KEY POINTS:
Leigh Elder is whippet thin. Turn him sideways and you'd miss him. He's a guy who has never had to give a passing thought to his own weight. But our fat nation is something that occupies his every waking moment and has become, in his 65th year, nothing short of obsession.
Elder isn't a doctor, or a proselytising fat boy gone thin. He's just a lay bloke from Mt Maunganui with a searching mind, a good salesman's pitch and a happy knack for helping people. After selling a Northland rest home business and in the comfortable space of not having to chase the almighty buck, the former phys-ed teacher-turned-financial adviser-turned-life coach spent five years researching our "scary" state of over-eating.
After last year's select committee appraisal of New Zealand's worsening obesity crisis, when the best they could recommend was the flaccid traffic light system of food labelling which is already a dismal failure in Britain, Elder was stung into action.
The outcome, to be revealed at a Tauranga launch tomorrow, is Project Turning Point, a growing network of health professionals, businesses, schools and other organisations unified in a healthy eating pact Elder hopes will turn back the tide on our gathering obesity epidemic.
It sounds a lot like pie in the sky, especially with Elder's potpourri of recent jobs. But he has grit, talks commonsense and has a powerful group of medical mentors backing his philosophies. He's enlisted an All Black front person, written a book to be published in September and believes his pragmatic "number 8 fencing wire" eating and lifestyle plan may just tip the scales.
Most persuasive is his simple Eat For Keeps book complete with cartoon characters Harry and Sally, and a kit bag of success stories of people from varied ethnic and economic backgrounds talking about how this skinny guy saved their lives.
Meet Aaron Buist, a production system leader at the Norske Skog Kawerau paper mill. It's within this unlikely factory forum that Elder has been able to quietly but significantly prove his weight-melting magic. The mill's health centre has offered the programme company-wide for the past year and is tracking nearly 100 workers. So far, 65 per cent of participants have achieved permanent weight loss of 3kg to 30kg-plus.
Buist is the mill's star performer. A former provincial under-21 hockey rep, he was a 34-year-old, 158kg lump of lard when introduced to Elder's Eat For Keeps challenge. That was last April when Buist was having trouble fitting into airline seats on his regular European business trips, suffering aches and pains and feeling miserable about being 60kg overweight.
In 10 months the father of two has downsized trousers three times, is riding a bike and loving life at a svelte 109kg.
Back home for three days between a trip to the Netherlands and a Norske Skog fact-finding mission to Brazil, Buist says the programme revolutionised his life through initially making just two or three food changes from a 15-point list at the core of Elder's plan.
"It started out as basic as changing the colour of my milk and bread.
"The challenge was so simple, focusing on a few core ideas like eating food which is slower digesting and cutting down on fat consumption. Rather than a restrictive diet I started by changing from white to multigrain bread, eating natural muesli and choosing lower-fat options.
"It was that easy," he says. "The key was understanding the biology of why I'd got fat and what I needed to change. There's no question I will go on with this. It's been life saving."
Simplicity is the heart of Eat For Keeps. Elder was much taken with Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth and its power to bring global warming into the international spotlight and people's living rooms.
Elder latched on to Gore's 10 simple procedures that people could implement on a daily basis to save energy, and he set out to do the same for those battling obesity.
He sought practical changes to food habits rather than expecting people to reinvent themselves and their lifestyles completely.
Five years of research later he believes New Zealand is in the middle of not one but three epidemics. The first is the overweight bogey facing more than half the population, the second is a dieting epidemic and the third is our alarming rates of Type 2 diabetes (largely caused by years of wrong food choices).
International research also told him that strict diets are "dogs". At any one time 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men in the US are on a diet, with only 10 per cent ever achieving permanent sustained weight loss, and 30 per cent likely to rebound to higher weights.
Elder's key beef is with the highly processed nature of Kiwis' favourite food choices: "All this dicing, juicing, rolling, milling, roasting and toasting makes the food faster digesting so we are likely to feel hungry again sooner and require more food."
The fulcrum of the Eat For Keeps philosophy is something identified by Harvard researchers in 1997. It's called GL (glycaemic load) or the amount of glucose produced by any given food. Essentially, if you knock back a fast-digesting breakfast glucose is produced rapidly, blood sugar levelssurge, lots of insulin is produced to counter that and the excess glucose is turned into fat by an unhappy liver.
Sounds complicated but it's made crystal clear by the cartoon stories of Harry and Sally who show what can happen when you exchange rice bubbles and milk, plus white bread toast and tea with sugar, for porridge and low-fat milk, multigrain toast and sugarless tea for breakfast.
In a sideline attack, Elder is making inroads on the cafe food market with his low GL message. He's working with the Robert Harris chain in a 12-month partnership to try to lower the GL and fat content of food offered in all 51 of their cafes.
As life gets busier we eat out more: there are now 11,000 food outlets nationwide (doing $13 million in daily sales) and most use highly processed white flour in their hamburger buns, baps, paninis, muffins, scones and cakes and sandwiches.
Replacement of even some of that white flour with rice bran, oat bran, rolled oats and buckwheat could make a significant difference (up to 30 per cent lower) in GL, Elder says. Throw in plenty of the good guy foods with low GL levels like meat, tinned fish, low-fat dairy products, fruit, vegetables, beans, pulses, porridge and natural muesli, and you will lose weight over time, Elder promises.
His book is stuffed with testimonials to prove it. Mikayla Brown of Welcome Bay was a sad, 80kg, teased-at-school 11-year-old when her Tauranga doctor referred her to Eat For Keeps. She lost 20kg initially on the programme and, three years, on is svelte, still food savvy and "with my life changed forever. I now have a normal life, my confidence has soared and our whole family has benefited - Mum says it's the best thing we ever did - and I can do things I never dreamed of." Like winning the 200 metre sprint at the school athletics day.
So smitten is Mikayla with her new lithe life she hopes to become a youth ambassador visiting schools telling her formerly fat story and urging other teens down the Eat For Keeps pathway.
Another Bay of Plenty identity, Robin Brooke, will front the Turning Point programme. The former All Black, now owner of the Gate Pa New World supermarket, met Elder as a customer in his shop. Both Brooke's parents have Type 2 diabetes and the lock was aware he was bulking up "like a kid in the sweet shop". Elder introduced him to Eat For Keeps, helped him trim 8kg off a 130kg frame and Brooke has been a disciple ever since.
The father of three plans to introduce the programme to his staff and says he'll do anything he can to help a "local guy with a great idea. This really could help the health of the nation. I don't want to sound corny, but as we watch the Americans eating themselves to death, then we usually follow their societal trends a few years down the track. I just don't want that to happen here."
There's a medical mentor behind the scheme too. Public health pioneer and former Nutrition Society Foundation director Professor Cliff Tasman-Jones has reviewed all of Elder's research, critiqued his book, written a foreword, and given it the good health tick.
So where to from here?
Elder wants to create nothing short of a nutrition model that will lead the world. "I can't see why not. There's a real opportunity here."
He insists he's not in it for the money. "I'm about getting a turning point in this thing. I'm driven by the result. I want the health authorities, someone, anyone to pick this up and run with it."
But he's not averse to a little commercial success. First he hopes the book will sell out to spread the word nationwide, then he wants 500 to 1000 companies to sign up (he charges $500 per company for the EFK package) and to extend his influence with food manufacturers.
And then, perhaps, a well-earned retirement?
"No, not, yet, we're trying to create something to take to the world. The joy of Eat For Keeps is you can fix yourself and once you've done that someone else wants to know how and the project takes on a people power life of its own. It's a piece of cake, really."
One baked with low-fat ingredients and wholemeal flour, of course.
Eat For Keeps (Cape Catley Press) is out in early September.
