eat all the time.
Graze. Think bovine thoughts. Start with five to six small meals, and work up from there. At some point, you'll wind up eating all day. At that point, you're really only having one meal per day. Keeping snack foods in desk drawers - not to mention in vehicles - is encouraged.
5. Eat on the go.
Eat in the car, while standing, wherever. Just keep moving so calories are burned as they are shoveled in. Eating in a rush and huff is fantastic because it never allows the body to digest food - no digestion, no calories!
6. Never mind.
Eat at the desk, alone, while working. Eat while watching TV at night while being distracted by the latest episode of "The Biggest Loser."
7. Pursue platter portions.
Serve meals on the largest plate available. Turn over a garbage can lid, if available and make sure to completely fill the space with whatever can be ladled into it. Remember this equation: more diet food = more diet = more weight loss. Do the math.
8. Bite the big one.
Take huge bites. Squirrel packing cheek pockets will ensure that more weight is lost, in time to fit into a fantasy bathing suit by June.
9. Practice gastro-physics.
Eat a candy bar and follow-up it with a diet product. For example, diet sodas and Snickers are dietary matter and anti-matter, cancelling each other out. So eat something naughty and chase it down with a Diet Coke or two.
10. Go for the glo.
Focus on foods that look like they originated in outer space. Think day-glo pink, neon orange. Those nuclear-yellow marshmallow "peeps" are an ideal screw-up-the-diet food. What's the reasoning? The people on this planet are too fat. Is there such thing as an overweight Martian?
Both Dr. Clower's Culture of Health and PATH programs make the results of a healthy Mediterranean lifestyle-low weight, healthy hearts, and longer lives-accessible to Americans.
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