Some thoughts on diets

Tags

A review of the existing diets, What will humanity eat?, Where is humanity bound?

Mark Twain hit the basic problem with diets perfectly with,

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.”

Wikipedia has a List of 100 Diets which will be the basic source for this post. We humans have the natural ability to eat and digest almost anything that other primates can eat. Gorillas eat lots of greens and little of anything else. I haven’t heard of anyone who eats a wild gorilla’s diet but the link above has gorillas in zoos eating supposedly healthy American diets and getting obese, diabetic and suffering from heart disease. Probably humans could eat gorillas’ diet but they probably don’t or the gorillas would have been driven to extinction by human encroachment on their living areas. Probably the same can be said for chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates’ food staples and natural habitats. Humans don’t eat those animals’ food because it requires more effort to harvest and/or digest those foods than it is worth for us. With the exception of fish, it appears to be more efficient for humans to grow most of their food rather than to hunt or gather it from natural sources.

We have genetically engineered natural foods for thousands of years to be domesticated for farming and to satisfy our particular human digestive abilities, nutritional needs, and taste preferences. The proof that farming works to our benefit is that for tens of thousands of years our wild human population was less than seven million and now it is over seven billion. That is, the Earth is now sustaining a thousand times more human beings using our modern industrialized farming techniques than it did when we were using hunter-gatherer pre-industrialized-farming techniques.

Much of our modern food productivity is based on one-time-use fossil fuels made of stored sun energy so that our large population isn’t sustainable unless other ways of harvesting the sun’s energy are developed. We are quite resourceful as a species so those necessary new techniques will probably come into existence. The population theorist Thomas Malthus wrote back in the year 1800 that our human population had reached its absolute limit, and indeed it had with the farming technology available at that time. However, since his book on the theory of population was published, we have gone from less than a billion people to seven and a half billion.

With the current CRISPR technology, it is probable that we will modify the DNA of desert and tropical plants to produce food usable by humans. It may be possible to create new food types that can be grown in currently sterile areas. Our present population may not be sustainable with our current technology but it may double within a hundred years with what we will probably bring into existence.

As amazing as the last hundred years have been, the next hundred years will probably be even more astonishing.

Today I showed off some mockups for the LOL diet.

Tags

LOL diet, LOL diet is a lifestyle, LOL is a lifestyle, LOL is not a diet its some easy habits.

Today I showed a couple of my retired professional friends my current mockups of my LOL diet tchotchkes. One friend was a successful owner of a company whose products you would recognize, and the other a successful professional artist of things you have seen. There was lots of praise at first for the presentation quality, and we talked about the various aspects for two hours, and the upshot was that some of the things that seemed good at first got a little weak after sustained viewing.

The starkness of some of the black and white presentations need to be softened with some colors, probably pastel colors. Also, it was generally agreed that some of the presentations needed pictures of things that should be eaten. It was agreed that everything should be positive in what was out there for purchase and that any negative comments about other diet plans should be put into “campaign” literature.

One complaint I didn’t expect was a challenge to the name “Laugh Out Loud diet”. It was claimed that it has an underlying negative feeling and hostility. It also has a undertone of demanding that we comply with an implied command, that we should laugh at some hidden thing about diets or dieters or fat people. Perhaps Lots of Love diet would be better, or just LOL diet, which would imply lots of love.

These are not trivial thoughts because this method of coping with obesity and the health issues that derive from eating problems of a billion people must have the best possible presentation. Without a fantastic presentation, this whole concept will wither and die. It needs to be attention-getting, and interest-holding, and functionally valid to be successful. There are deeply entrenched people making literally trillions of dollars off the ill health created by the sale of things that cause the problems. There is big money to be made by the sales of sugar, salt, grease and booze.

If the LOL diet doesn’t grab attention it will die. If it doesn’t maintain interest, it will die. If it isn’t functionally effective for a substantial number of people, it will die.

If we don’t get the LOL diet right from the beginning, it will die.

Thoughts on Laugh Out Loud diet publication strategy

Tags

Creating new habits, Facing fat squarely, Laugh-out-loud diet, LOL diet, Vivid - acceptable and funny

To contact the billion people who are overweight is the challenge. Clearly, the posting of the Laugh Out Loud diet on my blog isn’t working because there have been very few hits on those pages. There are already many good ideas in those posts and some of them are new, but no one finds them and no one cares; furthermore, if there are some good ideas websites like ehow.com will soon find them and post them as conventionally accepted wisdom.

A list of chapter headings would be helpful so I can state more clearly each of the different forms that the LOL diet will take. A list of things like handouts, business-card-size situation suggestions, and an app for cell phones for the various situations that will be encountered. There must be a chapter on why other diets fail and a chapter on why the LOL diet will work where others fail. A chapter on why the LOL is written in a funny style. Perhaps the lead chapter should be on the enormity of the obesity problem, and why there are so few links to other diets.

If the LOL diet fat chapter is written in a comedic style it will offend the very people whom it is intended to help. That might be counterproductive because then they wouldn’t read any further, or if it was written from the first person perspective then perhaps the reader could more readily identify with the problem and more easily begin using the LOL techniques. It is desirable to make each idea as vivid as possible, but stating it in too bland a way would make it easily forgotten. The most vivid fat scene in TV comedy is Monty Python’s fat man eating a little tiny mint … for a perfect finish to his meal … and he explodes! To reach the billion overweight people, and let’s not forget the next billion that are going to become obese, our rhetoric must be vivid. These people are desperate for a solution to their weight problem and the fact that they are spending a half a trillion dollars per year trying to cope with their fat is a positive proof of that assertion. Thus,

To be vivid and acceptable the Laugh Out Loud diet must be funny.

Progress with the Laugh Out Loud diet

Tags

A New Year's resolution you can keep., Laugh-out-loud diet, Progress with diet, Super simple diet, Willpower and diet

The various experiments I have been doing with the end goal in mind of helping people gain control of their bodily weight have been going well. The basic premise of this diet is to find actions that are so easy to do that they become automatic; after a week of doing them with a conscious intent, soon they are habitual. The only willpower involved is remembering to do some laughably easy thing. Other diets require so much willpower they are soon abandoned.

In order to practice this diet I and my partner have been intentionally leaving a small portion of food on our plate at the end of every meal. In the learning phase of this habit, we chose to pick out the best piece of each part of a serving and place it to the side of our plate. The goal was to make a small pile of choice food that would equal a single bite so the food we were rejecting was a meaningfully large amount. It was additionally meaningful because we knew that bite would be very tasty. The first few days we did this setting aside of good food we made the portion size very small so we weren’t feeling any guilt caused by not eating it. But after we had some comfortable familiarity with that laugh-out-loud action we upped the amount we set aside to where it felt significant, but we were still able to laugh about it. After we finished eating our slightly shrunken meal we would then push that final bite to the center of the plate and leave it. Okay, if the cook feels that procedure is too wasteful it’s okay for them to blend those last bites into the next meal. The point is to think and to say, “I am in control of food; food is not in control of me!” “I don’t have to eat food just because it is available; I even have the power to throw good food away.”

A strange side effect of this silly procedure is that we have been putting a little less on our plate and we even stopped eating a few times before the plate was clean. We stopped when we were down to our laugh-out-loud portion. I can still hear my mother and grandmother too saying, “Charles … clean up your plate!” That often heard statement was often coupled with the contradictory one, “You better take a second helping, you might need some stick-to-your-ribs food before dinner.”

I am creating a list of polite things to say to get out of eating things that are outside of the LOL diet plan. In that case:

I’d really like some more but I’m full. Can I take a little home for tomorrow?

The Laugh Out Loud diet visits restaurants.

Tags

Laugh-out-loud diet, Restaurant eating, Tips for eating in restaurants.

Eating meals outside of your home can be a problem because most of what comes out onto your plate is in someone else’s control. We may order a named dish, but the actual ingredients are in the cook’s hands. It is important for controlling our weight to control the ingredients going into our mouths. According to Consumers Reports, “We spend $2,222 per year for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.” That’s $6 per day of food we eat where we have little control of the ingredients.

The Laugh Out Loud diet devotee when visiting a restaurant will pay close attention to the big four – sugar, salt, grease, and booze. It is the four basic food groups that restaurants cater to because they are easy to prepare, are cheap, and people think they taste good. Another people pleaser is super-sizing the meals because once they are putting food on the plate the restaurant’s fixed costs like rent and basic employee staff have been covered, so a little more food doesn’t cost much. The problem is that we don’t want to waste the money we spent on the meal, so we clean it up, much to the chagrin of our waist.

Some Laugh Out Loud restaurant chuckles.

1. Seek places that actively promote healthy food.
2. Go to places that feature salads.
3. Avoid places with fat-boy icons.
4. Avoid places with an abundance of flashing lights.
5. Go to places that locals go.
6. Avoid places that cater to tourists.
7. Avoid getting the pancakes and syrup meals.
8. Avoid the greasy meat entrees.
9. Drink a cup of water before eating.
10. Avoid the giant sugar drinks
11. Get the real juice drinks.
12. Drink coffee, tea, kombucha.
13. Avoid beer, wine, liquor.
14. Order for health rather than volume.
15. Ask to hold the mayo, cheese, sauces to a minimum.
16. Get roasted, broiled, baked, steamed, foods.
17. Avoid creamy, crusted, sautéed, crispy.
18. Get single servings and share with a companion.
19. Order a takeout container early in the meal.
20. Set the starchy stuff aside early.
21. Get milkshakes split and give half away.
22. Leave a tiny portion of food on the plate.
23. Avoid all-you-can-eat buffets.

Today we ate out and did most of the things listed on the chart. I even had the milkshake split in two and gave one of the shakes still in its steel mixer tumbler to a stranger in another booth. Our half of the milkshake was plenty, even shared between Debbie and me .

Get a set of Laugh Out Loud flash-cards. One card for every occasion.

The Laugh Out Loud diet is too easy.

Tags

Don't eat until noon, Drink a glass of water, Laugh-out-loud diet, Leave a little on the plate, Never miss out on a fun diet idea, Super easy diet, Take a walk before eating lunch

For the last three months, we have been developing the Laugh Out Loud diet plan and finding new and super easy things to do that will affect one’s bodily weight and general health. The only part of the diet that even vaguely resembles an ordinary diet is to not eat anything after 8 PM or anything before noon. During our meals during the day, we eat as much as we feel like eating with no attempt to control how much we eat. We are night owls and stay up until after midnight, so if you are more of an early bird it would make sense to shift the hours to an earlier schedule. Our first attempt was to not eat between 8 PM and 8 AM and then eat to our fill, but that wasn’t even interesting. So, we upped the challenge to not eating until noon. That is just enough to be happy when it’s time to eat lunch, so the only time we feel anything at all like it’s a diet is that last hour, and we usually take a twenty-minute walk just before preparing our noon meal. Our walking and conversation distract us from any possible hunger. I can barely remember ever being hungry for the last three months. We have both been weighing ourselves every day and there is a slight downward trend. I’ve lost four pounds. That may not seem like much but I doubt if it will come back and I only intend to drop about four more and then decide if there is any further need. Basically, I am in near perfect health already.

Now the problems. We have been adding fun little games to our diet. It’s the part that is the Laugh Out Loud diet plan, and that is doing our present pick from my several blog posts of lists of super easy things to do. For two months now we have been drinking a cup of water before starting our sit down meals. That is easy to do and the tiny little problem is that we sometimes forget and start eating before we drink the water. Never in my life have I drunk a cup of water before eating, so when I do sit down and everyone else is ready I start eating. No big deal, but for me it is important to do things I tell myself that I am going to do. If I don’t do what I tell myself I’m going to do I feel it is necessary to make immediate amends, somehow. Together, we manage to get those glasses of water onto the table. If one of us picks up their eating utensil without having drunk the water the other stops talking mid-sentence and immediately stares at the other. Uh-oh, and we laugh and drink our water. Somehow, drinking that cup of water makes it easier to stop eating at the end of our meals.

The other Laugh Out Loud diet technique I’m having trouble with is to intentionally not clean up my plate. The goal is to intentionally leave a small amount on the plate. This is strangely difficult for me to do because all my life I’ve been told to clean up my plate, and I did. I never thought about it as a problem, and there were lots of cute little sayings like, “Waste not, want not.” The point is to begin by intentionally leaving a very tiny amount, say a quarter-teaspoon quantity. That is, to leave an amount you consider so insignificant it isn’t worth bothering with, but after a week of doing that to up the ante a little and leave an amount that is bite-worthy. Maybe a full spoonful. Yes, it gets thrown away. And that’s the point, to develop a control over your food rather than it having control over you because of your guilt. Actually, it’s a small amount and within a short time you will be eating less, so there is a success there, and a success in your eating less.

Each of those Laugh Out Loud diet techniques is laughable, but they are so easy to do, and can be made into fun games, so they can be developed into permanent pleasant habits.

For a diet to succeed in the long run it must be fun, easy and automatic.

Meditating on the Laugh-out-loud diet.

Tags

Laugh-out-loud diet, Lose weight without dieting., Meditation on diet plans, No willpower diet, Survival thru dieting properly, Thinking about diet control

Here is a new way of approaching food. Think about eating when sitting quietly. Intentionally choose to sit in a meditative way and for a few minutes let your mind wander, and then bring it to an intentional focus on a bodily function like the air coming in and out of your nose. Don’t control it, just observe it. Then after several minutes, perhaps at a preset signal by a timer or a guru, intentionally focus your attention on eating. Imagine as clearly as possible the many things you can do while eating but always keep these things under your intentional control. Make it part of your basic habit structure, part of your long-term character that you are in charge of your food and not the food in charge of you. This thought should be an automatic idea that springs into your mind while you are halfway through the food placed before you. The goal of the mindful meditation is to place you in control of your thoughts; in this case the thoughts are about eating and when to stop eating.

Some thoughts to ponder during meditation.

1. Put a smile on your face and say to yourself, I’m in control of food.
2. Have fun rehearsing doing things that are good for you.
3. I think of food as nourishment for my body, not as pleasure itself.
4. Think fun thoughts about food and don’t get too serious.
5. Reminisce over food giving you energy not emotional gratification.
6. Imagine playing with food on the plate as fun.
7. Potatoes and broccoli can make game pieces to move in your mind.
8. Imagine, I am choosing to sit down at a perfectly sized meal.
9. I am choosing to look at a menu and identify the healthy foods.
10. I smile at the waitress and ask about the daily special.
11. I ask in a friendly way what they think the healthiest item is.
12. I imagine chewing on a celery, the crunch, the squirt, the strings.
13. I feel the cool bubbly bitterness of a single beer.
14. I watch the beer flowing toward me as I tip the glass up.
15. I smile as I push away the half full glass and walk away.
16. I notice when I am no longer hungry.
17. I play the game with my companion of seeing strange things on the plate.
18. I imagine saying, “Thank you very much, but I never have second helpings.”
19. I practice excusing myself halfway through a meal.
20. I walk away from giant buffet tables and talk with someone at the periphery.
21. I think of situations and say, “I’m in control of food, it’s not in control of me.”
22. Think about talking to the greengrocer about vegetable details.
23. Rehearse rejecting food products with silly pictures and ads.
24. Rehearse setting bottles down when you can’t see what’s inside.
25. Think about talking about healthy eating restaurants versus cost.
26. Think about walking through a store with a healthy attitude.
27. Rehearse walking the periphery of grocery stores before checking an aisle.
28. Put a smile on your face when opening your eyes.

These are some ideas to think about to cultivate as automatic habits. The idea is to never feel any anxiety about food, eat as much as your body needs and never starve your body.

Your body will fight back if you willfully try to starve it, and it will win.

 

 

Laugh-out-loud diet – Incorrect jokes, humor, lies – sad

Tags

A little comedy in your diet, Diets are painful, Laugh-out-loud diet, Lose weight without dieting., Non dieting diet

If you are going to get through the rest of your life on any kind of diet it must be automatic, easy, fun, and comic. Nearly all diets will fail because they require constant attention, are hard, annoying, and tragic. I use the quibble word nearly because to say “All diets will fail!” would chase people away from the laugh-out-loud-diet (the LOL diet, Lots of Love diet), and once you understand this lol diet is fun you can laugh at all those nasty diets for the rest of your life. With the lol diet you can easily stop and restart without a trace of guilt because it’s more fun doing the diet than not doing it.

To begin with, it only takes three days to reset your food needs if your body is willing to cooperate, but it will never reset if it thinks it is going to starve. With regular diets where you are forced to eat well below your maintenance needs for weeks, you may lose some weight, but your gut will think it is enduring a famine and will demand to eat voraciously when it gets the chance to bulk up in preparation for the next famine. So, the only shortfall of food even considered in the lol diet is sometimes doing a daily intermittent diet. That’s where you don’t eat until noon and then eat anything you like but taper off a bit until eight at night, then stop. If you eat enough to be satisfied once a day, about midday, your gut won’t go into a starvation mode. With a regular diet once you are in a starvation mode you will have to convince your gut there isn’t a famine coming soon. Your gut has as many “brain-cells” as your brain so it is difficult to intellectually outwit your gut. The more successful your brain’s willpower is at forcing you to not eat the more stressed your gut will be and eager to trick you into eating. Guess which one has more long-term motivation, a hungry gut or a willful brain?

At any moment day or night you can think for a moment about one of your comic diet actions and get a chuckle. You and only you are in charge of your thoughts; thus you can think about your funny little tricks, like leaving a tiny bite of your favorite food on the plate. You are in charge of your food, not your food in charge of you. You can intentionally choose to take a short walk right now, right past where you know there is some food. You can think about looking at some candy and ignoring it while a fat person eats it. You can imagine what it feels like when you are bored, anxious, angry, or distraught to go for a walk instead of eating, or go play solitaire, or go meditate. If you are really challenged, imagine walking right past the snacks and around the block, and after you have done that imagining routine three times, go walk right past the temptation.

Everyone looks okay in great clothes, but healthy people look fantastic without clothes.

Good food sticks to you in the right places; guess where bad food goes.

I like the checkout line at Safeway; it gives me a chance to look at all those disgusting candies I don’t want and to lay my hand on them and reject them.

Do the tiniest thing possible for coping with your big problem; do it now.

 

Laugh-out-loud diet.

Tags

fat, Fatter, Fattest, How to shop at a grocery store., obese, The Laugh-Out-Loud-Diet

The last several posts have included some methods for losing weight without going thru the inconvenience of dieting. My new super-easy diet plans are laughable. — The absolutely easiest diet I have created so far. — A short list of super-easy diets. — Only a fool would throw away a trillion dollars. — Is it me? — My super easy dieting plan requires nothing from me.

Let’s add a few super-easy diets to our plans by starting at the grocery store.

1. At the checkout line where there’s candy, lay your hand on the candy and say I don’t need this.
2. Walk the periphery of the store because that’s where the non-sugared food is.
3. Go the back corners of the store because that’s where the healthiest food is.
4. Have a list of things you need and stick to it.
5. Ask the greengrocer what the best produce is for today.
6. On the cereal aisle check for the non-sugared brands.
7. Don’t buy anything with cute pictures on it.
8. Don’t buy anything near the checkout aisle.
9. Don’t shop when you are hungry.
10. Things nearest your toes are usually cheaper.
11. Get a hand-carry basket and stop when it’s too heavy.
12. Avoid cans with weird ingredients.
13. Buy as much fresh food as possible.
14. Go to the farmer’s market.
15. Observe what healthy people are buying and get those things.
16. Observe what the fat people are buying and take those things out of your cart.
17. Buy the rainbow foods.
18. Avoid processed foods.
19. Set your watch timer and limit your time in the store.
20. Buy things with transparent bottles.
21. Avoid bottles that are opaque, or covered with paper.
22. Don’t eat things with eyes; they make you feel guilty.

As with most of the other things about this Laugh-out-loud diet (LOLD or Lolod) there will be people making a half a trillion dollars per year who will challenge the claim that it is even a diet. That is true in the sense that you never have to suffer the pangs of not eating enough or of having to eat a bunch of stuff that you believe tastes awful. But the Laugh-out-loud diet will guide you away from unhealthy food that will make you fat, fatter and fattest.

The “Laugh-out-loud diet” doesn’t ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.

My new super-easy diet plans are laughable.

Tags

diet, Do nothing diets, Take control of tiny things.

I’ve been exploring ways for the public to be successful at dieting. That is important because a growing portion of humanity is becoming unhealthy and obese. Last week I posted, “The obesity epidemic is now worldwide and Americans, who are only five percent of the world population, are reported to be spending $60 billion on various diet cures right now. The Global Market for Weight Loss is Worth US$586.3 Billion by 2014.” People are aware of their weight problem but even with the vast sums of money spent they haven’t been able to control their weight. It is obvious from the links above that their concern with their weight is costing them half a trillion dollars per year. Therefore, people are aware of the problem but the huge sums of money spent on dieting are not working. If a single one of the multitudes of diet plans really worked well everyone would soon know about that and the epidemic would be over in a few months.

The reason their diets don’t work is because they demand things of the people that they don’t want to give. What I have been offering is a diet plan that is so easy it doesn’t ask very much and it doesn’t cost anything; in fact, it saves money on a daily basis because you are spending less out-of-pocket money at the store. But the most important thing is that it is so easy to do that it will work in the short run while you are forming the necessary habits, and it will work in the long run because the habits are so easy to form and easy to continue doing.

That’s an outrageous claim, especially when billions of people have tried those other diets and almost every individual has failed. It’s time to try just this one more diet. It is a strange diet because it is the opposite of most of them and instead of being painful is fun to do. Today I mentioned a few specifics that I have been doing in several different conversations. Everyone laughs at my ideas but agrees that they would probably work, but says that what I am proposing isn’t really dieting. For example, today we ate lunch at one of the more expensive restaurants here in Bend, Oregon. This is not a plug, but the Drake has some really tasty lunches that appeal to the culinary artist in me and Debbie. Along with not eating until noon, and drinking a glass of water before eating, and then we ate heartily, but the new diet detail was leaving a tiny bit of food on the plate. We created a beautiful little pile in the center of our plates with about a teaspoon full of this wonderful food left there. It would have tasted great, but by intentionally not eating it we took charge of our desires to eat. “We are in voluntary control of the food we eat and not the food in some bizarre way in control of us.”

By taking intentional control of little things we take habitual control of the big things.