Medical Facts About Dieting

December 4, 2009

Interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of the book You: On A Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management

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Mike Carruthers:
If you go on a diet to lose weight, the overwhelming odds are you will fail.

Mehmet Oz, M.D.:
The average person tries to diet hard. You can't diet hard - there are a dozen redundant biological systems that will force you to eat.
 

Dr. Mehmet Oz, co-author of the book You: On A Diet…

What we can do is diet smart - now to diet smart you use subtle little tools that your body provides you to manipulate the system so your body naturally takes you to your playing weight, which is the weight you were when you were about twenty years of age.

So, for example eat a salad before dinner with just vinegar and olive oil.

Salads fill up your stomach with bulk so you actually feel full, so you don't eat as much - there's actually data on this. So, if you start having a salad before dessert, you're not going to want to have much of a dessert, naturally. I'll give you one more good example: there's a chemical called ghrelin - it comes from your stomach it goes to your brain and it tells your brain, "Hey I'm hungry." If you have a meal, the ghrelin levels will come down but it takes about half an hour for the ghrelin levels to drop; but if about a half an hour before a meal you have a handful of nuts - when you actually sit down at the meal, those ghrelin levels will already be coming down, so you're not going to feel as famished - so you won't eat as much.

Dr. Oz says lack of sleep will also cause you to eat more, and remember…

That big decisions aren't made in the kitchen, big decisions are made in the supermarkets - if you buy the right foods you'll cook with the right foods - it all becomes easier.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here