The Great Physician's Rx for Weight Loss - Hardcover

Jordan Rubin is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Maker's Diet with over 2 million copies in print. His story and his previous books have been featured on Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Fox and Friends, and Inside Edition, and in USA Today, Time, and Newsweek. Jordan also founded the Biblical Health Institute to empower the church to live the abundant life that glorifies God.

Introduction: A Weighty Problem

Not long ago, Maria Elena Perez was sitting in her Miami living room, visiting with her sixty-six-year-old mother, Juana Acosta.

"Would you like some cafe, Mima?" Maria inquired.

"Yes, that would be very nice," her mother replied. "But let me help you."

"No, no, you sit right there. I'll be right back."

"I insist," her mother interjected as she strained to stand up. Mrs. Acosta, weakened by Parkinson's disease and hobbled by diabetes, labored to bring herself to her feet and put one foot in front of another.

A look of concern came over Maria. "Mima, you don't have to--"

"Don't you worry about me. I'm just getting old and infirm," she said.

Maria Perez came alongside her mother, but as they shuffled tentatively toward the kitchen, Maria noticed that she struggled to walk as well. I weigh too much, she thought. For years, she had carried forty extra pounds on her five-foot, four-inch frame, and now they were exacting a toll on her body. Maria realized that the spring in her step had left her many years ago, which explained why she went through life feeling constantly fatigued.

Then everything came rushing together for Maria: I'm forty-two years old, and I have many of the same aches and pains as my mother. What is my health going to be like when I'm her age? I need to do something. . . .

She had gained weight during her first pregnancy twenty years earlier. After bringing three boys into the world, Maria was resigned to the reality that she could never match the slim look she modeled when she married the love of her life, a handsome physician named Rodolfo Perez.

When she accompanied her mother into the kitchen that day, Maria weighed in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventy pounds. She had some company, too: over the years, Rodolfo had tacked on a few extra pounds as well. Standing at five-foot, eleven inches tall, he tipped the scales at 250 pounds.

Their expansive waistlines had not dimmed their love, however. Maria and Rodolfo enjoyed strolling hand-in-hand through air-conditioned malls, shopping together in supermarkets, traveling to medical conferences, fishing in the Florida Keys, or watching TV together. They even took pleasure working in the same office, where Maria managed Rodolfo's busy medical practice. Her husband was an endocrinologist who saw patients with metabolic problems, as well as obese patients suffering from diabetes and hypertension. The irony of an overweight couple offering medical care to the overweight didn't escape them.

Not that Maria and Rodolfo had never tried to turn things around. This couple, who loved doing everything together, even started periodic diets simultaneously. Over the last decade, they had tried them all--low-fat, low-carb, grapefruit, even the "starvation diet," which limited them to one meal a day: a small piece of chicken, veggies, and a salad. "We did starve ourselves on that diet," Maria said. "I think we lasted a week."

Maria and Rodolfo were classic yo-yo dieters: lose a few pounds by "being good" but gaining them right back whenever they resumed their normal eating habits. In their desperation, they even tried diet shakes containing herbal extracts purporting to be "fat burners," but all those did was burn a hole in their wallets.

"I was married to an endocrinologist, so I should know about these things," Maria confessed. "But I didn't."

Then Maria heard about me and the principles behind the Great Physician's Rx from Brian Russell, her oldest son's best friend. Brian had lost his mom to a devastating cancer, but during his search to help his dying mother, he had come across an earlier book I wrote, The Maker's Diet.

"You really need to start taking these living multivitamins and stuff called green foods," Brian told her. "And stop drinking cow's milk."

Brian told Maria that following the Bible's health plan could help her lose weight. He insisted on accompanying her to a health food store, where he helped fill her cart with natural foods, including goat cheese and other goat's milk dairy products. She also purchased whole food multivitamins and a powdered "green food" supplement. Within a few days, perhaps a week, she and her husband noticed that they had more . . . energy. They felt great, even fantastic.

Then Maria told me what happened next:

My husband and I are early risers, but I'll never forget the time we woke up at 4 a.m., wide-awake and ready for the day. We looked at each other with one of those What do we do now? looks. We discussed our options and decided to visit a nearby gym that opened at 5 a.m. Working out and then coming home and getting the kids off to school was great! Every morning we walked on the treadmill and lifted weights. The pounds started melting away. Within four months, I had lost thirty-five pounds. For Rodolfo, thirty pounds. Best of all, we've kept the weight off all this time.

From what her husband tells me, Maria is quite a cook with a flair for Asian and French dishes. They are able to eat what she enjoys cooking because they are following the principles that I lay out in this book.

What Maria wanted me to emphasize is that she didn't go on a diet. Instead, she and her husband embarked on a lifestyle change, and for the first time, they lost a significant amount of weight that they hope to never find again.

Taking a New Attitude
I like Maria's thinking because the Great Physician's Prescription for Weight Loss is not a diet book. My goal is for you to adopt the principles of the Great Physician's prescription for health and wellness and create a new lifestyle just like the Perezes did. This attitude is more in line with the etymology of the word "diet," which originated from the Greek word diaita, meaning "life, lifestyle, way of living."

The fact that you're reading this book tells me that losing weight is an issue for you or for someone close to you. If so, you probably don't need to be reminded that packing on too many pounds is unhealthy or has become part of the national discussion these days. The evidence surrounds us when we're out in public: you would have to be Stevie Wonder not to notice all the jiggly tummies or padded thighs in the malls these days. As a culture, we are a little taller but a lot heavier than we were a generation ago; today we weigh twenty-five pounds more than our grandparents or parents did in the 1960s, with the biggest weight gains attached to men forty and older.

The latest National Center for Health Statistics data on overweight and obese people does not paint a rosy future for this country. An estimated 65 percent of U.S. adults aged twenty years and older weigh too much, which is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of twenty-five or higher. About half of this sizable population (an estimated 30 percent) are obese, which means they have BMIs of thirty or higher.

As waistlines have expanded to Pillsbury Doughboy range, a sizable weight-loss industry has stepped into the vacuum, thanks to the insatiable appetite of more than 70 million Americans claiming to be on a diet at any one time. The U.S. weight loss and diet control market could top $50 billion in 2006, according to Marketdata, a market research firm that has tracked diet products and programs since 1989. That works out to $136 million a day spent on:

• books promising the "newest" approach to weight loss, plus a handful of perennial bestsellers: Atkins New Diet Revolution, South Beach Diet, and The Zone.
  
• gastric bypass surgery, in which surgeons staple or bind the stomach with an adjustable band. This creates a small pouch big enough to hold only a few ounces of food. Celebrities such as singer Carnie Wilson and Today Show weatherman Al Roker sang the praises of this potentially dangerous surgery after shedding hundreds of pounds.
  
• commercial chains such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and LA Weight Loss, where dieters commit to structured programs. More than 7 million have signed up for these programs.
  
• over-the-counter diet pills such as Cortislim and Trim Spa, which are heavily advertised on television and radio and target the lose-weight-quick crowd.
  
• diet food home delivery, where affluent dieters pay as much as $1,200 a month (per person!) for healthy meals to be delivered daily to their doorstep. A handful of companies such as Zone Chefs, NutriSystem, Seed Live Cuisine, and Jenny Direct (part of Jenny Craig) are cashing in on this booming market.
  
• weight-loss summer camps for heavy teens, which are a predictable outgrowth of the childhood obesity problem in this country. These types of camps didn't exist in my parents' time because the demand wasn't there. Today plump teens seek to turn their lives around at places like Camp La Jolla and Camp Shane.

For those who either can't bear the thought of climbing aboard another diet train (after having experienced so much failure in the past), a host of entrepreneurial companies are marketing products promising to make life comfy and cushy for the overweight. WideBodies Furniture sells oversized sofas, love seats, and chairs. LiftChair.com has introduced recliner chairs that lift and tilt forward so that morbidly obese people weighing as much as 700 pounds can get in and out of them more easily. For those who need a different type of seating, the Big John toilet seat is more receptive to an oversized tush: this toilet seat is a full five inches wider than the standard fourteen-inch-wide version.

Consumer research has helped huge corporations like GM and Ford tailor their products for Heavy America. The Detroit automakers have quietly widened seats in their SUVs and light pickup trucks so that heavyset drivers will have "plenty of leg room." You can scroll through Sizewise.com to determine which cars provide the most interior room, but some obese drivers have to take their cars into auto upholstery shops to ...