The
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iet
Lose Weight and Feel Great Even If
You’re Too Busy to Eat Right
STEPHEN SINATRA, M.D.,
and
JIM PUNKRE
Foreword by Barry Sears, Ph.D.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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The
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The
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.com/go/permissions.
The information contained in this book is not intended to serve as a replacement for pro-
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tion. The author and the publisher specifically disclaim any and all liability arising directly
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Sinatra, Stephen T., date.
The fast food diet : lose weight and feel great even if you’re too busy to eat right /
Stephen Sinatra and James Punkre ; foreword by Barry Sears.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-79047-8 (pbk.)
1. Reducing diets—United States. 2. Weight loss—United States. 3. Convenience
foods—Health aspects—United States. 4. Fast food restaurants—Health aspects—
United States. 5. Food habits—United States. I. Punkre, Jim. II. Title.
RM222.2S555 2006
613.2'5—dc22
2006002082
Printed in the United States of America
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This book is dedicated to the parents of America—and to their
children, who are the hope of our country’s healthy future.

7
The Six-Week Fast-Food Diet 105
8
Fast Food at Home 125
9
The Fast-Food Diet for Kids 151
10
The Fast-Food Diet Vitamins and Supplements 157
11
The Fast-Food Diet for Business Travelers 179
12
The Fast-Food Diet for the Holidays 187
vii
CONTENTS
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13
The Fast-Food Diet for Vegetarians 191
14
The Fast-Food Diet Walking Plan 195
15
The Future of Fast Food 213
Appendix A
The Glycemic Foods Index 221
Appendix B
Low-Calorie Snacks 223
Bibliography 225
Index 229
viii CONTENTS
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To Jim Punkre, who gave me the idea for this book as well as

as well as an unprecedented opportunity. Fast food has been
instrumental in conquering the problem of hunger in America.
A warm meal is now so affordable and abundantly available
that no one in our country should ever have to go hungry. The
challenge the fast-food industry now faces is to make their
meals more nutritious and calorie-conscious to benefit the
health and weight of their customers.
We are eating more fast food in North America than ever
before, and experts say this trend will not only continue but
increase. Time and money constraints will force this upon us.
Soon the lovingly prepared home-cooked meal of yesteryear
will become the rare luxury that today’s four-star restaurant
experience now is. Faced with rising levels of obesity and diet-
related health problems, the fast-food industry must accept the
responsibility of providing more healthful and less fattening
items on their menus. Their customers deserve a real choice. It
is no coincidence that people who rely upon fast food for a sig-
nificant portion of their diet are among the 40 percent of Amer-
icans who have inadequate or no health insurance. This
unfortunate situation is unlikely to change any time soon, so Dr.
FOREWORD
xi
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Sinatra’s solution presented in this book is especially
timely—
and practical.
Dr. Steve Sinatra is one of the top preventive cardiologists
in America. No one has a better understanding of the impor-
tance of food in preventing and reversing cardiovascular disor-
ders and other degenerative diseases. The uniqueness of The

merica is a fast-food nation, for better and for worse.
Consider the typical weekday. The alarm goes off
and the family’s bare feet start hitting the floor immediately.
Everyone’s probably running a little late because they didn’t
get enough sleep. (Americans sleep an average of seven hours
a night, down from nine hours a century ago.) Getting the kids
ready for school requires a Herculean effort: brushing teeth,
washing faces, and digging under the couch for overdue
library books. Time for a quick bowl of cereal? Probably not.
So you rush out the door with an empty stomach. Maybe
you’ll snatch something on the way—or just do without any-
thing to eat until lunch.
This frenetic pace doesn’t let up at work. There’s hardly
such a thing as a lunch “hour” anymore. More likely you’ll
grab food at a take-out joint near the office and wolf it down
on the way to the bank or some other errand. Then it’s back to
1
INTRODUCTION
Get Smarter, Get Slimmer
on Fast Food
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work until quitting time maybe five, six, or seven hours later.
At that point your blood sugar is crashing and the last thing on
your mind is cooking something from scratch. Ravenous and
stressed-out from your day, you point the car to KFC or
Wendy’s or Burger King. You want something fast because
you’re practically starving and there’s still the kids’ homework
to oversee, chores to do, and perhaps a game or your favorite
TV show to catch before crashing into bed.
Fast food is so affordable and plentiful that millions of

ing facts:
■
Type 2 diabetes is three times as common today as it was forty
years ago, mainly because of our increasing weight. The link
between obesity and diabetes is so strong that researchers
have coined a new word, “diabesity,” to describe it.
■ Heart disease remains the leading killer of North Ameri-
cans, largely due to elevated insulin and artery inflamma-
tion, both of which are caused by diets high in sugar and
refined carbohydrates, as well as saturated and trans fats—
the hallmarks of most fast foods.
■ Deaths from breast cancer and prostate cancer in the United
States dwarf the rates in countries where fast food isn’t
popular. Studies show that high-fat foods fuel the growth of
many tumors, acting as a kind of fertilizer.
Just about every life-threatening disease you can name,
from colon cancer and liver disease to hypertension and
stroke, is strongly linked to obesity. Frequent fast-food con-
sumption, with its excessive calories, makes it nearly impossi-
ble for the average person to maintain a healthy weight.
As a doctor, I see the painful effects of this every single day
I go to work. Patients come to my office with arteries so clogged
with fat deposits that blood can barely pass through them. Other
patients have such severe diabetes that their bodies’ own insulin
can no longer transform food calories into energy. As a result,
they live on daily injections, while excess blood sugar remains
in their arteries, corroding them and blocking blood flow to tiny
blood vessels. This frequently leads to blindness, gangrene, and
amputation of their limbs. Still others harbor large cancerous
INTRODUCTION 3

selling us these foods as long as we continue to buy them. And
people will keep buying them until they make the diet-health
connection for themselves. I wrote this book to help more
people make this connection before they (or their kids) get hit
4 THE FAST FOOD DIET
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with a serious health problem and to show people already hit
with one how they can get better by eating better. Make no
mistake—being overweight is an early warning sign of serious
health trouble ahead. No amount of denial or nutritional igno-
rance will ever change that.
Fast food is here to stay. It’s a permanent part of the North
American landscape and lifestyle. It fits our schedule, it fits
our budget, and we love the taste. So what’s the solution? The
only realistic answer to our weight woes is for you and people
like you to get smarter, just like I did. That’s what this book is
all about.
In the pages ahead, you’re going to learn how to lose weight
and improve your health simply by making small, smart
changes in your current eating habits—whether you’re dining
at home or ordering fast food. Yes, you really can lose weight
and become healthier without giving up fast food!
Over the years, we’ve seen a bunch of weight-loss diets come
and go: low-fat . . . low-carb . . . high-protein . . . vegetarian
. . . plus many others. Yet today, Americans weigh more than
ever. These approaches have not succeeded for three reasons.
(1) They are difficult to understand and hard to follow. (2) Most
require you to completely change your eating patterns.
(3) Many have “rules” to obey and “taboo foods” to avoid. The
Fast-Food Diet has none of these obstacles. It’s easy to under-

avoiding today’s plague of degenerative diseases. What you put
in your mouth determines whether you’ll live long or die young.
The greatest tragedy is that the medical conditions created
by consuming so much are so unnecessary. If we ate just a
few calories less at each meal and managed to be a bit more
physically active every day, most of these health problems
could be avoided or reversed. Experts have found that losing
just 10 percent of our current body weight is all that it takes
to turn many of these ills around and to increase our life span
significantly.
Hippocrates, the first physician and the father of modern
medicine, put it aptly more than two thousand years ago when
he told his patients, “Let food be thy medicine.” As a cardiol-
ogist and certified nutrition specialist (CNS), I can tell you that
6 THE FAST FOOD DIET
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eating healthier food is going to be the salvation of tens of
thousands—if not millions—of North Americans over the next
decade. The demand for safer foods is not a fad; it’s a trend.
And it will grow even stronger as more people discover the
profound truth that you are what you eat. In a perfect world,
we’d all be much healthier and live a lot longer and better eat-
ing chemical-free organic food and less red meat, sugar, and
fats. But ours, of course, is not a perfect world, so I’m offering
a realistic compromise in this book that, if followed, will pro-
duce a significant improvement in your health and weight.
Not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods or prepare
healthy, home-cooked meals for their families every night.
But anyone can easily learn how to make smarter choices, no
matter where they eat—even in fast-food restaurants!

works” was fifteen cents!) Today, I’m a cardiologist and my
job is fixing some of that artery damage I handed out in my
teens.
But don’t think this is another one of those fire-and-
brimstone sermons about the evils of fast food. It isn’t. Nutri-
tionists and health experts have been condemning fast food for
the last decade or so, and it hasn’t made much of a difference.
9
CHAPTER 1
The 80/20 Rule
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America still leads the world in obesity, in heart attacks, in
diabetes, and in cancer. It’s time for a different approach and a
more practical strategy.
So if you consider yourself a fast-food junkie—or you just
can’t imagine life without McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, or Taco
Bell (even though you probably know it’s not doing your fig-
ure much good)—this book has some good news for you. It
isn’t going to scold or shame you. And it won’t try to get you
to forsake your fast-food habits. Instead, it’s going to help you
accomplish something revolutionary. Something that the
health experts and weight-loss gurus say is impossible: to lose
weight and improve your health while eating at the fast-food
restaurants you’ve come to love.
Lose weight on fast food? Oh yes, it’s possible.
We all know the story of Jared Fogel, the Indiana University
student who once tipped the scales at 425 pounds. After trying
(and failing at) numerous diets, he settled on a radical plan:
two Subway submarine sandwiches a day—a six-inch turkey
sub for lunch and a twelve-inch Veggie Delite for dinner. After

going to. And that’s fine—because there’s absolutely nothing
wrong with enjoying a Big Mac, a side of fries, or a shake
once in a while.
I’m a big fan of the 80/20 Rule. I believe that if you’re eat-
ing right about 80 percent of the time, it’s okay to splurge the
other 20 percent. The biggest reason most diet and exercise
plans fail is that they’re too rigid. They may work for a week
or two, but sooner or later everyone gets tired of following the
rules—and, rebels that we are, we break them. But the 80/20
Rule is one you can follow for life, because it gives you room
to take a break. That’s why the Fast-Food Diet succeeds.
Want proof? Medical studies show that people who are rigid
and obsessive about losing weight—you know, the folks who
count every carb, eat only special foods, never have dessert,
gulp handfuls of vitamin pills and supplements, and so on—
fail far more often than people who take a more balanced and
flexible approach. The only thing being rigid is good for is
making you feel bad about yourself when you slip. And that’s
a lousy way to succeed at anything.
THE 80/20 RULE 11
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