Nick Yphantides - My Big Fat Greek Diet: How a 467-Pound Physician Hit His Ideal Weight and How You Can Too

MY
BIG
FAT
GREEK
DIET

MY
BIG
FAT
GREEK
DIET

How a 467- Pound Physician Hit
His Ideal Weight and How You
Can Too

NICK YPHANTIDES,M.D.

WITH MIKE YORKEY

Copyright 2004 by Nick Yphantides, M.D.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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Author is represented by the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc.,

7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920.

Scripture quotations noted NKJV are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Scripture quotations noted NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.,

Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted CEV are from THE CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH VERSION. 1995 by the American Bible Society. Used by permission.

PUBLISHERS NOTE: This book is intended for general health-care information onlyand is not intended to supplant medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment by a personalphysician. Readers are urged to consult their physician beforebeginning any weight-loss program.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yphantides, Nick.

My big fat Greek diet : how a 467pound physician hit his ideal weight and how you can too / Nick Yphantides with Mike Yorkey.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7852-6025-0 (hc)
ISBN 0-7852-8774-4 (tp)
1. Weight loss. I. Yorkey, Mike. II. Title.

RM222.2Y695 2004
613.2'5dc22

2004014404

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 10 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

TO MY DESPINA

CONTENTS

I s it true that you lost all this weight going to baseball games? The inquiry came from Josh Valdez, the regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I met him while attending a White House conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in my hometown of San Diego. As a family physician who has spent his entire professional life caring for the poor and indigent in the community health clinic system (I have never seen a patient with private medical insurance), I was keenly interested in how the medical community and the federal government could work together to meet the needs of those whove fallen through the holes of the nations safety net.

Well, its not as simple as that, I said. Going to the baseball games was a fun diversion while I drank protein shakes and exercised on the road.

Ive never met anybody whos lost as much weight as you have without having surgery, Josh commented.

Neither have I, I replied. I guess my story is fairly unusual. I spent eight months on the road, crisscrossing the country and taking in more than one hundred majorleague baseball games at every American and National League ballpark. I didnt eat any solid food during my road trip. Instead, I drank two or three protein shakes a day.

How much did you weigh when you started? Josh asked.

I can tell you the exact amount467 pounds. I kept at it until I lost 270 pounds, which is the combined weight of two average-sized American women standing five feet four inches and weighing 135 pounds.

I could tell Josh was intrigued by my story. What are you doing for lunch? he asked. You do... eat, right?

Of course. I love to eat, I laughed. I just dont eat like I used to.

Good. I know this excellent family-run Mexican restaurant in Old Town. They have great posole, he said, referring to a meat stew containing pork and kernels of corn or hominy with all the trimmings hot peppers, chopped onions, and diced chilies. Want to join me?

Josh didnt have to ask twice. Midway through our meal, as I entertained my new friend with anecdotes from my weight-loss baseball tour, he stopped me. Nick, this is incredible. How would you like to come to Washington, D.C., to share your remarkable adventure?

I nearly choked on my fresh corn tortilla. Come to Washington? As in D.C.? Sure. Who would you like me to speak to?

We have a monthly meeting of the regional directors who report to Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson and the White House liaison to the Department of Health and Human Services, and wed like to have you come and tell us how you lost the weight. Perhaps theres something we can learn from you, Josh said.

When would you like me to come? I asked with excitement rising in my voice.

Lets see, he said, pulling out his calendar book. How would Tuesday, April 1, sound? Im thinking about one oclock in the afternoon.

I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard Josh say April 1, not because I thought he could be pulling off an elaborate April Fools joke, but because that date meant so much to me. You see, April 1, 2001, was the day my remarkable weight-loss story began.

MY CORE MESSAGE

What I told the DHHS regional directors that afternoon in our nations capital forms the core message of this bookthat you have to change your life before you can change your weight. Im going to teach you how to do that through my Seven Pillars to Weight Loss and Maintenance, but in Part I of My Big Fat Greek Diet, I will tell you my story. In the past, I would have told you, Do as I say, not as I do. Now I can humbly say, Do as I say, and as I have done.

You see, I had reached a point in my midthirties where I desperately wanted to change my life. Eating had always been important in our ethnic family, but perhaps thats because Im as Greek as homemade baklava. My father, George Yphantides (pronounced Eee-fahn-tee-dees), grew up in northern Greece near the base of Mount Olympus. He came to North America in the mid-1950s to attend college in Canada and then the United States. While in New Jersey, he met a wonderful American woman named Bernice Pfaff. They fell in love and were married.

Just over a year later, Ithe firstborn of five childrenarrived on the scene. When I was four years old, Dad moved his young family back to Greece, where we lived for nearly five years. While living in an Athens suburb, I was enrolled in grammar school, where, as the joke goes, everything was Greek to me.

When I was in the fifth grade, our family returned to the United States, resettling in New Jersey. I had to learn English all over again, but I had a good ear and a good aptitude for schoolwork. I was allowed to skip two grades during my school years, so when I graduated from Tenafly High School in New Jersey, I was a peach-fuzzed and pudgy sixteen-year-old who weighed thirty or forty pounds more than an average kid my age.

I headed west for college, attending Azusa Pacific University in Southern California, where I graduated three and a half years later with plans to become a doctor. There was no doubt I was getting heavy since I weighed 280 pounds. Dad and Mom had always encouraged me to follow my dreams, and my dream was to care for the sick and infirm. Practicing medicine among those who needed it most greatly appealed to me.