Season 5 of “The Dr. Oz Show” kicks off Monday, Sept. 9 with a celebrity-filled lineup including rocker Steven Tyler, the stars of “Duck Dynasty,” dancer Cheryl Burke, and Wayne Brady.
“We have completely redesigned the show,” Dr. Mehmet Oz said Tuesday afternoon in a phone interview. After the show won its third consecutive Emmy, Oprah Winfrey issued a challenge to Oz. “Now is the time to realize that you have to compete against yourself,” Winfrey told Oz and his staff, so this season will be faster paced, with three to five segments per hourlong episode, more celebrity interviews and even more elaborate and outrageous demonstrations, Oz said.
This season, “The Dr. Oz Show” will be tackling subjects as varied as addiction, mood swings, hair health, and fasting.
That last subject piqued our interest so we asked him about it Tuesday afternoon in a phone interview.
“A lot of folks, unbeknownst to themselves, are actually fasting now because they’re not eating food that has nutrients in it,” Oz said. “They have adequate calorie counts, but they don’t have the elements in their body that they need to grow brain cells, get stronger, look sexy and be as sharp as they need to be.”
“And so when you fast in the setting of that – when you’re already malnourished, that’s actually not good for you. We’re gonna show folks how they can fast, do it for a short period of time safely and get the benefits they desire.”
But he looks at fasting as a way to reboot the system rather than a quick-fix diet.
“Fasting has been an effective way for humans to deal with adversity for all known human history, but it’s not the best way to lose weight. It’s the best way to reboot yourself, to detox yourself so you can actually go on a program of a nature I’m speaking about.”
And once your system is rebooted, Dr. Oz says it’s not the time to jump on a short-term crash diet.
“I never believe that diets work. What works is making profound changes in your behavior toward food,” he said. “They don’t have to be big steps, but they have to be differences in how you feel emotionally toward food and and how you interpret the reaction toward food.”
So that gnawing you feel may not be hunger, but withdrawal pangs, he said. And some foods can be just as addictive as drugs.
“That’s why things like toxic hunger, where you really withdrawing from the kielbasa you had for lunch and the really tasty croissant you had at breakfast – when you’re withdrawing from those, you’re going to feel pangs that you’ll interpret as hunger. They’re actually not hunger,” he said. “They’re very similar to the withdrawal you might get if you’d done ecstasy or heroin. And so having that recognition, that realization often changes people’s perspectives about how they’re going to deal with food.”
