Health & Fitness: Teaching the world how to eat

Dr. Michael Nierenberg wants you to enjoy life. At the same time, he wants you to shed those extra pounds that might be jeopardizing your health — and he insists these two goals aren’t self-canceling.

To help you find a strategy to lose excess weight without feeling miserable and deprived, the local doctor has just published a book that will take its place among the rows and rows of diet books in bookstores and libraries. But there’s one thing he wants you to know: “The Power of the Bite” is not a diet book.

“The whole ‘diet’ thing is a morass,” he says emphatically. “I wrote this book to help people learn how to eat — not learn how to diet.”

Dr. Nierenberg, who practiced medicine in Palo Alto and Menlo Park for about 30 years before retiring two years ago, says the distinction is important, because “diets don’t work.”

Diets, he says, give you goals and directives that doom you to a sense of deprivation and failure. “They focus on the negatives — don’t eat this, don’t do that,” he notes.

His approach to weight loss, on the other hand, emphasizes eating the food that you enjoy. “Just eat less of it,” he says, then shows how it’s done.

Simple, slow and steady

Dr. Nierenberg says he set out to create a book that is “geared to normal people eating normal foods.” Subtitled “Impressive Weight Loss, One Bite at a Time,” the 78-page book is written in a friendly, conversational style, offering a range of ideas on how to consume fewer calories almost without noticing.

His weight-loss method is based on a goal of eliminating a mere 120 calories a day, for a loss of only one-quarter pound a week. But that one-quarter pound adds up to a pound a month, 12 pounds a year.

For those with only a few excess pounds to lose, that simple and painless strategy is likely to be appealing. But even people who want to shed 20 or more pounds would do well to take the “slow and steady” approach, Dr. Nierenberg advises.

That’s because so many “diets” that emphasize complicated strategies for quick weight loss are almost guaranteed to fail in the long term, because they leave dieters feeling deprived and more vulnerable to overeating again once they’ve lost an encouraging amount of weight, he says.

Another reason is that as we eat less and lose weight, our metabolism responds by needing fewer calories to maintain the weight, he notes. This makes keeping the pounds off all the more difficult.

By losing the weight more slowly, he says, “that response is blunted — you’re sort of sneaking by” the metabolism’s radar.

In the book, Dr. Nierenberg uses metaphors and principles that are likely to stay with readers, giving friendly guidance as they try to eliminate 120 calories from their food consumption every day. For example, he likens his method to finding loose change under the sofa cushions — “nickel and diming” your way to dollars.

In the book’s entertaining preface, Klutz Books cofounder John Cassidy gives Dr. Nierenberg’s method his seal of approval: “If you are a normal member of the human race, filled with loc-cal intentions but hi-cal hors d’oeuvres, then maybe you should stick around. What follows is a plan about real weight loss for real people living in a world full of really good hot fudge sundaes.”

The 120-calorie question

For most people, eliminating 120 calories from their daily diet won’t be an onerous undertaking. It could be a matter of leaving behind a couple of bites of those potatoes or of that hamburger when you get up from the table.

In the book, Dr. Nierenberg gives a number of examples that help readers calculate what in their current diets might add up to the 120 calories. For example, if you’re addicted to a snack pack of M&Ms to give you a 3 o’clock boost every afternoon, don’t give up the candy if it’s really making you happy, he advises. Instead, discard half a dozen pieces when you open the bag and you may well be about a quarter of the way closer to your 120-calorie goal.

Another example in the book: “Suppose you have a sandwich each day for lunch. If you simply took off the top piece of bread and flipped the two halves together to make a double-decker, you would still have a great sandwich, but save eighty-plus calories a day.

Dr. Nierenberg presents caloric content of various foods in a measurement he calls “year-pounds.” “A year-pound is the measure of what you would gain eating an item every day for a year, over and above what you normally eat,” he writes.

The book contains an appendix that includes a range of foods, their caloric content, and a year-pound designation. Another appendix offers cooking and food prep suggestions, including substitutes for high-fat ingredients.

The book also includes some advice about exercising, again emphasizing the slow and steady approach that, over time, adds up to significant weight loss and weight control.

A weighty problem

Dr. Nierenberg practiced as an internist for nearly three decades before retiring from practice in 2005. He is an emeritus adjunct clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University.

He says he had been thinking of writing a book about eating well but wisely to control one’s weight for about 10 years. Throughout his career, he treated patients for a multitude of ailments — conditions that also might have been topics for a book.

But he wanted to tackle the issue of weight control, he explains, “because weight impacts so many things.” Being overweight can, and often does, lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and conditions such as joint ailments.

The problem with excess weight and obesity is only getting worse, he notes, even though many people diet. Studies indicate that the vast majority of dieters regain the weight within a short period. Dr. Nierenberg cites the following figures: Two-thirds of dieters regain the weight within a year; at the five-year mark, that figure has risen to 97 percent.

He notes that two-thirds of the people in the U.S. are overweight. “They’re even making coffins bigger — I think there’s a message in that,” he says.

His book is causing some buzz locally; he was interviewed a few weeks ago on Channel 7’s “The View from the Bay,” and he’ll be giving a presentation at the Menlo Park Library on Saturday, June 2, at 11 a.m.

The book is available at Amazon.com and at powerofthebite.com.

Information

Dr. Michael Nierenberg will give a presentation at the Menlo Park Library at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 2. The program is free. Call 330-2512.