I was reading a very interesting study that Dr. McDougall referred me to. He didn’t refer me to it personally but I found it very interesting. It was in his December 2011 newsletter.
I am going to give you the key to the kingdom to losing up to 10 pounds per month by eating anywhere from 6 to 12 additional slices of bread each day. All the while eating your regular meals as planned.
This isn’t just a great vegan weight loss diet, but also a terrific way for anyone to lose weight easily and persistently.
But before we get to the actual study, or my summation of it, you can read the study here if you like.
Before I tell you exactly what to do to lose more weight by eating more bread or starches of your choosing I want to give you some interesting data and summarize the study that came out in 1979.
This might be an older study, but it is a golden study. It was well done and from what I can tell it was definitely randomized and might have been double blind too.
Regardless, if you read the full study as I linked to above I think you’ll agree that it was performed well and carefully focused.
This study was conducted on 16 overweight college aged and college going males. The study was conducted over 8 weeks and the 16 students were broken up into two groups. One group was considered the control and they were fed white bread. The other group were fed a low calorie high fiber bread.
The white bread group had an average weight of 196 pounds (89kg) and the high fiber bread group had an average weight of 209 pounds (95kg).
Each group of men were given and told to eat 12 slices of bread additional to their daily diet. The white bread group ate bread that had 70 calories per slice and the high fiber bread group ate bread that had 50 calories per slice.
All their meals were catered for via the college cafeteria and they were given 4 slices of bread with each of their 3 meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner).
The amount of calories provided daily through the cafeteria was designed to give them the same number of calories they had been eating before the study started which was around 3,200 calories per day (a lot!).
These 16 male participants were also encouraged to choose smaller portions of higher fat foods and that weight loss is caused by eating fewer calories than needed. They were also instructed not to drink any alcoholic beverages but they were allowed to snack at their leisure but they had to diarize all snacks so the researchers could determine daily calorie intake.
The key to understand here is that they were allowed to eat almost ad libitum (at one’s pleasure or as they wished) but just to add more bread and yet they still lost a ton of weight.
Here are the results. The white bread eaters lost an average of 14 pounds (6.5kg) over the 8 week period eating on average around 2,350 calories. The high fiber bread eaters lost an average of 19 pounds (8.77kg) while consuming on average 1,975 calories per day.
Additionally, as a side benefit of adding bread to their diet, they dropped their cholesterol significantly. The white bread eaters cholesterol dropped from an average of 231mg/100ml to 155mg/100ml and the high fiber bread eaters dropped their cholesterols from an average of 223mg/100ml to 172mg/100ml.
These are astounding results. With the cholesterol, the results are greater than what you might expect with high powered cholesterol lowering medications.
The crux of this study is this. You lose weight by lowering calories. You can see this by the lesser calories these 16 men ended up eating just by adding bread to their diet. They felt fuller longer and couldn’t eat their regular sized meals.
So why don’t you add 600 to 900 calories worth of bread to your daily dietary intake and see if you don’t end up being too full to eat all of your regular meals. If so, you’ll end up losing weight just like these men did.
Eat white or brown bread though brown (whole wheat) is better. The crazy thing is, these weren’t even vegans and yet they decimated their cholesterol to almost “heart attack” proof levels. I’ll eat to that.