"The Weight Loss Program That Got Better with Time"
The CHIP program may be the most well-published
community-based lifestyle intervention in the medical literature,
and one of the most effective with clinical changes approaching that
achieved in live-in residential lifestyle programs.
Encouraging people to transition towards a more whole food plant-based diet
achieved blood pressure benefits that were greater than those reported
with the DASH diet, and comparable with the results
in blood pressure-lowering drug trials.
If we're going to reverse the worldwide chronic disease epidemic though,
we've got to scale this thing up.
So to make the CHIP program more accessible to a wider audience,
each of Hans Diehl's live presentations were videotaped.
Then you could just have a volunteer facilitator get people in a room
and watch the videos, help foster discussion.
When it comes to safe, simple, side effect free solutions
like a healthier diet and lifestyle,
you don't need to wait for a doctor to show up and give a lecture.
Yeah, but does it work?
Look at these numbers for those that came in,
the worst of the worst, and finished all the videos:
20-point drop in blood pressures, 40-point drop in LDL,
more than a 500-point drop in triglycerides.
Those that came in with diabetic level fasting blood sugars,
about 1 in 3 left with nondiabetic fasting blood sugars,
and all they did was empower people with knowledge.
Just encouraging people to move toward a whole food, plant-based diet
led to these remarkable benefits.
How about the effectiveness of this volunteer-delivered
lifestyle modification program on 5,000 people?
Same kind of significant reductions
in weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugars.
Most studies giving dietary advice to free-living subjects
can be expected to reduce total cholesterol by only about 5%.
But, hey, a sustained reduction of even 1% may result in a 2 to 3% reduction
in the incidence of heart disease,
so on a population scale, even the small differences matter,
but put thousands of people through just one month of CHIP and get an 11% drop
on average, and up to a nearly 20% drop among those who need it the most.
Yeah, but do they maintain their healthy habits?
I mean, doctors can't even get most people
to keep taking a single pill once a day.
How effective is a volunteer-led video series going to be
at getting people to maintain a change of eating habits?
Researchers looked at the CHIP data to find out.
How were participants still doing 18 months later?
Most were able to maintain their reductions of meat, dairy, and eggs,
though some of the junk food started to slip back in,
and their fruit and veggie consumption dipped, though not back to baseline.
But here's the huge shocker.
Even though they were explicitly told to eat as much as they wanted,
no calorie or carb counting, no portion control,
just by being informed about the benefits of centering their diets
more around whole plant foods,
by the end of the six-week program they were eating, on average,
about 339 fewer calories a day without even trying.
Instead of eating less food, they were just eating healthier food.
OK, but that was right at the end of the 6-week program
when they were all jazzed up.
Where were they 18 months later?
Anyone familiar with weight loss studies knows how this works:
you can excite anyone in the short-term to lose weight
using practically any kind of diet.
But then six months later, a year later,
they tend to gain it all back or even more.
Yeah, they were eating about 300 calories less a day during the program,
but 18 months later were only eating about 400 calories less.
Well, wait. What kind of diet can work even better the longer you do it?
A whole food plant-based diet.
Many weight loss programs restrict calorie intake by limiting portion sizes,
which often results in hunger and dissatisfaction,
contributing to low compliance and weight regain,
but the satiety promoting all-you-care-to-eat plant-based
whole food dietary approach may be the secret weapon
towards sustainable weight loss.