What is the main message of How Not to Diet?

The main message of How Not to Diet is that effective and sustainable weight loss is achieved through evidence-based strategies and a whole-food, plant-based diet.

How long does it take to read How Not to Diet?

The reading time for How Not to Diet varies depending on the reader's speed, but it typically takes several hours. However, the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is How Not to Diet a good book? Is it worth reading?

How Not to Diet is worth reading as it provides valuable insights, backed by scientific research, to help you make informed decisions about your diet and achieve a healthy lifestyle.

Who is the author of How Not to Diet?

The author of How Not to Diet is Michael Greger, M.D.

How Not to Diet Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: How Not to Diet
Rating: 4.6 (595 reviews)
Author: Michael Greger

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Discover a sustainable, healthy, and permanent weight-loss diet.

If you’ve ever decided to diet, you know how confusing it can be. There are just so many options out there. Do you go low-carb? Low-fat? Paleo? South Beach? Mediterranean? There are more dieting choices than there are options when ordering take-out.

Worse still, it’s hard to know who to trust. Low-fat diets and high-fat diets can’t both be right, after all. What any serious dieter really needs is a purely evidence-based guide. Well, that’s where these blinks come in.

Read on, and you’ll discover that you don’t need fads, an extreme approach, or unsustainable portion-size control. You just need to cut out the rubbish that’s making us all overweight and get back to a “normal” human diet – the one that we followed for millennia. What our ancestors ate before processed, sugary, fatty foods became normal just 50 years ago.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how fiber acts as a discounter on the calories you consume;
why obesity is a normal response to our abnormal environment; and
how eating beans will stop you eating too much next time you sit down to a meal.

Key idea 1 of 11

Obesity is a normal bodily response to an abnormal situation – the abundance of highly calorific and processed foods.

Let’s start with a sobering fact. One hundred years ago, just one in 30 people were obese. Today? It’s one in three. In fact, in the United States, 71 percent of adults are overweight, and 40 percent are obese. Fat is the new normal.

Why has this happened? Why have so many people piled on the pounds? To understand this, we have to look back in time. Way back.

Here’s the key message: obesity is a normal bodily response to an abnormal situation – the abundance of highly calorific and processed foods.

Humans were born to eat.

For most of our history, we lived in survival mode. Food was scarce, and its availability unpredictable. If you found food, you ate it.

And you’d hunt out calorie-rich foods in particular. After all, if our ancestors were gathering a pound of food per hour, with a total of 250 calories, then they might need to forage for up to ten hours just to get their daily intake. But if they could find a pound of food with a total of 500 calories, they could wrap up their daily forage in half the time. Result: Five extra hours to focus on cave paintings.

Thus, humans developed an evolutionary preference for eating and storing calories when possible. And they developed an inbuilt understanding of – and preference for – calorie-dense foods.

We still have this inbuilt understanding today. What foods do you lust for? Lettuce? Cucumber? Or fatty, rich, sugary, starchy foods, packed with calories? In fact, studies of young children show that their preferences are correlated with calorie-density. They’ll pick a banana over berries, and even potatoes over a sweet peach: it may not taste as good, but it has the calories.

But what was a necessity for millennia is a problem today. Our biology is still built for scarcity, but our environment is a land of plenty. Bananas, with around 400 calories per pound, no longer top the calorie-dense scale. Chocolate, cheese, bacon, and other processed foods can contain thousands of calories per pound. And while we can naturally perceive the difference between bananas and lettuce, at the top end of the scale, we struggle to tell the difference. Hardly surprising, as chocolate chip cookies and grilled cheese weren’t on the menu for our ancestors.

The reality is, weight gain isn’t unusual or unexpected. Overweight bodies are doing what nature has taught them to do when confronted with excess calories. And today, we are confronted with more excess calories than ever.

Key idea 2 of 11

The modern food industry is giving us more calories than we need.

Obesity rates have increased in the last hundred years. But not in a stable, gradual way. Something strange happened in the 1970s. Obesity rates suddenly shot up, not just in the United States, but in wealthy developed nations around the world. Why?

The food and drink industry would like us to think it’s because we are all moving less. PepsiCo’s CEO once claimed that “if all consumers exercised, obesity wouldn’t exist.” But that’s just plain wrong. A detailed review of scientific literature is clear. Researchers have decisively concluded that calorie intake is a far bigger problem for obesity than a lack of exercise.

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Key idea 3 of 11

Eating fiber-rich foods is an important part of a weight-loss diet.

Search Amazon for weight-loss books and you’ll find 30,000 options. Weight-loss is a $50 billion industry. But the truth is, the industry offers more fads and quick fixes than sustainable results.

For example, Weight Watchers likes to highlight people who’ve lost hundreds of pounds through its program. But actual scientific trials show that the average weight loss after two years of Weight Watching is a measly six pounds.

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Key idea 4 of 11

A low glycemic load diet can support weight loss.

How can white bread and pasta, made from the exact same ingredients, have very different impacts on your health?

Well, bread causes a blood-sugar spike twice as large as the spike caused by pasta. Why? Because bread contains tiny bubbles. These give your digestive system easier, quicker access to the starch in bread, converting it more quickly to sugar. Your system is less quick to break down the starch in pasta because pasta is a little more solid.

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Key idea 5 of 11

A truly low-fat diet is effective for weight loss but involves less fat than you think.

Today, it’s fashionable to blame carbohydrates for the obesity crisis and give fat a relatively free ride. The theory goes that decades of government advice to reduce fat intake has, in fact, driven greater consumption of sugary carbohydrates. The result: the obesity crisis.

Well, that’s just not true. Sure, sugar is to blame. But so is fat.

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Key idea 6 of 11

Radically reducing added sugar is essential for weight loss.

The average American is overweight to the tune of 350-500 excess calories a day. The average American just so happens to consume 350-500 calories of excess sugar a day.

So here’s the key message in this blink: Radically reducing added sugar is essential for weight loss.

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Key idea 7 of 11

Losing weight isn’t just about eating smaller portions; it’s about reducing calorie density.

How can you reduce your calorie intake from a plate of pasta without reducing portion size? Simply by reducing the calorie density of a pasta sauce. By choosing tomato and broccoli over cream and cheese, you can reduce calorie intake by a third!

Achieving a healthy weight isn’t just about eating less. It’s about eating less densely.

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Key idea 8 of 11

Legumes are an important ingredient for a healthy life.

Why is it that Hispanic Americans tend to live longer than all other Americans, despite having, on average, lower socioeconomic status and health-insurance coverage?

Hispanics have a 24-percent lower risk of dying prematurely. They experience significantly less cancer and heart disease. What could be driving this longevity?

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Key idea 9 of 11

A plant-based diet is a sustainable and proven approach to weight loss.

There are thousands of different diets out there. Most are fads. Some are real and can lead to weight loss but still aren’t necessarily particularly healthy.

The key message here is: A plant-based diet is a sustainable and proven approach to weight loss.

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Key idea 10 of 11

Boost weight loss by embracing accountability and front-loading.

What’s the best diet? The answer might surprise you.

The most effective diet program in the history of medical literature is a volunteer-run self-help group born out of a small town in Pennsylvania. The Trevose Behavior Modification Program is similar to Weight Watchers, involving weekly weigh-ins and group support. But participants achieve an average weight loss of 39 pounds after two years, compared to just 6 pounds on Weight Watchers.

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Key idea 11 of 11

Drink plenty of water and get plenty of sleep to boost your weight-loss program.

According to national research, drinking lots of water is one of the practices often associated with weight loss. Drinking lots of water is also, however, one of the practices associated with unsuccessful weight-loss attempts.

So does it work, or not?

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