Living Low Carb (40 page)

At the same time, the program is edgy enough to take a stand on the subject of ketosis, which the program makes good use of. The author argues that people who experience the benign ketosis of the weight-loss portion of the program lose weight more quickly than they would on traditional diets (undoubtedly true), which in turn increases their motivation to stick with the program until they achieve their goal (sure makes sense to me). Participants experience reduced hunger and fewer cravings, a very common effect on ketogenic diets. The book offers a short but accurate couple of paragraphs on why ketosis is perfectly safe, then lists the three situations in which one would not use a ketogenic diet (for a full explanation of ketosis, see
chapter 6
).

The Lindora folks recommend vitamin and mineral supplements (they sell their own, which is no surprise), essential fatty acids, potassium, and calcium—though they are way behind the curve on this one, failing to mention the importance of bone-supporting minerals like magnesium, manganese, and boron and vitamins like vitamin D, not to mention weight training!

Their recommendations on exercise are limited to walking. Most exercise specialists now feel that weight loss will not be achieved with walking alone, and nearly all recommend weight training as part of any program. Weight training is not discussed at all in this book.

The best part of the Lindora program is
not
the eating plan. It’s what the book has to say about motivation, behavior modification, and self-help.

Journaling is essential to the Lindora program. Your journal is your “daily action plan.” Every day there is a specific “mind–body” item that you focus on: it could be “recognizing rationalization,” “the self-sabotage shuffle,” “turning obstacles into opportunities,” “values and vision,” “visualizations,” “affirming the positive,” or any of a few dozen other such exercises, all of which are noted in your daily action plan. The book is filled with pithy little sayings—most of them are pretty good, actually—some by Stamper (“The most important words you’ll ever hear are the ones you tell yourself”), some by Norman Vincent Peale (“Change your thoughts and you change your world”), and some that seem to be lifted directly from the reject pile of new-age greeting cards (“Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in”).

Early on, the book lists what the Lindora program considers the “six essentials for success.” These include being clear that your goal is to be lean for life (not just for the duration of the diet), and learning to recognize and eliminate your defensive barriers. Examples of barriers are denial and rationalization, such as “One little bit won’t kill me,” “I deserve this—I’ve been good all day,” or my personal favorite, “I don’t need to write down what I eat—I have a great memory.”

There is a lot of work on learning to manage and control cravings. Lindora considers three main causes of cravings:
physical
, which includes insulin resistance and low serotonin levels as well as lack of exercise;
psychological
, about self-image; and
environmental
, meaning conditioned responses to triggers such as events, people, places, and emotions (an example of an environmental trigger and its associated eating behavior: movies and popcorn).

Lindora also focuses on relaxation techniques and the reduction of stress, pointing out that people who have difficulty managing stress have difficulty losing weight, and if they do lose, they regain. The program suggests tools to help individuals stop using food to self-medicate and manage stress.

Finally, there are “success strategies” for maintaining lifelong results: maintain a support system, continue exercising, maintain your daily action plan journal, weigh yourself every morning, eat three meals a day, do one protein day a week (to maintain a sense of awareness and control over your eating and to help curb the appetite), drink 80 ounces of calorie-free liquid daily, take vitamins, and do mental training exercises.

The Lindora Program as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere

This is a program for people who really can commit to the whole self-help aspect of weight control. You can’t just do the diet part of it and be successful. The program requires journaling, homework, and a lot of mindful, thoughtful activity. There is a ton of support available on the Web site; and if you live in southern California, the company encourages you to come to the Lindora centers on a regular basis. Lindora also sells a truckload of products and foods as part of the overall program. If this speaks to you, great. If it turns you off, look elsewhere. The diet itself is not for extremely carbohydrate-sensitive people.

JONNY’S LOW DOWN
  

The strength of this plan is clearly in its holistic approach and its motivational “we’re all in this together” spirit. I’ve always been a fan of incorporating ways to increase consciousness about food into a program, and the program can’t be faulted for its emphasis on self-esteem, new habits, goal-setting, and the mind– body connection. And because it takes such an aggressive approach to raising consciousness, I can easily see how it would be effective at re-training people to be aware of what they are eating and to be thoughtful and mindful about whether their eating habits are compatible with their goals of permanent weight management. So far, so good
.

I’m not such a fan when it comes to the actual diet. You could certainly argue that it is realistic and allows a lot of stuff that other, sterner taskmasters banish, which makes it palatable for a lot of people. Maybe. But for me, it’s a failed attempt to find the political middle ground, to satisfy the low-fat contingent, satisfy the low-calorie contingent, and, oh yes, throw some more protein into the mix. The emphasis on protein is a step in the right direction, but everything else about Lindora is very conventional and conservative. There are also far too few vegetables and way too many grains (in the maintenance program) for my liking
.

I think this program has a place for people who want to really surrender to making the program a priority in their life for as long as it takes to get the job done; it will be very good for people who respond well to the self-help and psychological aspects. From a food point of view, there are many better diet systems and there are certainly a lot more sophisticated writers than Cynthia Stamper Graff when it comes to talking about food, hormones, and weight
.

17. T
HE
M
AKER’S
D
IET AND
P
ERFECT
W
EIGHT

J
ORDAN
S. R
UBIN

WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL

A biblical approach to eating and weight loss. The eating program is excellent, but the religious component is pretty heavy-handed.

About the Maker’s Diet and Perfect Weight

Jordan S. Rubin—the author of both
The Maker’s Diet
and
Perfect Weight America—
bills himself as “America’s Biblical Health Coach.”

If that puts you off, these books are probably not for you. Full disclosure:

it’s difficult to separate the nutritional information in these two volumes from the heavy overlay of faith and religion in which they’re packaged.

Reviewing this diet was a challenge because—I admit it—I had some strong prejudices about author Jordan Rubin going into it. For one thing, I prefer some separation of church and state when it comes to diet (we’ll get into this more in a bit). For another, he runs a multimillion-dollar supplement company (Garden of Life) and also manufactures a variety of healthrelated products, many of which are liberally recommended in his programs.

Truth be told, he has always struck me as a kind of slick marketer, a kind of Kevin Trudeau in spiritual clothing.

So, full disclosure—I didn’t want to like these books.

But I did.

Surprisingly—at least to me—Rubin comes pretty darn close to getting most everything right when it comes to food. And he won me over when he started taking on the sacred cows of the health establishment and the diet “dictocrats.” Here’s a sample of what he says early on:

•  I am in favor of eating beef, lamb, and other “healthy” red meats.

•  You should spend time in direct sunlight.

•  Make sure you take your children out to play in the dirt.

•  You will be healthier if you consume saturated fat every day.

That got my attention.

If you’ve read this far in the book, you’re probably not surprised by the advocacy of healthy meat (meaning grass-fed, free-range, and the like). But you might find the items on sunlight and dirt to be surprising. Actually, they make perfect sense and are in keeping with the whole sensibility of the books. Maverick health practitioners have long thought that we’re way too sun-phobic, particularly in the light of what looks to be a pretty endemic level of vitamin D deficiency in this country. And our obsession with avoiding germs (anti-bacterial soaps and the like) may be partly responsible for our less-than-robust immune systems which we protect from any challenge that could make them stronger. So these “myth busters” aren’t as nutty as they might seem at face value. For me, anyway, these recommendations were a breath of fresh air.

Rubin spends a lot of time in this book going into some of the myths about diet and health. Here’s a tiny sample of the myths he doesn’t buy into:

•  Vitamin B12 can be obtained from plant sources (nope, sorry).

•  Meat-eating causes osteoporosis (nope, sorry).

•  Our needs for vitamin D can be met by sunlight (nope, sorry).

Rubin’s philosophy about food and eating very much shows his debt to, and respect for, the Weston A. Price Foundation, a word about which would be in order. The foundation is named after nutrition pioneer Weston Price (and is actually a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity founded in 1999 to disseminate his research and nutritional philosophy). Price wrote one of the seminal texts in nutrition,
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
. It’s a text that many of us who lean toward low-carb eating strategies cut our academic teeth on.

Price was a dentist who was fascinated with the fact that cavities and tooth decay seemed to be so rampant in industrialized nations and so curiously absent in native, indigenous populations that were isolated from big cities. In the late 1930s, he did a series of field studies on hunter–gatherer societies, painstakingly chronicling their diets and lifestyles. He compared these native people who lived in comparative isolation to people from the same tribe and with similar genetics who had moved to the big cities and adapted their diet to their new surroundings in industrialized areas. And he took numerous photographs.

Price studied 15 societies, ranging from the New Zealand Maori to Peruvian Indians, from Eskimos to the coastal Indians of Ecuador. The pictures tell the story better than any summary of the 500-plus-page textbook, which has been reprinted in at least seven editions. In virtually every case, hunter–gatherer people eating their native diet had gorgeous teeth and robust healthy skin, and they exuded good health. Their “cousins” in the big city were a mess—broken and missing teeth, misshapen jaws, bad skin, and scraggly hair.

While the 15 hunter–gatherer societies studied varied widely in what they ate (the isolated Swiss mountaineers, for example, got a large percentage of calories from fresh cream!), they all had one thing in common—none ate processed foods. The take-home message of the book—one that informs the Weston Price Foundation and, by implication, Jordan Rubin—is that native foods, relatively unprocessed, as they occur in nature, are the cornerstone to good health. These hunter–gatherer folks didn’t eat “low-fat” diets. They didn’t avoid meat or cream or fat. They just ate the food that was around them, as long as it could be hunted, fished, gathered, or plucked.

The Weston Price Foundation publishes a quarterly journal—
Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts
—that’s dedicated to exploring the scientific validation of dietary, agricultural, and medical traditions around the world. Its president and guiding force is the respected nutritional educator Sally Fallon, whose own book—
Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
—is a classic. The title of that book says it all and explains volumes about the tradition from which Jordan Rubin comes: it’s not a dietary strategy that fears traditional foods or the things found in them. Meat, fat, cream, butter, vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries—all on the menu.