I don't know about anyone else but I am sick and tired of restrictive diets. In my 40 years I have heard all about the dangers of sugar and white flour, the dangers of fats, and the dangers of carbohydrates. I have read books that limited my food intake to grapefruit, to cabbage soup, and even worse to the infamous lemonade with cayenne pepper. I have been educated about the dangers of eating foods bad for my blood type (does Rh value come into play?) and the dangers of mixing foods (the evil sandwich!). And in the end I ate whatever I wanted.
Dr. Barbara Rolls teaches and does nutrition research at Penn State University, where she holds the endowed Guthrie Chair of Nutritional Sciences. Her first book, The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan, was published in 2000 in the middle of the great no carb boom and just didn't compete with Atkins and South Beach. We should all be grateful that she stuck it out and gave us The Volumetrics Eating Plan.
You may wonder what kind of groundbreaking new food Rolls is bringing to the forefront, or what kinds of restrictions she presents. Guess what? The answer is NONE! Rolls' research shows that people generally eat the same volume of food each day. We seem to have an innate sense of what quantity we need to feel full and we automatically eat that much. If we eat significantly less than that amount we feel extremely deprived and hungry, significantly more and we feel like piggies.
Since weight loss only happens when you take in fewer calories than you expend, the book tells us that to lose weight we must exercise daily and reduce caloric intake. This should not be news to anyone. No magic bullets, no special foods, no restrictions--cut calories going in and increase calories going out. What is different is Rolls' approach. Since we need to eat the same volume of food to feel satisfied, we must choose our foods so that we can eat the most amount for the least calories. We need to get the most bang for our caloric buck in order to successfully lose weight and keep it off.
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