Jorge Cruise - The Cruise Control Diet: The 28-Day Plan for Automatic Weight Loss and Forever Fat-Burning

There are thousands of diet books on the market, and I think I must have read them all: low-fat diets, low-carb diets, low-calorie diets, paleo diets, keto diets. All of these diets work if you follow them carefullyat least at first. The pounds fly off. Everything goes exactly as advertised. Life is sweet. But this honeymoon period usually only lasts for about six months.

Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the diets power seems to wane. The pounds are not flying off, but the scale is still moving in the right direction, just a little slower. Then slower. Then slower again. So, you redouble your efforts. You go lower fat, or lower carb, or lower calorie than ever. This intensified effort pays dividends, but not at the rate of weight loss you enjoyed at the start.

Then the dreaded, inevitable day comes, as you always knew it would. The pounds stop coming off completelya plateau. But its still all good, you tell yourself. As long as the weight stays at this level, youll be happy. But your happiness is short-lived. Because despite your maximum efforts, your weight starts to budge upward. Slowly at first. But with growing horror, you see it accelerate. Within a year, or two at the maximum, your weight is back where it was when all this effort to lose weight began. You are crushed. You are devastated. You know youve tried your best, even as you face the silent accusations and crushing condescension of your friends and family. Again.

It happens to the best of us. If youve ever watched any of the weight-loss competition shows on television, youll know that insane amounts of exercise combined with highly restricted diets can produce very impressive results, but only in the short term. You might have noticed that they never have reunion shows because all the contestants have gained their weight back. In many cases, their weight is higher than before they started the show!

Why? Why do so many of us struggle with losing weightand keeping it off? Ive spent my career studying this problem and discovering the solution.

I trained at the University of Toronto and the University of California, Los Angeles, to become a doctor and kidney specialist. But after years in practice, I realized that many metabolic diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, must be treated with diet, not medications. I, along with most other doctors, had missed the seemingly self-evident point that dietary diseases must be treated with diet, not drugs. Now we see it: using medications for a dietary problem was as useful as bringing a snorkel to a bicycle race.

Today, I run an Intensive Dietary Management (IDM) clinic in Toronto, where Ive been seeing patients for eighteen years. Ive been in the daily fight to help people lose weight and keep it off, and Ive been researching and writing about weight loss for ten years, too.

Both in my clinic and in polite company, everyone asks the same question: What should I eat? Whats the magic combination of ingredients and quantities? Should we eat avocados or kale? Should we eat bacon or skinless turkey breast? Should I eat vegetables or meat?

But heres what all of my thought and experience tells me: what to eat is only half the equation.

Questions about dietingredient questionsdont get at the other key part of the equation: timing questions. They fail to address whether we should eat three meals or six, early in the day or later at night. In fact, most diets completely ignore this when question altogether. Its therefore no wonder theyve all failed to deliver the promised weight benefits over the long term. No matter how much we adjust the foods we eat, if we dont acknowledge and change the timing of our eating, we wont be successful. We can change what we eat and we can eat healthier ingredientsquinoa, cabbage soup, leafy greens. But thats only half the problem. And you cant ignore half the problem and expect great results. After all, if you answer half the questions on the final exam, the highest mark you can get is an F.