Automatic weight loss: Women’s World review of the Setpoint Diet

Do you think automatic weight loss is impossible? We don’t blame you. Like everyone else, you’ve probably been taught — and know from your own experience — that losing weight is hard. There is nothing easy or automatic about it.

To lose weight, the “experts” tell you, you have to really work at it. You have to count the calories of every food you eat or think of eating while exercising like crazy. You also have to…well…starve yourself. Starvation is the only way you’ll be able to force your body to burn fat, the “experts” also tell you. (By starvation, we mean dropping your calorie intake below what your body needs.)

What these “experts” never really tell you is that starving your way to slim never keeps you slim. Everyone who has ever gone on a starvation-type diet knows this to be true. How many times have you lost 20 or 30 pounds, only to gain it all back plus a dozen more pounds after you go off the diet? Probably too many times to count. Right?

Well…that was then. Today is a new day. Hundreds of thousands of people have achieved automatic weight loss by following the simple plan outlined in The Setpoint Diet book. The plan is so effective that Woman’s World magazine featured the setpoint diet as their success story of the week. Woman’s World not only details the diet, but it also tells the stories of three women who used the setpoint diet to achieve automatic weight loss.

One of them, 80-year-old Jean Simmons, was living in a nursing home when she discovered Jonathan Bailor’s Setpoint Diet. Wanting to experience automatic weight loss, she asked the nursing home staff for help in increasing the vegetables and protein in her diet. Within five months, she dropped 50 pounds, regained her strength, and left the nursing home.

Today Jean is physically active, healthy, and happy. Jean’s story is not unique. The automatic weight loss that she and hundreds of thousands of people have experienced can also be yours.

The Setpoint Diet way to automatic weight loss

The Setpoint Diet differs from other diets in that it is based on solid science. For more than 15 years, Jonathan Bailor painstakingly analyzed hundreds of peer-reviewed, double-blind clinical research studies regarding the metabolism and the causes of weight gain/loss. (Double-blind studies are when neither the participants nor the experimenters know who is given a certain treatment. Double-blind studies help prevent biased research results and are thus considered the highest standard in clinical research trials.)

Jonathan’s 15+ year research odyssey was prompted by more than just idle curiosity. To pay his way through college, the naturally thin Jonathan had gotten a job as a personal trainer at a popular gym. His job was to help his clients lose weight, yet he was less than successful (to put it mildly.)

Jonathan’s failure…

Day by day, his clients — smart, professional, ambitious, health-conscious men and women — told him they were not losing the amount of weight they should be losing. They were frustrated, becoming more so each time he told them they needed to “give it time.” And like a good personal trainer, he gave them advice, too. They needed to work harder, he told them. Eat less and exercise more. After all, for as long as anyone can remember, that’s what the “experts” have always said is necessary for weight loss. That principle was a central part of Jonathan’s training as a personal trainer.

While Jonathan was telling his clients to work harder, he was downing shots of olive oil to try to gain weight. One day, while he was taking his daily shot of olive oil, Jonathan had an epiphany. What if, he thought, some muscular guy was looking at him, thinking that if he only tried harder, he’d be able to gain weight and build muscle?

And his “automatic weight loss” breakthrough

In that instant, Jonathan realized he and his clients were in the same boat. He couldn’t gain weight, and they couldn’t lose it. And they were both getting sicker and more unhappy by the day trying something that obviously didn’t work.

Jonathan quit his job as a personal trainer because he couldn’t bear hurting his clients anymore with the advice he now knew was incorrect. But it ignited a passion in him to discover the truth that he — and almost everyone else — had been denied.

Hoping for direction on how to proceed, Jonathan turned to his parents, both college professors. They told him that the failure with weight gain/loss he and his clients were experiencing was likely an information problem. They advised him to consult primary research studies to find out what science says about metabolism and weight issues.

Thus began his long research journey. And what he discovered shocked him. Nothing, absolutely nothing he had been taught about weight gain/loss, was true. Nothing.

It’s not about calories.

One of the biggest “untruths” Jonathan discovered is weight gain, and loss is not about the number of calories you take in or exercise off. It’s not about intentionally creating a calorie deficit. Rather, your weight is controlled by your setpoint.

In simple terms, setpoint weight is the level of stored fat the body works to maintain by regulating your appetite and metabolism through your hormones, genes, and brain. If you want to know your setpoint weight, just look at the number on the scale. That’s the number your weight hovers around, within a range of about 10-15 pounds. Your setpoint weight has little to do with the number of calories you consume.

It works like this: your brain, digestive system, and hormones communicate with each other through several feedback loops to synchronize the activities that automatically maintain body fat and blood sugar at a specific level, otherwise known as your setpoint.

A good way to understand the biological feedback system that establishes your setpoint is to think of it like the thermostat in your house. Because of the thermostat, your heating or air-conditioning system responds to the weather outside and keeps your home at whatever temperature the thermostat “thinks” it should be at. Similarly, your setpoint stimulates or suppresses your appetite and raises or lowers your metabolism in response to how much fat it “thinks” you should store.

Why starvation diets fail

When you look at it this way, do you see how counterproductive it is to go on the latest starvation diet to try to shed some pounds? The minute you slash calories, a metabolic alarm goes off, letting your body know you’re not eating as much as you normally do. What happens then? You become ravenously hungry because the levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin are increased, courtesy of the hypothalamus in the brain.

Meanwhile, your metabolism slows down to conserve calories, so you don’t starve to death, and your body sends most of the calories you do consume to your fat cells. This is because, during a famine, which your body thinks you are in, excess body fat is essential for survival. To help conserve these fat stores, your body also starts burning muscle for energy, further slowing the metabolism.

Yes, you will lose weight on a starvation-type diet. But weight loss primarily comes from water and muscle. As soon as you go off the diet, you gain it back because your metabolism is now slower than it was before you began the diet…and because your body overreacts to the starvation period and raises your setpoint weight.

The only way to lose weight long-term is to lower your setpoint weight.

Setpoint weight, automatic weight loss, and the importance of high-quality calories

The big problem with most weight loss diets is that they practice the calorie deficit theory of weight loss, which treats all calories the same. That is, if you reduce the number of calories consumed by a certain amount, you will lose a certain amount of weight. And it doesn’t matter where those calories come from.

According to the calorie deficit theory of weight loss, if you want to eat a nutritious diet composed primarily of non-starchy veggies, protein, and whole-food fats, that’s fine. As long as you do not exceed, say, 1,500 calories per day. On the other hand, if you want to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the fast food restaurant down the street, that’s fine, too. As long as you stay within your limit of 1,500 calories per day.

Automatic weight loss: why a calorie is not the same as every other calorie

Science shows, however, that this is just not true. Calories vary greatly in their effect on the body depending on the foods from which they come. Some foods, such as protein and non-starchy vegetables, are digested slowly, keeping blood glucose levels steady. This prevents weight gain (or promotes weight loss.) In other words, these foods support a low setpoint weight.

Other foods, such as grains and sugar, are quickly converted into glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream. This causes a spike in blood sugar levels, triggering a release of insulin that is needed to shuttle the excess glucose to your cells. Insulin, though, is also a fat-storage hormone. Eating a regular diet of sugar, starchy carbs, and processed foods demand the almost constant presence of insulin in your bloodstream. Insulin will shuttle most of the glucose to your fat cells.

This means that your non-fat cells are not getting fed. That’s bad news. Before long, your non-fat cells signal to the brain that they’re starving. Even though you may be eating plenty of food, your brain doesn’t know that. It thinks you need more food, so it elevates your setpoint weight.

Do you see how the difference in the quality of the calories you consume affects your body and your weight?

Autopilot weight loss? Your setpoint will handle it.

While it is true that a calorie deficit is necessary for weight loss, it is not your job to create that deficit. Rather, your body is perfectly capable of burning off a tremendous amount of excess calories without you even breaking a sweat. It actually increases the calorie burn of several metabolic processes while also regulating your calorie intake automatically to keep you within range of your setpoint weight.

Once you lower your setpoint weight, your body will take care of the rest. But how do you lower your setpoint weight? You do this by eating high-quality calories.

How high-quality calories trigger automatic weight loss

As Women’s World points out in the article, high-quality calories are loaded with nutrients that steady blood sugar and reduce inflammation. As a result, your cravings for foods that spike blood sugar levels and cause inflammation diminishes. This lowers setpoint weight. No willpower or struggle or calorie counting is required.

And it’s incredibly easy to do. The Women’s World article gives sample menus for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. But you don’t have to follow a particular menu. All you need to do is keep a few basic principles in mind.

4 dietary principles that trigger automatic weight loss

Here are a few principles that lower setpoint weight and trigger automatic weight loss.

1. Focus on eating MORE setpoint-lowering foods

Foods proven to lower setpoint weight include non-starchy vegetables, high-quality protein, and whole-food fats.

When you focus on eating more setpoint-lowering foods, you will automatically eat fewer foods that raise setpoint weight. If you do that, you’ll automatically follow this next principle.

2. Reduce or eliminate heavily processed foods.

Instead, focus on eating foods in their natural states as much as possible. This means choosing vegetables that you could have grown yourself (fresh or frozen) without artificial flavorings, preservatives, or chemicals. Choose lean meats (fresh or frozen) that contain no added preservatives or other ingredients. Bread and cereals, even whole grain ones, are not in their natural states because there is no such thing as a bread or cereal tree. These foods undergo extensive processing before they arrive at the supermarket.

3. Shop the perimeter of the supermarket

The center of the supermarket is where you’ll find all the processed foods. These foods can be awfully tempting, especially when you’re first starting out with the setpoint diet. To avoid temptation, try to stay close to the interior walls of the supermarket. This is where you’ll find meats, poultry, vegetables, fruits, and dairy. (Dairy is not a big part of the setpoint diet, but we do recommend plain nonfat Greek yogurt and cottage cheese because of their high protein content.)

4. Focus on all the delicious SANE foods you CAN Eat

Most diets you’ve tried probably told you what you couldn’t have. Of course, all this does is make you focus on what you can’t have. This causes you to crave those forbidden foods, and before long, you give in to those cravings. It’s time to change that. Instead of focusing on what you can’t have, focus on all the delicious SANE foods you CAN have. When you do this, you’re brain and eyes will automatically seek out all the setpoint-lowering foods at the supermarket. Foods that you barely noticed before will be front-and-center in your attention focus on the SANE foods you can have. Try it and see!

Ready for automatic weight loss? Try the Setpoint Diet

There is so much information about metabolism, setpoint, and automatic weight loss in The Setpoint Diet book that we couldn’t possibly include all of it in this article. However, we couldn’t end this article without covering one more thing — the 4 basic food groups of the setpoint diet.

Non-starchy vegetables

10+ servings per day

Consuming at least 10 servings of non-starchy vegetables per day is a central component of the setpoint diet. You can reach 10 servings by including a little more than 3 servings of non-starchy veggies with each meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner.)

You don’t even have to count servings. Simply fill half your plate with non-starchy veggies at each main meal. Or, whip up nutritious setpoint-lowering green smoothies using a couple of servings of green leafy veggies as a base. Put these green leafies in a high-powered blender, add a couple of servings of other (preferably green) veggies, a serving of low-sugar fruit (if desired), and water or almond milk. Blend until smooth.

Great non-starchy vegetable choices include:

• Asparagus
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Eggplant
• Endive
• Kale
• Spinach

Nutrient-dense protein

3-5 servings per day, 30-55 grams per main meal.

Nutrient-dense or concentrated sources of protein are foods that have more calories coming from protein than from fat or carbohydrates.

Eating at least 30 grams of protein at one sitting is essential for triggering muscle protein synthesis, a condition in which the body refreshes and renews lean tissue. This rebuilds muscle, increasing metabolism.

A single serving of protein is about as large as two of your palms, whether it is in the form of lean meat, cottage cheese, or nonfat Greek yogurt. But don’t get hung up on measuring serving sizes. All you need to do is fill up a third of your plate with nutrient-dense protein. This should ensure you get 30-55 grams of protein.

Great nutrient-dense protein options include:

• Chicken
• Cottage Cheese
• Grass-Fed Beef
• Oysters
• Perch
• Plain, nonfat Greek yogurt
• Salmon
• Tuna

Whole-food fats

3-6 servings per day

Contrary to popular belief, eating fat does not cause you to get fat or develop heart disease. Dietary fat is an essential nutrient. The key is to eat whole-food versions of healthy fats, not just their oils. For instance, eating olives is better than consuming olive oil because the whole food (olives) contains fiber, water, protein, and other nutrients that help to lower setpoint weight.

Cooking with a little healthy oil is fine, though we recommend using coconut oil rather than olive oil for cooking. This is because olive oil has a low “smoke point,” meaning that it starts to burn and smoke at high temperatures. This not only gives a burnt taste to foods, but it also destroys beneficial nutrients.

Fill the remainder of your plate with whole-food fats. Some great whole-fat food options include:

• Almonds
• Avocado
• Chia Seeds
• Cocoa/Cacao
• Coconut
• Whole Eggs
• Flax Seeds
• Olives

Low-fructose fruits

0-3 servings per day

The setpoint diet includes low-fructose fruits for those who prefer fruit occasionally. However, you do not have to eat any fruit — ever. Anything fruit can do, non-starchy veggies can do with a lot less sugar!

Some low-fructose fruit options include:

• Blueberries
• Cherries
• Goji Berries
• Grapefruit
• Lemons
• Oranges
• Peaches
• Strawberries

The Setpoint Diet: Your key to automatic weight loss

Are you ready to experience automatic weight loss like the women featured in the Women’s World article? Click here to order The Setpoint Diet book today!