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Dr. Bowden: My name is Dr. Jonny Bowden. I'm a board-certified nutritionist. I also have
a master's degree in psychology. I've written 14 books, and my passion is helping people
feel good about themselves and having a great life. Unleash Your Thin is our first diet
program ever in 14 books of writing about diets and telling people how to make sense
of diet programs and what makes sense and what doesn't and what's a myth and what isn't.
It's the first time that I've actually put a program together with my own name on it.
What it does that's a little bit different than any other diet program I've ever done
or that I've ever seen is that it looks at an aspect of weight loss that tends to get
neglected in a lot of the other programs. See, people don't do what they're supposed
to do, not because they don't have the information. I have never met a person in my life who was
smoking cigarettes because they didn't get the memo about lung cancer. I've never met
someone and said to them, "Do you know those things cause cancer?" and they go, "My God.
Nobody ever told me," and they take their Marlboros and throw them out. So clearly,
there's another aspect to this. Most people know what they need to do to accomplish
anything, whether it's stopping smoking, losing weight, getting healthy, going to college,
getting a divorce. They know what the steps are. What stops them is some belief that they
can't accomplish this. Some other thing gets in the way, and what Unleash Your Thin does,
it spends at least one-third of the time talking about that other thing. What stops you from
doing what you know would really work for you and get you where you want to go?
In the case of food, it has a lot to do with addiction. We're addicted to food. We're addicted
to the foods that make us that tired, sick, and depressed. These foods have been engineered
in very clever ways. Scientists actually overlay these foods with precise layers of the types
of things, like salt, fat, and sugar, that literally light up our brain chemistry and
get our dopamine neurons firing so that we feel craving and we feel we have to have these
foods. Will power really only goes so far with that. Will power is kind of ... It'll
get you so far, but it's kind of like holding onto a ledge with your fingernails. Eventually,
you're going to let go. What we do in Unleash Your Thin is we talk
about why these foods have the kind of hold they have over us, why when you walk into
a food court and you smell a Cinnabon, you must have it. You cannot say no to it, or
it's very hard to say no to it. We work on those kinds of associations that we have to
food that make them addictive. We try to break that down and actually reprogram our brain
so that we are not the victim of these cravings, but instead, have some mastery over them.
Everybody has different trigger foods, so rather than just give a list of these are
the foods you should never eat, which, by the way, we do, but for most people there
are certain foods that are like their triggers foods. You just can't say no to these. These
are the ones that are just going to derail you no matter what. We do a lot of individual
work in Unleash Your Thin where people actually identify what those foods are for them. What
are the foods they can't say no to? We talk a lot about things like wheat and grains,
which are bad for a lot of people, but not for everybody. We're not big believers in
the one-size-fits-all theory on any aspect of diet.
What we try to do in Unleash Your Thin is actually have people, through journaling and
through keeping notes on how they're affected by different foods, discover which foods are
really the ones that are derailing their whole program. Then they can take those foods out.
If those foods really are not problems for them, then we have a template, an infrastructure,
that figures out how you can add those back and in what amounts. So you're very, very
carefully actually doing kind of a science experiment with yourself as the subject to
find out what foods actually fit and forward the action in terms of getting you where you
want to go and which foods are guaranteed to derail the action and take you exactly
where you don't want to be. See, people have been victimized by the conventional
wisdom, which is both not really conventional when you look at the long range and certainly
not wise, which is that weight loss is simply a matter of calories and exercise. We eat
too much, and we don't move enough. That's the conventional wisdom. It's been passed
down for ages. Everybody believes it, including obese people, and they think that if they're,
in fact, fat, it's because they don't exercise enough and they eat too much. That has a germ
of truth, but you could drive a Mack truck through the hole that's missing in there.
What's missing in there is that there's a ton of people who aren't eating a lot, and
they're on the treadmill all the time, and they're not losing weight. It's wrong to tell
those people it's their fault, that they're doing something wrong. What we do in Unleash
is try to really get at what those foods are that create those cravings that are so irresistible.
A lot of people have the wrong information about what's a healthy breakfast. I meet people
on a daily basis who say, "I do everything right. I'm eating the right foods." You say
to them, "Well, what are those foods? What did you eat for breakfast?" They go, "I ate
the greatest breakfast. I had Special K and orange juice and toast and a banana, and it's
all low fat." No, it's the precisely wrong breakfast if you're trying to lose weight,
so we need to correct that information, but we also need to do something about the programming
of the brain that causes you to crave the very foods that derail your program, and that’s
what we do in Unleash Your Thin. What we did with Unleash Your Thin is we looked
around and we said, "What really keeps people on a path?" A lot of people get very inspired.
We're good at inspiring people, and we're very happy that we're good at inspiring people,
but that's not all we want to do is inspire them to take action for a couple of weeks.
We want to actually inspire them to change their lives, and that takes some continuity.
What we've learned from the internet and from Facebook and from Twitter is that social media
and social connection and some interaction like that is very powerful reinforcement for
people, so we built a community, and we built it as a membership site.
What we're hoping is that it will become the go-to health-membership site, not just for
people who are into health, but people who are into performance and real estate and flipping
houses and all the other communities that exist on the internet where people go, "This
is working for me, but now how about taking care of my health, as well?" We want to be
the health place that everybody goes to, so we have hired one of the smartest MDs I've
ever worked with in my life. There's me. There's a couple of nutritionists that I hired that
are first rate. We've got the group that we have that's built the site, and we want to
be the go-to place where people can actually get the kind of health information that's
going to make a difference in their lives forever. That's the purpose of Ultimate Brain,
Ultimate Body, and that's the theory behind the membership site. So far, I've got to say,
I've been involved in a lot of projects in my life, nothing that I've been prouder of
than this.