The Golden Gate Diet

The Golden Gate Diet is a medically sound way to lose weight. It is based on the experiences of my patients and on the scientific literature.

I am a physician with expertise in nutrition, and my patients want to know two things from me. First, they want to know what foods will cause them to lose weight. Second, they want to know what foods are healthy to eat. By healthy foods, I mean foods that prevent disease or at least do not cause disease. That is, foods that prevent heart disease and foods that prevent cancer.

These are separate problems. Certainly many foods that will cause you to lose weight are healthy. But there are also foods that will cause you to lose weight but will cause heart disease. And there are even some foods—for example, nuts—that will cause you to gain weight but are so effective at preventing heart disease that you should eat them anyway. And, of course, there are many foods that cause you to gain weight and are very unhealthy.

So this book answers two questions:

How do I lose weight?

What foods do I eat to stay healthy?

How do you lose weight? The key to losing weight is eating foods with a low “caloric density.”

Now this book is not hard to understand. You don’t need to know any math to follow this diet. I have done all the math for you.

As you will see, if you eat foods with a low caloric density, you will lose weight. If you eat foods with a high caloric density, you will gain weight. The caloric density of any food is a number—and that number is listed in the charts in chapter 9.

If the caloric density is less than 2, eat the food, it will help you lose weight. The lower the number, the better.

If the caloric density is between 2 and 3, go easy.

If the caloric density is greater than 3, in general you should eat very little of that food—it will cause you to gain weight.