Your body is a bathtub

If you haven’t heard anything about the Colorado Diet, you’re probably wondering what’s so different about it.

Drs. Hill and Wyatt’s philosophy is that one of the biggest barriers to keeping weight off once you lose it is that with most diets, your metabolism (how effectively your body burns fuel) either doesn’t change or slows way down. They created the Colorado Diet with the goal of changing your inflexible metabolism to a flexible metabolism.

That vocabulary didn't resonate with me much, and I guess it didn't with a lot of other people, either. So in the book and in class, Drs. Hill and Wyatt explain it this way: your body is a bathtub, the water is food and the drain is your metabolism.

When you are overweight or obese, your drain is so small almost no water gets through; your faucet is on so high that the bathtub not only fills up, it begins to overflow (i.e. your intake is so high and your metabolism is so low that instead of burning food for fuel, your body stores it as fat).

In the three-phase Colorado Diet, they first have you turn your faucet down low (drastically reduce your calories for a short time). This quickly brings the water level down. In Phase II, they allow you to turn your faucet up a little bit (allowing some more food in), but you must work on widening the drain (through exercise). This way, water going in is a little less than water going out. Finally, in Phase III, you widen the drain to its maximum (by exercising at least 70 minutes a day, six days a week) and turn the faucet to a normal level.

By the time you are done with the diet and move into maintenance mode, your body’s metabolism will be so flexible and efficient, your diet will be more flexible too. (It’s unlikely you’ll be able to eat pizza and donuts every day, but if you indulge every now and then, it won’t go straight to your hips. Also, you’ll never have to count calories on this diet – hooray!).

So, in the end, it seems to me that the long-term plan to achieve a State of Slim is not as much about the food (although that is important) as it is about making exercise a part of your everyday life, so you can keep your drain as big as possible.

If you'd like to learn about other weight loss programs from the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, visit their weight management website.