44 Days | Strong Mental Focus & Good Strategy

"A healthy weight is the result of a strong mental focus and a well-planned eating strategy."

From Dr. A:

Create a New Energy Management System

To reach and maintain a healthy weight, you need to take control of your energy management system—that is, calories in and calories out. It’s also critical to get your body out of fat-storage mode and into fat-burning mode by controlling your body’s release of insulin.

Take a look at this chart of our typical eating pattern. Does this resemble the way you eat or how you used to eat? When we eat meals that are high in fat, sugar, and simple carbohydrates, our blood sugar and insulin levels increase and facilitate the accumulation of excess fat. This lesson is designed to help you fire your current energy management system and enter your new leptogenic world through a comprehensive approach that puts you in charge.

Eating a little healthier or walking a little more isn’t going to get you to your healthy weight because the evil forces out there—tempting you with calories and offering you a nice, cushy ride in place of exercises—are just too powerful. The steady-as-you-go approach just isn’t going to work for most of us, but it does provide a foundation for us to begin using our biological design to our advantage.

We’ll start by giving you a new eating strategy. Look at it this way: if I can help you lose one to two pounds each week while keeping you from being hungry and eliminating your cravings for carbohydrates, and if a little later (after you have lost some weight) all I ask of you is 30 minutes of your time for a nice walk, will you do it? I hope your answer is yes.

The Logistics of Healthy Eating

Can you eat every three hours? If so, you can change your life. A study by David Jenkins, MD, PhD—the University of Toronto pioneer in low-glycemic eating—demonstrates that eating small portions at frequent intervals is good for your health in a number of important, even remarkable ways. Among those benefits are weight loss, hunger control, reduced blood insulin, and reduced LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. If you are following this program with Medifast meal replacements, you are already enjoying the benefits of properly timing your portions, but now you can better understand the science behind your choices.

Here’s the schedule that you’ll use during your weight-loss phase, which I call Phase I in my book The Habits of Health:

• 7:00 a.m. breakfast
• 10:00 a.m. nourishment
• 1:00 p.m. nourishment (or small lunch)
• 4:00 p.m. nourishment
• 7:00 p.m. dinner
• 9:30-10:00 p.m. small nourishment

Whether you are using our Medifast meal replacements (The 5 & 1 Plan*) or doing this with your own foods, you should be eating every two to three hours. 

Continue the process of discovering Optimal Health by creating a microenvironment of health. I hope you’re thirsty, because you should already be drinking your first 8-ounce glass of water!

*For those of you on the 5 & 1 Plan, one of those meals will be a Lean & Green™ Meal; the rest will be Medifast Meals.  Follow the guidelines in the Quick Start Guide, and work with your Health Coach until you reach a healthy weight. You will then transition to all of the ideas presented in the next few e-mails. The good news is that you are starting to learn the Habits of Healthy eating for life while using the simple, effective 5 & 1 Plan.