Ken Babal, staff nutritionist, Erewhon Natural Foods, Los Angeles on the use of nutritional therapy as an alternative treatment for weight loss:
People come to you with issues of weight control. What kinds of things can you do?
Well, we don’t have any magic pill, just like conventional medicine. The basic approach, of course, is looking at calories in, calories out. As far as calories out, the approach is to exercise and turn up the metabolism. That’s going to help with the calories out. For calories in, it’s only natural to want to eat until you’re full and satisfied.
So we want to make sure you’re eating foods that are going to fill you up — whole grains, vegetables, fish, lean protein. We have some supplements that can help with the metabolism as well.
How much are people influenced by the latest fad diet?
(Many people) find these fad diets difficult to follow. Usually they’ll lose the weight in the beginning, and then go back to their old eating habits and put the weight back on. And the weight that we lose sometimes is muscle, unfortunately. And the weight that we put back on almost entirely is fat. So that can be even more damaging.
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