The Carb Reset

Chapter 1

The Truth About Losing Weight

“Where did I go wrong?”

I’ve been asked this question about weight loss thousands of times. The answer is simple, but it’s not what most people think. Diets have taught us to look for a single cause that simultaneously makes losing weight easier and gaining weight harder.

However, the issues of weight gain and loss can’t be linked to a single source. To better understand why you gain weight and how you can more effectively lose weight—and keep it off—you need to understand what drives us to eat more (and how to get back in control), why losing weight can feel impossible (when it’s not), and how to stop falling for the hype and misinformation of diet trends (and learn what really works).

Here’s the truth: the more restrictive the approach, the more damaging it is to your health. Need proof? Over the last several decades, more “fringe” diets have emerged than at any time previously—no gluten, no dairy, no grains, no sugar, no carbs, only nighttime eating, no morning eating, and so on. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, obesity affected approximately 13 percent of people in the United States. As I write this today, the obesity rate is more than 40 percent! To state the obvious, these diets don’t seem to have had a positive impact.

When people talk about the “best” diet or the best way to lose weight, an important piece of the discussion is often left out—what has been driving our eating behaviors and why that has been pushing us to eat more and gain weight. Global weight gain—which is estimated to cost the world more than $4.3 trillion in healthcare costs over the next decade—is the by-product of a food industry that made a subtle, but significant, change about forty years ago. Ever since then, we’ve been repeating the same mistakes, falling for the same lies, and being manipulated by health food messaging that has made us less healthy.

You are being sold foods that you think are healthy and good for you. And when those foods don’t make you healthier, you feel like you have no option but to take extreme measures to change your outcomes. And when those extreme measures don’t work, you can become frustrated and start feeling like your goals for weight loss and health are next to impossible. But I promise, it’s not you. It’s them! It’s false promises and misinformation. These foods and extreme diets don’t deliver. None of us ever really had a chance on them.

Reaching your goals through extreme behavior isn’t just a problem in nutrition, of course. You’ll see the same kind of promises made about exercise, too.

When I was brought in to train Halle Berry, Robert Downey, Jr., and Penélope Cruz for the movie Gothika, I had some explaining to do, especially with Halle, who was my main focus for the film.

At the beginning of our first session, Halle told me she was looking forward to working with me, but she had worked with the same trainer in L.A. for twelve years, and once she was done on set, she would be going back to him. We met for our first workout, which the studio booked at ninety minutes together. After twenty-five minutes, I told Halle we were done. She looked at me like I was crazy. “What do you mean we’re done? I need to get in great shape, and this won’t get me in great shape. I work for ninety minutes.” I told her that we don’t need ninety minutes. I explained that resistance exercise is like antibiotics. Sometimes taking extra doesn’t necessarily help. Instead, it’s about a specific frequency, duration, and intensity.

She didn’t know what to make of it, but she didn’t quit. The next session, she booked an hour. Again, we were done in twenty-five minutes. I could tell she was frustrated, but she came back again for a third session. When she showed up for that third workout, she didn’t say much. Then, just as we were about to start, she gave me a big hug and told me her body felt like it never had before. She didn’t know what had happened or what she was feeling, but she liked it. As they say, the rest is history. We worked together, and when she returned to L.A., I helped her prepare for Catwoman.

I remember one of the reviews for Catwoman saying that the movie was terrible, but at least her trainer did his job properly. Halle was in the best shape of her life, and she spent less time in the gym than ever.

No Fat? Actually, No Good.

In 1992, the food industry was about to change forever. That year, the USDA adopted the food pyramid for the first time (it had originated in Sweden in 1974). The 1992 pyramid recommendations were paired with the findings of a report—Dietary Goals for the United States—issued by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs from fifteen years earlier. (No one ever said the government moves quickly.)

Those 1977 suggestions (issued via two reports) were actually pretty good. They recommended consuming less fat from saturated fats; eating more carbs from whole foods such as grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables; and reducing added forms of salt and sugar in our diets. The problem is that the 1992 food pyramid oversimplified the guidelines, and the American public got the wrong message. More important, the recommendations probably didn’t spend enough time emphasizing some of the finer details, and all the categories in the pyramid were left open to interpretation and manipulation.

The biggest misunderstanding about this food pyramid was right there at the top: that we should be eating fat, but sparingly. Eating lower fat is good, but too many people interpreted the new pyramid as recommending removing fat completely from the diet, which was not good. Healthy fat has many roles in your body, including helping with hormone production and brain function; cutting it out entirely is actually unhealthy.

But food manufacturers and marketers took this “no fat” idea and ran with it, focusing on less fat overall instead of less saturated fat. Big food companies became obsessed with low-fat everything. That meant changing the chemical structure of their products to make things taste irresistible (that is, replacing fats with a bunch of ingredients that are arguably less healthy but add to the taste). Our taste buds and cravings would never be the same. We were set on an endless spiral of labeling certain foods as bad and were encouraged to think of these manipulated, processed foods as better than nature’s alternatives. You know what happened next: we all ate more of these “healthy” Frankenfoods than was actually good for us.

The SnackWell’s Effect

Nothing highlighted this misinterpretation of the government-sanctioned dietary advice more than a line of cookies that was launched by Nabisco as a “healthy” choice: SnackWell’s. They were just what the government ordered—very low in fat. But they were also loaded up with sugar to improve their taste. And they sold like mad.

The entire country seemed to fall under a low-fat spell (in truth it was more like mind control). We all fell for it. We didn’t realize that we were replacing the fat with a massive amount of sugar because something had to be added to those processed foods to compensate for there being no fats in them; sugar made them taste good. But we know now that consuming all that sugar, not enough fiber and protein, and limited amounts of functional, healthy fats was a recipe for disaster.

Next thing you know, we were all consuming far too much sugar, making us crave more. A vicious cycle led to sugar being added to almost everything, transforming otherwise healthy foods—like bread and crackers, yogurt, and granola—into sneaky sources of weight gain. We were so worried about any amount of fat causing things like heart disease that we didn’t grasp that one of the biggest drivers of those diseases wasn’t fat as a macronutrient but overall body fat. We were made to believe that consuming fat made you fat, but the truth is to have less body fat, we need to eat fewer calories and consume more nutrient-dense foods. And to do that, we need fiber, but fiber wasn’t a part of any of those high-sugar, fat-free treats.

What happened then was almost too predictable. As a society, we started gaining weight, obesity levels began to skyrocket, and we’ve been headed in the wrong direction ever since.

You would think the connection between rising obesity rates and the increased consumption of processed foods would have been obvious. Unfortunately, the opposite has been the case. We missed the forest for the trees. The Senate committee’s guidelines recommended less saturated fat, more carbs, and less sugar and salt. It was not a sweeping moratorium on fat. The takeaway should have been, “Hey, some fat is good. Eat more avocados, nuts, and fatty fish. Eat a little less red meat, but you don’t need to abandon it completely.” Which is a perfectly reasonable plan that I can fully endorse—more on that later.