The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss: Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss [Kindle Edition]

I've been dieting all my life and I've noticed that when I diet HARD I lose less. No matter where I looked for an answer to this problem, no diet book seemed to address the phenomenon. But this book does! Finally, The Slow Down Diet combines the body and mind link to guide people into losing weight. Showing scientific experiments and individual profiles, the author Marc David, a nutritionist with a master's degree in the psychology of eating, shows how the more pressure you put on yourself to restrict food or force yourself to cut out one full type of food and the more you push yourself into doing un-enjoyable exercises, the more your body sees it as an attack and responds by readying itself for hardships. It lowers metabolism and you don't lose weight!

When I read how this book says that it's not just what you eat, but how you eat that keeps weight from coming off, it rang a bell to me. Marc David explains that rushing and not thinking about the food you consume impairs digestion so you might be eating a lot of calories but your body isn't getting what it needs for optimal health and you hunger for more. By paying attention to the food you put into your mouth, by slowing down to take the time to actually use all your senses to give respect to the food, it permits the body to achieve it's maximum metabolism to get all the nutrients from your meals. This book explains why, if you slow down and take the time to enjoy the process, then your body can calm down enough to work properly and let the excess weight your body doesn't need come off. It also explains how exercise must not be perceived as a punishment but as a joyful physical experience so as to help the body permit the excess pounds to be burned off. This is the first book that finally explained why dieting hard doesn't work and guides you to a way to slow down in order to permit your body to lose weight! It makes wonderful sense.

Nutritionist and weight loss expert Marc David asserts in THE SLOW DOWN DIET that some of our most dearly held beliefs about weight loss and dieting are woefully misguided. According to David, some of the biggest myths about eating are well-intentioned, yet contribute to ever-increasing girth. Starting with one of the most widely believed myths, "the best way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more," David describes how people who attempt to follow that old advice so often end up frustrated. As David points out, "What you eat is only half the equation of good nutrition. How you eat is the other half."

David describes the eight universal metabolizers that have the biggest effect on whether we gain or lose weight: relaxation, quality, awareness, rhythm, pleasure, thought, story, the sacred. We don't overeat because we lack willpower or put our metabolism into starvation mode, but when meals are deficient in one of the eight universal metabolizers. Food eaten in an anxious rush will trigger physiological stress responses that decrease our calorie burning capacity at the same time as we lose the value of the nutrients.

At a time when the benefits of meditation are being formally acknowledged, it's refreshing to see a book that cites scientific sources that describe a metabolic power of relaxation. I love the way Marc David includes scientific research studies alongside case histories and exercises. Did you know that your gut has a brain? The enteric nervous system in your body has more nerve cells than your spinal column, at over one hundred million neurons, and it moves through nightly 90 minute cycles as if it were dreaming. Marc David asserts that the amazing differences between French and American food habits and weights are that while the French eat generally fattier foods, they slow down and savor long lunches as the biggest meals of their days... while Americans eat on the run in a constant state of stress.

THE SLOW DOWN DIET proposes something that seems almost too good to be true... a way to savor meals and consistently lose weight doing so. By simply being "awake at the plate" and not doing something distracting or stressful while eating, but instead enjoying every moment of your meals... David assures us that we can lose weight.

Listen to talk radio for a few hours and the newest diet claim will become clear: Stress causes fat. The latest buzz in the diet biz is that stress releases certain hormones that cause the body to hang onto fat and store it right in the biggest problem area - the gut. Is there any truth to this claim?

According to Marc David, author of THE SLOW DOWN DIET, there is. David, a Sonoma State University-educated nutritionist with Harvard training under his belt, has spent a lifetime unraveling the mystery behind healthy eating and weight gain/loss. His experience has brought him to the pages of THE SLOW DOWN DIET, where he painstakingly lays out his theories on weight, stress, pleasure, and health.

THE SLOW DOWN DIET is an 8-week diet plan, not so focused on commandment-style lists of diet do's and don't's, but focused more on finding the hidden nutritionist within and, as the title suggests, slowing down and tuning in enough to listen to that hidden food guru.

According to David, we already own the 8 metabolic powers that can help us lose weight, if only we can learn how to access them:

*Relaxation

*Quality

*Awareness

*Rhythm

*Pleasure

*Thought

*Story

*the Sacred

Using copious research (including some very alarming and interesting facts), David backs up his approach to weight loss with science and a few case studies borne of his years of being a nutritionist.

No doubt about it, David's weight loss approach is appealing. Who can find fault with the idea of treating each meal as a celebration, eating delicious healthy food, and dropping the stress for awhile? What's even better, if we do already possess the tools for this system, what excuse could there possibly be to not give it a try? Who would argue with the idea of relaxation as a means for weight loss?

David's weakness, however, lies in his lack of specificity. He recognizes the difficulty for many people to find, afford, prepare, and eat (and/or feed a family) organic, all-natural, fresh foods. While his message of quality = health certainly can't be argued, he offers no real suggestions on how to make this high-quality lifestyle available for a great many people, including people who have no access to health-food stores or who have a limited budget and a large family to feed.

Also, some of David's claims might seem a bit "extreme" to some people, and great care will have to be taken to maintain an open mind while reading passages such as the following:

"If [a tomato] is picked by an underpaid migrant worker who's given no benefits and few worker's rights, then the tomato is hypocritical and lacks integrity. If it is chopped by machine along with thousands of other tomatoes, delivered to a fast-food joint, and slapped together with a bun and meat from a cow who suffered even worse traumas, then our tomato is now suicidal, or even murderous, because it has lost its soul and has no reason to live" (p. 47)

If dieting trends continue in the direction they've been going (attention to quality of food and interest in how the chemical reactions of stress manifest themselves in the body), it is likely that THE SLOW DOWN DIET could become wildly popular. Offering a lifestyle that is welcoming in this age of "overworked and overweight," Marc David will be the diet expert to watch.