People are getting fatter, it seems, by the minute. Obesity, even amongst children, is becoming a global pandemic. Over the past few years, Berni Dymet has lost 25 kgs – that’s 55 lbs – in weight. And is effortlessly keeping it off.

  Secret Number 1

Are you ready for secret number 1? Here we go. Back in the 1800s we ate about 7 kg (that’s 15 lbs) of sugar a year. Today, that’s topping out at 70 kg (or 150 lbs). The crazy thing is, we kind of think that’s normal, but before the early 20th century, the only way you could get sugar in your diet at all was to fight the bees for some honey (there was no farming or mass production the way there is today), or to be near an apple tree when it was in season (once a year), or chew on a log called sugar cane because 99% of it’s log, and only 1% of it is sugar.

What we consider normal today, in a historical perspective, is grossly abnormal. It’s our high consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates that’s very clearly at the heart (pardon the pun) of so-called western diseases of obesity – cardiovascular disease (that’s heart attacks and strokes), and diabetes. In fact the research shows that within 20 years of a western diet high in refined carbohydrates, making it into a country, almost like clockwork, heart disease, stroke, obesity and Diabetes simultaneously appear, but don’t just take my word for it. If you’re online, go to YouTube and watch the video “Bitter Truth” by Professor of Paediatrics, Robert Lusdig. The high refined carbohydrate intake isn’t just killing us and disabling us. It means that in many countries now, childhood obesity (previously unheard-of) is a pandemic.

So here’s my number 1 secret for losing the 25 kg which I have lost, and am now able to keep off without ever having to think about it: I have as completely as possible removed both sugar and other refined carbohydrates (white flour, peeled potatoes, white rice) from my diet, and I know you might think that I’m crazy, but hear me out. When I came to the conclusion that refined carbohydrates were at the heart of my problem, my wife and I went through our pantry and we removed everything that contained refined carbohydrates: Barbecue sauce, 42% sugar by weight; the breakfast cereals were 35% sugar; fruit juice (see I thought fruit juice was healthy); cakes; chips; chocolates; cookies; white bread; Thai sauces – pretty much anything and everything that had been refined and prepared by someone else, and do you know? There was almost nothing left. It was really demoralising – I mean really, and the first week for me was hard not having any sugar, ‘cos I was addicted to the stuff. I used to kid myself that I wasn’t, but actually I was.

The researchers bred rats without taste-buds, and they put two clear fluids in their cages: One was water with sugar, the other was water with cocaine, and each rat became addicted to the sugar solution.

The change in our diets was radical because just about everything out there has sugar and flour in it. We became a bit like our friend Bill who’s a Celiac. He always has to check everything before he eats, and now, we’re kind of the same. I check the label; I ask the waiter, and I will not allow refined carbohydrates to enter my mouth.

Now I know, I know; you think I’m nuts. Well let me tell you what happened. The weight just fell off me. Now let me tell you: I still eat butter, cheese, bacon – all the high-cholesterol things that traditional medicine tells you is bad for you. I’m going to talk more about that a little bit later, because my doctor is over-the-moon with my blood test results.

I eat as much as I want whenever I want, and I lost 25 kg (that’s 55 lbs). It was the moment I removed all those refined carbohydrates. Look, the withdrawal of sugar lasted about a week, and then I was fine. But when I removed those refined carbs, I lost my appetite; I just wasn’t that hungry anymore, and here’s the science behind that. When you eat refined carbs with a high glaecemic index, your body digests them very quickly. In an instant, your blood sugar spikes, so now your body’s pumping insulin into your bloodstream because insulin is the stuff that processes the blood sugar into energy, and the surplus into fat.

A spike in your blood sugar produces a strong insulin response, and the insulin is so effective in mopping up your blood sugar quickly, you’re left with a really low level of blood sugar, and what does that tell your body? It says: ‘I’m hungry!’ What’s your response? You eat. You go for something that’s going to give you a quick fix, so your blood sugar pumps up rapidly again, and down again and up again and down again ... Your insulin is pumping way too high, and right there, you have the beginnings of insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and Diabetes.

As soon as you remove the spikes, most of your hunger goes away. That’s the reason I can eat whatever I want whenever I want – because I now want less food and I want it less frequently. And that my friend, in a nutshell, is how I lost 25 kg. And have for the first time in my life ever kept it off without trying. All I do is I avoid refined carbohydrates. I don’t have to think what I eat; how much I eat; when I eat ... That’s easy to do. I walk past those sweet muffins at the café which they put right at eye level to look and to smell stunning, and do you know? There’s not a single twinge of desire in my body to have one because I’ve broken the addiction to the sugar and the carbohydrates. I no longer need the fix, so I look at that, and I don’t want it. I’ve been through the withdrawal, and the desire is gone.

Now what I’ve just told you may sound completely counter-intuitive. How can the guy still be having bacon and eggs for breakfast, and losing weight? But the truth is, almost every truth is counter-intuitive. Hey; love your enemy. Take up your cross. Blessed are the meek. Those things are all counter-intuitive, and yet it’s true.

But God’s also given you and me a brain, and I don’t want you just to take my word for it. Here are three sources that I access frequently to wrap my mind around the rights and the wrongs of what to eat:

The first is the book “Sweet Poison” by lawyer and author David Gallesby, who like me was grossly obese, and given his gifted legal mind, he applied his forensic investigation skills to understand what was going on with his epidemic of weight-gain, and how to lose weight.

The second is that YouTube video by Professor Robert Lusdig called “Bitter Truth” (it’s right there on YouTube), and finally there’s a fantastic blog and website by a brilliant young doctor, Peter Attier. The site is called www.eatingacademy.com All 3 are brilliant, and if you’re a person whose lifestyle and waistline and blood sugar tests and blood lipid tests aren’t what they should be, my friend, it’s time for you to wrap your mind around this stuff, and do something about it because next month, next year, could be too late.

My secret number 1 for losing 25 kg is this: Get rid of the sugar and other refined carbohydrates in your diet, and watch the weight fall straight off you.

 

Secret Number 2

When I reduced the sugar and refined carbohydrates in my diet, not only did the weight come tumbling off without me having to starve myself or go hungry, but my blood cholesterol and triglycerides (those things that tell you whether you’re at risk of heart attack or stroke) – they improved so dramatically, it had my doctor asking, "What have you done?"

See, for years, he’d been telling me to reduce my cholesterol by going on a low-fat diet: Limiting dairy products (no more than 2 eggs a week) – the traditional things that doctors tell you to do, and for years I’d been trying to do that, but it just didn’t work. In fact, I’m not the only one. The whole idea of low-fat diets emanated from a flawed study done by a man named Ansell Keyes back in 1939. He promoted the ‘Fat makes you fat’ message, so he did this study of some 20 countries, and he chose just 7 of those to demonstrate that increased fat consumption was making people fat.

Had he reported the findings of all 20 countries, he simply wouldn’t have been able to say that; and in fact, had he chosen 7 different countries out of the 20, he would have proven exactly the opposite, but there’s a certain elegant simplicity about the message that fat makes you fat, so by the 1960s and 70s the idea of a low-fat diet was in full swing, and it’s still being promoted today.

The only problem is that over that same time, obesity rates have climbed dramatically. See, the low-fat thing, whichever way you look at it, isn’t working. And that, my friend, is something that I’ve proven over my life, as over and over again, with the yoyo effects of dieting, losing over 20 kg (45 lbs) 7 times in my lifetime, and each time stacking it back on again, whilst watching my fat intakes very carefully and wondering why I still had a fatty liver (which is a precursory to cirrhosis and cancer), and why I just couldn’t keep the weight off.

So, finally, having lost 25 kg (55 lbs) these last few years the easy way, virtually eliminating processed and refined carbohydrates from my diet, I came upon secret number 2: Replacing those bad calories, the ones that kept causing my blood sugar levels to spike and then to plummet, making me hungry all the time, with good calories. Now whilst Ansell Keyes was promoting the low-fat approach to dieting, there was another man (you may well have heard of him) called Doctor Robert Atkins – famous for the Atkins Diet, promoting low-carbohydrate diets, which didn’t limit the fat intake.

Now I’ve read the Keyes studies and I’ve read the Atkins approach, and whilst I always thought that those Atkins people were nutters, I decided to give it a go. So I replaced the chips and cakes and bread rolls and mash potatoes and all that stuff with three things, and here is secret number 2: Lots of vegetables. Every colour; every variety; cooked; raw; salads; stews ... You name it and I am into vegetables. Secondly with protein: Lots of meat and fish of all kinds. Well, neither of those things are particularly controversial, are they? But the third one is: Fat. And not the fats that they tell you are healthy – the polyunsaturated margarines (the research is telling us that those manufactured oils, created in a laboratory and in a factory are actually bad for us), but saturated fats – animal and monounsaturated fats, like olive oil.

See, I no longer restrict my fat intake. In fact, hang in there ‘cos I haven’t gone crazy. My high-sugar content cereal breakfast of fruit juice and tinned fruit and muesli; total sugar content, around 45% by weight, has now been replaced by eggs fried in butter, bacon, spinach, and fried tomatoes. Why did I do that? As an experiment. Here was an alternate theory: ‘Cos the low-fat one I’d believed in for most of my life, the low-fat message that made so much sense, had simply failed to deliver and hadn’t worked.

And as much as that was totally counter-intuitive, that having so-called bad fats in my diet would help me lose weight, I had nothing to lose; I gave it a spin, and I decided to do it for 3 months. I would not restrict my fat intake, but would make sure that very few refined carbohydrates ever passed my lips. Remember that green, red, yellow, purple, orange vegetables are all actually packed full of carbohydrates, so I still have plenty of carbs in my diet. The difference is that the carbs I’m now eating in vegetables are packaged inside fibre, which makes them much slower to digest, avoiding any spikes in my blood sugar, and the tummy-rumbling plummet in blood sugar that follows.

So, what happened? What were the results? Well, firstly, I am now seriously addicted to vegetables, and I’ve rediscovered a whole bunch of fantastic vegetables that I’d forgotten.

Secondly, the fat that I’m eating has not increased my cholesterol or triglyceride readings. To the contrary: Bad cholesterol and triglyceride readings are down, and good cholesterol, the HDL type, is high. The reason is simple. See, most of your cholesterol in your body (85%) is actually produced by your liver and your small intestine, and your diet has very little influence over your blood cholesterol levels.

And finally, I simply wasn’t as hungry anymore. Not as often, not as much, and to this day I can basically eat what I want (other than refined carbohydrates) and not put on any weight. The key is, I want a lot less because I’m not that hungry anymore.

Now if you’d told me at the beginning of my 3-month experiment that this would be the outcome, I’d have said to you: ‘You are nuts!’ Do I still get hungry sometimes between meals? Yeah, occasionally, so I go for a handful of incredibly healthy nuts, a piece of cheese, some left-over protein, chicken, or whatever happens to be in the refrigerator. 25 kg (which is what I’ve lost over the last few years) is as heavy as a heavy suitcase, and I was carrying that round in my body. I mean, no wonder my joints were hurting. No wonder I didn’t want to exercise. No wonder I was always tired. I spent most of my adult life carrying that incredibly heavy suitcase strapped to my body in the form of fat. That’s a scary thought.

When you think about this stuff, as radical as this approach might seem, in a historical context, it’s not radical at all. It’s simply winding the clock back a century or so to eat exactly the sort of foods that my grandparents were eating in the late 1800s and early 1900s when (listen carefully) heart disease, stroke and diabetes were as rare as hens’ teeth. Before Ansell Keyes sold us this lie that that fat makes you fat. Hey, I’m not your doctor, and I’m not here to give you medical advice, but because so many people have asked me, I’m just telling you what I did, and how it worked.

 

Secret Number 3

See, I have a confession to make. I have never, ever, ever enjoyed running. Every now and then you hear of some big fitness event being organised, and they have the hide to call it a fun run. What, are they mad? Running has never been fun for me – ever, ever, ever. In fact, in my younger years, I trained to be an officer in the Australian army – 4 years at the royal military college of Duntroon, which is the UK’s equivalent of Sandhurst and America’s West Point. And do you know? I was almost kicked out in my final year for failing the cross-country run by 22 seconds – twice! So when I talk about exercise, I want you to understand where I’m coming from, and what I’m going to say is perhaps not what you think I’m going to say.

The prevailing wisdom is that in order to lose weight and get into shape, you need to do exercise. And by spending all those calories on exercising, and restricting the calories you consume, you create a calorie deficit that causes you to draw on your fat reserves and lose weight. That’s the theory. In fact, the whole exercise and fitness industry is worth billions of dollars every year. It’s booming, and have you noticed? People are getting fatter and fatter.

If you’ve been able to join me this week, you’ll have heard me share with you that I have lost more than 20 kg (that’s 45 lbs) 7 times in my life, and each time except this last time, I’ve put all the weight back on again. Anyone who’s ever tried to lose that kind of weight will tell you that 20 kg is a Herculean effort; it’s huge. Think about it. Each kilo of human body fat contains 7700 calories of energy, so to lose just 1 kilo, you need to create a deficiency between the energy you spend and the energy you consume of 7700 calories. That’s hard work.

And so when I lost all that weight all those times before, I would set about creating as much of a deficit between my energy output and energy consumption as I could possibly force my body to do, in order to burn the fat. Hey; at one stage, I was walking 20 km a day (that’s 12-and-a-half miles a day) and consuming only around 1100 calories. In other words, I was starving myself. It took a lot of time; it required a lot of work; a lot of dedication; a lot of willpower over many, many months to lose the weight that way; and as soon as I stopped doing it, I’d put it straight back on again.

Bottom line: With my own life and blood and sweat and tears I have proven that exercising doesn’t help you lose weight in a way that will cause you to keep it off, and the reason is that if you’re constantly hungry, well that’s something you can’t sustain. You can’t fight your appetite every day for the rest of your life.

When you spend calories exercising, your body automatically wants to replace them by eating, and if you bother to study the research (which now I finally have), that’s exactly what the research tells you. Study after study proves exactly that fact.

So here’s my secret number 3: Exercise is not a mainstay in helping you lose weight because it increases your appetite. Now if you’re living on a diet high in processed and refined carbohydrates, you’re actually breaking your finely tuned appetite control mechanism. By applying secret number 1, drastically reducing those refined carbs in your diet, to allow your brilliantly sophisticated appetite control feedback loop to start working properly again, and now all of a sudden you’re going to eat less; not because you’re forcing yourself to, but naturally because you want to – because your appetite system is working the way that God meant it to work. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Now all of a sudden, exercise takes on an entirely different role in your healthy lifestyle. You’re no longer beating your head up against a brick wall, trying to exercise to lose all this weight, which the studies tell us simply doesn’t work. Now, you’re exercising to be healthy.

Do you know what the biggest single indicator of an impending heart attack is statistically? Is it high cholesterol? No. Is it high triglycerides? No. Is it high blood pressure? No. It’s not even being overweight. The single greatest indicator of an impending heart attack statistically is a lack of exercise. But when you’re carrying all that weight, you don’t feel like exercising. Believe me, I know.

I used to sit there on the couch in the evening, having consumed a high-carb snack like chips or something, and I’d feel so tired and lethargic. I couldn’t bring myself to get up, put my runners on, and walk out the front door. But once I’d lost the weight, by doing what I’ve been talking about (modifying my diet, taking the refined carbs out and replacing them with really good stuff – the stuff our grandparents were eating when heart disease and Diabetes were rare as hens’ teeth), I discovered I had so much energy that I needed to exercise, so these days I walk rather briskly about 7 km (or just under 4-and-a-half miles) most days. It takes me about an hour, and if for some reason a couple of days go by without me being able to get out there and go for a walk, I start getting really twitchy and just ... I just have to get out there and exercise because I have all this energy.

Sometimes I run for part of it, but only because I have excess energy to burn and I feel like it. I never take a watch; I never time myself; I don’t make it a competition against myself or anybody else. I just get out there for a brisk walk and I enjoy the fresh air, and I do it because I feel like it – not because I have to. I’m not training for a marathon; I’m just getting my body to be mobile.

Now walking may not be your thing. You might enjoy bike-riding or swimming or playing basketball or going to the gym. We’re all different, but once the weight has started to come off you, once you’ve removed those refined carbs, replaced them with good calories and the weight is just falling off your body, I guarantee you are going to want to go and exercise. Your body is amazing. The desire to exercise when the weight comes off is as certain as night following day. It’s natural.

Let me ask you something: Is this good news or what? I mean, you and I have been given this incredibly amazing body by God. He hand-crafted you and He hand-crafted me in our mothers’ womb, and laid down every strand of DNA that makes us who we are. The moment this western diet gets dumped on us, the fizzy drinks full of sugar; the white bread; the sugar-laden cereal; all the stuff made with white flour; the fruit juices that have the fibre removed and leave the poisonous sugar in … The moment that gets dumped on us, either from birth (because we’re born in a western country) or as the western diet gets introduced to the country where we live, we end up breaking the finely tuned appetite control system that God designed and gave to each one of us.

That’s what we do: We break it; we fool it; we keep having our blood sugar spiked, and then it plummets and we’re hungry, and up and down and up and down, and that’s where insulin resistance begins. That’s where premature ageing begins. That’s where Diabetes and metabolic syndrome and heart disease begins. You take all of that stuff away, you lose weight; you feel so much better, and you want to go and exercise. And you know what exercise does? Exercise attacks the triglycerides in your bloodstream. Exercise puts all sorts of good hormones back in your bloodstream.

May God bless you as you take hold of your life (your eating habits) and get your body, the only one that you’ll ever be given here on this earth, back into a healthy condition – the sort of condition that God meant for it to be in.