Below is an excerpt from Part One of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

The Nature of The Beast

Most of us have had the experience of starting a new diet and feeling at first that it's "almost kind of fun". Sometimes we even get cocky and think things like "this isn't that hard", and "I can do this forever", and so forth. This goes on for a few days. You feel better. The scale reads lighter---weight does come off. You get a feeling of "thinness" and "triumph" as your clothes feel looser. You get a feeling of energy as you have less weight to drag around...

...But then one day that diet suddenly gets hard. You're not having fun at all anymore. You're dragging yourself around starting to feel uncomfortable, unhappy, and grouchy. From then on, your diet just gets harder and harder until, one day, some thing inside you just takes over. Your will becomes useless. Your good intentions are irrelevant. You find yourself with your head stuck in the refrigerator practically grazing on whatever doesn't need an hour's cooking. And the whole time you know what you're doing---but you can't stop---by then you probably can't even care. Sound familiar? If it doesn't, you probably don't need this book. (Please give it to someone who does.J)

It's happened to me many times. One day, it's hard to get through the day. I start to think too much about food and not enough about more important things. A day or so later my temper gets short ("Why don't these idiots stop pestering me?"). After that, I'm not much fun to be around---but then it's even worse to be me. And after a week or two of this, that diet is history. Some inner thing simply overrides my desire to lose weight with a desire to get out of this misery. "IT" wins again. "I" fail again. My self-esteem is half of what it was. My social and family life need major repairs. Whatever weight I lost is back in a few weeks.

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Cravings and Binges

Cravings and binges are the two most obvious effects of the blocking factor. When you feel food cravings, you can be sure that the blocking factor is active, trying to force you off your diet, and that you are now using pure will-power to stay on your diet. A binge, of course, represents the collapse of your will power and the total triumph of the blocking factor at ending your diet.

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That Beastly Behavior

What is this "thing-that-takes-over?" Well, we could use some pontifical term such as "the homeostatic nutritional management system". And in fact homeostasis is the main physiological principle behind the phenomenon. (See MORE ON... THE THRESHOLD THEORY on page 113 in Part Two.)

[Note: Homeostasis is defined as the tendency of biological organisms to maintain a state of equilibrium using feedback and control systems which regulate internal balances.]

But here in Part One of The Multi-Diet we aren't going to use technical terms. They're useful to specialists, but to the rest of us they're just "techno-babble" that gets in the way of understanding what we actually need to know. We Multi-Dieters want terms that are a little easier to work with.

Not only that, but I want us to have a little fun with this serious and

 usually depressing subject of weight loss. So I've chosen a somewhat more "exotic" term for this frustrating aspect of "the homeostatic management system".

I simply call it "The Beast".

You will find it very useful to think of "The Beast" as an "internal entity" that "wakes-up- when-you-diet- and-makes-you-miserable- until-it-forces-you-off-your-diet".

I think of it as a big stupid shuffling hairy creature that wakes up inside my mind and gobbles up all my will power and good intentions (as a light snack) while it drags me off to its lair (in the kitchen) to get into some serious gluttony.)

And The Beast always wakes up after a few days on any of the usual diets. At first you can ignore it. But after a short time you must fight it. You usually oppose it with sheer will power, and if you're very strong, you succeed for a while. But eventually, it wins. Why? Because it wears you down. It's a part of your mind that's completely obsessive about food. When it's awake and active it focuses on nothing else. You, on the other hand, need to think about other things from time to time---like your family and your job. So eventually, even if you're very strong, The Beast catches you in an unguarded moment. Then your diet is over and the cheating or bingeing begins.

How does The Beast fight you? First, it initiates a sort of restless "food-seeking" behavior (you may not even notice this consciously, but it's influencing you nonetheless). Then it activates food cravings that are initially mild but always become increasingly stronger. Eventually these cravings get so strong that they dominate your conscious thoughts for most of each day. When this stage is reached, very few people can continue to resist eating.

Second, while The Beast is doing these things, it's also slowing down your metabolism so that now you not only feel hungry, grouchy and depressed but you're also slothful and sluggish---and you're not burning much fat either. No doubt about it---this Beast is one tough cookie (uh... creatureJ).

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Why do we eat even when
we're "not hungry"?

This phenomenon that I am irreverently calling "The Beast" is the part of the mind that evolved to "motivate" us to eat when our bodies start to get low on something we need in order to stay healthy.

After 500 million years of evolution, it would be rather surprising if it hadn't evolved a few "tricks" for doing this besides crude "stomach-rumbling hunger". In fact, it has many ways to motivate us to eat by creating a "food focus"---some of them pretty sneaky.

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