This is the second part in my series of posts on the Dukan diet. Doing this diet in 2011 is one of the best thing I ever did in my life: it wiped me 14 kilograms of excess fat in 3 months, without any physical exercise. In my first post, I described the diet and explained why I think it is solidly anchored in practical reality. Here I want to explain why I think the Dukan diet works so well, and what it takes to implement it in practice. So let’s begin!
Why the Dukan diet works so well
You do not feel hungry
The diet allows you to eat as much as you want, and there is no feeling of deprivation. You do not have to fight against a constant hunger, and therefore your willpower is not attacked.
And so, you can easily sustain this diet for a long time!
The immediate results keep you very motivated
You will start noticing the changes within the first few days. At the end of the first week of “Attack” phase, you can expect one or two kilograms gone. I remember looking at myself in the mirror four days into the diet, and wondering “Could it already be visible? It seems I’m a little thinner?”. You bet I was. Within the first four weeks, I had dropped five kilograms. Better than I ever achieved even at the peak of my “cardio” years!
In the “Cruise” phase, you keep losing weight at a fast rate. It is exciting and motivating! You just want more!
It recognizes excess carbohydrates as the main cause for obesity
If you are overweight, chances are that it’s because you’re consuming much more carbs than you should, and probably the wrong kind of carbs, too!
Now, carbohydrates raise the levels of blood sugar, which in turn forces the pancreas to create insulin. Your blood is then constantly flooded with it! But insulin is the hormone that tells the cells to store nutrients as fat reserves! Because of this, high insulin levels is usually associated with fat storage and obesity. The human body was never designed to function under such a high level of insulin!
That’s what makes excessive carbohydrates consumption the leading cause of the obesity pandemics observed in the last 50 years.
By drastically cutting the amount of carbs in your food, you are also cutting on your level of blood sugar, and therefore of insulin. This process of storing reserve fats is cut short.
It is naturally a “lower calorie” diet
The Dukan diet drastically cuts on oil and fats, which are the most calorie dense nutrients: 9 calories per gram of fat consumed, as opposed to 4 for each gram of carbs and proteins.
Because of that, 100 grams of food with high fat content, will bear more calories than 100 grams of food with low fat content. Another way to say this is, for the same total calories consumed, you can eat a bigger quantity of food, and feel more satiated.
By reducing the amount of fat you consume, this diet is naturally going for lower calories – without the need to count calories!
Proteins are more satiating
It takes hours for your stomach to break down the proteins into assimilable nutrients. Your stomach is kept busy breaking down that steak for a longer time, preventing you from feeling hungry. Contrast this with “fast” carbohydrates, which are absorbed in the bloodstream within 30 minutes of ingestion. A busy stomach means you don’t feel hungry!
So not only proteins are less calorie dense, they also keep you satiated for a longer time. That means even less calories consumed at the end of the day!
It takes more energy to digest proteins
Our body expends energy to digest food. Yes! It’s the caloric effect of food. And proteins are the nutrients taking the most energy to break down. By forcing your organism to digest more proteins, you are in fact increasing your daily caloric expenditure!
Your body can generate glucose and fats from your fat reserves
By cutting on the carbs and fats consumed, you are forcing your body to generate these nutrients from the fat reserves. The body is a fine chemical plant that can turn on new chemical processes to attend its own needs in times of shortage. The only thing the body cannot generate is the nitrogen it needs to maintain muscle mass – which it is getting precisely from proteins!
To summarize, you are losing weight for several reasons:
- You feel satiated for a longer time, with less calories ingested
- Your body expends more calories digesting proteins
- You force your body to generate the missing carbs and fats from its reserves
- You drastically cut the amount of insulin flooding your blood – the hormone precisely triggering fat storage.
But there is one last point, and not the least of all!
The diet cares not only for the weight loss, but also for what’s after
The Dukan diet doesn’t leave you in the middle of the desert after you dropped all that weight! Because that’s when the second challenge comes: avoiding the weight bounce and returning into the bad old habits.
The third phase of the diet takes care about restoring the “permanent” diet progressively, so as to avoid the weight bounce, and ultimately aims at replacing your former dietary habits for better ones. This “Consolidation” phase is longer than the weight loss phase itself!
The idea is to lose weight, once and for all.
The Dukan diet in practice
Once you start the Dukan diet, you will notice how non compliant is your environment.
The supermarkets are packed with high carbs processed food. Cookies, sweets, cereals, bread, rice, pasta, cakes, etc… they all take up a majority of the floor space! No wonder why obesity is everywhere.
The restaurants, even the quality ones, all serve rich meals packed with carbohydrates and nice sauces. That nice strip-loin steak? It comes with potatoes and floury sauce. The Italian restaurant? It’s all pasta, risotto, and pizzas, and they serve bread with olive and balsamic oils as starters. The Japanese restaurant? All rice, and rice noodles. The nice brunch? It’s another all-you-can-eat thing, you pay 80$ anyway, and for that price you surely can’t be eating just two eggs! In fact, in our day and age of endemic obesity, all-you-can-eat menus should be banned for the dietary disaster they are!
Takeaway food? It’s going to be sandwiches with bread and lots of sauces, or fatty chicken with rice and sauce.
Your loving wife? Her philosophy is “I love you, therefore I feed you”. Don’t expect her to cook without oil. Plus, she’s also cooking for the children. She will be cooking loads and loads of carb-based dishes.
Going out with your buddies? What will you do when they pay you a pint of beer? Are you going to refuse? And if you go to their home, what will you do when their wife proposes a piece of home-made chocolate cake? And you can’t even blame them!
Any way you put it, you will be constantly prompted and tempted and attacked OUT of the diet. And if you are serious about the diet, you should aim to do NO EXCEPTION. Making an exception once, is an open door to make it a second time. Your resolve will be quickly eroded, and soon you can kiss goodbye to your weight loss.
In short, it looks like everything around you is conspiring to make you fat, and to keep you there!
The foreseeable conclusion is as follows.
Take firmly your nutrition in your own hands.
In order to benefit from the diet, you will have to take a very careful, personal control of what you eat, for each meal of the day. Including the lunch at the office!
It is very doable, but it requires a careful organization.
You will need to shop your own choice of Dukan-compliant ingredients at the grocery store. Then you will need to prepare your food yourself. For the lunch at the office, you can easily grill a piece of meat in the morning (it takes less than 15 minutes), or otherwise when you cook your evening meal, just double the quantity and save some for tomorrow’s lunch.
Make also sure you have some eligible snacks with you at work – especially the first few days, when you will be afraid of being starved. You won’t be actually starved, but the first few day the apprehension will be there. So bring some snacks with you at work. After all there is no limitation in how much you eat.
In any case, get prepared to cook for yourself, every day! Overall, it is quite a good habit to have anyway. I kept this habit myself, ever after I did the diet.
Temporarily cut on social life
Like I noted above, restaurants serve very caloric food, loaded with oils and carbohydrates, and you can’t expect them to be compliant with the Dukan diet. And if you go out with friends, you will constantly be prompted to consume some of the “bad stuff”. Go refuse a glass of beer when all your friends are drinking around.
The best is to avoid social life outside home altogether for the whole duration of the “Cruise phase”. Later on, you can go out as one of the allowed “celebration meals”, that is, once a week, and later twice a week.
That is probably the hard part of the diet (or any diet)! But that is the price to pay if you want to shed this excess weight for good. Just remember that it’s just for a few months, with benefits for the rest of your life.
The usual objections and excuses I’ve heard
Ever since I successfully did this diet, I have been recommending it around me. Here are the usual objections I heard.
- I can’t be eating meat all the time! That’s gross!
- But I can’t live without rice / beer / bread / etc…
- I can’t cut on my social life
- Etc…
Sorry, but this is all in your head. Of course you can do all this stuff, it is just a matter a will. Recognize the reality: You are very comfortable with your current (bad) habits, and you are just making excuses not to change them. You have decided that you can’t do those things!
Forget these beliefs. Stop saying you can’t and just try. We’re only talking about a few months here! This is only the temporary price to pay to get rid of that overweight for good.
At the end of the day, it is a matter of choice. There is no magic wand, and if you’re serious about losing weight, you will have to sacrifice something.
“Meat is not healthy”
This is another of these excuses that deserves its own paragraph:
“Eating meat is not healthy. What about your cholesterol?”
I don’t buy this even one minute.
Mankind is at least 1 million years old, and agriculture is 10,000 years old. For 99% of mankind’s existence, the lion share of human diet consisted in, surprise surprise, meat and fish. Fruits and salads didn’t just grow conveniently when they wanted to, and were just occasional complements. Meat is what mankind has evolved on since the dawn of times. Meat is our natural diet! Our body is designed to handle meat. And the same goes for those “saturated fats” vilified everywhere.
“I will just do exercise instead”
Really? At the time of my peak weight, I had always been doing exercise for 10 years, one way or another, and it never helped. Read this:
Exercise is for body conditioning, diet is for weight loss!
You don’t believe me? Alright! Go and sweat yourself five times a week on the treadmills, for three months, and come back. In the same amount of time, you could have lost 14 kilograms. See where you’re at, and decide.
Conclusion
The Dukan diet is a very effective diet and the best time to start is NOW!
The Dukan diet original book is available on Amazon. Disclaimer: I do NOT perceive any sales fee on this book – this is just my uninterested review.
This diet is extremely efficient if you have a big amount of weight to lose (such as 10 kg or more). It is relatively easy to stick to (as good as a diet could be!) for a few months, because it carefully avoids deprivation and hunger.
Unless of course you are a vegetarian! In this case, I would recommend you to review your daily nutrition, and to remove anything that has a high glycemic index (rice, rice…). Replace all these foods with others, with low or medium GI.
And you should start immediately. For doing any meaningful change in your life, the best moment is always now. It is counterproductive to wait for a “more favorable timing”. As we know, the stars will never align perfectly. In addition, the most important success factor is your resolve! And if you wait, your resolve will fade away. So go for it now while your resolve is high!
Just stop thinking, dear Reader, go to the grocery store, buy all the Dukan compliant food you can, and start the diet right away.
Yours,
Medical disclaimer. I am a Doctor, yes, but as in Ph. D., and not a medical Doctor. This post or other posts on this site do not constitute a medical advice – it is merely my sole opinion. For medical advice consult your M. D.!
