Jordan Rubin - The makers diet for weight loss

I N GREEK MYTHOLOGY, Atlas was commonly depicted with a great globe on his shoulders, like some overambitious shot-putter, holding up the world in an agonized asymmetrical position.

If Atlas were holding up the earth today, hed better truss his loins to lift all of the overweight people inhabiting the planet. For what surely must be a first in the annals of recorded history, demographers have determined that there are more overweight people living among us than those who are undernourished. According to the World Health Organization, one billion adults are overweight (of which 300 million are obese, meaning they weigh at least 50 pounds more than their ideal body weight). At the other end of the spectrum, the number of rail-thin starving and undernourished individuals remains steady at 600 million.

For thousands of years, our forebears eked out an existence that depended upon the sweat of their brows and whether or not nature provided bountiful crops at harvest time. Hunger was their constant companion; famine, their frequent worry. I cant imagine what went through the minds of desperate parents who held their starving, frightened children to their breasts and wondered what they could do to provide something to eat.

The miracle of modernization has taken care of much of that problem, although as someone who supports the relief efforts of Life Outreach and Compassion International, Im aware that far too many fall asleep each night with gnawing hunger pangs in their growling stomachs. If the World Health Organizations figures are correct, at least one-sixth of the global population has a different dilemmatheyre too big from engorging themselves with greasy, high-fat, low-nutrient, chemicallaced, mass-produced foods. The global growth of industry and technology has led to an abundance of cheap, high-calorie meals, unhealthy sugary snacks, and a steep decrease in physical activity, resulting in one of the most blatantly visible, yet most neglected, public health problems in the history of mankind.

The skyrocketing ascent of obesity in both developed and developing regions inspired the World Health Organization to coin a new phrase for this occurrence:

What an astonishing turn of events! I can remember Mom reminding me to clean my plate because of the starving children in China, but she would have to amend her example if she were raising me today. Ten percent of city-dwelling Chinese children suffer from obesitya number thats increasing by a shocking 8 percent per year. In Japan, obesity in nine-year-olds has tripled. Twenty percent of Australian adolescents and children are overweight or obese.

Thats just the tip of a massive iceberg thats threatening to sink the health of young and old from Anchorage, Alaska, to Zurich, Switzerland. The tentacles of globesity reach into every continent and grip every major city in the world. Were seeing hundreds and hundreds of millions who consume Western-like convenience foods shift away from physically demanding jobs in agriculture and devote their growing leisure time to watching TV and surfing the Internet. Theyre adopting this new lifestyle rather rapidly, unaware that they are putting themselves at risk for chronic diseases that could shave years off of their lives. My colleague Dr. Bulwer says that fast food is everywhere in Belize, where eating well means eating like the Americans or the Britishthe greasy fried foods they see advertised on television.

Another telling example comes from the Japanese, who, after centuries of staying slim on a diet of fish, vegetables, seaweed, fermented soy, and rice, have developed a new millennium sweet tooth for Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Cold Stone Creamery mix-ins. When the Japanese McDonalds introduced the Mega Maca four-patty burgerthey sold 1.7 million in four days. The fascination with Yankee junk food is so widespread that the Japanese have coined a phrasewhich translates to in your face foodto describe their apparent desire to escape the stresses of a pressure-packed society by satiating their stomachs with glazed doughnuts and quadruple-stacked hamburgers.

The Japanese still have a long way to go before they catch up with us, though. Like an Olympic flag bearer, the American contingent is leading the globesity parade. Not only are we the fattest nation on earth, but were also ballooning to extremely obese proportions at an alarming rate. While most people have heard that two-thirds of American adults aged twenty years and older are overweight (which is defined as having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or higher), the number of those who are extremely obeseat least 100 pounds overweighthas quadrupled since the 1980s. Twenty years ago, one in two hundred adults were candidates to purchase two seats when traveling on Southwest Airlines; today that number is one in fifty.

HEAVY DEMAND

I havent met a heavyset person who wouldnt want to lose weight, but from my vantage point, many obese individuals harbor attitudes similar to the classic five stages of grief, as articulated by Elisabeth Kbler-Ross in her seminal book On Death and Dying. The five stages are:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Im willing to wager that if youre battling your weight, you could place yourself among one of those five descriptions. You could be denying that youre really overweight, that all you have to do is set your mind one day to taking off those extra pounds on your waist and hips. You could be angry about your lackluster physical condition and appearance, harboring resentment that youve always been heavy or were born into a family that fed you crummy foods growing up. You could be at the bargaining stage, where youd do anything to lose weightlike undergo expensive gastric bypass surgery or take a pharmaceutical with dangerous and embarrassing side effects. You could be depressed and feel like you have no future and no hope of reaching your ideal weight. Or you could be at the final and most dangerous stageacceptance, a feeling that youll always be obese and theres nothing you can do about it.

Im seeing more evidence that being overweight is a societal norm among the cultural elite. Weight and body image issues are squeezing into college course catalogs as fat studies emerge into a growing interdisciplinary field in universities around the country. At Harvard, students can sign up for Body Sculpting in America, which examines the social and political consequences of being overweight. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee offers a course called The Social Construction of Obesity, which is taught by a human movement sciences professor who challenges the alarmist message about the obesity epidemic in America.

Elsewhere, students on a dozen campuses are organizing groups that focus on promoting fat acceptance. A San Diego State University graduate student cofounded Size Matters to fight the prevailing attitude that being fat is a moral failure rather

Im all for feeling good about yourself, but for the estimated 72 million dieters in America, a sizable weight-loss industry has stepped into the vacuum. The U.S. weight-loss and diet control market was expected to swell to $58 billion in 2007, according to Marketdata Enterprises, with various options vying for attention:

• Gastric bypass surgery, in which surgeons staple or bind the stomach with an adjustable band. This creates a small pouch able to hold only a few ounces of food. Celebrities such as singer Carnie Wilson, Today Show weatherman Al Roker, reality show star Sharon Osbourne, and talk show host Star Jones Reynolds have sung the praises of this potentially dangerous surgery after shedding hundreds of pounds. American Idol judge Randy Jackson, who has advised less-than-svelte contestants that they might want to lose some weight, underwent gastric bypass surgery in 2003.