When my Rebels start to tell their friends, family, and co-workers that they’ve joined the Code Red Lifestyle™, opinions start coming out of the woodwork.
Some people want to know more because they’re interested in joining. Some people cheer my Rebels on and encourage them, even if they aren’t (yet) interested in changing their eating habits.
And some people turn out to be naysayers. Their remarks range from “Is is really safe to drink that much water” (the answer is yes) to “Oh, that Code Red’s just a fad diet.”
(How anyone can view eating real food, drinking water, and sleeping as a “fad” is beyond me. Probably people who haven’t bothered to look into the program.)
I define a diet as a temporary change you make in order to lose weight, before returning to the same food and eating habits that got you fat and sick in the first place. It’s the diet mentality, plain and simple.
You’ll notice I call my program the Code Red Lifestyle™, not the Code Red “diet.”
It’s because Code Red is not just about the foods you eat. It’s about eating real food, drinking water, sleeping, and taking care of yourself in every way. It’s not a “temporary change,” even if some people starting out choose to see it that way because society hits us over the head with the diet mentality.
But if you’re not convinced, Google “definition of fad diet” and you’ll get all kinds of stuff about what constitutes a “fad diet.”
Wikipedia, for example, offers the following definition:
“A fad diet is a diet that is popular for a time, similar to fads in fashion. Fad diets usually promise rapid weight loss or other health advantages, such as longer life. They are often promoted as requiring little effort and producing a “quick fix”. In many cases, the diet is characterized by highly restrictive or unusual food choices, which can cause serious health problems.”
Seriously. Go read the whole thing. Read the other stuff that pops up in those search results!
Some of it’s clearly not Code Red, such as the part about quick fixes.
There’s no such thing as a quick fix to your weight problem.
And then there’s the part that mentions “restrictive food choices?”
My Rebels can find the foods we eat anywhere, whether it’s a business lunch, a truck stop in Illinois, or on vacation in a foreign country. That doesn’t sound restrictive to me.
On the Code Red Lifestyle™, we eat meat, nuts, vegetables, eggs, seeds, seafood, and healthy fat. You’ll see there’s no mention of so-called “healthy whole grains” and fruit. (In weight loss mode I a few types of berries, but that’s it.) And no mention of sugar, soy, gluten, grains, chemicals, preservatives, and so on.
Since most of the Standard American Diet (SAD) people are used to eating revolves around grains, sugar, chemicals, soy, gluten, and preservatives, the way we eat on Code Red might seem “restrictive,” depending on what you’re used to eating. Once you make the adjustment, there’s a whole new world of food out there.
Other parts of the various “fad diet” definitions DO have elements that you feel may sound similar to the Code Red Lifestyle™.
For example, the part that insists eating lower than the 2,000 calories a “healthy adult” needs, regardless of their age, gender, height, weight, and so on…and regardless of the quality of those calories.
So 2,000 calories of candy and soda’s all good? A calorie is calorie? Calories in, calories out?
Not in my experience, or I wouldn’t have been a fat athlete with IBS before I created the Code Red Lifestyle™.
Lower in the Wikipedia article there’s another section purporting to be the mainstream view of “healthy eating,” that says to “eat less, move more,” and to just “go easy” on the junk food.
There are millions of Americans who are following, or who have followed, that “mainstream” advice, and either stayed fat and sick, or didn’t lose as much weight as they needed to.
“Eat less, move more” doesn’t work if you’re not eating the right foods. And exercise, though it has a million benefits, isn’t required for weight loss, or my wheelchair-bound Rebels like Holly Ann Bergen and Yvette Price wouldn’t have been able to lose 57.6 pounds and 82 pounds (respectively) with zero exercise.
Exercise certainly doesn’t cancel out bullcrap food choices, or there wouldn’t be so many fat athletes.
There’s also a part in the “mainstream” view of healthy eating that says to eat foods as close to their natural state as possible, and eat mostly plants.
THAT statement actually aligns with the Code Red Lifestyle™.
I eat meat and let my Rebels eat meat, because eliminating sugar and grains, drinking water, and sleeping, has helped thousands of my Rebels lose weight, even if they still eat meat. For that reason, I don’t take them off meat.
Plus, eliminating meat without understanding how to eat so you get your nutrients from plants can be dangerous.
But eating plenty of plant-based foods is essential for optimum health.
So, is the Code Red Lifestyle™ a “fad diet?”
Of course my answer is heck no. I hate “diets.”
Plus, so many of my Rebels report, in addition to weight loss, that their doctor taking them off medication, their blood sugar returning to normal levels, increased energy, and that they’re no longer experiencing pain, it’s hard to argue that they’d experience those benefits from a “fad diet.”
But if you’re still unsure, talk to Code Red Rebels. View the success stories section of my website.
Heck, find some haters and grill them about it.
Use your brain and get as many perspectives as you can.
Better yet, try it for yourself before making any judgments.
Society’s “mainstream” views of health that are pretty off-base, but because they’re mainstream, we blindly accept them, and anything that contradicts them is automatically labeled a “fad diet.”
At the same time, a lot of gimmicks and “snake oil” weight loss solutions exploit that, as well as our love of quick fixes, to convince us that their bull crap product is that “magic answer we’ve been waiting for.”
I believe in my program with 100% confidence. So do thousands of my Rebels.
But don’t take my word, or theirs, or even society’s.
Instead, decide for yourself.