The Dukan Diet (30 page)

Chicken with Mustard

Custard
or
4 ounces (115 grams) nonfat yogurt

Wednesday

Lunch

Poached Salmon with Fresh Herb Sauce

Roast Chicken with Tarragon and Lemon

Custard
or
1 Dukan Oat Bran Galette

Dinner

Hard-boiled Egg with Ravigote Sauce

Cod Fillet with Mussel Broth

Dukan Floating Island
or
8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt
or
nonfat ricotta

Thursday

Lunch

1 slice Smoked Salmon

Chicken with Mustard

Chocolate Crème
or
8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat ricotta

Dinner

Scallop Gratin

Pork Medallions

Custard
or
4 ounces (115 grams) nonfat yogurt

Friday

Lunch

Steamed Shrimp with Dukan Herb Mayonnaise

Grilled Swordfish

8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt
or
nonfat ricotta

Dinner

Shrimp Sautéed in Herbs

Tandoori Chicken Cutlets

Dukan Floating Island
or
8 ounces (225g) nonfat yogurt

Saturday

Lunch

Turkey and Chicken Rolls

Poached Salmon Fillets

Custard
or
1 Dukan Oat Bran Galette

Dinner

Mussels Marinières

Lemon Chicken

Dukan Floating Island
or
8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt
or
nonfat ricotta

Sunday

Lunch

Steamed Sole

Roast Beef

Coffee Crème
or
Custard

Dinner

Poached Fish

Chicken with Mustard

Dukan Floating Island

The breakfasts, midmorning, and afternoon snacks for the entire week are the same as for the pure protein Attack phase.

Monday

Lunch

Smoked Salmon

Baked Salmon

Custard
or
1 Dukan Oat Bran Galette

Dinner

Crab-Stuffed Eggs

Sliced cold Roast Beef with Hunter’s Sauce

Coffee Crème
or
8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt

Tuesday

Lunch

Stuffed Mushrooms

Three-Pepper Tuna

8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt

Dinner

Butternut Squash Soup

Turgloff Beef Kebab

Custard

Wednesday

Lunch

Hard-boiled Eggs with Ravigote Sauce

Baked Salmon

Custard
or
1 Dukan Oat Bran Galette

Dinner

Shrimp Sautéed in Herbs

Chicken with Mustard

Dukan Floating Island
or
8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat ricotta

Thursday

Lunch

Stuffed Tomatoes

Dukan Chicken and Herb Omelet Sandwich

Coffee Crème

Dinner

Zucchini Velouté

Baked Salmon Parcel

Custard
or
4 ounces (115 grams) nonfat yogurt

Friday

Lunch

Hard-boiled Eggs with Dukan Herb Mayonnaise

Vietnamese Beef

Dukan Floating Island
or
Custard

Dinner

Beef Skewers

Grilled Fish

8 ounces (225 grams) nonfat yogurt

Saturday

Lunch

Lettuce Salad with Vinaigrette #2

Cauliflower Gratin

Custard
or
1 Dukan Oat Bran Galette

Dinner

Cucumbers, Served Hot or Cold

Chicken Marengo

Vanilla Crème

Sunday

Lunch

Shrimp Sautéed with Herbs

Roast Chicken with Tarragon and Lemon

Dukan Floating Island

Dinner

Poached Salmon with Hollandaise Sauce

Pork Medallions

Chocolate Crème
or
Custard

The Dukan Diet owes its success to the enthusiasm of users who have benefited from it and have then worked tirelessly to spread the word. More than two hundred websites, forums, and blogs have been set up by anonymous users and volunteers, mostly women, who, without knowing me, became teachers and advocates of my method.

The rights to the book have been acquired by Italian, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Brazilian, Polish, British, and now North American publishers. As much as I understood the success in France, the stir created through the press and forums in other countries took me by surprise.

After the book appeared in other countries, I received many letters from journalists and doctors telling me how much they liked the method and the successful results they had achieved by following it. They all told me that, however French the method may have appeared at the outset, it had not seemed foreign to them.

Moreover the concept of eating as much as you want responds to the way we function most instinctively and naturally. When we are hungry or thirsty, we should eat or drink until we are satisfied—that is, until there is a return to a biological equilibrium. This need is all the more demanding when it is coupled with a desire or a compulsion of a psychological and emotional nature. It is counting calories and restraining our appetite when faced with tempting food that runs counter to nature.

Today, after thirty-five years of daily practice as a physician and nutritionist treating excess weight and obesity, I am convinced that one of the reasons why the struggle against weight problems has failed throughout the world is because low-calorie diets don’t work.

In theory, low-calorie diets are the most logical of diets, but in practice they are one of the worst. Why is this so? Because they are based on a model that works against the psychology of people who put on weight. Counting calories only takes into account the cold logic of numbers, ignoring anything to do with feelings, emotions, pleasure, and the need to find sensory gratification.

Low-calorie diets tell us that we eat too much, or eat too many things that are bad or too rich. This is true, but it does not explain
why
we do it. And low-calorie diets also say that we will put on weight because we consume too many calories, so if we cut down the number of calories we eat, we will lose weight. We therefore spend our day calculating to make sure we do not go over the number of calories allocated, whether it be 1,800 or 600.

But what happens if people on a low-calorie diet manage to get down to the weight they want? Can we then ask someone who has put on weight because they have always eaten without keeping track of what they eat to suddenly turn into a calorie counter for the rest of their lives?

To defend this counterproductive diet, which goes against nature, its supporters brandish the word
balance
—as in eating a
balanced
diet. But if overweight people were capable of eating a balanced diet, they would never have become overweight. In thirty-five years, I have not met a single person who
wants
to become big, fat, or obese. If women or men become obese, it is because they were unable to resist eating. Asking such individuals to eat only 900 calories a day will simply add to their confusion and suffering.

Low-calorie diets are doomed to fail, but the people who still use them do not want to acknowledge their failure. Moreover, by definition, the recommendation to cut down and count calories makes any hope of stabilizing the weight achieved impossible. The only exception is the Weight
Watchers method, but it is not the diet itself that is innovative and effective; it is the support of Weight Watchers meetings, which at the time were a real revolution. Weight Watchers are, to my mind, the only ones who can claim to have slowed down the increase in weight problems in the world, until the availability of daily Internet coaching.

However, low-calorie diets without any real monitoring are almost automatically doomed to failure. And I hope that it will be pressure from the very people who actually follow diets that rely on counting calories that will bring about their end.

A Major, Decisive Advance in Fighting the World’s Weight Problems

Several large international studies have shown that one of the major keys to success in the fight against excess weight is for the person trying to slim to be monitored and supervised by a health professional.

Wherever monitoring has been combined with a high-quality diet program, the results obtained have been significantly better, both for losing weight as well as for stabilizing it over the medium term. The only problem is the mathematical impossibility of recruiting millions of nutritionists throughout the world to participate.

Since the late 1990s, many websites have been set up that offer weight loss coaching based on a program of healthy eating and exercise.

As chairman of an international association that fights against weight problems, I was invited by its American members to see the best of what was happening in this promising field. I met my counterparts in the United States and, with them, looked in the tiniest detail at the largest American coaching websites. I met some of their promoters and their top public relations professionals.

Together we examined the most popular sites’ home pages. Their advertising banners offered “personalized, interactive” coaching delivered by professionals.

In fact, we found nothing of the sort. Not a single coaching website was either personalized, let alone interactive. All we ever found was a standardized method cut up and served in chunks to subscribers. These websites certainly have the means to send their subscribers every day a stream of well-presented information of exceptional quality, recipes, exercises, and tips, but they offered
nothing whatsoever addressed to a single individual user
.

So, for example, a husband and wife joining on the same day will receive the same instructions regardless of their difference in age, gender, and weight.

Moreover, what was the point of these instructions and this information if the people giving them out could not then assess the results? The essential feature of coaching and monitoring is precisely that you can come and tell your doctor: “I’ve followed your instructions to the letter and I’ve succeeded—Mission Accomplished!”

Back home in France, I made up my mind to set up a coaching website as I imagined it should be:
a site combining means, weapons, and appeal and capable of working as well as a nutritionist dealing directly with one of his or her patients, but able to offer this service to dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of overweight or obese people
.

To achieve objectives, this site would have to be capable of delivering:

• A professional service
  . One that is devised and coordinated by a doctor
  
• A
  personalized service
  . One that enables the person offering motivation and instruction to know exactly whom they are talking to and what that person’s needs are
  
• An interactive service
  . One that establishes a feedback dialogue rather than a monologue
  
• A daily service
  .
  

Between 2000 and 2004, I worked with a team of thirty-two doctors and three artificial intelligence and Internet technology wizards to create a book written for a single overweight reader—based on an Internet questionnaire of 154 queries—an exploration and analysis of the reader’s own weight situation, with a unique solution for losing weight created especially for that person.

I felt it was possible to integrate this invaluable expertise with coaching, and in so doing to give coaching the very essence of what monitoring is—that is, direct communication. This means that the coach can say to the person being coached:

“You know who I am, and I know who you are and what you need, day after day, so you can reach your goal as quickly as possible and with the least possible frustration.”

I embarked on this new project with the firm belief that if I achieved my ends, we would at long last have a new weapon that might stand a chance of taking on our runaway weight problem epidemic.

So I got my team of thirty-two doctors and three IT specialists together again. The expertise previously acquired was an enormous help, but the constraints of coaching turned out to be even more demanding. I wanted a system that would allow me to monitor my subscribers on a daily basis, adapting my program to the jungle of their temptations, their traveling, their illnesses, their business lunches, their stresses and weaknesses, as well as their sudden bursts of motivation.

It was particularly important to me that the counselor could receive the subscriber’s report every evening. To my mind, this was the only way of knowing if and how the subscriber had followed my instructions, the only way of being able to react, put right, applaud, and gently reprimand day after day, pound after pound, and keep people on track toward their True Weight.