Yoni Freedhoff M.D. - The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work

Praise for The Diet Fix

I doubt you need anyone to tell you that dieting is badly broken; just look around! But if you would like to know how to fix it and adopt a sensible, sustainable, and satisfying approach to weight control, then you certainly do need to hear from Dr. Yoni Freedhoff. In The Diet Fix, Dr. Freedhoff draws upon his excellent knowledge of relevant research and his many years of clinical experience to serve up empowering insights that are as much about living well as they are about losing weight. This is a terrific book.

David L. Katz, founding director of Yale Universitys Prevention Research Center and author of Disease-Proof: The Remarkable Truth About What Makes Us Well

The Diet Fix is the real deal: a book that challenges the conventional wisdom about losing weight. This compassionate and hope-filled guide serves up the secrets to achievingand maintainingthe weight thats right for you. Forget the quick fix: The Diet Fix will give you the tools you need to (finally) make peace with food.

Ann Douglas, author of The Mother of All Pregnancy Books

Few people know as much about weight loss as Dr. Yoni Freedhoff. It is no surprise that he has produced a book that is the perfect combination of evidence-based facts and good, solid, usable advice. There is so much misinformation in the media about dieting. And so many trendy and near-useless diets. The Diet Fix is exactly what we need: a science-informedand fun to readroad map to long-term weight loss success.

Tim Caulfield, author of The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness

After reading Dr. Freedhoffs book, I can conclude that only an expert who has real-life experience treating patients suffering with weight issues could have written this guide to weight management. Dr. Freedhoff distills the science of dieting into a very easy and practical read with proven results. Anybody who is battling weight issues should turn off their computer, get off the blog sites boasting miraculous weight loss, and just read this book.

Garth Davis, MD, medical director of bariatric surgery at Memorial Herman Hospital and author of The Experts Guide to Weight-Loss Surgery

The Diet Fix is a no-nonsense approach to realistic weight management by a recognized expert in the field. This step-by-step guide to long-term weight management provides the evidence, debunks common myths, and is chock-full of practical tipsthe ultimate diet book for anyone wanting to stop dieting and start living.

Arya M. Sharma, MD/PhD, Disc. (h.c.), FRCPC, professor of medicine at the University of Alberta, Canada

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff passionately demonstrates in The Diet Fix that he is every dieters advocate. His 10-Day Reset will not only make you healthier, but it will also turn you into an activist around your own health.

James Beckerman, MD, author of The Flex Diet

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and the publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents in this book.

Some individual cases described here are composites and/or have been created by the author as illustrative examples based upon his experiences with patients.

Copyright 2014 by Dr. Jonathan Freedhoff

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-8041-3757-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3758-4

Jacket design by Jess Morphew

v3.1

For the four wonderful women in my life
Stacey, Talia, Leah, and Yael

Whether it was Rita Mae Brown or Albert Einstein who first said it, the quote Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results might just as well have been written to describe societys past few hundred years of weight loss efforts. From the famous milk cure of the early 1800s, when dieters traveled deep into the Swiss Alps for the privilege of being assigned their own personal cow whose freshly milked udders provided their sole source of sustenance for 7 to 14 days, to William Bantings blockbuster 1864 bestseller Letter on Corpulence, to the 1970s 700-calorie Scarsdale Diet, grapefruit diets, and cabbage soup diets, theres certainly not been any shortage of traumatic diets over the years. The modern day isnt much different; for every ridiculous diet that falls out of favor, a new ridiculous diet is born. While all of these diets have markedly different methods of calorie control, they all share a common theme: in order to lose weight, you have to suffer. There is an underlying belief that success resides in white-knuckle willpower, in undereating, overexercising, and somehow learning to like it. These ideas are echoed not just by individuals, but by the media, the entertainment industry, and even our public health officials and allied health professionals.

So do any dieters succeed in not just losing, but in actually keeping it off?

A recent poll revealed that of the two-thirds of us who have medically significant amounts of weight to lose, nearly 60 percent have tried more than six times to lose weight. Of those whove tried more than six times, 34 percent report having tried more than 20 times, and 66 percent of those report theyve tried so many times theyve lost count!

What is it about how were dieting that leads us, seemingly regardless of our chosen dietary approaches, to keep failing? Sure, you can point to various diets that have helped you lose weight, but why hasnt any diet been shown to help people uniformly keep it off? You might think that after literally centuries of different diets, at least one or two of them would have hit that mark. How is it possible that so many divergent approaches to dieting could fail so many people? From low-fat to low-carb, and from macrobiotic vegan to paleo, youd think that given the incredible variety of approaches, if there were such a thing as the right diet, or the best diet, one of them would have led not only to significant losses, but also to their lifelong maintenance.

Truly, success with dieting must be measured by a diets ability to help dieters keep their weight off, and not by simply the losing. But what if its not the foods involved in the diets themselves that is tripping dieters up? Could there be some underlying collective feature that, despite their incredibly different recommendations, ties low-fat to low-carb; Ornish to Atkins? Some shared narrative that leads even those who successfully lose a great deal of weight on any given diet plan to abandon their efforts and eventually find themselves right back where they startedor worse yet, having gained back more than theyd lost in the first place?