Article: There was a time that...

There was a time that I only counseled competitive, elite athletes. With my knowledge, training and experience I could help them push out the walls of performance: giving them the extra strength and energy to reach the goal line in the last few minutes of a championship game, or helping push out the walls of time and distance performance during an Olympic trial or event. With all the years of experience and the hundreds of athletes that I worked with, it became very clear that even the most elite and fit of athletes can't perform if they're depressed. It doesn't matter how fast you can run or how high you can jump if you can't get out of bed in the morning.

So ten years ago I started to combine the science of how food effects the brain with the state of the art in sports nutrition. And I started including more everyday people as clients in my practice. That was the conception of The Good Mood Diet (although I didn't know it at the time), and over the years the results have been astounding. Today there isn't a client that I work with who doesn't call me within a week of starting their plan and say "I feel better than I've ever felt in my life!"

As a scientist, I wanted to make sure that people who would read a book that I would write would get similar benefits as my private clients. How could I know whether it was my contact with them, or the fact that they had a customized diet that was making all the difference, rather than the diet itself? I decided to run a test. With the help of the publisher of the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the health columnist, Bob Condor, I ran a 12 week public diet group in the newspaper. The group members were selected by the paper. They were interviewed and photographed, and their progress followed à la "reality TV". We began the program on January 1st, during the dark days of winter in Seattle.

My goal was to set it up to fail, with true scientific strategies in mind. I had one hour of contact with the group to give them an introduction to the philosophy of the program. I gave them a 50-pg booklet of the core of the diet plan, a log book and a pedometer, and they were on their own. We had one meeting again with only half the group at a local supermarket so that I could give them a tour of how to shop the aisles to support the program. Bob Condor followed their progress, and the results were amazing. Just like my private clients, the members of the group switched from talking about what they weighed to talking about how they felt within the first week or two on the plan. Everyone was happier, had more energy, better mental focus, coped with stress better, and they all lost weight. One year later, unaware that they would be contacted for a follow-up article by Bob, they were still all following the plan, and felt that it had changed their lives.

I was convinced, and The Good Mood Diet was born. It's all about how you feel, not about what you weigh. You can feel great while you lose weight!

copyright© 2006 by Susan Kleiner.