Simple Effective Weight Loss

"You are not lazy, or apathetic, or 'a slob'. You just know that the 'answers' you've been given don't really work and aren't worth the effort."

AAA: More seriously, most diet books have a deservedly bad reputation because so many of them are not only ineffective but are really written only to make money, or give someone "bragging rights" about being a published author, or for other equally trivial reasons.

I'm not interested in being associated with all that. So I remain anonymous, and we give away much of the material free on the Internet.

BW: Why bother to write a book at all?

AAA: The short answer is that I know what causes obesity and we badly need a diet technique that really works. Obesity is rapidly becoming one of the most expensive and dangerous chronic medical problems in the industrialized world. Already, over 1/3 of the U.S. population is seriously overweight. So those with new ideas need to make them known so that they can benefit the people who can use them.

Then again, the medical problem is just one part of it. I have lurked in many of the Internet's overweight support groups. Generally, overweight people don't really complain all that much. But it's not hard to see the emotional pain they live with.

Let me just quote you some of the more obvious examples I've picked up:

• "Sometimes I'll look at my plate loaded with food and wonder, 'Why am I doing this? Why do I just keep stuffing it in when I know I shouldn't?'"
• "...believing that I have a chemical imbalance helps me stop feeling that I am a weak-willed, spineless person with no determination..."
• "I think about food constantly... I try to get my mind off it, but I can't seem to do it for very long. It's like a never-ending cycle."
• "I live to eat, instead of eating to live. Will I ever reach the point where I can eat to live instead of living to eat?"
• "I have strange food cravings... pickles, split peas, shredded wheat, I eat and I can't stop."
• "I don't want to blame myself or anyone, I just want to do something about it... but no one knows how."
• "Some days food controls every thought in my head. I'm eating lunch and wondering what I'm going to have for dinner. I will probably always be like this."

Could anyone miss the suffering in these comments? A belief in lack of will-power, in guilt, and in personal ineffectiveness are dominant in all of them.

But the threshold theory makes quite clear that "will-power", even will-power reinforced by guilt, has almost zero ability to affect whether you gain or lose weight. The problem is much more basic and much more easily controlled.

In my opinion, most overweight people actually have MORE will-power than most normal-weight people. This is because they are always exercising their will-power to try to avoid becoming fatter. Naturally constant practice makes them better at it than those who don't practice.

Unfortunately, will-power is simply the wrong tool for the job. You don't drive nails effectively with a screwdriver no matter how good your screwdriver is.

And then it's all made worse by those ignorant "professionals" and "specialists" (and others) who "explain" the problem by publicly saying things like "We just eat too much." or "We just need to exercise more." or we should just push ourselves away from the table while we'll still slightly hungry." Of course, they always say "we", but they always mean "you".

People like that don't have the smallest clue about the real causes of overweight and they have no answers for it. But instead of honestly admitting this, they avoid it by laying a guilt-trip on the victims - which only makes the suffering worse.

BW: It sounds like you're down on specialists.

AAA: Just the bad ones. I know that collectively specialists hold the answer to the problem, although they don't yet realize it. But as in all professions there are some very poor specimens who really ought to go into other lines of work.

The real problem now - I think even more in the medical community than in the general public - is that there is so much pessimism from so many failures to find an answer. Although they often won't admit it, most doctors now believe that obesity must have some "metabolic" or even "genetic" cause. By this, most of them are really just saying "It must be some cause too deep for me or the kind of medical training I've had".

Of course, I do not believe that obesity is a deep mystery at all. I think development of an understanding of obesity will follow the same pattern that the understanding of the cure for peptic ulcers took. Are you familiar with that?

BW: I don't think so.

AAA: Well, let me tell you then.

Prior to the early '80s the cause of stomach and duodenal ulcers was also considered to be a deep mystery.

Doctors knew that stomach acid was somehow able to unnaturally attack the lining of the stomach and cause intense discomfort, pain, and occasional life-threatening punctures of the organ walls, but they didn't know why this happened.

People with ulcers suffered for years or their whole lives. Billions of dollars a year were spent on the problem. Occasionally the ulcers spontaneously healed. But no one knew how or why.

Naturally, the drug companies had huge research programs that came up with drugs that would turn down stomach acid or turn up mucus secretion or do this or do that. But the drugs were only partially effective at best and most doctors really thought it would take more billions of dollars and "breakthrough" research to uncover the cause and cure for this mysterious disease.

And then one day up pop a couple of Australian pathologists who say in effect: "Ulcers are caused by a common bacterium (helicobacter pylori) that lives in the stomach, has been well-known to science for decades, and which all of you wrongly think is a harmless, sluggish bug that won't even grow in culture."

Naturally, when high-paid specialists with big research budgets who have spent decades studying a problem are told by "unknown upstarts" that the real cause of the problem is a common, easily-killed GERM, they are not amused. Of course, they tried very hard to ignore these guys' work.

However, the Australians wouldn't shut up, and they wouldn't go away, and after a while their work was checked experimentally by various other specialists who could not be ignored. And guess what? It turned out they were right!

So now peptic ulcers are considered easily curable and all the formerly expensive, by-prescription-only, questionably-effective ulcer medications have become cheap, over-the-counter "heartburn remedies" and are apparently entirely effective for that purpose.

Now I say that this huge obesity issue is really the same kind of problem. It's not a deep mystery. It has a simple solution that, for whatever reason, has just been missed up to now.

Nor do I claim that I or even my mentors are overwhelmingly smarter or more perceptive than other people. We've just noticed something simple that everyone else didn't -- sometimes you get lucky.

But if we hadn't seen it, eventually someone else would have.

I think it's likely that examination and acceptance of this answer will be resisted for maybe a few more years and then obesity will no longer be considered much of a theoretical problem at all.

However, I do expect the current pessimism to be a temporary obstacle to investigation of the threshold theory and even of The Multi-Diet's popular approach.

Fortunately, I believe that the public, because of it's lesser (though still high) degree of pessimism, will eventually jump out in front of all but the best professionals on this issue. That's one reason why TMD (The Multi-Diet) is a popular book instead of a series of journal articles.