The Dukan Diet Read Free

Land: genuine, long-lasting, unequivocal success built on four successive phases, each decreasing in intensity, which create a supportive and clearly signposted path that allows no escape. A short, strict Attack diet that gives lightning results is followed by a Cruise diet and sustained by a Consolidation phase, whose duration is proportionate to the weight lost. Finally, so that the weight you have achieved with such effort remains stable forever, there is a Stabilization phase, which includes a locking measure that is as specific as it is effective:
a single day a week devoted to dietary redemption
. This measure is designed to keep the rest of the week in balance, provided it stays by your side, like a loyal guard dog, for the rest of your life.
    Finally, with these four successive diet phases, I achieved my first real lasting results. Now I no longer had only a fish to offer, but a whole course on how to fish, a comprehensive program that allows overweight people to be autonomous, lose weight quickly, and keep it off for good, and to do this all by themselves.
    I have spent thirty-five years creating this beautiful tool for a limited number of people. Today I want a wider public to be able to access my program.
    This program is for those of you who have tried everything, who have lost weight often—too often—and who are looking for a way not just to lose weight, but more important, to maintain those hard-earned results and live comfortably with the body you want and deserve.
    So I dedicate this book and this method to all my patients, who have made my life as a doctor so fulfilling, and in particular to the very first of them, the overweight publisher.

THE BIRTH
OF A
FOUR-STEP
DIET

    The Dukan Diet
    Thirty-five years have passed since my life-changing encounter with the obese gentleman. Since then, I have devoted my work to helping thousands of men and women lose pounds and stabilize their weight.
    Like all my French medical colleagues, I was trained that calories counted and low-calorie diets were the way to lose weight. Every type of food was allowed in moderate quantities. Nowadays, what I know and practice I have learned through direct daily contact with flesh-and-blood human beings who have constant cravings to eat.
    I very quickly realized that it was not by accident that an individual was overweight. Their appetite and their apparent lack of restraint were a camouflage concealing a need to find comfort in food. This need is all the more overwhelming as it is connected to our survival mechanisms, which are as archaic as they are instinctive. It soon became obvious to me that I could not make an overweight person lose weight and stay slim simply by giving sound advice, even if that advice was based on common sense and scientific research.
    Support is what overweight people determined to lose weight really want and is what they need from a counselor or a method—support so that they are not left alone to face the ordeal of dieting, which deliberately goes against their own instinct for survival
.
    What overweight individuals are looking for is an outside will, a decision maker who walks ahead of them offering guidance and specificinstructions, because what overweight people most hate and simply cannot do is decide for themselves when and how they are going to deprive themselves of food.
    As for managing their weight, overweight individuals will admit without shame—and why should there be any?—that they are powerless when it comes to controlling what they eat. People from every social and economic background have all sat in front of me and described themselves as being astonishingly weak when it comes to food.
    Obviously, most of them have found in food an easy “escape valve” through which they can release excess tension, stress, and life’s all too frequent disappointments. Any logical, reasonable, and rational instructions just cannot stand up to those pressures—at least not for long.
    During my years