I invent a small new diet device

Tags

Bariatric stomach banding, Temporary bariatric stomach banding

While making up the handout for my coming lecture on intermittent fasting, the use of bariatric stomach banding for limiting the amount of food that would be ingested and held in the stomach came up. The dieting literature mentions that these bariatric devices are among the few things that are actually effective in reducing people’s weight and BMI. On the other hand, they are expensive and carry some risk of infection and other complications because of the required surgical procedure for installing the band. Half-jokingly the surgeons say the most common bariatric procedure is removing the stomach bands. Apparently, they do work but after the weight is lost the patients feel they interfere with their life enough that they go to the expense of having them removed. 

In Live Science here is reported bodily weight gain during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day period in the United States and weight gain at other times of the year in other cultures at their festival times.

Weight gain per month starting at Thanksgiving dinner.

What is needed is for Americans to have the ability to eat reasonably from Thanksgiving through New Year’s holiday. I have no ability to tell three hundred million people what to do, but I can make some suggestions that just might catch the public’s imagination. Americans typically have New Year’s resolutions, of which the most common is to lose weight. Unfortunately, 99% of diets fail in a year and there is a consistent weight gain of a pound or two. It doesn’t make much difference in a year but in forty years a svelt youth turns into a chubby grandparent.

I have been working on an intermittent diet plan which will be presented here in pieces as it is written up, but I have a brilliant-stupid idea that would probably eliminate that December disaster. It is something so simple and so obvious and requires no particular willpower and will cost most people absolutely nothing because it uses something you already own. It is based on the bariatric stomach banding technique mentioned at the top of this article. But there is no need of surgery. If the object is to compress the stomach during the final stages of eating a big Thanksgiving meal it would be easy to have a second belt under your clothing that isn’t holding your pants up. It is just there around your waist. The idea is to slip this belt up to where it encircles your lower ribs and constricts your stomach just a little. That is what the bariatric stomach banding device does, but the belt is free and it is only needed when you are nearing the completion of a big meal. It reminds you to stop eating sooner. After you walk away from the feasting table you can slip the belt back down, or loosen it a link or two so you can be comfortable.

Did I mention that this was a silly idea? And yet it is obvious that it would work.

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A fantastic diet needs a name, a logo, a person, and idea.

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a diet, a logo, a name, a person, an idea.

These last fourteen months Debbie and I have been dieting. It has been incredibly easy and totally successful, and therefore it is only fair that we share it with the world. Both of us have lost close to two pounds every month. We have used the WeightGURUS app on our phones to track our progress and it has been very helpful for maintaining our attention on our progress. It is a game that we play every day and only win about once a week. That is, we only have a new low about once a week because there is almost a one pound variability day to day; thus there must be about a half a pound loss to show up at a weekly level. However, that does consistently average about two pounds per month and twenty pounds per year. I have gone from BMI of about 28, which is above the recommended 25, down to BMI of 22, which is near ideal. I am intending to librate at 158 pounds. That means sometimes my weight will go as low as 157 and sometimes as high as 159. At the moment it means I am flattening out my diet and aiming to see 157 in about a month or two and bounce just a little.

A fantastic diet needs an easy name, a memorable logo, a person who knows the diet works, and the good idea to present. I have all of those things right now and can easily assemble them into a presentation. They only need a launch location, and I have already contacted two places which are available to me for free.

All that is needed is for me to say, “I’ll do it.”

An intermittent diet that worked for me.

Tags

A daily diet., Intermittent diet, Six hours of eating., The easiest diet ever., The NO diet diet.

I have a typical body for an American male of my age. All my life I have been average. I mean average! Average height. Average weight. Average grades in school. Average.

Unfortunately for me, average means I gained weight consistently throughout my adult years. I did a lot of the average things during the 50s, 60s, 70s and all the rest of those decades, and one of those things was slowly gaining weight. I jogged a lot during most of those decades; when I lived in Berkeley there were long runs to the top of Grizzly Peak twice a week for ten years. Maybe that is a bit more than average, but it wasn’t unusual among my acquaintances. The point is that I went from weighing 150 pounds when I graduated from high school in 1953 to 194 pounds in 2007. I know that was my weight that day because we just put up our fancy Tibetan calendar from Shambhala and I had noted 194 there on January 1st 2007.

This last year Debbie and I have been dieting and we each have lost 22 pounds and I now weigh 161 pounds. Wow! Or boring, you might say, but a bit of further research on dieting here in America demonstrated to me that the diet industry is flawed. Flawed! There is a blizzard of information and yet two-thirds of Americans are overweight and about five percent approaching BMI of 40. That’s fat! Don’t get upset with me for saying that word if you are one of those people. BMI of 40 is fat! The diet industry is a total failure, or perhaps only 99% failure, and thus their advice isn’t worth much.

Debbie and I have been doing the intermittent fasting diet for 13 months now and the way we have been doing it is as easy as breathing. We hardly think about dieting. We have some easy habits and we do them. We eat as much as we feel comfortable with at our meal times and our bodies rarely tell us that we are hungry, so there is no pressure from within to eat. So, there is absolutely no strain of any kind to our dieting.

Google “diet” and there is mountains of information and most of it presented in such a way that it seems to make sense. Some say eat lots of this and none of that, but there are others who say exactly the opposite: they say eat lots of that and none of this! Most of the problem comes from excess sugar and especially excess fructose sugar, but notice I say excess. A little of that stuff won’t hurt you, but … and it’s a big BUT! It is hard to eat only a little sugar and it’s functionally addictive. It is far easier to just avoid as much sugar as possible. Just say NO. That was a slogan several years ago when it was being applied to drugs, but fructose sugar is a big one of those drugs that should have been included. “Just say NO to sugar!” Our food industry pushes sugar because it’s cheap to include in their products and the sugar addicts like it. Because so many foods have been loaded with sugar we have all become sugar addicts without realizing it. The modern world is loaded with sugar addicts.

Intermittent fasting works if you do it in a sensible way. Eating the way people did back in the 1950s works just fine. Eat breakfast, lunch and supper and nothing else before or after those times and you will do just fine for weight maintenance once you are near your ideal weight. When you want to lose weight at a pound per month close your eating window up an hour on each end. That means eating breakfast an hour later and supper an hour earlier. If you want to lose two pounds per month tighten up your eating window two hours on both ends. Do a couple of weeks with one hour before you move to two hours; that will make the adjustments easier. If you are twenty pounds over your ideal BMI of about 23 it will take about ten months to get there. Yes, that is a long time but it’s as easy as breathing, and I assume you expect to keep breathing those ten months. Our eating window has been noon to 6 PM.

Our bodies easily adjusted to six hours of eating.

My daily intermittent fasting diet – update.

Tags

A diet that works, Daily intermittent diet, Lose weight slow

I don’t remember the exact day Debbie and I began our present diet but it was mid-December a year ago. At the beginning, it was just a casual idea and an alternative diet to the many we have done over the years. We used to play a game of doing a new diet the first week of every month, doing it strictly the second week, mildly the third week and just coasting the last week. It was fun and we discovered that for us at least the low carb and low glycemic index seemed to be the easiest. A couple of years rolled by and we both slowly gained weight. I graduated from high school weighing 155 pounds and the years I spent running was generally in the 160s but even with that I slowly gained weight and was stable at 183 in the 1980s. My knees and feet were starting to feel the miles and in 2004 after moving into a new home, where there wasn’t a good running possibility, I quit running. But, I did walk a swift mile to my coffee shop, the Med in Berkeley, and a couple of hours later back to BART and home. Then I gained a few more pounds and a year ago was about 189. No one ever said I looked overweight, and I didn’t feel overweight at a BMI of 27, but since the official number is BMI 25 I decided to do a diet again. I read several serious diet books, and thought about the subject some and decided to do a daily intermittent fasting diet. Our strategy wasn’t all that much different from the way I ate as a youth. Breakfast about 7:30, lunch at noon, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I got home from school, and supper about 6:30. I don’t remember our family ever eating anything in the evening, and I remember being shocked when visiting my granddad and he ate a small bowl of ice cream later in the evening. The reason I mention that is because I still remember that event and it must have been back in the mid-1960s. It was that unusual.

Anyway, Debbie and I began our intermittent daily fast by not eating anything after 7PM or before 8AM. After a week that diet was so easy we moved the hours to 7PM to 10AM, and a week later from 7PM to noon. That finally began to feel like a diet, but our stomach had gotten used to the routine and didn’t complain. When we did eat we ate our usual meals and ate until we were full. For a while, we narrowed the eating time from noon to 6PM, and are still on that six-hour eating window. It is easy to do because we are totally in sync with that habit. We almost always take a fifteen-minute walk around our neighborhood before eating lunch. This diet has been so easy it is difficult to refer to it as a diet.

The results are that we both lost about two pounds per month since last December. I have lost, according to my Weight Gurus iPhone app, which links to my electronic scale, exactly 21.0 pounds. Debbie says she has lost 19.8 pounds. Some weight losers on TV can lose that much poundage in a week but the people who do that suffer and the statistics say almost all of them gain it back quickly. I doubt that I or Debbie will gain any weight back unless we choose to do so. I have regained some of my stair climbing ability and routinely go up three flights of stairs at the car parking structure two steps at a time. I take two deep breaths as I approach the stairs and then don’t even get short of breath at the top. Not bad for an 82-year-old who sits at a coffee shop or a computer quite a lot.

For me and Debbie the intermittent daily diet is easy and effective.

We begin tapering off on our diet

Tags

Ending diets, Tapering off dieting, We are at our goals

Debbie’s and my weights are near our aim points. These goals are now a little arbitrary because we are both so near the ideal BMI of 23.41, which I once calculated out from some life expectancy charts. On that J-shaped curve the zone around the bottom is nearly flat so the ideal for a given person, assuming it could ever be determined precisely, might be a point or so either above or below that number.

Another number was hit today on my iPhone Weight-Guru app, which is linked to my electronic bathroom scale. I have lost exactly 20 pounds in the last ten months. We both lost close to two pounds per month without the slightest annoying effort and mostly by just playing little games. The primary game is timing our meals. As I have explained elsewhere we started by not eating after 8 PM nor before 8 AM, then soon moved it up to 7 PM to Noon, and then for several months to a more positive approach of an eating window of noon to 6 PM. Even that was easy because our stomachs and bodies had gotten used to always eating to the full during those hours and not eating anything at other times. No snacks and no caloric drinks! Choosing to eat all foods during a specific well-defined period is far easier than trying to keep track of some strange diet plan.

This procedure was helped early on by creating the supermarket checkout line procedure. You can do it right now. Imagine standing there waiting in line and instead of picking up some easily available candy, holding our your hand and pushing away those candies with your palm. Close your eyes and do that now. It’s that easy; so when you have succeeded with that little game, intentionally physically smile and say to yourself something like, “I choose not to do things that are not good for me.” That easy procedure when done occasionally will have spillover into other habits you choose to control.

A food problem for me was at public events where there was a pile of free food, including various cakes, pies, and lots of other tempting stuff. Now when I see those things I do the grocery checkout line procedure in my mind and quietly walk away and get some coffee and find a conversation. It works every time and when I leave the event my stomach feels good.

Today’s new diet plan is to expand the eating time a half hour on both ends. Now we will limit our eating to between 11:30 AM and 6:30 PM. Such a small adjustment will be easy to the point of being unnoticed by our bodies but it will ease some of the timings of our social events.

Controlling our bodily weight this way was easy.

The theory of human diet is in chaos.

Tags

A daily diet., diet, Intermittent diet, Intermittent fasting

In the booklet I’ve been working on called Love Your Life, there are going to be a few pages on food and dieting. It seemed appropriate to read the latest literature on that subject, but it turned out to be a trip down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole. Weird science, pseudo-science, real researchers with vast real-world experience mixed with obviously self-serving money grubbers seeking a fast buck. The money involved in the diet industry is enormous. It’s claimed that Americans spend more than 60 billion dollars annually on various forms of dieting to control weight. Even with all that money being spent, it is obvious that the public is gaining weight and at present two out of three here in the US are overweight. Worldwide there are pockets of famine, but overall one out of three humans is overweight. If there were an easy diet plan that was well known, then it seems obvious that everyone would soon know about that diet and do it. Reading a few current diet books makes the problem perfectly obvious. There is a flood of confusion creating an ocean of chaos.

It appears that every book has a theory of everything about proper diet, but each book will have another book directly opposed to it. There was one point of agreement and it seemed to be that sugar was a key promoter of obesity and early death. Of course, that is instantly proven wrong by almost every food producer. Of course, they make lots of money inserting sugar into their products and people buy those products. Obviously, beverages and candy have lots of sugar, but so do supposedly healthy breakfast cereal and the “vegetable” tomato catsup.

I have never been obese but a year ago my BMI was 27, which is above the cutoff for overweight at BMI 25. I was eating close to the Standard American Diet (SAD) minus meat, soda pop and sugared breakfast cereal, so Debbie and I after some reading decided to try the intermittent fasting diet. We have a long history of playing a game of following a new diet for the first ten days per month followed by a gradual tapering off for the rest of the month. The glycemic index diet seemed to work okay but I like white bread too much for it to be a lifelong lifestyle.

The way we have done our intermittent fasting is to eat three times per day but to narrow the time that we eat. We began that method by not eating anything after 8 PM nor before 8 AM. That was easy, but it got us into the habit of observing the clock before we ate. After a month we moved the times to 7 PM and 10 AM, and after another month to 6 PM to Noon. That left us with a six-hour window for eating and an eighteen hour fast.

As it turned out our stomachs realized that they were eating to the full every day and so they never signaled us that they were hungry. We usually go for a fifteen-minute walk before we “breakfast” at noon and we never feel hungry during that pleasant walking time together. I usually feel full all afternoon and am never hungry in the evening or in the morning.

The theory of human diet may be in chaos but after about ten months of more serious dieting, we are both down nineteen pounds and I am near my ideal BMI of 23.4.

Timing when we eat as a diet plan

Tags

Dieting, Intermittent fasting diet, Timing when we eat

Debbie and I have been doing an intermittent fasting diet for about ten months. The softness of the date is because we drifted so slowly into our diet routine that there wasn’t really a precise date. However, we both have been losing about two pounds per month and we have suffered neither hunger to speak of nor any other unpleasant symptoms of bodily neglect. It strikes me as strange that when I google intermittent fasting there are such strange things that are presented under that search. Our form of intermittent fasting is simplicity itself. It is very similar to the standard way of eating here in the United States when I was a child. Eat breakfast before going to school, or work, eat lunch about noon and eat supper after school, or work, about six in the afternoon. That’s it. We ate whatever was presented until we were full, and our stomach did the decision making, not our head. If you look at photographs of people at that time nearly all of them appear trim, whereas nowadays when I see TV man-on-the-street interviews outdoors I watch the background people walking by and there are lots of overweight people. What’s the difference?

People are snacking whenever they feel a hunger pang, and drinking calorie-laden beverages often and drinking and eating while watching TV. After living much like everyone else I started jogging in 1971 and routinely ran from below Sacramento Avenue in Berkeley to the top of Grizzly Peak about 1200 feet up. My usual route was about twelve miles. I made that run one hundred times a year for five years and then started running the Berkeley high school track a couple of time a week for several years. In 2004 I moved to El Cerrito where it was inconvenient for me to jog and I stopped. All those years running I weighed about 175 pounds and after I stopped running that slowly went up to 190, which gave me a BMI of 27. Not bad for a guy in his late 70s by that time, but last year it seemed like a good idea to drop back to what I discovered to be an ideal BMI of 23.41. That is where I am now but a problem arose. That BMI is based on my age 25 height and I have shrunk an inch so my BMI calculations need to be adjusted a bit, and I must lose a few more pounds to compensate for my shrinkage.

Our intermittent fasting diet is so easy to do that I’m not concerned about achieving a few more pounds dip or of keeping off the excess weight beyond my goal. In the book I am presently writing, Love Your Life, there will be a short spread on our form of intermittent dieting. I’m sure it will be a great success because it is so easy to do and it works. There are lots of other diets, but it is obvious that they don’t work well because half a trillion dollars are being spent on dieting at present and the public is gaining weight. If even one of those diets really worked everyone would soon hear about it and do it. But that isn’t happening, so because …

This form of intermittent dieting works so well it will become popular.

An overview of diets with web links.

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A diet that works, diet, Dieting, Links to the major diet plans., Love Your Life diet, My super easy diet works

 A long list of diets from Wikipedia. I also checked the possible 38 Popular Diets Ranked by Health.com experts and copied their list below. I made web links to all of the diets on their list and a few that they didn’t list. Debbie and I have created a slight variation on the intermittent diet where we did a very easy form of intermittent fasting and then once a month increased the challenge slightly. We have each lost about two pounds per month for ten months and are now within a few pounds of what I estimated to be our ideal BMI of 23.4 weight. For me, that was estimated to be 161.75 pounds. So what I am now aiming at is bouncing between 161 and 163 pounds. Two pounds seems to be about what the usual variation is when I weigh myself when I get up in the morning.

When we began this intermittent diet I was eating a serving of tilapia fish about once a week and taking salmon oil capsules. We have been moving slowly over to a vegan diet although I still eat Greek-style yogurt. One of the unexpected effects of our diet plan is that I am never hungry and am usually feeling just a bit full. I have been eating a lot of trail mix made with nuts and cranberries. The list below was created so it would be quicker and easier to compare what we are doing to what the rest of the dieting community is doing.

Best Diets Overall

1. DASH Diet
2. MIND Diet
2. TLC Diet (tie) Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes
4. Weight Watchers
4. Mayo Clinic
4. Fertility
4. Mediterranean (tie)
8. Volumetrics (tie)
8. Flexitarian
10. Jenny Craig
11. Biggest Loser
11. Ornish (tie)
13. Vegetarian
13. Traditional Asian (tie)
15. Slim Fast
15. SparkPeople
15. Anti-Inflammatory (tie)
18. HMR Health Management Resources
18. Flat Belly
18. Nutrisystem (tie)
21. Vegan
21. Engine 2
21. South Beach
21. Abs (tie) Abdominal exercise
25. Eco-Atkins
25. Zone
25. Glycemic-Index (tie)
28. Macrobiotic
28. Medifast (tie)
30. Supercharged Hormone
30. Acid Alkaline (tie)
32. Fast
32. Body Reset (tie)
34. Raw food
34. Atkins (tie)
36. Dukan
36. Paleo (tie)
38. Whole 30
Not listed but I checked them out
— Weight Management
— Dieting
— Intermittent fasting

The big problem with diets is the difficulty with sticking to them for the rest of your life and instead reverting to your previous lifestyle and level of weight.

What I like about my current diet plan is that it is so easy and it works.

My personal experience with diets

Tags

A no effort diet, BMI 23.41, BMI 25, diet, Intermittent diet

Eight years ago Debbie and I were playing a game where we did a new diet every month. The first week of the month we would pick and do a diet plan and do it gently for a week. The second week we would do it rigorously. The third week we would try to do it automatically without thinking about it and the remainder of the month we would just ignore the diet and coast. The only diets we did that seemed to make any difference were the variations on low carbs, such as the low glycemic index diet. One thing we had quit much earlier, and so it didn’t factor in, was sugary beverages. I’ve averaged less than one cola or sugared sparkling water per year for decades. My relationship with diets has mostly been fun and games. My weight had slowly gone from the mid 170s when I was running twenty miles per week in 1980 up to 190 after I had quit running in 2010. My BMI had hit 27 which is a bit above the recommended max BMI of 25 but my blood pressure was still excellent, usually coming in about 120/65 – 55 BPM on professional equipment.

Last December we bought a new electronic body weight scale and about mid-December we began easing into the intermittent fasting form of dieting. There are many forms of intermittent fasting, but what we did was so easy it wasn’t even doing anything. We didn’t eat anything between 8 PM and 8 AM. After a week of that mild form of dieting, we upped the challenge a little to not eating anything between 8 PM and 10 AM. That wasn’t much of a challenge either so we upped it to 8 PM to 12 noon. That was just enough that we stuck with it for several months and we each lost about two pounds per month for eight months, thus we are down sixteen pounds.

After My Annual Physical Exam, I did a BMI analysis carried to the absurd and decided my ideal BMI would be half way between the recommended cutoff for acceptable BMI of 25 and a computed max life expectancy for a BMI of 23.41. In pounds for me, that meant half way between 156.25 & 167.25 or 161.75. By that standard, I still need to lose 4.25 pounds, which at the current rate would mean two months more of dieting and then going onto a flat maintenance routine.

The beauty of this form of dieting called intermittent fasting is that it is so easy and suffering-free it never seemed to be an inconvenience. Once my body decided that it would be well fed at a certain time it didn’t put up the slightest fuss. Occasionally I have noticed a bit of hunger but then I just drink a glass of water, and usually, we take a fifteen-minute slow walk before eating. When we eat, we eat until we are full and lately I have been feeling a bit overstuffed so I haven’t even been totally finishing the serving on my plate. We have been eating quite close to the DASH diet, but that is our choice and I don’t think the actual food is the critical factor in weight loss but is a factor in maintaining a healthy body.

The New York Times, August 22, 2017, has a fact-filled article based on scientific research that demonstrates very similar results to my experience. They did have one improvement that we have been not quite doing although it isn’t too clear what they were doing. The ideal intermittent diet seems to be eating a large breakfast, a smaller midday meal, and a small evening meal and nothing at all later. The way they described their plan seemed to allow a much longer eating time slot than we have been using, perhaps as long as from 7 AM to 7 PM. They may have a twelve-hour eating window and we have been using an eight-hour eating window. We are now eating between 1 PM and 7 PM, which is only a six-hour window. I haven’t felt any discomfort from hunger, quite the opposite, eating three times in only six hours leaves me feeling a bit over-stuffed much of the time.

Just saying NO to eating for a self-chosen time window requires little thought or willpower.

Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald – Book review

Tags

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.