Dieting without the suffering
10-day regime can lead to long-term weight management, Yoni Freedhoff writes
Why Diets Fail And How To Make Yours Work
Dr. Yoni Freedhoff (Random House of Canada)
Dr. Yoni Freedhoff (Random House of Canada)
OTTAWA — Dr. Yoni Freedhoff has a guilty pleasure.
The Ottawa-based advocate for healthy eating and good lifestyle choices just can’t pass up a bag of zesty cheese Doritos.
In fact he’s got a passion for a wide range of savoury snacks. But, really, he says, what’s wrong with that. Nothing, he adds, as long as the consumption of such food stuffs is balanced by otherwise good food habits and exercise. He also loves to smoke foods in his Weber Smokey Mountain.
The 42-year-old Freedhoff actually does know what he is talking about. He runs a prominent family medicine practice with a focus on nutrition and weight management. He is certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine. His blog Weighty Matters is approaching six million page views.
Over the years, Freedhoff has learned a lot about the management of the human body, what it takes in and what it puts out and he has come to a conclusion.
Succinctly put, most people are trying to balance their weight with diets that are failing. Those programs are failing, Freedhoff says, because they punish the people who try them out and leave those individuals with “post-traumatic diet disorder.”
They make the odd indulgence verboten and, as a result, Freedhoff says, they fail.
“We’ve got to get ourselves as a society (past) thinking that we need to suffer to succeed with weight management. By definition it dooms people to long-term failure.
“It’s the common thread that ties dieting failure together that people do diets that are miserable. Even small miseries, over time, amplify,” he said. Food should be a
pleasure. It forms the oldest social network for the human species. Eating is the second most important thing we do after breathing, he says. If you are trying to diet, don’t go into a supermarket hungry.
Freedhoff has finally put down his thoughts on what makes a healthy diet into a book that hit stores this week.
The book is called The Diet Fix and it offers a 10-day regime that he suggests would lead to long-term weight management.
What Freedhoff fears is what many in the health-care system are coping with now will become a tidal wave of obesity-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers, all related to poor diet and a lack of exercise and all treatable and preventable with some good old-fashioned common sense.
Freedhoff hasn’t always practised what he now preaches. As a university student, he indulged in junk food. He skipped home-cooked meals. But when he married and children started arriving, a decision was made to get straight.
Now he exercises five days a week. And his family sits down together to an evening meal.
This was the kind of family meal that he was used to when he was growing up in the 1980s in Toronto.
It was commonplace then, but it is not now. Instead, families today eat out way too much, he says, instead of making it a rare treat. “Just being Tuesday is not an occasion.”
“I don’t think that people have changed,” Freedhof says. “I don’t think we’ve had an epic loss of willpower in society. What has changed is the world around us.”
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