Jim Karas - The Ultimate Diet REVolution: Your Metabolism Makeover

To Olivia and Evan

You may have heard this staggering statistic. If one hundred people successfully lose weight, what percentage will have kept all the weight off after five years? Drumroll please. Five!!! Yep, the success rate is an incredibly low 5 percent, and thats the weight-loss worlds dirty little secret.

I myself have been part of this disheartening statistic. I spent the first twenty-one years of my life overweight, and sometimes really overweight. I cant tell you how many times I lost the weight, only to gain it back, and then some. But it was my fault, because each time I was tellingno, demandingthat my body gain the weight back. I would starve myself and then perform cardio, two behaviors that can ruin your metabolism. I was doing what I thought I should, but it was the exact opposite of what I actually should have been doing. In our nation, where obesity is on the rise, this is an all too common mistake that leads to our inability to keep the weight off.

Reading a statistic like this on weight-loss failure, you must be thinking, Why even try? Donut, please!

Ill tell you why you shouldbetter yet, musttry. Because being at your optimal weight, even losing any weight, is essential to your health. I have been in the weight-loss business for over twenty years with an 80 percent success rate in helping clients not only lose weight but keep the weight off. My clients include movie and television stars you see all the time. Yep, I have the secret to successful, permanent weight loss, and it all revolves around one word: REVVED.

Lets start with the title of this book, The Ultimate Diet REVolution. Aristotle described a revolution as a complete change from or modification of an existing constitution,... one that is such a motivating change in ideology that the masses follow.

Consider that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2010:

Of adults age twenty and over, 69.2 percent are considered overweight, which is defined as having a body mass index over 25 (only Mexico beats us with an overweight figure of 69.5 percent).

Of that 69.2 percent who are overweight, 35.9 percent are obese, defined as having a body mass index of over 30.

Sixty-nine percent clearly constitutes the masses, and since the last time this number was determined was in 2010, I would say that it is even higher now and more people are part of this statistic. We are going the wrong way and continue to grow in size (no pun intended) every year. There is a 95 percent NON-success rate when it comes to weight loss. Dont you agree that its time to REVolt?

REVVED is about optimizing metabolism. Every bit of research-backed advice I give you in the pages of this book has one simple, specific goala REVVED-up metabolismand with that stoked metabolism comes the power to change your body and achieve permanent weight loss. Im sure that many of you have tried and failed. Im sure that some of you currently think that you can never achieve your ideal body. Metabolism is the key that unlocks all that you need in order to experience incredible weight-loss success. You already have the power within you.

Metabolism is the chemical change in living cells that creates the energy necessary for being physically activeand for simply staying alive. Our REVVED goal is to stoke those chemical processes up and get them running at full speed. Think of yourself as a powerful convertible sports car. You want your motor racing as you run out each gear and speed along the highway, the top down and your hair whipping in the wind. I want your metabolism REVVED just like that sexy car. And that can happen at any age and at any time. Its not too lateyoure in charge of your body, your metabolism, and your future.

You see, it isnt inevitable for your metabolism to become sluggish or devolve into what many people term a slow metabolism. How many times have I heard Oh, I just have a slow metabolism. It runs in my family. But thats not true. What your metabolism is doing is listening and responding to your instructions, which are dictated by your beliefs and behaviors. The truth is that YOU are in control of your metabolism. Your metabolism doesnt control you.

A note about belief in a bad, or slow, metabolism because of genes: Some people eat often, they eat the wrong foods, and their subsequent inability to take the weight off reinforces their belief that their metabolism is stacked against them. Its a terribly destructive cycle that has to be brokenand breaking it is one of my goals with this book. I will go into the genetic component of a REVVED metabolism in chapter 2.

Im going to teach you a new belief system about your body and your weight. Your new belief will then result in success-driven behaviors. Did you notice that I said behaviors? Not just one behavior, but manya completely new way of approaching your body. Presto: weight loss, and this timeand this is a huge pointall the weight you lose is fat loss, not muscle loss. You will learn how to control what occurs within your mind, which leads to changes in your body. You do so by making new REVVED choices.

Heres an example. Do you believe that its okay to skip breakfast? If so, then that belief and subsequent behavior (having just coffee or, worse, a glass of juice) increases your odds of becoming overweight or obese by 450 percent.

Why? Skipping breakfast disrupts your metabolism and actually reduces it by between 5 and 10 percent. This slowing down happens because the human body is very, very smart. When you skip breakfast, the body wonders, Why arent I being fed? There must not be a readily available source of food around. This could go on for some time, so I better slow my metabolism down so I can stay alive on fewer calories.

How does the body efficiently go about slowing itself down? It draws from its most metabolically active tissue: muscle. You instantly start to lose your REVVED efficient metabolism. Start believing that eating breakfast is essential, then change your behavior (make sure to eat breakfast each and every day, and make it a BIG meal), and that devastating metabolic reduction starts to REVerse. And the exciting part is that you start to get REVVED back immediately.

And those of you who simply say Im not hungry in the morning, do you know why you arent hungry? Its for one of two reasons:

1. Your smart brain got tired of asking for food in the morning. After not getting it for days, weeks, months, or maybe even years, the brain said, Enough. Dont ask, cause youre not gonna get it. Your body listened to your instructions.

2. You gorged the night before and your body is still dealing with the onslaught of a huge dinner, then dessert, then snacking. Sound familiar?

Its not only your metabolism that you are killing by skipping breakfast. You actually up the odds of killing yourself. Skipping breakfast may lead to obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. In fact, men who skipped breakfast regularly increased the odds of dying from a heart attack or stroke by 27 percent.

Women dont escape breakfast-skipping consequences either, as a very large study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed. Women who skipped just one breakfast a week increased their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 20 percent.

Im going to ask you to change your belief. Im going to ask you to acknowledge that eating breakfast is essential to having an efficient and fully energized metabolism. And Im going to ask you to put that belief into action by planning to eat within the same 30-minute window every single day, Monday through Sunday. I will give you more details and the research behind this part of my plan, but just know that your body