Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald – Book review

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Diet Cults review, Matt Fitzgerald author, Suggestions for a healthy diet, What to eat and avoid

Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald is one of my favorites of the stack of diet books I’ve been reading as background material for the diet book I am writing. It is easy reading and covers rather critically all of the major diet fads that we have been subjected to in the last thirty years in reasonable detail. He illustrates where each of the popular diets has its failings and where the scientific studies have demonstrated their failings.

One of the themes of the book is built right into the title, the cult-like qualities of the popular diets. That personal dedication from the dieters is needed because of the difficulty in maintaining rigorous limitations on what they can and can not eat. Pick any food you can name and you can find some people who insist that it is a panacea and others who will insist that it’s poison. Well, everything except vegetables, he wavers, no one he wrote that he had met was willing to claim vegetables were evil. I haven’t known any more people than average, but Dale, one of my buddies back in Berkeley, did claim that all green foods were poison, and he never ate any of them. Unfortunately, he died about the time he turned fifty.

Diet Cults is written in a friendly style and claims not to be cultish itself, but Matt defines his study group for perfect health to be extreme athletes. Not run-of-the-mill athletes either, but world-class ones who train to appallingly high, self-imposed, rigorous standards. He claims these are perfect specimens of human health whom the other seven billion of us average humans should emulate. Most people would simply kill themselves if they did exactly as these paragons of health do as their routine exercise.

To come back to what these heroes eat, as opposed to what they physically do, is more sensible. His recommended diet even for them is simply common sense. Lots of vegetables and fruits and quite a lot of nuts, wild-fed meats, whole grains, and yogurt. He doesn’t say to totally avoid processed fatty meats, sugar, and fried food but to keep them to an absolute minimum. It’s okay to eat lots of carbs if you’re doing a marathon or are a lumberjack burning through five thousand calories per day.

Ultimately it appears that humans can eat almost anything and remain healthy if they are physically active enough. 

Does a new diet need to become a cult to be successful?

Tags

How to contact the media, LOL promotion ideas, Promoting a diet plan

I am working on a diet plan that might help the billion overweight people come closer to their desired weight. It is obvious they want to lose their excess weight and are having trouble doing it because they are spending vast sums of money on various weight and fitness plans. Those types of books are very popular on Amazon. There is a need.

I have written about the problem of an unknown person reaching a billion people. It isn’t easy, even if you have a brilliant and sound idea. If the book, when finished, is published by a local publisher it is unlikely to get any national attention, let alone worldwide attention. I know a publisher and he has already said he is interested, but I do have some tentative contacts in New York who might be able to put in a good word in the right place.

My motivation is to reach that final audience of obese people. The publishing industry and media are motivated by making a profit on their work, and no doubt some are interested in manipulating the public to some political end. Therefore, if I am going to reach my audience I must somehow cooperate with the media. When I lived in Berkeley I did know people who were successful in manipulating the media: Max Scherr, the founder of the Berkeley Barb, Jerry Rubin of the 1968 Democratic Convention fame, and Joan Blades of MoveOn.org fame. I don’t claim to have known these people well, but I did have several personal conversations with each of them. Each of those people was more into the political thing and the means of reaching the media was more direct and more ballsy. Reaching the diet crowd and the associated media is very different, but it may require a certain element of spunk.

To be heard in the modern world means to somehow reach far enough into some absurdity to pique the media’s interest and thus the public’s consciousness. Thus…

I must watch carefully during my diet research for an appropriate promotion “angle”.

My diet is going to be totally positive.

Tags

LOL diet development strategy, LOL is totally fun and positive

I’ve been looking through some diet books and even the ones I like are laden with guilt. Also, every one of them is locked on to some weird detail that makes their diet better than all the rest. The obvious problem is that all of them have some things, some details that prevent them from becoming truly effective. Usually, that detail is that they are too difficult for normal human beings to practice for very long and thus eventually the participants fall off the bandwagon and, after a few attempts to get back on, quit and either accept their fate or after a while try yet another diet.

Since the first chapter of my diet book is going to be the bare facts of what to do to achieve a realistic condition it seems logical to have the preface deal with the problems with the other plans. Basically, that is pointing out how the diets are nearly impossible to stay on permanently without some form of external reminders and emotional support. The LOL diet plan requires no effort beyond learning the simple strategies and the rules of how to play the games and have fun playing them. Every moment of the games is designed around the simple fact that you can do this because it is so simple and easy and fun. There isn’t anything about the LOL diet game a child couldn’t learn and do as a game.

If you can learn to play a game the first time, then with every repetition of the game it becomes easier to succeed; and as you become more skilled you can succeed and add more personal details to make it more personal and more fun. You can become a master player of your own game and in doing so become a master of your body.

You can become a master LOL player and in doing so you can become a master of your body, your self, and your life.

 

Who is my target audience for my diet plan?

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LOL diet, LOL diet development strategy, Love Our Life - diet

The world presently has over a billion overweight people, and the diet industry takes in over a half a trillion dollars per year. If one of those diets really worked well everyone would quickly hear about it and flock to that diet plan. Therefore, none of those current diet plans work, at least they aren’t working for a billion people.

I have been following a diet plan for five months, and I have consistently lost two pounds per month and thus have lost ten pounds. The plan is designed around the idea of being a group of fun games for my mind and body that always leaves my gut feeling happy.

I am working on this new strategy for promoting this diet plan because giving things away doesn’t work. If you can’t sell something for money it isn’t worth anything and people don’t value things that are worthless. Sad. The media don’t promote and sell things that are free, and when they say “free” there is always an offer. The solution to that simple-minded conundrum is to sell my diet plan for money. That way it can be promoted on the media, and thus it can be disseminated worldwide and not be just a few fun and games for my personal friends.

Previously I have been thinking of my target audience as overweight people, but that group isn’t the audience that will get me through to the ultimate audience. It is imperative that the message is disseminated through the mass media if it is going to be seen and heard by billions of people who need to hear the message. Therefore, my primary audience must be those providers of mass media who can reach those billions of overweight people.

These days the most successful promoter of various diets is Oprah on her TV show, and so she is the key person to whom my diet plan must be aimed. I rarely watch Oprah but I do watch Steven Colbert and his show is flagrantly promoting various people and their products, such as new movies, TV shows, Broadway shows and books. I have found that a bit annoying when it isn’t something I’ve been interested in, but now I must pay attention to that aspect of his presentations. Also, I must watch some of Oprah’s shows so I can get a better understanding of what she wants. I need to know what publishers she works with, and thus they to have become a primary audience.

All of this comes back to how I write the book. What the tone is, what the humor is and how the message can be presented so it is accepted. I need a good idea, which I have; a well-written book, which I have started; a great name  – (LOL diet) Love Our Life diet is good; a good iconic logo – I have a background in that kind of thing; and a person to step into the media and represent all these things – I’ve done a little stage work, so that isn’t impossible.

This is an outline strategy for getting the Love Our Life diet rolling.

Some thoughts on diets

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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.

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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

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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

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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.