The eye surgeons who’ve seen the future of dieting
After years treating the side-effects of obesity, two doctors sought the root of the problem. Their solution? The radical ‘whisper plan’ that could change your life and, shhh, you can still eat a juicy burger
MOST Saturday nights, former eye surgeons Dr Paul Barrington Chell and Dr Monique Hope-Ross sit down to a full curry banquet with poppadoms, onion bhajis and naan bread.
The feast at the kitchen table in their timber-framed house will be washed down with a bottle of fine red wine.
The next morning they might fry up a substantial cooked breakfast of three eggs and four rashers of bacon each, plus fried cherry tomatoes and mushrooms dripping in butter. It hardly sounds like the meal plan of two health-conscious diet experts — but this married couple are convinced they have discovered a simple blueprint for long-term weight loss that allows them to enjoy hugely calorific ‘treat meals’ without gaining pounds.
Now they have written a book, The Diet-Whisperer, which sets out their radical plan. It’s all about gently nudging the hormones that govern hunger and fat storage into a super-efficient fat-burning mode which allows you to swiftly offset the evils of indulgent eating with a short period of fasting.
No need for calorie-counting or strenuous exercise but, they say, the promise of excellent health and rejuvenation. Plus, as jaw-dropping as it sounds, they claim that when you have those hunger hormones on your side, you can
fast for days without feeling hungry. Paul and Monique designed a 12-week regimen which acts as a short, sharp shock to your metabolism.
At the end of this time, your body will have turned into such an efficient fat-burning machine that you can enjoy a huge roast dinner (with roasties and Yorkshire pudding) and half a bottle of wine, or perhaps an oozing burger or a meaty pizza washed down with a bottle or two of beer, twice a week if you like — all without worrying about your waistline.
Their advice goes against everything you were probably taught about ‘healthy eating’. But it is backed by swathes of compelling research. And when you look at this slim and active couple — he is 58, she is 60 — it does make you wonder whether they are on to something.
Paul and Monique met at medical school, married 25 years ago and enjoyed successful 35-year careers as eye doctors.
Paul worked as a consultant ophthalmic surgeon specialising in cataracts and corneal transplants; Monique worked as a consultant surgeon at hospitals in London, New York and Birmingham, while also lecturing at the University of Birmingham, specialising in diseases of the retina.
Over the years they noticed that a growing number of their patients were experiencing eye problems as a result of obesity or diet-related type 2 diabetes, since uncontrolled blood-sugar levels can lead to damage to blood vessels in the body, including the tiny capillaries in the eyes.
Although these patients were hugely motivated to lose weight to save their sight, they just couldn’t stick to their diets.
‘We would pass on all the recommended advice about eating low-fat foods, increasing exercise and cutting back on calories. But we were confounded by the fact that so many of our patients found lasting weight-loss impossible to sustain,’ says Monique.
They started to investigate the latest nutritional research and became fascinated by the apparent power of human hormones and the role they play in our hunger cravings and whether we put on fat or burn it off.
By 2016 it was clear that obesity had become what Paul calls ‘a runaway train’ and the pair made the brave decision to quit frontline medicine to focus their efforts on prevention instead.
‘We could see that rising obesity levels were having an impact on every department of the hospitals we worked at, and we realised we could do more good if we focused on prevention,’ says Paul. They threw themselves into researching the mechanics of metabolism and the workings of the various appetite hormones to try to work out why traditional weight-loss diets so often fail.
The hormones in question include insulin — the major hormone responsible for building up your fat stores — and the hunger/ satiety hormones ghrelin and leptin, as well as a hormone responsible for melting body fat called glucagon.
Through testing their theories on former patients, friends and themselves, they found a solution in a pattern of eating that works with the body’s nutritional hormones rather than against them — ‘whispering’, not shouting.
They are now convinced that the Diet-Whispering plan offers a timely, if dramatic, solution for anyone carrying a little or a lot of excess weight and those who are concerned that their bulging waistline might increase their risk of complications if they should catch Covid-19.
WHY DID WE ALL BECOME SO FAT?
LIKE a hybrid car that runs on petrol or electricity, we run on a duel-fuel system, burning fats (from food or our own fat stores) or carbohydrates. A healthy body should be able to switch easily between the two.
Although our ancestors ran almost exclusively on fats, because our diet is now mostly carbohydrate-based, we have adapted to burn sugars for fuel. That means our system is flooded with insulin, which manages our blood-sugar levels and diligently stores any excess as tough-to-shift fat.
‘If you want to lose weight, you have to reduce your insulin,’ explains Paul. ‘To burn fat, you must have periods during the day and night when there is no insulin running through your veins.’ But when you live on a carb-based diet, you are at the mercy of your hormones
Their advice goes against everything you might have been taught about ‘healthy eating’ but is backed by science