Welcome to listeners of The Big Show

Some Food & Diet Factoids..

• One tablespoon of olive oil has more saturated fat than 100 grams of pork chop.
• Liver has four times the vitamin C of apple (and not many people even know that meat can contain vitamin C).
• You would need to eat 39 medium eggs daily to get the USA Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of 15 micrograms of vitamin D.
• The average Brit consumes 1,130 calories of flour and sugar daily – that’s a heck of a lot of empty calories!
• We only need about one teaspoon of glucose (sugar) in the blood stream at any one time.
• As a 110lb female (7 stone 12), I would need to walk for over an hour and a half, covering nearly 5 miles, to burn off a single Mars Bar^®.
• You cannot eat saturated (or unsaturated) fat alone. All foods that contain fat contain all three fats – saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated – there are no exceptions.
• The only food group with more saturated than unsaturated fat is dairy products. (Not that one natural fat is better or worse than another – nature puts them all in real food for good reason). Meat, eggs, fish, nuts, seeds and even lard all have more unsaturated than saturated fat.
• The only foods that don’t contain protein are oils and sucrose (what we know as table sugar). Every other food, from lettuce to lentils or from bananas to beef contains protein.
• The UK National Food Survey tells us that we were eating 2,290 calories per person per day in 1975 and, by 1999, this had fallen to 1,690 calories per person per day. Obesity rose nearly tenfold during this time.
• There is no such thing as good and bad cholesterol. The formula for cholesterol is C27H46O. There is no good or bad version. Ignorant people call HDL ‘good’ cholesterol and LDL ‘bad’ cholesterol. Neither HDL nor LDL are even cholesterol – they are lipoproteins. Lipoproteins carry cholesterol, protein, phospholipids and triglyceride around the blood stream to undertake vital roles.
• Five-a-day was invented by the fruit & veg industry in California in 1991 to sell more fruit & veg. It’s a marketing message, not a nutritional one!

What is The Harcombe Diet?^®

I don’t know anyone who wants to be fat and yet two thirds of the UK population is overweight and one quarter obese. Why?

To be slim, we are told that we just need to “eat less and/or do more.” Quite specifically, the advice is:

“To lose 1lb of fat you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories.” (This is known as “the calorie theory”).

So, why don’t we just follow the advice? Why on earth do we have an obesity problem, let alone an epidemic, when we so desperately want to be slim?

The Harcombe Diet^® is the result of twenty years of research trying to answer this question. The journey has taken me through thermodynamics, peanuts under Bunsen burners and more obesity journals than hot dinners. The conclusions have been staggering and The Harcombe Diet^® has incorporated all the findings:

1) The calorie theory is wrong.

2) The current diet advice is actually the cause of the obesity epidemic; never will it be the cure.

3) The only way to lose weight is to work with your body – never against it.

4) Weight gain and loss depends on what we eat, what we eat with what and how often we eat. In no way is it as simplistic as just how much we eat. Weight gain and loss also depends far more on carbs consumed, than calories, or fat, consumed.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t eat carbs. It means that we need to use everything we know about carbs, insulin, how the body uses food for energy and how the body stores fat, so that we can eat the right carbs, in the right way, and still lose weight.

5) Overweight people are not greedy, weak-willed or in need of a psychiatrist. They are victims of the wrong advice.

Two thirds of the population is overweight. I do not believe that two thirds of the population has a psychological issue with food. I do believe that the majority of people have at least one physical reason (one of three common conditions) driving their food consumption. I also believe that the avoidance of hunger is such a fundamental human instinct that telling people to eat less will make them eat more.

How is it different to other diets?

1) It works. I set out to understand why we had an obesity epidemic and to design a diet that would eliminate hunger and food cravings. I did not set out to design a diet that would lose people 17lbs in five days and yet, at the time of going to print, this is the record for Phase 1. As a bonus, the most common themes in the endless testimonials are: “I’m not hungry”; “My cravings have disappeared”; “I feel great”; “I’ve got more energy than I’ve ever known” and “This is the last diet I will ever need”.

2) It fundamentally rejects the calorie theory, upon which 99% of diets are based.

The other 1% of diets are the very low carb Atkins and Co. These will work, if you can stick to them, but I don’t think that many people need to go to this extreme to lose weight. If you want to lose weight, gain health and enjoy a great variety of food, you may like this diet.

The 99% will not work, and we have a century’s worth of obesity journals to prove this. (You would also not be reading this book if calorie counting did work). One definition of madness is to do the same thing again and again and to expect a different result. To go on a calorie restricted diet, is therefore, mad.

The Harcombe Diet^® is so simple; for centuries it was accepted as the only way to eat. It is based on the principle that nature knows best. Not the Food Standards Agency, not food manufacturers – nature.

On this diet, we eat only real food – food in the form that nature intends us to eat it. We eat this natural food in sufficient quantities to nourish our body and at regular intervals to give the body no reason to store fat. We don’t eat processed food – food in the form that food manufacturers intend us to eat it.

3) The new and unique contribution of The Harcombe Diet^® is the discovery that there are three very common medical conditions that cause insatiable food cravings and that these conditions, in turn, are caused by eating less.

The Harcombe Diet^® has been carefully designed to be the perfect diet to overcome all three conditions. These conditions, by the way, come with a whole range of other, nasty, symptoms. So, if you just want to lose weight, this book will tell you how. If you want to get rid of things as wide ranging as dandruff or waking up at 4am – this book could help you with way more than your waistline.

So here’s a summary of what the diet means for you:

- Because it rejects the calorie theory, it does not try to get you to eat less, so quantities are unlimited;

- Because it rejects the calorie theory, it does not try to get you to do more, so exercise is optional;

- Because it is based on working with, not against, your body, you eat regular, healthy meals and your body stops storing food and fat (you also start to feel healthy and much better about yourself);

- Because it’s a lifestyle change, it gives you three simple rules, to lose weight and stay slim for life.

I’ve been asked by the media – if you don’t agree with the “Eat less, do more” advice – what do you agree with? My answer is “Eat better and do whatever you like”.

I’ve also been asked – is the diet low carb or low-fat and the answer is neither. It is real food – carbs and fats – in whatever quantities you want – just not at the same meal. All will be explained…

Zoë Harcombe