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The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss

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I've been dieting all my life and I've noticed that when I diet HARD I lose less. No matter where I looked for an answer to this problem, no diet book seemed to address the phenomenon. But this book does! Finally, The Slow Down Diet combines the body and mind link to guide people into losing weight. Showing scientific experiments and individual profiles, the author Marc David, a nutritionist with a master's degree in the psychology of eating, shows how the more pressure you put on yourself to restrict food or force yourself to cut out one full type of food and the more you push yourself into doing un-enjoyable exercises, the more your body sees it as an attack and responds by readying itself for hardships. It lowers metabolism and you don't lose weight!

When I read how this book says that it's not just what you eat, but how you eat that keeps weight from coming off, it rang a bell to me. Marc David explains that rushing and not thinking about the food you consume impairs digestion so you might be eating a lot of calories but your body isn't getting what it needs for optimal health and you hunger for more. By paying attention to the food you put into your mouth, by slowing down to take the time to actually use all your senses to give respect to the food, it permits the body to achieve it's maximum metabolism to get all the nutrients from your meals. This book explains why, if you slow down and take the time to enjoy the process, then your body can calm down enough to work properly and let the excess weight your body doesn't need come off. It also explains how exercise must not be perceived as a punishment but as a joyful physical experience so as to help the body permit the excess pounds to be burned off. This is the first book that finally explained why dieting hard doesn't work and guides you to a way to slow down in order to permit your body to lose weight! It makes wonderful sense.

Nutritionist and weight loss expert Marc David asserts in THE SLOW DOWN DIET that some of our most dearly held beliefs about weight loss and dieting are woefully misguided. According to David, some of the biggest myths about eating are well-intentioned, yet contribute to ever-increasing girth. Starting with one of the most widely believed myths, "the best way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more," David describes how people who attempt to follow that old advice so often end up frustrated. As David points out, "What you eat is only half the equation of good nutrition. How you eat is the other half."

David describes the eight universal metabolizers that have the biggest effect on whether we gain or lose weight: relaxation, quality, awareness, rhythm, pleasure, thought, story, the sacred. We don't overeat because we lack willpower or put our metabolism into starvation mode, but when meals are deficient in one of the eight universal metabolizers. Food eaten in an anxious rush will trigger physiological stress responses that decrease our calorie burning capacity at the same time as we lose the value of the nutrients.

At a time when the benefits of meditation are being formally acknowledged, it's refreshing to see a book that cites scientific sources that describe a metabolic power of relaxation. I love the way Marc David includes scientific research studies alongside case histories and exercises. Did you know that your gut has a brain? The enteric nervous system in your body has more nerve cells than your spinal column, at over one hundred million neurons, and it moves through nightly 90 minute cycles as if it were dreaming. Marc David asserts that the amazing differences between French and American food habits and weights are that while the French eat generally fattier foods, they slow down and savor long lunches as the biggest meals of their days... while Americans eat on the run in a constant state of stress.

THE SLOW DOWN DIET proposes something that seems almost too good to be true... a way to savor meals and consistently lose weight doing so. By simply being "awake at the plate" and not doing something distracting or stressful while eating, but instead enjoying every moment of your meals... David assures us that we can lose weight.

Listen to talk radio for a few hours and the newest diet claim will become clear: Stress causes fat. The latest buzz in the diet biz is that stress releases certain hormones that cause the body to hang onto fat and store it right in the biggest problem area - the gut. Is there any truth to this claim?


According to Marc David, author of THE SLOW DOWN DIET, there is. David, a Sonoma State University-educated nutritionist with Harvard training under his belt, has spent a lifetime unraveling the mystery behind healthy eating and weight gain/loss. His experience has brought him to the pages of THE SLOW DOWN DIET, where he painstakingly lays out his theories on weight, stress, pleasure, and health.


THE SLOW DOWN DIET is an 8-week diet plan, not so focused on commandment-style lists of diet do's and don't's, but focused more on finding the hidden nutritionist within and, as the title suggests, slowing down and tuning in enough to listen to that hidden food guru.


According to David, we already own the 8 metabolic powers that can help us lose weight, if only we can learn how to access them:


*Relaxation

*Quality

*Awareness

*Rhythm

*Pleasure

*Thought

*Story

*the Sacred


Using copious research (including some very alarming and interesting facts), David backs up his approach to weight loss with science and a few case studies borne of his years of being a nutritionist.


No doubt about it, David's weight loss approach is appealing. Who can find fault with the idea of treating each meal as a celebration, eating delicious healthy food, and dropping the stress for awhile? What's even better, if we do already possess the tools for this system, what excuse could there possibly be to not give it a try? Who would argue with the idea of relaxation as a means for weight loss?


David's weakness, however, lies in his lack of specificity. He recognizes the difficulty for many people to find, afford, prepare, and eat (and/or feed a family) organic, all-natural, fresh foods. While his message of quality = health certainly can't be argued, he offers no real suggestions on how to make this high-quality lifestyle available for a great many people, including people who have no access to health-food stores or who have a limited budget and a large family to feed.


Also, some of David's claims might seem a bit "extreme" to some people, and great care will have to be taken to maintain an open mind while reading passages such as the following:


"If [a tomato] is picked by an underpaid migrant worker who's given no benefits and few worker's rights, then the tomato is hypocritical and lacks integrity. If it is chopped by machine along with thousands of other tomatoes, delivered to a fast-food joint, and slapped together with a bun and meat from a cow who suffered even worse traumas, then our tomato is now suicidal, or even murderous, because it has lost its soul and has no reason to live" (p. 47)


If dieting trends continue in the direction they've been going (attention to quality of food and interest in how the chemical reactions of stress manifest themselves in the body), it is likely that THE SLOW DOWN DIET could become wildly popular. Offering a lifestyle that is welcoming in this age of "overworked and overweight," Marc David will be the diet expert to watch.

What Candace Pert does for mind-body medicine, Jon Robison does for holistic health, and Joseph Campbell does for the mythic journey, Marc David does for nutrition. This book's debut in the middle of the quantum physics renaissance seems like no accident. But then, there are no accidents, right? The world is ready for The Slow Down Diet. But this is no diet book.

In the era of fad diets and countless books on nutrition advice, weight management and health remain an enigma for thousands, often reaching the point of "I've tried everything and nothing works." We work entirely too hard on controlling the details that would come easily to us, if we just slowed down and paid attention.

Praises for this book of ultimate self-care. As a dietitian and nutrition counselor, I recommend it highly to revitalize the intuitive nurturer we all have within ourselves. The common-sense-yet-commonly-lost principles of The Slow Down Diet reflect the essential principles of living-REALLY living an enriched, fulfilled life.

Thank you to Marc David for saying what has not been said before. We now have permission to breathe a sigh of relief and taste our food!

Years ago, I picked up a book called "The Only Diet There Is." After reading it, I considered it too New Age and outrageous to really help in the battle of the bulge. It dealt specifically with how thoughts and negative emotions were keeping us all fat. It spoke about the pursuit of pleasure, toxic thoughts, forgiving others, ourselves and finally letting go of the obsession with weight. There was no science to it, just a book of affirmations urging us all to change our thoughts/feelings from negative to positive in order to lose the weight. Good book, but seemed so WAAAAY out there that I never fully gave it a chance. Besides the fact that it had no science to back it up. I wanted a program that worked!

Well, now we have "The Slow Down Diet." Marc David has confirmed with science all of the above. There are actual studies on how our thoughts chemically change the conditions in our bodies to either make us fat or slim. After reading chapter one and trying to practice just the art of relaxation, I could feel an immediate difference.

I knew what was causing all of my overeating episodes. I was unable to relax at any meal. I was still agitated from work, people and life. Trying to slow down showed me how tense I was. I was bringing this attitude to all of my meals. Marc says he rarely meets anyone with an overeating problem. I believe him now. I've struggled for years with hating myself because of physically being unable to stop eating when I was no longer hungry. I thought it was all emotional. I didn't get enough love. I was angry. I wanted to hurt myself. I kept searching and finally found an answer.

Within a week of just trying to "Slow Down" people kept asking me if I had lost weight and commenting on how small my face was. It was a revelation!

While trying to adhere to a real food lifestyle there are times when some dietary conundrums rear their ugly heads and make you feel as if there's got to be more than just eating only real food. We live in an industrialized nation where information moves at a frenetic pace. It is imperative that we all do our homework and try to keep track of what the medical and dietary gurus deem as healthy. Even though all this real food information makes sense and seems to work for entire French and Italian populaces, the low fat/no fat police, ever conscious of maintaining their job security have simply done their jobs too well.

A case in point: The mere thought of ingesting a full fat yogurt or supposed ultra fatty Greek style yogurt consisting of only the freshest organic ingredients elicits cautionary adjectives like `high in fat" and subconsciously mobilizes every wannabe consumer to envision cholesterol cells amassing and attaching to arterial walls with a dread akin to that evoked by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge and the manmade horror of a New Orleans levee breach.

So even if you force yourself to eat it, even if it tastes so good, even if you eat less because you need less to satisfy you, what does all that guilt do to your well-being and hence your metabolism?

Marc David, one time leading nutritional expert at the Canyon Ranch, addresses perplexing dietary dilemmas like this in "The Slow Down Diet, Eating for Pleasure, Energy and Weight Loss", an easy-to-read, 187-page book replete with real life success stories from his practice, workshop style exercises and bulleted key lessons. Each of the eight chapters, representative of a one week mini-seminar, introduces and focuses on another aspect of metabolic readjustment: relaxation, quality, awareness, rhythm, pleasure, thought, story, and the sacred.

I will not spoil the read with any in-depth explanation of David's eight defining metabolic powers, but I will tell you that as an advocate for the lifestyle mentality espoused by all real food supporters ---- Will Clower in "The Fat Fallacy", Naomi Moriyama's "Japanese Women Don't Get Fat or Old" and Mireille Guiliano's "French Women Don't Get Fat"-----David encourages an overall overhaul in the art of eating in America. In particular, he denounces eating in an anxious state, providing an in depth flowchart outlining the biochemical burden of stress on the body, to prove that when we eat; the act of eating should preside as the sole activity. In addition he demands a strict awareness of exactly what you are eating to form a mind-food connection and insists on compliance with the body's natural rhythms as to when to eat to further boost metabolism. Like foodies everywhere, he promotes eating only quality foods, where the words mass-produced, hormone-added, non-organic, processed, and refined describe only the foods to be avoided. Taking a page out of the French notebook, he propounds that eating for sheer pleasure underwrites optimal nutritional absorption. As an answer to my case in point, he cautions us to the type of negative thinking exemplified in my full fat yogurt scenario which serves only to increase the production of cortisol and other stress hormones, greatly inhibiting the entire digestive process and resulting in excess fat storage --- despite all the exercise you may do and how small your portions are. In fact, if you have ever wondered why even after having routinely exercised every day of your life, you still hadn't hit your goal weight; David may have hit on the answer. He contends that over-training or choosing the wrong exercise for your body closely mimics stress responses and thereby sabotages your best intentions.

In a departure from the familiar real food premises, David fully stretches his metaphysical wings and takes the metaphor of the mind-food relationship to another intriguing spiritual level that at times seems somewhat entrenched in a mystic's vision worthy of Joseph Campbell. With the metabolic power of `story', he implores you to research your own food history with all its ups and downs and then fabricate an entirely new story with a whole new you as the main character. Exploring who you were when you came to the table in terms of Jungian archetypes helps pinpoint how to nutritionally and spiritually nourish your different personae. Scripting a new mission statement for the new you determines what to eat to actually become that person. The "Sacred" power explores the connection between metabolism and the sacred healing qualities of love, truth, courage, commitment, compassion, forgiveness, faith and surrender. David teaches you to take nutritional soul lessons like depression, fatigue, and digestive health and within them find their cure --- if you are fatigued, rest, depressed, explore the reasons why. In spite of all the seemingly nebulous talk of powers and pie-in-the-sky aspirations, David clearly states his message from a not too lofty platform ---- the power to up our metabolism comes from our definition of self and that of the Divine.

Bottom line: Marc David isn't going to map out a specific plan for you, complete with menus and recipes. Instead of specifics, he hands you the tools in which to make an informed decision with enough anecdotal backup to make the reading journey both agreeable and palatable. Simply put, the key to solving you weight issues lies within you. Only you, as a journeyman on this road of discovery can discover the food relationship that best fits your unique interplay of body, mind and spirit. To my mind, David is telling us to eat the best under the best circumstances to garner the full nutritional value. Fie negativity, full fat yogurt --- here I come!

It sounds contrary to everything we are taught about losing weight, but the author advocates you eat exactly what appeals to you (not some imitation, reduced calorie, fat free substitute), truly savor the flavors and smells and appearance, and pay attention to that moment when continuing is no longer sublimely pleasurable. It's amazing how wonderful real food tastes when eaten slowly (and how nasty imitation food tastes under the same conditions!) and how easy it is to stop eating when you have fulfilled your need for pleasure as well as for nourishment. It's not a fast way to loss weight, but it is steady and enjoyable and will change your relationship with food forever.

I can honestly say that I could not put this book down...it is pure genius, in my opinion. I have always struggled with weight in my search to be perfect. This is the anti-diet book since it helps the reader consider so much more than calories or points. Marc David's words are awe-inspiring. I have a totally new and enlightened view of my body and its nourishment. I cannot recommend this read enough. Absolutely life changing.

This book is outstanding. It offers no special diets. Instead of providing information on what to eat, it provides information on how to eat. I work with individuals with eating disorders and cannot tell you how many times I refer to the information in this book. I highly recommend it.

Don't expect another recipe-laden dieter's cookbook in The Slow Down Diet: Eating For Pleasure, Energy & Weight Loss: this is an 8-week program presented by nutritionist Marc David which blends nutrition and psychology in a discourse on how to understand our relationship to food and how to eat in ac different manner. His program encourages exploring personal relationships to food in an effort to avoid fad diets and common nutrition myths surrounding 'eat less/exercise more'. Some eye-opening facts are revealed.