Eat Yourself Slim

Montignac

The theory of slimming based on the low-calorie approach is without doubt the greatest scientific “fudge”of the twentieth century...

Up to then I had led a fairly conventional social and professional lifestyle and my tendency to put on weight had seemed to level off. My ”overeating”, if indeed I overate at all, was only very occasional and tended to occur in a family context. When you come, as I do, from South West France, you have been brought up to value gastronomic cuisine as part of your cultural heritage. I had long since given up sugar, or at least, sugar in coffee. I never ate potatoes, claiming to be allergic to them, and, apart from wine, very rarely touched alcohol... When I looked around me I felt no more overweight than the average..

Then, overnight, my professional circumstances changed. I was appointed to a new post with an international dimension at the European headquarters of the American multinational company I worked for... But three months after taking up my new post I had put on [weight]..

Like everyone else, I started off by trying to apply the usual weight-loss rules and, like everyone else, I became thoroughly disillusioned with the lack of positive results.

But soon afterwards, as luck would have it, I came across a general practitioner with a keen interest in nutritional problems. He gave me some advice, and the guidelines he suggested to me seemed to call into question the fundamental basis of traditional dietetics. It was not long before I was achieving very promising results. So I then decided to delve further into the theory...

In 1930 two American doctors, Newburgh and Johnson, of the University of Michigan, suggested in one of their papers that ”obesity results from a diet too high in calories, rather than from any metabolic deficiency". Their study on energy balance was based on very limited data and, above all, had been conducted over too short a period to deserve serious scientific acceptance. This did not prevent their study from being immediately and widely acclaimed as irrefutable scientific truth, and it has been treated as ”gospel” ever since...

The first question is: When the consumption of calories is reduced, why does weight loss not follow? Actually, weight loss does occur, but only temporarily. This is, in fact, where Newburgh and Johnson went wrong, in that they collected their data over much too short a period of time...

Insulin

Whether or not we accumulate body fat is directly linked to the secretion of insulin, so we will first take a brief look at this. Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas 6 and it plays a vital role in human metabolism...

When, for example, you eat a piece of bread with butter, [.. the] carbohydrate is broken down into glucose; the blood glucose level rises; the pancreas secretes insulin. However.. the lipid is converted into a fatty acid in the blood...

[But] a piece of cheese, eaten on its own.. involves no release of glucose into the bloodstream. Consequently, the pancreas secretes virtually no insulin. In the absence of insulin, the energy cannot be stored away as fat.

[What to Avoid]

Sugar

Sugar is the hands-down, outright winner in the bad carbohydrates stakes. It should always carry the skull and crossbones symbol, like other lethal substances... for tens of thousands of years human beings did not have such a thing, and they were none the worse for that. Just the opposite, in fact. Less than 200 years ago, sugar was still a luxury hardly ever available to most of the population...

[T]he body does not need to get sugar from outside (this is just what upsets the blood glucose level). It can produce its own sugar in the form of glucose when it needs it, and this is far and away what it prefers to do.

Starchy Foods

Most [starchy] foods are bad carbohydrates and some need to be completely excluded from your diet. The number one starchy food is the potato. You may be interested to know that when the potato was brought back from the New World by explorers in 540, the French firmly rejected it, considering this root vegetable fit only for pigs. They thought it so unpleasant they refused to eat it, unlike some “northern” European peoples, such as the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish, who took to it readily. It has to be said that some of these people had relatively little choice, often having not much else to eat. For two centuries the French continued to pour corn on the ”pig root". It was not until 1789, when Larmentier published his Treatise on the cultivation and uses of the potato, that people in France finally came round to eating it. The famine that was raging at the time was an additional incentive. It was later discovered that the potato is rich in vitamins and minerals, though it loses most of these when it is cooked and, especially, when it is peeled. Recent tests have shown that the potato releases a very large quantity of glucose into the system.