The Dukan Diet (10 page)

A 3-day attack best suits this goal as it allows you to proceed effortlessly to the Cruise phase, which alternates days of pure protein with days of both proteins and vegetables.

If you would rather avoid an all-too-rapid start, a single day may be enough. This first day takes your body by surprise and produces a satisfying weight loss that is enough to encourage you to get started with the diet program.

When the goal is to lose over 40 pounds, when motivation is really intense, or when previous experience with other diets has always resulted
in the lost weight being regained, this phase may last 7 days or even as long as 10 days. An Attack diet of this length should only be begun after consulting with your doctor and on the express condition that you drink enough fluids throughout the entire Dukan Diet and especially the Attack phase.

The first day of the Attack diet is one of adaptation and combat. While the door is open to many categories of popular and tasty foods, it is firmly closed to other categories that you may be in the habit of eating without thinking about just how many and the quantities you consume.

If you feel restricted (and the Attack phase can initially overwhelm the less motivated), the best remedy is to take full advantage of the diet’s instructions to eat as much as you want of the permitted foods.

On the first day, eat more than you would normally. Make up for the foods you cannot eat with the quantity of the foods you can have. And, above all, organize yourself so that you always have all these essential foods available at all times.

Also, by drinking more water than you have ever drunk before, you will feel as if “there is something there” and more satisfied. You will need to go to the bathroom more often. The next morning, get on your scale, and you will be amazed by your first day’s results.

Weigh yourself frequently, especially during the first three days. From one hour to the next, you could see new results. Get into the habit of weighing yourself every day of your life: Although for those who put on weight, the scale is an enemy, it is a friend and provides just reward for anyone who loses weight. Any weight loss, no matter how tiny, will be your very best incentive.

This is not the right time to push your body to extremes. Avoid hard physical exercise, competitive sports, and, in particular, skiing at high altitudes. If you already do some gentle gymnastics, jogging, or swimming, keep this up but, whatever you do, make sure you walk for 20 minutes a day as this is an integral part of the program. As you will see in the chapter on exercise, these 20 minutes are not just recommended; they are prescribed, and this means they are non-negotiable.

By the third day, your tiredness should disappear and is usually replaced by a sense of euphoria and dynamic energy, which is further reinforced by the encouraging messages of your scales.

Bad breath and a dry mouth occur with any weight loss diet, but they will be more evident with the pure protein Attack diet. They are a sign that you are losing weight, and as such you should welcome them as proof of success. You can ease these symptoms by drinking more.

For people who are already prone to constipation and for those who do not drink enough, constipation at this stage of the diet is even more likely. For others, bowel movements may simply be less frequent, but do not take this as a sign of constipation. It is just a reduction in the amount of waste due to the low fiber content of proteins.

If this initial constipation bothers you, buy some wheat bran flakes and add 1 tablespoonful along with your oat bran to your galette or to your dairy products. Above all, drink as much as is recommended, because water not only makes you urinate, it also softens the stools, improving intestinal contractions and digestion.

More serious constipation is unpleasant, and you must do something
about it. Your pharmacist can offer advice and may recommend some natural products based on fruit fiber. If these products are not enough, you need to see your doctor. Try to resist the temptation to take laxatives, which are too aggressive and to which you could eventually become habituated.

You will find your hunger disappearing after the third day because of the increased release of ketones, the most powerful natural hunger suppressants. The monotony of eating all proteins these first few days has a marked effect on your appetite. Hunger pangs and cravings for sugar disappear completely. The quantity of protein you consume, considerable over these first days, gradually decreases.

I do recommend taking vitamins, but it is hardly compulsory for such a short period of only 3 to 5 days. On the other hand, if you need to follow the alternating protein diet for some time to deal with a major weight problem, it is a good idea to take a high-quality multivitamin. As soon as vegetables are allowed, you can have mixed salads with plenty of lettuce, raw peppers, tomatoes, carrots, and cucumbers—a natural source of various vitamins.

The weight loss the pure protein diet produces is the most you could hope for in such a short period of time with a diet consisting of real food. It produces the same results as a powdered protein diet, or even total fasting, without any of their main drawbacks. Nevertheless, the
weight loss depends on how many extra pounds you have at the outset. Obviously, someone who weighs over 200 pounds is going to shed those first pounds more quickly than someone just wanting to lose a few extra pounds before going on holiday.

Some people have also been “vaccinated” against dieting by their previous failures with other diets. Age is significant too. For women, hormones play an important role during puberty, after pregnancy, with oral contraception and—I cannot emphasize this too strongly—during menopause and postmenopause, peaking especially with any temporary or prolonged hormone therapy treatment.

Five days are generally the most popular and most effective time span, and usually the weight lost varies between 4 and 7 pounds. It may reach 8 or even 10 pounds for someone who is very overweight, especially an active man, or, at worst, it may only be 2 pounds for a menopausal woman on hormones who is prone to water retention and edema.

A woman’s body retains water for 3 to 4 days before her period starts. This water retention reduces the elimination of waste and stops the combustion of fat, temporarily reducing the diet’s effectiveness and blocking weight loss.

It is important to realize that in the days before a woman’s period starts, the weight loss process has not been interrupted. It has just been camouflaged by water retention, and it will resume 2 or 3 days after the period is finished. If not properly explained and understood, this premenstrual plateau can make women despair, as they understandably think that all their efforts have been in vain, undermining their determination and prompting them to give the diet up.

So please, always wait until the end of your period before taking such a decision, because as soon as you eliminate the water, your low tide after the premenstrual high tide is when you often see the scales go down at a dizzying rate. If you have to get up to go to the bathroom several times in the course of one night, you might even lose 2 to 4 pounds.

If your Attack diet lasts just 3 days, you can expect to lose between 2 and 5 pounds.

If you follow the Attack diet for just 1 one day, you may lose around 2 pounds because the surprise effect is always greatest on the first day.

At the end of the Attack phase, the Dukan Diet is underway and the Cruise phase—what I call the alternating protein diet—begins, which will take you straight to your chosen weight.

This phase actually consists of two alternating diets: one day, the protein + vegetable diet and then the next day, the pure protein diet, and so on until you reach your target weight.

Having examined in detail how the pure protein Attack diet works, now let’s look at the protein + vegetable diet.

Here again, as with the Attack phase, there is not a standard version of the alternating rhythm of the two diets for everyone. Rather, the rhythm is adapted to each person and situation based on the factors that I will describe shortly.

For a long time, the rhythm I used most frequently was the 5/5
alternating rhythm, 5 days of proteins + vegetables alternating with 4 days of pure proteins. With time, and especially for people wanting to lose over 20 pounds, I have slowly come round to the 1/1 alternating rhythm with a single day of proteins + vegetables followed by a single day of pure proteins. My own statistics showed that at the end of the first month, the weight loss for both groups was the same, but more decisively, over the long term, the risk of tiring of the 5/5 alternating rhythm was greater than for the 1/1 one.

In my experience, the majority of dieters have always gone for the most radical solutions, such as 7 to 10 days of the Attack diet and then the 5/5 alternating rhythm. This confirms one of my most consistent observations as a practitioner: that when overweight individuals who have resisted the idea of dieting for a long time feel motivated to suddenly start dieting, they know perfectly well that the force that has suddenly taken them over is as powerful as it is fragile, and that the best way to maintain it is to follow as closely as possible instructions that are precise, simple, focused, concrete, and non-negotiable. For this reason, I am asking you to trust me and to follow this Cruise phase using the 1/1 alternating rhythm.

By the time you finish the protein-only Attack diet, especially after days, you really start to miss one particular food category—vegetables, raw or cooked—which is great because this is just the right time to introduce them.

Everything that was allowed in the pure protein diet is still allowed, with the same freedom of quantity, time of day, and combinations. Just do not make the mistake of eating only vegetables and no proteins.

From now on, as well as protein-rich foods, you are allowed all cooked or raw vegetables and, here again, without restriction regarding quantity, time of day, or combination.

You can eat tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, spinach, asparagus, leeks, green beans, cabbage, mushrooms, celery, fennel, all types of lettuce, eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, peppers, and, provided you do not have them at every meal, carrots and beets.

Vegetables considered to be starchy foods are, however, forbidden: potatoes, corn, fresh or dried peas, beans, and lentils. Avocado is also forbidden; it is not a vegetable, but a fruit, and a very fatty fruit in the bargain. Rice, quinoa, barley, wheat berries, millet, and other grains are not allowed.

You can eat these vegetables raw or cooked. However, if you can digest raw vegetables, it is always preferable to eat vegetables when they are fresh and uncooked so you do not lose any of the vitamins they contain.

Dressings may appear harmless, but they are a major problem for weight loss diets. Indeed, many people base their diet around salads and crudités, which are low in calories and rich in fiber and vitamins. This is perfectly true, but do not forget that it is the salad dressing that upsets the balance of these good qualities. Let’s take a simple example: in an ordinary salad bowl containing two heads of lettuce and 2 tablespoons of oil, the salad accounts for 20 calories and the oil for 200 calories, which is why so many diets based on mixed salads fail.