The Perfect Fit Diet is a customized dieting strategy built around your life and your preferences. In recent research, food preference has emerged as a key factor in satisfying hunger, and thus, in dieting success. (Nutritionists who work with people with diabetes have led the way in recognizing the importance of structuring a diet that works with a dieter's individual tastes.)
The Perfect Fit Questionnaire systematically uncovers what makes you eat, what tastes good to you, what relieves your cravings, and what makes you feel satisfied. It incorporates that information into a personalized diet plan that will let you lose weight and maintain your ideal weight -- because it's a satisfying eating plan that's a perfect fit for your lifestyle, your food preferences, your satisfaction -- in short, a perfect fit for you.
Doctors, and just about everyone else, have thought of food preference as something trained and therefore malleable. If you wanted to lose weight, you would learn to love broccoli. If you couldn't, then you weren't serious about weight loss. Science is beginning to show us how little of food preference is really learned behavior and how much is in our genes.
Recent research here at Yale reveals that what we think of as food preference or taste is actually a complex variety of factors, both genetic and acquired, physical and emotional. One of the most interesting findings is that some foods taste very different from one person to another, and that this sensibility exists on a genetic level. For example, some people have tastebuds that are keenly sensitive to even a trace of bitterness, and to them, vegetables like broccoli and Brussels sprouts and fruits like grapefruit can be extremely unpalatable.
In experiments, researchers have used a chemical called 6-n-propylthiouracil, or PROP for short, to test for this trait. Some people can detect even a trace of this chemical, while others cannot taste it at all. And it runs in families. If one of your parents has the ability to taste PROP, there's a good chance that you will have it too.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health recently identified a gene, called TAS2R, on chromosome 7. There are five forms of this gene, and which one you inherit determines whether you can even detect this bitter taste or to what degree you are sensitive to it. If you inherit a high degree of sensitivity to PROP from both parents, you will be able to taste even the tiniest amount of it. If you can taste PROP, then you may not be able to enjoy broccoli, because it simply tastes bitter to you. This means that hating vegetables may not be so much a moral failing as it is a genetic trait, like hair color or the presence of freckles.
That's just one reason why accommodating individual food preferences is so important to a successful diet. My research, and that of others, shows that the primary predictor of a dieter's success is longevity: The longer you can stay on your diet, the more weight you'll take off and keep off. Deprivation diets only work in the short run; you can only stay on a diet that satisfies your fundamental food cravings. Unless your diet reflects your individual food preferences, it can't be sustained -- because it won't be satisfying. The Perfect Fit Diet is the first weight-loss program that respects this immutable law of human nature.
The bottom line of the new science of dieting is clear: If you can customize a diet to reflect your individual profile -- your genes, your metabolism, your lifestyle, and your food preferences -- you can stay satisfied, and stay on your diet.
That's how you lose weight, and that's what this book is all about.
by Lisa Sanders, M.D. (Rodale Inc., Hardcover, $24.95). Permission granted by Rodale, Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold.)
