Dr. Frank Neelon/Rice Diet Medical Director

“The Rice Diet was started as a therapeutic diet to treat problems and the weight loss is an unexpected and unavoidable side effect of that,” says Dr. Frank Neelon, Medical Director of the Rice Diet.

“What makes it successful is I think when people come they become part of a community of fellow sufferers who work together and begin to change their life in meaningful ways. I’m fond of telling patients that diet is a Greek word meaning way of life. So I tell them they don't want to come to Durham they don't want to come for a two week, 5 month way of life. You want to come to establish a new way of eating, healthy and living that make you healthy for the future. That's the real essence is our focus on health by eating right and exercising properly,” says Dr. Neelon.

“When Dr. Kempler devised the diet in 1939 it was to treat severe hyper tension. And he did this by treating them with a diet of rice and fruit. It was boiled white rice, washed twice to remove sodium. The Rice Diet is the lowest sodium diet. We also decrease the amount of fat to very low levels; low fat, low protein and low sodium diet to treat severe hypertension. Weight loss followed from that,” says Dr. Neelon.

“When it comes to people who want to lose weight we cut their calories to 800-1000 calories a day. Still maintaining low sodium low fat focus. As they begin to achieve their goal we add grains and other vegetables as well as rice and fruit. It becomes a rice, fruit, grain and vegetable diet. Serve fish once a week. When they go home add more animal protein and non -fat dairy products,” says Dr. Neelon.

“You can't pull into a fast food restaurant and say I want an order of rice, fruits, grains and vegetables. That does make it more difficult. They have to restructure their life to do this. One of the secrets is they come here and stay long enough to see real results and they find out their blood pressure is better, weight is down, their heart healed up they've gotten rid of medicine after medicine,” says Dr. Neelon.

“Hardee's sells a sandwich that has 1,400 calories in it. That's two days of the rice diet in one sandwich,” says Dr. Neelon.

“People put real sacrifice into this. Time, money and disrupt their life and come and spend time with us and revise what they're doing. I think that accounts to a great measure for the long-term success we see, which is much better than other statistics,” says Dr. Neelon.

“One of the places we focus, coming to grips with the internalization of changing my lifestyle. And so a lot of times we spend with patients is focusing on how are you going to make a real change in your life. In addition to feeding people three meals a day we offer classes, lectures, experiential things like yoga,” says Dr. Neelon.

“The focus was always on medical aspect. People ask for cosmetic reasons, we really don’t care. It's fine if you want to look good, but that's not goal. We are not here as plastic surgeons, we are here because we want people to get healthy,” says Dr. Neelon.

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