THE BEVERLY HILLS DIET – PHASE ONE FIRST WEEK: THE INSIDE STORYDuring the first week, you will only be having fruit. Don’t forget to wait two hours before changing from one fruit to another. Before you decide to make that change, be sure you don’t want any more of the first fruit. Once you have finished it, you can’t go back to it.If your day ends with a limited-quantity item, remember that it’s the last thing you can eat. Save it until late in the evening so you don’t have to go hungry. You might even want to take it to bed with you. Remember, hungry is one thing you’ll never be again.When you buy your pineapple, make sure it is ripe. If it’s not it will make your mouth sore. (See Chapter VII on shopping.)If after looking over the first week’s diet, you think you might get tired of pineapple and papaya, don’t. Remember, it’s their little enzymes that are burning up the fat and digesting all that extra protein that’s clogging your system.Don’t think I’d fill your system with pineapple and papaya for no good reason. Pineapples, and to a lesser degree, strawberries, have a high concentration of the enzyme bromaline which interacts with and actuates the hydrochloric acid in your stomach to help burn up the fat.*67\251\8*

Let’s revisit the high-carb menu as it relates to insulin/glucagon balance. Those healthy-looking menus from the diets espoused by Barnard, McDougall, and the Diamonds stoke your furnace with grains, fruits, and vegetables but are deficient in two macronutrients—protein and fat (essential fatty acids)—that help slow down the release of sugars into the bloodstream.

When protein and fat accompany carbohydrates into the stomach, digestion is slowed, allowing the release of sugars into the bloodstream in a time-release manner. In other words, the sugars are not just dumped into the bloodstream, which would generate a gush of insulin; they are slowly released into the bloodstream, providing a steadier stream of glucose to the brain and peripheral tissues. Because the energy is used immediately, insulin is not needed to store the excess.

When a meal doesn’t contain an adequate amount of protein and fat to balance the carbohydrates, sugars are both digested quickly and released quickly into the bloodstream. Insulin pours from the pancreas in a desperate attempt to stabilize the critical level of blood sugar, and many of those carbohydrate calories will be stored as fat.

Why, then, doesn’t everyone who eats a high carbohydrate diet get fat? Dr. Barry Sears, author of Enter the Zone, wrote about the role genetics plays in insulin/glucagon balance.

People’s genetic insulin responses to carbohydrates are diverse. In about 25 percent of a normal population, insulin response to carbohydrates is very blunted. When these lucky people eat excess carbohydrates, their insulin levels don’t rapidly surge upward. They can consume large amounts of carbohydrates and not get hungry or fat. (These people often do very well on high-carbohydrate diets, so the dietary establishment elevates them to iconlike status to demonstrate the moral superiority of such a diet. Heck, these people just had a lucky draw in the genetic lottery.)

On the other hand, 25 percent of an otherwise normal population has an unlucky genetic draw that dictates an extremely elevated insulin response to carbohydrates. These people simply have to look at a carbohydrate and they begin gaining fat.

Between these two extremes lies the other 50 percent of the American population. These people respond normally to carbohydrates, which means that if they eat too much carbohydrate they’ll have an elevated insulin response—not as elevated as the unluckiest 25 percent, but still elevated enough to do all the damage described above. These people will always fail on a high-carbohydrate diet. They’re accused of being weak-willed gluttons who can’t control themselves, when in fact they were just born with unfortunate genes.

Yes, some people will do well on high carbohydrate diets such as those found in the Diamonds’ book, Fit for Life, or the McDougall Plan. These people can eat carbohydrates willy-nilly and never suffer the unpleasant consequences of excess carbs like the rest of us. And sometimes, they do radiate a certain moral superiority about it.

The rest of us, for reasons as diverse as our lifestyles or the way our bodies are made, aren’t so lucky. When we eat a diet high in carbohydrates, our bodies are thrown into hormonal imbalance and we’re sensitive to even the good carbohydrates found in fruits, vegetables, and grains.

For example, Samantha commented that she notices an immediate insulin reaction when she eats rice cakes. Judy said, "I never realized how sweet vegetables are!" Please notice that rice cakes and vegetables are not "bad foods." They are terrific foods, and your body will love them if you eat them in balance with other foods to control the release of insulin.

If it’s difficult to believe that a grain-and-vegetable-based diet will put on excess fat pounds, visit your local beef farmer and ask him how he prepares his beef for butchering. He fattens it up for market by "graining" it. He feeds the cattle extra grain to marbleize the meat—to add fat to the muscle tissue.

In that sense, we aren’t any different from beef cattle. If we want to fatten ourselves up, we can "grain" ourselves and pack on the pounds, which is exactly what many of us have been doing for years in the form of whole-grain breads, spaghetti, and cereals.

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How do the opinions and attitudes of others affect this client’s goals? Obese clients often declare that they wish to lose fat because someone else wants them to, usually a partner but sometimes also another helper such as a physician. A careful examination of the relationship between the client and the other person will tell you something about the ethics of working with the client. For example, the extent to which the client wishes to lose fat for personal reasons, or feels forced into it, is likely to be relevant.

How do the opinions of others affect your goals? Everyone’s job meets a variety of personal needs, including social ones. For example, a client may have been referred to you by someone you respect or value as a source of referrals and do not want to disappoint. You may feel the need to get a good result in order to secure your relationship with the referrer. This need to impress the referrer may make it difficult for you to turn the client down even if there are good reasons to do so. Conversely, you may feel the need to prove your effectiveness as a fat loss agent and may therefore avoid offering help to clients who appear unlikely to achieve impressive fat losses even though they could benefit greatly from your help in other ways.

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