Read an Excerpt

One hour per meal can change your life.

And it only takes minutes.

Have you awakened from a long, deep sleep to a body you don’t recognize as you?

So what happened over all that time? Years and years of mindless food choices, eating on the run, eating fast food and eating fast, showing love through food, the “one more bite” mentality, and the idea that we can dump any food into our gastric system and wake up feeling good—that’s what happened. And you know this.

It doesn’t help that we live in a food-rich environment, and that our food has changed and is full of chemical additives.

After years of unconscious eating, we walk into a gym and hire a trainer and expect them to guide us to fast, sustainable weight loss within weeks. We start some weight loss fad and expect it to be the magic answer.

And we keep trying to play the game over and over. Then comes the feeling of blame. Don’t waste your time and energy blaming yourself for the past. It will beat you up. Begin with recognizing what does not work. Then, after you realize what does work and a day comes along where you did not do well, ask yourself how you can do better tomorrow. There are no mistakes, if we learn from them.

When it comes to getting healthy and losing weight, information and advice coming from the experts is confusing, conflicting and often misleading. Most of that advice is based on poor science about a very complex and poorly understood system—our gut and our “gut brain.”

What makes this problem worse is that the sheer volume of information about nutrition and health and weight loss is enormous. We’re bombarded with what my colleague Sam Horn calls “infobesity.” Too much weighty information about the topic of too much physical weight. How ironic is that? And despite year after year of receiving even good advice, we seem to be in the same place, or getting worse.

The problems are compounded by the fact we’re all different, with different tastes, food choices, cultural traditions, and food sensitivities.

In the first chapter of "The One Hour Power Diet", we take a closer look at “what we are doing,” because what we’re doing isn’t working. Understanding what isn’t working allows us to move on to what does work.

At the end of this introduction, I’ll share a simple, powerful tool that does work—one hour power, a method that takes only minutes.

Much of “what we are doing” are poor indicators of success and create false expectations.

The problem with beliefs like a 30-day weight-lost plan is sustainable, or that a measurement like calories informs us about food energy, is that they create false expectations. Because they’re based on weak science and on assumptions, they make us believe that by doing some action we’ll get a certain result. When we give that misleading action our energy and we don’t see the results we expect, we want to quit.