The Nantucket Diet: A Safe and Effective 3-Phase Program for Permanent Weight Loss and a Healthy Lifestyle - Hardcover
What is it about Nantucket that keeps people who live there so fit, healthy, and happy? Is it the nutritious food and the active lifestyle? Imagine a diet that allows you to eat your fill of classic New England cuisine with recipes from Nantucket’s top restaurants: Pesto Crusted Rack of Lamb, My Lobster Rolls, Pineapple-Raspberry Napoleon, and other mouthwatering fare. A diet has never been so delicious. Welcome to Nantucket!
Sensible, and effective, The Nantucket Diet presents a way of eating and living that best benefits your body and state of mind. For maximum results, you calculate your calorie needs using a weight-loss formula based on your individual metabolism. With the goal of maintainable weight loss, this program is a sound scientific alternative to fad diets and the drastic dietary changes they require, which result only in weight regain and frustration. At the diet’s core is a three-phase eating plan–termination of weight gain, weight loss, and weight maintenance–that puts you back in control of your weight.
The Nantucket Diet shows you how to
· eat right and live well without strict limitations
· lose weight–and keep it off–permanently
· incorporate basic exercise into your day–without breaking a sweat
· cheat (yes, cheat!) with a weekly “make love to life” meal that curbs the urge to binge (recipes included!)
· create your own meals and snacks, or take advantage of the sample menus and full range of meal plans–with recipes from top Nantucket restaurants
· benefit from a new understanding of essential weight loss and lifestyle issues–from insulin and carbohydrates to vitamins and supplements
The Nantucket Diet’s premise is that there is no legitimate quick fix to your weight problem. This comprehensive weight-management program will pay off in the long term with its goal of sustainable weight loss and a healthier lifestyle. Best of all, the food is delicious, and you’ll finish every meal feeling satisfied and feeling great!
Sensible, and effective, The Nantucket Diet presents a way of eating and living that best benefits your body and state of mind. For maximum results, you calculate your calorie needs using a weight-loss formula based on your individual metabolism. With the goal of maintainable weight loss, this program is a sound scientific alternative to fad diets and the drastic dietary changes they require, which result only in weight regain and frustration. At the diet’s core is a three-phase eating plan–termination of weight gain, weight loss, and weight maintenance–that puts you back in control of your weight.
The Nantucket Diet shows you how to
· eat right and live well without strict limitations
· lose weight–and keep it off–permanently
· incorporate basic exercise into your day–without breaking a sweat
· cheat (yes, cheat!) with a weekly “make love to life” meal that curbs the urge to binge (recipes included!)
· create your own meals and snacks, or take advantage of the sample menus and full range of meal plans–with recipes from top Nantucket restaurants
· benefit from a new understanding of essential weight loss and lifestyle issues–from insulin and carbohydrates to vitamins and supplements
The Nantucket Diet’s premise is that there is no legitimate quick fix to your weight problem. This comprehensive weight-management program will pay off in the long term with its goal of sustainable weight loss and a healthier lifestyle. Best of all, the food is delicious, and you’ll finish every meal feeling satisfied and feeling great!
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
SOL JACOBS, M.D. practices endocrinology in the greater Boston area. Dr. Jacobs is a Fellow of the American College of Endocrinology and is a faculty member of Tufts University School of Medicine.
JANE CONWAY CASPE is a fashion model working and living in the greater Boston area and on Nantucket. She is a fourth-generation descendant of one of the original settling families of the island of Nantucket.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
JANE CONWAY CASPE is a fashion model working and living in the greater Boston area and on Nantucket. She is a fourth-generation descendant of one of the original settling families of the island of Nantucket.
Chapter 1
The Origins, Science, and Politics of Weight Gain
The human body has evolved to store excess calories. Our ancestors lived in an environment that was harsh and unpredictable. Food was a precious commodity not easily obtained. The majority of calories were gathered by women carrying children on their hips, while men would occasionally come home with the spoils of a hunt. Families were constantly on the move, living in small groups so that their demand for calories did not outstrip the supply.1 Our hunter-gatherer ancestors stored calories as fat in times of relative food surplus and then burned these stored calories during the inevitable times of food shortage. These food shortages could occur as often as several times per year, as plants and wild game were frequently scarce and many groups were competing for the same resources. Gaining weight during times of food surplus was an evolutionary advantage in this environment, a very specific environment that no longer exists.
We are therefore attempting to defy our genetic inheritance. Our bodies, programmed over hundreds of thousands of years to store excess calories as fat, have been thrown into the industrialized world, where food is high in calories and easily obtained in absurd abundance 365 days per year. We eat far more calories than we need to survive and reproduce (our evolutionary purpose), and our bodies store these calories as fat to be burned during a time of food shortage that will never come. It is not that our bodies are defective—they are doing the job they have evolved to do. Unfortunately, there is no current need for this specific ability. It has been suggested that economic success in our market economy encourages less exercise and more eating.As we have become more sedentary and our diets have become higher in calories, we as a society have failed to burn our excess calories. As a result, obesity and overweight have become epidemic in the Western world. Certainly genetics plays a role in the development of obesity, and some people will have a harder time losing weight than others, but no one doubts that environment plays a role even across this genetic variation.
While we may live more comfortable lives than our ancestors, the resulting obesity and overweight (to be defined shortly) carry with them the risk of multiple health problems and premature death. For many years healthy weight range determinations were based partly on data collected by life insurance companies in the late 1950s. Since that time multiple studies have shown an association between excess weight gain and risk of death.
Unfortunately, in spite of a now growing appreciation for the risks of obesity both by the general public and by physicians, the obesity problem in this country has dramatically worsened over the last decade. We are facing an epidemic in the true sense of the word. The World Health Organization has declared obesity one of the top health dangers to the developed world.This not only is a problem for the adult population but is increasingly affecting our teens and children. As a result, diseases such as type 2 diabetes (ironically previously known as adult-onset diabetes) occur now with startling frequency in progressively younger patients. Up to 33 percent of diabetes diagnosed in childhood turned out to be type 2 diabetes according to a 1996 report.
How are obesity and overweight defined? Traditionally, men with more than 25 percent body fat or women with more than 35 percent body fat have been considered obese. Clinicians now, however, use a measurement called the body mass index (BMI) as a good indirect estimate of a person’s percentage of body fat. While the BMI is quite good at estimating the percentage of body fat in most individuals, it is less accurate in bodybuilders, who have a higher percentage of muscle for any given weight; in them the BMI overestimates the percentage of body fat. The BMI is also likely less accurate in the elderly, who have less lean body mass; in them the measure underestimates the percentage of body fat. Use the following charts to determine your BMI and to estimate your percentage of body fat. You can also go to the Nantucket Diet’s Web site (www.thenantucketdiet.com) to quickly determine your BMI using the BMI calculator.
Calculating the BMI allows a clinician to conveniently chart a continuum of increasing health risk as a person’s weight (and percentage of body fat) increases. Evidence from large studies of both men and women show increased risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease as BMI increases. The risk of other diseases such as arthritis, stroke, sleep apnea, colon cancer, prostate cancer, postmenopausal breast cancer, and infertility as well as sudden death also rises with increasing BMI. Thus individuals who lose weight will likely decrease their risk of disease and death as their BMI drops.
In addition to BMI, it is well established that an individual’s physical distribution of excess weight is related to heart disease risk. A pattern of obesity in which most excess fat is gained in the abdominal cavity, termed central obesity, leads to the insulin resistance syndrome (high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, diabetes, and coagulation and blood vessel wall abnormalities) and results in a particularly high incidence of cardiovascular disease such as heart attack and stroke. Therefore, even for the same BMI, heart disease risk is increased when more weight is gained as fat around the abdomen in the so called central pattern. The table below lists relative heart disease risk based on waist measurement even within the same BMI categories.
In June 1998 the National Institutes of Health published its “Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation and Treatment of Obesity.” The expert panel that prepared these guidelines suggested that, given population studies showing an increased risk of death in individuals with a BMI over 25 and particularly a BMI over 30 (as much as a 100 percent increased risk of death from heart disease), the BMI cutoff values of 25 and 30 should be considered the clinical definitions of overweight and obesity, respectively. Therefore, to health care providers, the terms overweight and obesity should have specific medical definitions and not simply be colloquialisms or slang terms. It follows that health care providers should base their diagnosis and treatment of obesity accordingly.
Recent data have demonstrated that 65 percent of the United States adult population meets the above-mentioned BMI-based definition of overweight while the prevalence of obesity in adult Americans is estimated at 30 percent. The prevalence of severe obesity has quadrupled to one in fifty adult Americans in the past fifteen years. It is estimated that 39 percent of U.S. adults will be obese by 2008. The numbers regarding children are just as alarming. Up to 15 percent of children in the United States are overweight, and this number approaches 25 percent for minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics. Unfortunately, weight gain among children is also occurring in other developed areas of the world. A recent study in Australia revealed that the percentage of children ages seven to fifteen who are overweight or obese doubled from 1985 to 1997. Excessive weight is truly a global problem.
As noted above, overweight and obese American adults and children face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer of many types, and a host of other weight-related health problems such as arthritis and sleep apnea. Data published in 2003 suggest that severe obesity in relatively young adults will result in the loss of between eight and thirteen years of life, potentially representing up to a 22 percent reduction in their remaining years. These are years lost with their loved ones and productive years lost to society—an immeasurable toll. In fact, obesity is now the number two preventable cause of death in the United States, second only to smoking, currently resulting in as many as 400,000 deaths per year. The financial cost of obesity is also staggering. Obesity and its resulting health problems cost us $99 billion per year, approximately half of which is direct medical costs.
It should also be pointed out that the cost of obesity is not measured only in disease or health care dollars. There is considerable bias against and discrimination toward overweight and obese individuals, and they may therefore incur a significant psychological toll as a result of the insensitive attitudes held by society. Stigmatization of and discrimination against obese individuals in the areas of employment, health care, and education have been demonstrated. Parental bias toward obese children has also been noted, and overweight adolescents are more likely to be socially isolated by their peers. Recent data published by Yale University researchers show that even health care professionals who treat obese patients are biased against them and believe that these patients display stereotypical behaviors such as laziness that contribute to their weight gain.
While weight gain causes health problems, weight loss has been shown to be beneficial. There are major health benefits when even 10 percent of body weight is lost and this weight loss is maintained. In fact, a landmark study conducted by the National Institutes of Health called the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) showed that a 5–7 percent weight loss through calorie restriction and moderate exercise in overweight subjects, with maintenance of this weight loss over three years, reduced the risk of progression to type 2 diabetes by 58 percent!These data show that you don’t have to get back to what you weighed at the senior prom in order to derive significant medical benefit. In fact, unrealistic weight loss goals set us up for failure and are therefore counterproductive.
Because weight gain results ...
The Origins, Science, and Politics of Weight Gain
The human body has evolved to store excess calories. Our ancestors lived in an environment that was harsh and unpredictable. Food was a precious commodity not easily obtained. The majority of calories were gathered by women carrying children on their hips, while men would occasionally come home with the spoils of a hunt. Families were constantly on the move, living in small groups so that their demand for calories did not outstrip the supply.1 Our hunter-gatherer ancestors stored calories as fat in times of relative food surplus and then burned these stored calories during the inevitable times of food shortage. These food shortages could occur as often as several times per year, as plants and wild game were frequently scarce and many groups were competing for the same resources. Gaining weight during times of food surplus was an evolutionary advantage in this environment, a very specific environment that no longer exists.
We are therefore attempting to defy our genetic inheritance. Our bodies, programmed over hundreds of thousands of years to store excess calories as fat, have been thrown into the industrialized world, where food is high in calories and easily obtained in absurd abundance 365 days per year. We eat far more calories than we need to survive and reproduce (our evolutionary purpose), and our bodies store these calories as fat to be burned during a time of food shortage that will never come. It is not that our bodies are defective—they are doing the job they have evolved to do. Unfortunately, there is no current need for this specific ability. It has been suggested that economic success in our market economy encourages less exercise and more eating.As we have become more sedentary and our diets have become higher in calories, we as a society have failed to burn our excess calories. As a result, obesity and overweight have become epidemic in the Western world. Certainly genetics plays a role in the development of obesity, and some people will have a harder time losing weight than others, but no one doubts that environment plays a role even across this genetic variation.
While we may live more comfortable lives than our ancestors, the resulting obesity and overweight (to be defined shortly) carry with them the risk of multiple health problems and premature death. For many years healthy weight range determinations were based partly on data collected by life insurance companies in the late 1950s. Since that time multiple studies have shown an association between excess weight gain and risk of death.
Unfortunately, in spite of a now growing appreciation for the risks of obesity both by the general public and by physicians, the obesity problem in this country has dramatically worsened over the last decade. We are facing an epidemic in the true sense of the word. The World Health Organization has declared obesity one of the top health dangers to the developed world.This not only is a problem for the adult population but is increasingly affecting our teens and children. As a result, diseases such as type 2 diabetes (ironically previously known as adult-onset diabetes) occur now with startling frequency in progressively younger patients. Up to 33 percent of diabetes diagnosed in childhood turned out to be type 2 diabetes according to a 1996 report.
How are obesity and overweight defined? Traditionally, men with more than 25 percent body fat or women with more than 35 percent body fat have been considered obese. Clinicians now, however, use a measurement called the body mass index (BMI) as a good indirect estimate of a person’s percentage of body fat. While the BMI is quite good at estimating the percentage of body fat in most individuals, it is less accurate in bodybuilders, who have a higher percentage of muscle for any given weight; in them the BMI overestimates the percentage of body fat. The BMI is also likely less accurate in the elderly, who have less lean body mass; in them the measure underestimates the percentage of body fat. Use the following charts to determine your BMI and to estimate your percentage of body fat. You can also go to the Nantucket Diet’s Web site (www.thenantucketdiet.com) to quickly determine your BMI using the BMI calculator.
Calculating the BMI allows a clinician to conveniently chart a continuum of increasing health risk as a person’s weight (and percentage of body fat) increases. Evidence from large studies of both men and women show increased risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease as BMI increases. The risk of other diseases such as arthritis, stroke, sleep apnea, colon cancer, prostate cancer, postmenopausal breast cancer, and infertility as well as sudden death also rises with increasing BMI. Thus individuals who lose weight will likely decrease their risk of disease and death as their BMI drops.
In addition to BMI, it is well established that an individual’s physical distribution of excess weight is related to heart disease risk. A pattern of obesity in which most excess fat is gained in the abdominal cavity, termed central obesity, leads to the insulin resistance syndrome (high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, diabetes, and coagulation and blood vessel wall abnormalities) and results in a particularly high incidence of cardiovascular disease such as heart attack and stroke. Therefore, even for the same BMI, heart disease risk is increased when more weight is gained as fat around the abdomen in the so called central pattern. The table below lists relative heart disease risk based on waist measurement even within the same BMI categories.
In June 1998 the National Institutes of Health published its “Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation and Treatment of Obesity.” The expert panel that prepared these guidelines suggested that, given population studies showing an increased risk of death in individuals with a BMI over 25 and particularly a BMI over 30 (as much as a 100 percent increased risk of death from heart disease), the BMI cutoff values of 25 and 30 should be considered the clinical definitions of overweight and obesity, respectively. Therefore, to health care providers, the terms overweight and obesity should have specific medical definitions and not simply be colloquialisms or slang terms. It follows that health care providers should base their diagnosis and treatment of obesity accordingly.
Recent data have demonstrated that 65 percent of the United States adult population meets the above-mentioned BMI-based definition of overweight while the prevalence of obesity in adult Americans is estimated at 30 percent. The prevalence of severe obesity has quadrupled to one in fifty adult Americans in the past fifteen years. It is estimated that 39 percent of U.S. adults will be obese by 2008. The numbers regarding children are just as alarming. Up to 15 percent of children in the United States are overweight, and this number approaches 25 percent for minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics. Unfortunately, weight gain among children is also occurring in other developed areas of the world. A recent study in Australia revealed that the percentage of children ages seven to fifteen who are overweight or obese doubled from 1985 to 1997. Excessive weight is truly a global problem.
As noted above, overweight and obese American adults and children face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer of many types, and a host of other weight-related health problems such as arthritis and sleep apnea. Data published in 2003 suggest that severe obesity in relatively young adults will result in the loss of between eight and thirteen years of life, potentially representing up to a 22 percent reduction in their remaining years. These are years lost with their loved ones and productive years lost to society—an immeasurable toll. In fact, obesity is now the number two preventable cause of death in the United States, second only to smoking, currently resulting in as many as 400,000 deaths per year. The financial cost of obesity is also staggering. Obesity and its resulting health problems cost us $99 billion per year, approximately half of which is direct medical costs.
It should also be pointed out that the cost of obesity is not measured only in disease or health care dollars. There is considerable bias against and discrimination toward overweight and obese individuals, and they may therefore incur a significant psychological toll as a result of the insensitive attitudes held by society. Stigmatization of and discrimination against obese individuals in the areas of employment, health care, and education have been demonstrated. Parental bias toward obese children has also been noted, and overweight adolescents are more likely to be socially isolated by their peers. Recent data published by Yale University researchers show that even health care professionals who treat obese patients are biased against them and believe that these patients display stereotypical behaviors such as laziness that contribute to their weight gain.
While weight gain causes health problems, weight loss has been shown to be beneficial. There are major health benefits when even 10 percent of body weight is lost and this weight loss is maintained. In fact, a landmark study conducted by the National Institutes of Health called the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) showed that a 5–7 percent weight loss through calorie restriction and moderate exercise in overweight subjects, with maintenance of this weight loss over three years, reduced the risk of progression to type 2 diabetes by 58 percent!These data show that you don’t have to get back to what you weighed at the senior prom in order to derive significant medical benefit. In fact, unrealistic weight loss goals set us up for failure and are therefore counterproductive.
Because weight gain results ...
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- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0345476778
- ISBN 13 9780345476777
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages304
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The Nantucket Diet: A Safe and Effective 3-Phase Program for Permanent Weight Loss and a Healthy Lifestyle
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Ballantine Books
(2005)
ISBN 10: 0345476778
ISBN 13: 9780345476777
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