Please enjoy this recent article in the Burlington County Times written by Jason Harris.

His diet advice? Cheating is OK

By JASON HARRIS
phillyBurbs.com

BURLINGTON TOWNSHIP — Joel Marion, a gym teacher at Burlington Township High School, hit upon his preferred method to lose weight quite by accident in 2002.

That bit of good luck, combined with five years of research, lead to Marion's first book, “The Cheat to Lose Diet.”

Marion was an undergrad at The College of New Jersey at the time, studying exercise science and health education. He was also dieting and training hard with the goal of getting into the best shape of his life, but he reached a point where the needle on the scale just wouldn't budge.

“About three weeks into the diet, I stopped progressing,” he said. “I hit a wall.”

So he did what any frustrated dieter would do: He started cheating. To his surprise, it worked.

“I lost more fat that week than I did in the three weeks previous,” he said.

Marion began studying metabolism and the body's defenses against starvation to understand why he lost weight after indulging in the kinds of high-carbohydrate foods that are usually forbidden to those trying to lose weight. He eventually concluded that the conventional wisdom about weight loss — eat less, exercise more — doesn't work.

“The commonsense approach, when it comes to dieting, doesn't work,” he said. “Dieting works against your body.”

What Marion figured out is that one has to trick the body in order to lose weight. The best way to do that, he says, is to allow a “cheat day” where the dieter can eat anything at all.

Cookies? Yep. Fried chicken? You betcha.

“The only rule I give people is don't eat to discomfort,” he said. “I teach you how to use the foods you enjoy to burn fat faster.

As Marion explains in the book, which was released Aug. 14, diets make the body believe it is being starved. As a defense mechanism, the body slows metabolism and stores fat. Marion said that by allowing “strategic cheating,” the dieter loses weight and fat faster.

“It's about working with your body instead of against it,” he said.

Marion is on a one-year leave from his job at the high school to promote the book.

Teaching is his passion, he said, but he's not sure he'll go back to it.

If “The Cheat to Lose Diet” does well, he plans to write a “Cheat to Lose” cookbook, and he's planning to co-write a book on women's fitness.