Simple Effective Weight Loss

"The problem is that people using simpleminded pre-threshold theory diets are starving themselves - not for calories, which they obviously have too many of - but for all the other things that come in food.

"Naturally, their bodies rebel in every possible way against this starvation."

BW: This would be a good time for me to back up and ask the obvious question. What is the Multi-Diet?

AAA: The Multi-Diet is the practical technique associated with a new theory about the real cause of both weight gain and loss. This new theory is called the Threshold Theory.

The threshold theory simply states that whenever your body's reserves of any necessary nutrient fall below the preferred or "threshold" storage level of that nutrient, your body triggers hunger in order to make you go get it some more of that nutrient.

When this happens, a smart dieter can learn to eat to bring the level of that particular nutrient back up to normal and shut off hunger - without eating many calories in the process.

An even smarter dieter can learn to make sure his/her body never goes below that level at all. Learning this means you will be able to eat very few calories in a day... and therefore use up stored fat for energy without giving your body any reason to trigger the hunger or other food-seeking sensations and behaviors that destroy diets.

BW: Is that the central feature of the threshold theory?

AAA: Well, I don't say it quite this way in the book, but really the central idea is the proposition that hunger or any other food seeking behavior is entirely a part of the homeostatic phenomenon. By this I mean that to be healthy your body needs about 50 different nutrients it can only get from food - and it gets very "unhappy" and "uncooperative" if it's not getting enough of one of them.

What is new is the proposition that the main (and probably only) source of the stimulus to eat (i.e. hunger) is a LACK of enough of one or more of these things. And it could be any one of them or any combination of them.

In other words, there are about 50 different causes each having exactly the same effect, which is hunger and food-seeking.

Now food energy is obviously one of the 50 nutrients we must get from food. But go look in a mirror. Does it look like you're getting low on food energy?

If not, then your hunger is caused by getting low on one or more of the other things you must get from food.

TMD shows you how to figure out which one it is and how to fix it. And fortunately they all fall into a small handful of easily managed groups.

More importantly, TMD shows you how to avoid getting low on these things in the first place. That way you can successfully eat food that has lots of the necessary nutrients but not many calories and so begin to use up some of the excess fat you're carrying around now.