Dieting and spending have a lot in common and most of it centers around our ability to gain control over our compulsive nature and then maintain that control in the face of a vast array of colorful and delectable temptations that have made overeating and overspending an epidemic in America.

I spoke with Dr. Barry Sears of The Zone diet this week and after years of his study on lipids and the human body, he enlightened me on four methods of food control we should have learned from our grandmother:

1. Eat small meals throughout the day.
2. Eat protein with every meal – roughly the size of the palm of one’s hand.
3. Clean those veggies off your plate.
4. Take fish oil with every meal to get the appropriate amount of Omega 3 fatty acids.

It’s easier to change one’s religion than diet found Dr. Sears as he spent years testing various ways to affect hormonal responses to food that would help people achieve their weight loss goals and live a healthier life. In the middle of his research, a breakthrough happened when the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for the discovery of hormones called eicosanoids which play into cardiovascular disease, diabetes, auto-immune diseases and cancer. Noting that these specialized hormones were generated from dietary fat, Dr. Sears decided to treat food as a drug to be controlled, thus testable against a variety of ailments, specifically, on diabetic, neurological and cardiovascular patients.

Dr. Sears found that hunger comes from hormonal imbalance and that food should be treated like a medicine to be controlled because everything that you put in your mouth will affect your hormones in some way. When you eat large quantities of refined high-glycemic load carbohydrates (for example, donuts, pasta, bread, potatoes), cells in the body get inflamed creating a potentially toxic situation. Insulin levels increase and our bodies are overloaded with messages to store the excess sugars (or glucose) because we are eating way more than our bodies need to burn. The more you eat, the more you want and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Stepping out of the sugar cycle and filling your body with foods rich in protein and vitamins takes a determination to be healthy and feel good and make the right choices. Dr. Sears was told by patients and readers following his ever popular Zone diet that he couldn’t take away all their bread options. It was unreasonable to expect them to stick to a diet like that. So, he started to experiment with protein powders as substitutes in baked goods that would give a more satisfying balance but still help people reach their goals without destroying the perfect hormonal balance they were trying to achieve through dietary means. On his site Medwell.com, you can select from a variety of food plans and even buy the specially engineered baked goods that Sears offers to help you control your temptation to overload on carbohydrates during the day.

As a lifelong researcher, Dr. Sears is concerned that the public know about the toxicity of fat which he spells out in his 12th and most recent book on the subject called appropriately Toxic Fat. He believes that toxic fat leads to silent inflammation which is the underlying cause of many chronic diseases. He also believes that toxic fat is caused by diet and can be reversed by diet.

I am not here to sell you Dr. Sears’ latest book {but if you do — click on the link below!} but after trying numerous diets myself and yo-yoing on the scales throughout the years, I find his work fascinating and as I try to incorporate his principles into my latest attempt to defy my genetic disposition towards weight gain, I’ll let you know how it goes. So far, I’ve lost 8 pounds in two weeks. Now, according to the Metropolitan Life Tables from 1983, I’ve got 43 to go.

In the Phoenix, July 24, 2010

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