We just had a long time PEERtrainer member email us about some comments in a thread in the community. We all need to work to keep them clean, so if you see something, say something. We keep the forums anonymous because people sometimes express some painful or embarrassing things. And we want people to feel like they can express themselves in a positive way.
Interestingly, the thread in question had to do with wondering if
one can lose 100 pounds in a year in a healthy way. This is a very interesting question and discussion among people who were on the path to lose 100 pounds. So we had to clean it up a little. But it brought up a very interesting question, something that we are thinking about here internally.
When we started PEERtrainer, we came to this with a "diet neutral" philosophy, meaning we just wanted to provide a place for people to follow through on what they already knew, and were already working on. Over time we started to see different things working, some things not working.
So we started to develop some observations, maybe some opinions. We started to write some articles, basically sharing what we saw working.
The Fat Smash Diet was one of these things, we saw people talk about it, form groups and teams about it. We started to see people eat lots of fruits and vegetables, much more than was commonly recommended by the run of the mill nutritionists out there. So we wrote about it and started to feature it on the PEERtrainer site.
And it was helping people lose weight, we were seeing this. We were then introduced to Dr Joel Fuhrman by a business colleague and friend of ours.
This person had helped start Oxford Health Plans, and had a real passion for health. And passion in a real way that got our attention. He had served as Chairman of the company during some hard times (ended up engineering a $6 billion deal with United Health Care).
In this role he had a birdseye view of how screwed up our whole health care system is, with a total focus on acute care, and a major lack of focus on prevention. Anyway, he gave us a copy of
Eat To Live, and introduced us to Joel. And what we found was a person with a record of excellence in helping people lose major amounts of weight, safely.
If you get a copy of Eat To Live or his newer book, Eat For Health (
click here to read our take on it) you will see comments from his friend, Dr Mehmet Oz. So you can see that Joel has made some very good friends over the years of his work.
Which brings me back to the original question. And I think the answer to the question to losing 100 pounds is of course a complex one, but that it involves going on a diet that radically increases vegetables, fruits, raw foods, blended foods. And it involves exploring the ideas that Ian Smith, Joel Fuhrman are putting forth. The greens, veggies etc have to go to 80%. There is also this great clip on YouTube that I will dig up (or somebody please post) of a guy who went on a raw food diet and did a timelapse of himself.
So be open to these new ideas and approaches. And this is also permanent weight loss. When you change your diet- over time- to do mainly plant based foods, you are going to lose weight. There will be no more of this starving yourself and eating 100 calorie snack pack kind of deals. In fact, a sure way to know that you are going to gain the weight back is if you are eating 100 calorie snack packs each day.
Now if you are just beginning the journey, these snack packs are a great way to get portion control under your belt and transition. But over time they have to go, along with all the other fake foods. What our business friend taught us was that people might be thin but they are not healthy eating these foods.
We tend to shy away from the "health" aspect of weight, because who wants to be lectured. But know that diets advocated by people like Joel also help people massively improve their health profile.
"People might be thin but they are not healthy eating these foods" ... well said - SO TRUE!
Posted by: jana_ | December 10, 2008 at 02:25 PM