Michael R. Eades - The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle: The Simple Plan to Flatten Your Belly Fast!

B ob Hope famously quipped that middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle, and the audience always obliged him with a hearty laugh. But for millions of adults the sad irony of the middle-aged middle is anything but funny. Except for a select few metabolically gifted individuals, crossing the threshold into middle age heralds the beginning of a battle of the bulge that seemingly never ends. Granted some reach that threshold sooner than others; some acquiesce to the larger belt and the broader silhouette with some degree of aplomb, while others rail against time and fate. They take up and discard first one diet and exercise program and then the next in a frustrating quest to recapture the slender waist they can still recall, but no longer see in the mirror.

Weve spent the majority of our medical careers helping people of every description with just this battle, combating overweight and weight-related health issues. Although some were in their teens and twenties, and some were in their seventies and eighties, the vast bulk of the many thousands of patients we guided to better health and lower weights were in middle age. What we learned from these many years in the diet trenches is that middle-aged weight is stubborn; its different to deal with; it doesnt respond readily to modest dietary changes or the incremental increases in exercise usually recommended by the purveyors of received medical and nutritional wisdom. The factors driving middle-aged weight gainwhich really does go straight to the middleare like a perfect storm, metabolically speaking. A confluence of changes in hormones, stress, lack of sleep, alcohol intake, medications, fat and cholesterol phobias, and a mountain of nutritional misinformation combine to create a mid-life tsunami that seems to swamp the metabolism and fill every nook and cranny of the middle of the body with fat.

For more than twenty years we have researched this area of science, refining the tools to deal with it effectively, writing about it, and lecturing on it, so youd think that our expertise would protect us from the tsunami, if it came our way. But it didnt. Like everyone else, when the middle-age wave hit, we found ourselves floundering in the tide, paddling as fast as we could, and still not making much headway. At least not until we dug back into the medical bag of tricks we had used with success in our middle-aged patients and applied them to ourselves. Heres how it all began.

Our wake-up call came the morning we walked onto the set to film the pilot for our TV cooking show. Years before, I had gained a tremendous amount of weight while pursuing my career as a busy, practicing physician, then lost it on a diet I cobbled together from information I got rereading my old medical school texts and delving into the medical literature. My weight loss did not go unnoticed by my patients, and soon many were clamoring for me to put them on the same diet I had developed for myself. I did so with great success. In short order my practice changed. My wife, Mary Dan, left her busy family practice and joined me in what became a huge bariatric (the treatment of obesity) practice. We refined the original diet and wrote about our methods in Protein Power, a book that sold over 4 million copies. During the never-ending promotion of the book, we met a producer who proposed that we star in a TV cooking show designed around the precepts of our diet and a cookbook we had written. We said, Lets do it. He put the deal together and set the shooting schedule for the pilot.

We walked onto the set in sunny Southern California one morning filled with both enthusiasm and apprehension. As we wandered through the semi-organized chaos that is a film studio, stepping over giant cables, ducking under the scaffolding for the overhead cameras, and dodging production assistants darting here and there, we began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into. The whirlwind of activity and the thirty or so people on the set were intimidating, to say the least. We had done countless live and taped television and radio interviews in the previous years, but never a project in which we were the sole actors on the stage, the ones who had to carry the entire show on our own shoulders. A young man recognized us and directed us to the Green Room, telling us the director would be in to talk with us shortly.