How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss

by Michael Greger

For significant weight loss, however, the committee recommends closer to a minimum of 450 minutes a week, or more than an hour a day.

Standing burns three times more calories per minute than sitting.

Randomize type 2 diabetics to a leisurely twenty-minute stroll (about 2 mph) before dinner or after dinner, and you can show that after-dinner walking can comparatively blunt blood sugar spikes by 30 percent.3279 Same meal, same amount of exercise, same intensity of exercise, but with a significant bonus effect on blood sugar control, thanks to a little tactical timing. Even just a ten-minute walk after a meal may make a difference.

During exercise, listening to a preferred playlist can significantly reduce our “rate of perceived exertion,” which is how hard you feel your body is working.3297 Put severely obese youth on a treadmill and have them go until exhaustion with or without music, and those listening to their favorite tunes tended to make it about 5 percent longer.

Why might calcium supplements increase heart attack risk, whereas the same calcium you get in foods does not? When you take calcium pills, you get an unnaturally large, rapid, and sustained spike of calcium in your bloodstream that can last as long as eight hours. This can cause your blood to clot more easily, which could increase the risk of forming clots in the heart or brain.

Green Light whole plant foods, unlike dairy, package calcium with lots of fiber, folate, iron, antioxidants, and thylakoids, instead of the baggage that too often accompanies milk products, such as sodium, cholesterol, and saturated butterfat.

Drink Hibiscus Tea

trials have found ginger to be effective for treating morning sickness3552 and migraine headaches,3553 as well as reducing cholesterol, triglycerides,3554 blood sugars,3555 and signs of inflammation.

Just make sure to choose real cinnamon (also known as Ceylon cinnamon), not cassia cinnamon (also known as Chinese cinnamon). In the United States, if it doesn’t specify Ceylon on the label, it’s probably cassia, which, as I described in How Not to Die, has too much coumarin for comfort. A single daily teaspoon of cassia cinnamon could exceed the safety limit for liver toxicity risk in an adult, and even a quarter teaspoon may be too much for a small child.3581 So make sure it says Ceylon on the label, and then sprinkle to your heart’s desire.

Although more than two thousand compounds have been identified in tea leaves, most attention has been paid to a family of antioxidants called catechins, such as EGCG.3626 This is because even straight EGCG has been shown to boost metabolism and the rate at which fat is burned at rest.3627 That is one reason most of the spotlight has been on green, white, and oolong teas, as they have about five times more EGCG than black tea.

You may have heard that habits take twenty-one days to form. That’s a myth that evidently originated from anecdotal evidence of how long it takes plastic surgery patients to psychologically adjust to their new appearance.3767 When it was actually put to the test, the average time to reach automaticity was sixty-six days.

There are two ways to break a bad habit: change the cue, or change the action. The most straightforward approach is to try to avoid the situational triggers.

Health-wise, it matters little what we eat on birthdays, holidays, or special occasions (unless for you every day is National Hot Dog Day). It’s the day-to-day that adds up, which is why our eating habits are so important, for good or for ill.

As I mentioned here, this irrational reaction to overindulge after overeating because now the “day is lost” has a name in the scientific psychology literature. It’s been coined the “what-the-hell effect.”

Since I drink filtered water mostly just for taste, I used to wait until the water started tasting funky before I changed the filter. Bad idea. Not only do the filters eventually lose much of their removal capacity, but bacterial growth can build up inside them, resulting in your filtered water having higher bacterial counts than the water straight out of the tap.3890

So if you dust your air-popped popcorn with nutritional yeast, a vitamin-packed cheesy topping (spritzing the popcorn first with apple cider vinegar to get it to stick, of course), your urine stream can light up neon yellow like a light saber. This can give the false impression that your urine is more concentrated than it is and, hence, that you’re more dehydrated than you actually are.

Is there any danger in drinking too much water? Absolutely, yes. Even healthy kidneys can only handle about three cups of water an hour.3896 Beyond that, we risk washing the electrolytes out of our brains with potentially lethal consequences.

In the Dietary Inflammatory Index scoring system I discussed in the Anti-Inflammatory section, the single most pro-inflammatory food component is saturated fat. The single most anti-inflammatory food component? Fiber.3899 Since saturated fat is found mostly in meat, dairy, and junk food, whereas fiber is abundant in whole grains, beans, vegetables, and fruit, that information alone is enough to get a general sense of what an anti-inflammatory diet might look like: one centered around whole plant foods.

Goji berries, also known as wolfberries, have at least four times the antioxidant activity compared to other dried fruits like raisins or dried cranberries that you might sprinkle on your oatmeal or add to your trail mix.

Sustainable weight loss is not about eating less food—it’s about eating better food.

They’ve been turned into free online calculators you can use to make personalized estimates. There’s the Body Weight Planner from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Weight Loss Predictor out of Louisiana State University (LSU). • NIH Body Weight Planner: www.bit.ly/NIHcalculator • LSU Weight Loss Predictor: www.bit.ly/LSUcalculator

Increased protein intakes are commonly suggested, but most studies fail to show a beneficial effect on preserving muscle strength or function, whether young or old, active or sedentary.

researchers randomized overweight older men and women to either a normal-protein diet of four grams for every ten pounds of body weight or a high-protein diet with about eight grams per ten pounds, during a 25 percent caloric restriction. A doubling of protein intake had no discernible effect on lean body mass, muscle strength, or physical performance.

Nine years later, however, that number dropped to fewer than one in ten. Almost everyone had regained the weight they had fasted away.

Fasting only works long term if it can act as a jump-start to a more healthful diet.

in 1921, a distinguished physician and scientist at the Mayo Clinic suggested trying what he called a ketogenic diet, a high-fat diet designed to be so deficient in carbohydrates it could effectively mimic the fasting state.

Promoters of ketogenic diets for cancer, paid by “ketone technology” firms4135 or companies that market ketogenic meals,4136 report “extraordinary” anecdotal responses in some cancer patients.4137 I’m sure they do. But more concrete evidence is lacking.4138 Even the theoretical underpinnings may be questionable.

A common refrain is that “cancer feeds on sugar.”4139 True, but all cells feed on sugar. Advocating ketogenic diets for cancer is like saying Stalin breathed air, so we should boycott oxygen.

Cancer can also feed on ketones. Indeed, ketones have been found to fuel human breast cancer growth and drive metastases in an experimental model, more than doubling tumor growth.4140 Some have even speculated that may be why breast cancer oft...

When ketones were dripped on breast cancer cells in a petri dish, the genes that got turned on and off made for a much more aggressive cancer and were associated with a significantly l...

Researchers are even considering ketone-blocking drugs to prevent further cancer growth by...

So far, not a single clinical study has shown a measurable benefit from a ketogenic diet for any human cancer.

Diet adherence is difficult, though, because, as you know, anytime you try to cut calories, your body ramps up your appetite to compensate. This is why traditional weight-loss approaches like portion control tend to fail.

Nighttime snacks are more fattening than the same snacks eaten in the daytime.4330 Thanks to our circadian rhythms, metabolic slowing,4331 hunger, carbohydrate intolerance, triglycerides, and our propensity for weight gain are all things that go bump in the night.4332

These findings have led to the suggestion that efforts to “avoid eating after 8 pm and fast for 13 h[ours] or more overnight may be a beneficial consideration for those patients looking to decrease cancer risk and recurrence,

Early time-restricted feeding may even play a role in the health of perhaps the longest living population in the world, the Seventh-day Adventist Blue Zone in California. Slim, vegetarian, nut-eating, exercising, nonsmoking Adventists live about a decade longer than the general population.

Though this has yet to be studied with respect to longevity, frontloading one’s calories earlier in the day with a prolonged nightly fast has been associated with significant weight loss over time, leading the researchers to conclude: “Eating breakfast and lunch 5-6 h[ours] apart and making the overnight fast last 18-19 h[ours] may be a useful practical [weight control] strategy.”4345

Because of the metabolic slowing and increased appetite that accompany weight loss, sustained weight loss requires a persistent calorie deficit of three hundred to five hundred calories a day,

Try this at home: Measure your heart rate before and after drinking two cups of water. Within ten minutes of drinking the water, your heart rate should slow by about four beats per minute, and by fifteen minutes, you should be down six or seven beats.

Drinking two cups of water increased the metabolic rate of men and women by 30 percent. The increase started within ten minutes of water drinking and reached a maximum within an hour.

In the ninety minutes after drinking a single tall glass of water, the subjects burned an extra twenty-four calories.4437 Simply drinking a tall glass of water four times throughout the day would wipe out nearly one hundred extra calories, more than the calories burned by taking weight-loss doses of the now-banned ephedrine three times a day.4438 Plain, cheap, safe, and legal tap water!

A similar effect was found in overweight and obese children. Drinking about two cups of water led to a 25 percent increase in metabolic rate within an hour.4440 So just getting the recommended, daily “adequate intake” of water—about five cups a day for children aged four through eight and seven cups a day for girls and eight daily cups for boys aged nine through thirteen4441—may offer more than just hydration benefits.

Preload people with a chicken appetizer, for example, and they eat significantly more at the subsequent meal than after eating the same appetizer made with more fiber-rich options, either tofu or a meat-free chicken (Quorn).

commencing a “celery soup diet”4564 or spending time in a tanning bed an hour after eating just one large celery root may be enough to result in a serious blistering burn.4565

The effect of eating an additional 80 mg of cholesterol a day—which is less than half an egg4814—was similar to the effect of being approximately three years older, appearing to effectively accelerate brain aging.

Every single one of the top fifteen sources of saturated fat is meat, dairy, or junk.

A single meal high in animal protein can nearly double the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood within a half hour of consumption, more than twice that of a meal closer to the recommended level of protein.

If you feed men a high-protein diet packed with fish, poultry, other meat, and egg whites, and then switch them to a lower-protein diet centered around bread, fruits, and vegetables, their cortisol levels drop about a quarter within ten days.

Yes, fiber supplements can help with constipation, but all the other purported benefits didn’t seem to materialize.

In How Not to Die, I compiled the healthiest of the Green Light foods into my Daily Dozen checklist of foods I encourage people to try to fit into their daily routines. I made it into a free app, Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen, available for iPhone and Android, so anyone and everyone can try to check off all the boxes every day and track their progress over time.