The 17 Day Diet: A Doctor's Plan Designed for Rapid Results [Hardcover]

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Just Give Me 17 Days

I can personally sum up the 17 Day Diet in two words: fast results.

Depending on your weight when you start out and your metabolism, you might expect to lose up to 10 to 12 pounds the first 17 days. Of course, the further you are from your ideal weight, the more you’ll lose initially.

Let’s not kid each other: When you start a diet, you want to see results right away, in how you look and in how you feel. That’s because our society is geared toward to the immediate; we want things and we want them now. The same is true of weight loss. We get impatient when the pounds don’t come off fast enough to meet our expectations. It seems much easier to give up than to go on.

This diet is designed to produce quick results, not because it starves you down to size but because its carefully designed balance of food and exercise adjusts your body metabolically so that you burn fat, day in and day out.

Also important: The weight-reduction portion of this diet is limited to just 17 days at a time so that you aren’t demoralized by the thought of endless months of dieting.

Nor are you apt to plateau like you often do on other diets. The 17 Day Diet keeps your body and metabolism guessing. I call this “body confusion.” With each 17 Day Cycle, you’re changing your calorie count and the foods you eat. By varying these things, you prevent your body from adapting. The scale is less likely to get stuck. The added bonus: You’ll never get bored. And it’s fun watching those pounds melt off. So confusion is good!

At the end of 17 days, you’ll go on to a second 17-day Cycle, then a third, and finally enter the weight-stabilization Cycle of the diet in which you get to eat a greater variety of foods, including your favorite foods within reason. (I don’t want you to get too chummy with the all-you-can-eat buffets again.)

I already know what you’re thinking: Is it possible to shed pounds swiftly yet safely? If done right, without sacrificing good nutrition, the answer is yes.

Despite what many nutritionists have preached for years, rapid weight-loss diets can be healthy if done correctly and can work wonders on reducing pounds and inches in just days. Brand-new research suggests that the faster you take weight off, the longer you keep it off. Now that’s a reason for dieters everywhere to rejoice. Plus, if you’re too embarrassed by a recent weight spike or have just gained an embarrassing eight pounds after a holiday weekend or an ice cream binge, this diet can get you back on track fast.

The 17 Day Diet thus gives your body the perfect jump-start, the kind of quick drop in weight that gives you a powerful mental boost. My whole focus is to get you thin as soon as I can. When I do, just think: You’ll no longer have to move around hauling the equivalent of two 40-pound bags of cement on your body. The button of your jeans will no longer pop out and ping off the wall. You’ll no longer have to wear plus-sized clothing with those expandable waistlines. This diet will make you slim, healthy, and curvy, and I won’t make you slurp your way to a thinner you, or follow some hardcore exercise regime used by the Navy Seals.

But you do have to accept that this won’t be a pleasure diet. You’ve got to stop eating unhealthy crap. You’ve got to eat vegetables, fruit and lean meat. I’m not going to ask you to probe your inner eater and uncover hidden emotional reasons for why you’re fat. But I am going to ask you to keep your portions down, cut your intake of fatty, sugary, salty foods, and move your butt. You won’t be faint with hunger or found in the kitchen at midnight, feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough. You can do this, because anyone can do anything for 17 days.

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MISTER M.D., CAN YOU PLEASE TELL ME But won’t a lot of the weight I lose be water weight? Yes! And that’s awesome, because water is weight too. Never dismiss those extra pounds as only “water weight”; this is a self-defeating attitude. Cosmetically, water weight can hide fat loss and be particularly frustrating. Healthwise, fluid retention can put a strain on your heart. When your body holds water, this means there’s more water in your blood. Your heart has to work harder to pump all that extra volume. Once all that excess fluid has disappeared, so will your bloat and puffiness. You’ll start looking visibly thinner in three or four days. And chances are, you’ll feel much lighter and be more motivated to watch what you eat.

The beauty of this program is that you won’t get discouraged or bored by the prospect of staying on a diet for what seems like forever. It can yield results that will stand the test of time just as well as those long-term diets that emphasize depressingly slow incremental drops in weight. You’ll love the fact that in 7, 10 or 17 days, you’ll be slimmer. And chances are, you’ll feel a lot lighter and have an absurd amount of energy.

The 17 Day Diet is doable and easy—unlike so many other diets, which are slightly less complicated than the checklist for a shuttle launch.

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SCIENCE SAYS: Slow Isn’t Necessarily Better Conventional wisdom says that rapid weight loss leads to rapid weight regain. A new generation of science, however, shows that slow isn’t necessarily better. Shape Up the Fast Way. A 2010 study from the University of Florida suggests that the key to long-term weight loss and maintenance is to lose weight quickly, not gradually. Among 262 obese middle-aged women, fast weight losers were those who shed more than 2 pounds a week. Compared to more gradual losers, fast weight losers lost more weight overall, maintained their weight loss longer and were less likely to put weight back on. The findings were published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. Trim Belly Fat. We pack on two forms of belly fat. One type collects around internal organs (also known as visceral fat). This type of fat raises blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and increases the risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s and even some cancers. Visceral fat is far more sinister than fat elsewhere in the body. The other type sits just under the skin and is known as subcutaneous abdominal fat. It causes a hard-to-get-rid-of belly pouch. In a Finnish study published in the International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, a rapid weight loss diet followed for 6 weeks trimmed visceral abdominal fat by 25 percent and abdominal subcutaneous fat by 16 percent.

So can you just give me 17 days?

If you can, congratulations! You won’t be disappointed.

What Lies Ahead?

So what is this 17 Day Diet? I’ll go into depth in the next few chapters, but as a very quick summary, the 17 Day Diet is a fun, fantastic way of eating designed to take off weight quickly. It’s based on some very simple principles, one of which is eating foods that favor fat-burning and are friendly to your digestive system.

I want to emphasize that excess weight is always a sign of nutritional and metabolic imbalance. Contrary to popular assumption, it’s not strictly a question of how much exercise you do or how much food you eat. Rather, it’s also a question of what types of foods are eaten, and how they are digested, assimilated and metabolized. If any of these components of good nutrition are compromised, then the body will not be adequately nourished at the cellular level, metabolic function will be impaired and toxins will accumulate. Thus, to lose weight fast we need to optimize digestion and metabolism. That’s what the 17 Day Diet does.

Trust me, you’ll love the rapid loss of a few pounds so much that you’ll decide to keep on going. After the first 17 days, there’s another 17 days, and another—3 total Cycles and a maintenance Cycle in which you get to eat whatever the heck you want, mainly on weekends. Here’s an overview:

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Quick and Easy Overview of the 17 Day Diet Cycle 1: Accelerate (17 days) Purpose : To promote rapid weight loss by improving digestive health. It helps clear sugar from the blood to boost fat-burning and discourage fat storage. Cycle 2: Activate (17 days) Purpose : To reset your metabolism through a strategy that involves increasing and decreasing your caloric consumption to stimulate fat-burning and to help prevent plateaus. Cycle 3: Achieve (17 days) Purpose : To develop good eating habits through the re-introduction of additional foods and move you closer to your goal weight. Cycle 4: Arrive (ongoing) Purpose : To keep you at your goal weight through a program of eating that lets you enjoy your favorite foods on weekends, while eating healthfully during the week.

Once we’re through with all the basics, I’m going to talk to you about how to follow the diet. I can’t wait to show you all of its wonderful components and start you on your way to looking fit and fabulous. Take it one step at a time so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Your Appointment with Me

I might as well take a moment here to introduce myself. I’m a family practice doctor. Under America’s health insurance system, most people go first to a doctor like me for all complaints, from infections to chronic illnesses. I love the diversity of family practice. One moment, I’m treating an 18-year-old guy w...