Martin Katahn - The Rotation Diet (Revised and Updated)

ALSO BY MARTIN KATAHN, PHD

The T-Factor Diet

The T-Factor Fat Gram Counter (with Jaime Pope)

Contents

WHATS IT ALL ABOUT?

IN FEBRUARY 1986, seventy-five thousand people in Nashville, Tennessee, joined together, all with the same thing in mind: to lose weight using the Rotation Diet. Over a period of three weeks, crowds of eager Nashvillians picked up instructions for the diet at Kroger supermarkets and weighed in there on a weekly basis. During the rest of the year, fifteen million more people picked up Rotation Diet pamphlets at thousands of supermarkets around the United States. When the first edition of The Rotation Diet , complete with menus and recipes, was published, three million copies were sold.

The average weight loss during the supermarket promotion replicated almost exactly what the research team had obtained in the study at the Vanderbilt Weight Management Program (WMP): Women lost an average of two-thirds of a pound per day for twenty-one days . Some women, especially heavier women who were retaining water, lost as much as a pound a day, two to three inches around the waist in just three days, and one to three dress or pant sizes in three weeks. All in all, approximately 1,000,000 pounds were shed in Nashville, and untold millions more were lost around the United States.

So, if people can lose weight so quickly and easily on the Rotation Diet, why bother to update and revise it? If you have dieted in the past and regained weight afterward, like the vast majority of people who go on any reducing diet do, you already know the answer: dieting does only half the job! Its one thing to lose the weight. Its quite another to keep it off.

Losing weight and maintaining that loss for the rest of your life pose a number of different issues. In this new, revised edition of The Rotation Diet , I propose to show you how to do the complete job. I know how to do this. Forty-eight years ago I lost 75 pounds, and I have not regained a single pound. I know how to keep the weight off and can tell you how to do it too.

So, if you are like 90 to 95 percent of all overweight people who go on a reducing diet and lose weight only to gain it back again, I can tell you how to prevent rebounding. Most of us have some behaviors or environmental influences that must be changed in order to stay healthy and slim.

Research has shown that successful people find their own, unique way of weight management. For myself, and for about 95 percent of people who succeed in long-term weight management, one of the keys to success is to increase ones daily energy expenditure to the tune of at least 200 calories. Why are those 200 calories so important to weight management? Because thats the energy expenditure it takes to keep 25 pounds of fat, once lost, from sneaking back into your fat cells! Do you have more than 25 pounds to lose? Let me reassure you, I can show you from personal experience that losing the second 25 pounds can be as easy as losing the first.

Perhaps the easiest way to burn these extra calories is to walk for 30 to 40 minutes a day. Up until now I did not think there were any other ways that came close to the effectiveness of walking as the key to weight maintenance. But there are, and I discuss them later in the book. One of them, or combinations of them, should fit you and your lifestyle.

If you follow my suggestions over the next few weeks, a few months from now you will wonder why you didnt discover how to kee p those pounds off before. Truly, its easier than you think.

THE ROTATION METHOD OF WEIGHT MANAGEMENT

More and more professionals in the weight-management field have come to realize that when people need to lose more than 10 to 15 pounds, moderate caloric restriction in their diet for many weeks on end often becomes both discouraging and depressing. After several weeks of slow, gradual weight loss, they hit plateaus, and a single deviation from the diet (a single high-calorie meal, a salty dish or snack) leads to a demoralizing increase in weight, mainly due to water retention. Instead, many professionals who recommend slow, gradual weight loss now suggest a time-limited plan, for example, no longer than three months at a time. In this way people find it easier to maintain their motivation (and their spirits) during the designated period.

The first persons to try out the Rotation Diet in the WMP were four women in a group of eighteen who were halfway through one of our standard ten-week programs in which we prescribed a 1200-calorie diet. They were discouraged because they hadnt lost as much weight as they had hoped. So I told them how I had lost weight myself on a rotation plan, and they volunteered to try it for three weeks. At the end of that time, their results caused a great deal of excitement. Weight loss increased significantly, as did morale!

We then organized a formal test group of twenty women who right from the start began their weight-loss program on the Rotation Diet. We found that the women on the Rotation Diet lost, on average, as much weight in three weeks (12 1/2 pounds) as persons who had participated in our standard ten-week programs. Eighteen (90 percent) of the twenty women declared a preference for the Rotation Diet over a standard 1200- calorie diet.

USING THE ROTATION DIET

There are two basic ways to use the Rotation Diet to lose weight. One is to follow my lead. I never counted calories. I never kept an eating diary. I found an approach to dieting that actually made it fun, and I lost 75 pounds in a little over a year. Ill show you how you can adopt a similar approach if it appeals to you, as well as how I have kept all that weight off for so many years.

In contrast, we gave our research participants daily menus and recipes that were based on eating a specified amount of calories each day, plus free foods. It offers a caloric guarantee of an average loss of about 13 pounds in three weeks.

The women ate approximately 600 calories per day for three days, followed by 900 calories per day for four days, and then a week of 1200 calories per day, returning to the 600/900-calorie rotation once again. They had a diet consisting of a wide variety of foods.

Men had a core diet of more calories, approximately 1200 per day for the first three days, 1500 per day for the next four, followed by a week on 1800 calories per day. They repeated the 1200/1500 rotation for the final week.

However, you are not allowed to go hungry ! I will provide you with a list of free vegetables and safe fruits to add to the core plan. These foods are so low in calories that even if you add as many as three to four servings a day, they will hardly slow your weight loss. The use of fruits for snacks and desserts should become a permanent part of your weight-maintenance plan too. In addition to helping you maintain your weight loss, they will greatly increase your diets nutritional value.

When you finish the three-week rotation, you MUST stop dieting . You have to take a vacation! You will gradually add foods back into your diet in an experiment to see which of them helps with weight maintenance and which ones lead to extra pounds. If you have more weight to lose, before you repeat a rotation, this brief vacation of a week or a month or more (its up to you) will not only increase your motivation to succeed, but also help guarantee that you will not regain any weight when you reach your goal weight. Ill explain the reasons in the next chapter, on gaining control over your metabolism.