Fast and Sustained Weight Loss: Why Lose the Weight Fast?

By Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Dr. Fuhrman/ETL Background and Weight Loss Success
When I began my medical practice more than 14 years ago as a specialist in nutrition, I focused my attention on individuals who were looking for nutritional intervention as a means of reversing their medical conditions. These patients wanted their diets – the nutrients in their food – to help them regain their health. They wanted to avoid taking medications or to avoid invasive surgery.

The inevitable outcome was that, when my patients were committed to the goal of superior health by changing their diets and achieving nutritional excellence, they were able to reduce and eventually stop their dependency on medications for high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and a host of other conditions. Spectacular disease reversals were the norm, not the exception. Also, weight loss success was the norm, not the exception.

I found that, when people ate a diet comprised of the most powerful anti-cancer, high nutrient foods available, their cholesterol dropped more powerfully than possible from the typical cholesterol lowering medications. Their diabetes disappeared. I told patients, “Let's not just treat your diabetes and control it. Let's get rid of it and make you non-diabetic.”

The focus of the effort was never on caloric restriction per se; rather, it was on having my patients eat more high nutrient food to improve the overall nutrient content of their diets. As a result, they ate less of the low nutrient foods, which are often high in calories and damaging to the body in many ways.

Overweight patients were able to return to their ideal weight with ease on this safe “diet.” No calorie counting, no complicated formulas, pills or unfulfilled promises. Just by taking the healthiest foods and by making them taste great, they lost the weight. They eat as much as they desire of these high nutrient foods. The weight loss success on the Eat To Live program was overwhelming.

My patients dropped the weight that they could not lose before, in spite of having tried every diet out there. What's more, they achieved these results relatively quickly. Weight loss wasn't always their primary objective, but they were thrilled with the fast weight loss.

They addressed their medical conditions, reversed the chronic diseases they initially came to see me about, gained protection against heart disease and cancer, and began a safe diet to last a lifetime. They don't consider Eat To Live a weight loss diet, though. It is an approach that involves selecting healthy, high nutrient foods.

What about Fast Weight Loss?
The traditional viewpoint is often stated that if you lose weight too rapidly it won't stick, and you will gain the weight all back. I have never advocated that people be in a race to lose their excess weight. However, I see no reason to try to eat in a more unhealthful way or to force yourself to eat when you are not hungry under some notion that losing weight slower would be better. The reality is that, if your body needs to shed unhealthy weight and if you are eating a nutritious, healthy diet, your body will drop on its own its unhealthy weight relatively quickly, and it does this without you starving yourself or gorging unnaturally.

Permanent Weight Loss
In my experience with patients, I have seen the permanence of their weight loss success and results. Knowledge motivated their change, not will power. The spectacular weight loss results have been lasting, because once a person becomes a nutritional expert and experiences the weight loss success, that person will Eat To Live forever.

The secret to making weight loss permanent is to gain the proper education first. You must do the work; read the book, or gain the knowledge online from my membership services, but you must study and understand the science. If the preponderance of the evidence and the logic does not make perfect sense to you, then don't do it.

Many people already think they are eating all of the proper nutrients necessary for a healthy diet. They are not. They might follow a highly marketed notion of a weight loss plan or a balanced diet, and under that formula, many think the only way to lose weight is to drastically cut the portion sizes and eat less food. The consequence of that approach is that as you eat less and consume fewer nutrients. Logically, any means of crash dieting is unhealthy in the long run and cannot be sustained for many reasons.

The book Eat To Live encompasses and documents the scientific support, the patient experiences, and creative ways to make nutritious and healthy eating both practical and fun. Eat To Live is marketed as a weight loss book, because it works to enable those with a metabolic hindrance to weight loss to lose weight easily on a safe, healthy, high nutrient diet.

Eat To Live is not just a diet book. It teaches and motivates everyone about universal health issues, and provides the most powerful nutritional tools and education that we have to prevent conditions like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

Disease and a premature death are not inevitable. They are, however, the inevitable consequence of eating a disease-causing diet that Americans and other modern societies eat. On the other hand, we have an unprecedented opportunity in human history to use science to live longer and achieve health unobtainable by prior generations.

We are Eating to Live to various degrees, and I hope you will use the resources available to achieve superior health for yourself and your loved ones.

I wish you a long life and enduring health. It can be yours.