Calories or Chemistry?

Most patients who come to our office to lose weight have tried other programs; they have bought diet books in bookstores, frozen meals, shakes, powders, bars of all sorts, pills, and tried programs taught to them by television stars. They have tried and failed, and they often feel frustrated and sometimes defeated. So what is it exactly that makes our program different? Why do our patients not only lose weight but manage to keep it off while so many other programs fail?

The answer is actually simple. The Balance Weight Loss program is based on chemistry, not calories. Most diets available to overweight people are calorie based programs. The idea is that if your body burns about eighteen hundred calories per day, and you only eat five hundred calories per day, the difference is what you lose in weight. So in this situation, burning 500 calories a day would allow you to lose about 3500 calories in a week, which theoretically is about one pound per week. But here is the problem. If you go out and eat a piece of chocolate cake, you will get on the scale the next morning, and you will quickly discover that you have gained one, two, or even three pounds. But there are not 3500 calories in a piece of cake. But supposedly, you have to eat 3500 calories to gain one pound. So the numbers don’t add up. Something is missing in this calorie formula.

In the Balance program you will never count calories. You will learn to think about food in terms of chemistry, and how much of each food type you need to eat. And you will lose weight because you are eating foods that bring your body into chemical and hormonal balance.

People ask me, exactly how this works; is this a high protein based diet? No, it is not. You actually eat a lot of carbohydrates on the Balance diet, but it is the right amount for your body and it is the right kind of carbs. The way it works is that foods trigger hormones; By eating an imbalanced diet, you trigger high amounts of hormones, creating, for example, very high insulin levels, or triggering high amounts of lipogenesis, the production of fat. By eating the right balance of foods, the correct combination of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates creates a balanced amount of insulin and glucagon. When you are in hormonal balance, your fat cells are able to release fat, and you slim down. Furthermore, because you are in hormonal balance, you also have much more energy, feel much better, sleep better, have much less abdominal cramping and constipation, and much less depression, and on and on. All of these symptoms are hormonally controlled.

Unfortunately it is even much more complicated than this, as many many other hormones are involved.

So if you are a person that thinks that losing weight is all about counting calories, let me make this suggestion to you. Eating 400 calories of salad and grilled chicken, is not the same thing as eating 400 calories of candy bars. It does not trigger the same hormones, does not activate the same enzymes, and is not metabolized the same way. Eat a 400 calorie candy bar, within one hour you will feel tired, lethargic, depressed, bloated and probably hungry, reaching for a bag of chips and coke loaded with caffeine. Eat the salad, you will feel energized, focused, and satisfied to say the least. Same number of calories in either meal, completely different hormonal triggers in your body.  I don’t care what any program tells you, all calories are not created equal.

So if you are ready to make the commitment to not only slim down, but to a life style change, and would really like to permanently lose those unwanted pounds, we would be happy to help you at the Balance Medical Weight Management program. We will design an individualized program specific to your body, and we will not only help you achieve your goal weight, we will lower your cholesterol levels, often cure diseases like diabetes, IBS, and PCOS, and get you into hormonal balance. On our program you will never again count calories, nor will you live on shakes, bars, powders, frozen meals, any kind of processed foods, or pills. You will not only slim down to your goal weight, but most importantly you will be empowered with the knowledge of how to stay there.