How To Tame The Beast
In modern societies, The Beast's undiscriminating and
obstinate insistence on eating anything and everything until it's gotten what it
needs usually means you get fat from all the calories in the modern food supply
long before it gets enough of whatever it really does need. Although this is
"kind of" a solution to the problem of keeping you nutritionally
healthy (which is The Beast's real objective) - it's obviously a very
unsatisfactory solution from any other point of view. You can easily do better.
How can you do better? There are several requirements,
but the most important requirement is for you to decide that you will supply the
brains, discrimination and decisions about what foods you will eat when you get
hungry. (We discuss how to do this in the next chapter.) You must make the
decision to never let The Beast decide "what to eat" - because it just
isn't smart enough to get what it really needs without getting a lot of unneeded
Calories in the process.
What The Beast actually does know is when you are getting
low on some nutrient you can get only from food. It always knows this better
than you do. But it doesn't have a clue as to what - in the modern world - you
must eat in order to get that nutrient without getting a lot of fattening
Calories besides.
It is only you - the rational, conscious self - who can
learn to make sure The Beast gets the right stuff right away - without the
Calories. When you succeed at this, The Beast goes back to sleep (or never wakes
up in the first place), your interest in food disappears, and your body simply
pulls its energy requirements out of its (much too ample) fat stores.
This situation is The Holy Grail of Weight Loss.:) You
create this sublime condition of glorious exaltation by consciously managing
eight food factors that dominate The Beast's existence and control its behavior.
Basic Beast - Taming Tools
It is not difficult to understand the eight food factors
that control this homeostasis phenomenon we irreverently call "The
Beast". In fact, you almost certainly know about at least six of these
factors (and maybe seven). Very few people outside the research community know
of all eight. But you probably have no idea how powerful all of them are for
losing weight - when they are used together.
The need to use these factors all together at the same
time is the central contribution of the threshold theory to weight control. Even
though much has been known about each factor for a long time, and many well -
known diet techniques are based on one or another of them, it is the new
threshold theory that allows us to fit them together and use them as a
functioning whole. In the rest of this chapter I discuss the issues that relate
to using all eight of these factors together. In the next chapter I discuss the
basics of handling each of them individually. (And in Part Two each of them has
an entire chapter giving the most complete and relevant information.)
These eight factors are (in no particular order of
importance):
- The Protein Factor
- The Essential Oil Factor
- The Carbohydrate Factor
- The Vitamin/Mineral Factor
- The Fiber Factor
- The Water Factor
- The Exercise Factor
- The Sensory Factor
Of course, you recognized most of them, and already know
a lot about them. But right now, the single most important thing for you to
understand about these eight food factors is that you must manage all of them
properly at the same time. A piecemeal approach simply doesn't work for long.
Mishandling even one of these factors for more than a day or two always
"wakes The Beast", which then tries to force you off your diet.
Not only that, but the effect of mishandling any of these
food factors can be very subtle. This means that if you don't know about one of
them - or if you're not paying attention to some of them - you'll never know
which of them caused The Beast to wake up to make you start cheating and eating.
However, if you are aware of them and are paying attention to them, none of them
is very difficult to manage. After finishing the Multi-Diet you will know how to
manage each one of these "Eight Vital Factors", which is the term I
will (modestly) use for them in the rest of this book.:).
The requirement to properly manage the Eight Vital
Factors all together at the same time is the main reason other diets don't work
for long. Although the best of these other diets correctly focus your attention
on controlling some of these Eight Vital Factors (usually protein, carbohydrate,
or fat), they unfortunately always ignore one or more of the others. These
others then get out of balance and wake The Beast - which zaps you with those
desperate food cravings, the sluggish metabolism, and all the other nasty
negative nonsense. So you can't stay on these diets long enough to lose much
weight, and then you quickly gain it all back. (Naturally, you blame yourself
for this failure, but it's not your fault. You were simply using an incomplete
and therefore inadequate technique.)
Learning to use the Eight Vital Factors properly means
learning how to get enough of the right kind of each factor in your diet without
getting a lot of excess Calories besides. "Enough" is different for
each of them, and getting the "right kind" is critically important,
but once you've read the discussions in this book you'll be able to do it easily
enough. And after you have learned to do this you will easily be able to
restrict Calories and lose weight without any of the usual unpleasant side
effects of dieting.
Your body has a threshold storage level for each of these
Eight Vital Factors that it considers to be "enough" for its needs.
When you keep its supplies above that threshold storage level, it's happy and
won't make you hungry. But if it falls below its threshold level on any one of
them it will "wake The Beast" to make you eat to get it's supplies
back up above the level - and you will almost certainly get a lot of unneeded
Calories in the process.
Furthermore, the fact that you are overweight means that
even your "normal" diet often leaves you marginally below the
threshold (i.e. marginally deficient) in at least one of the Eight Vital
Factors. This, in turn, means that The Beast has been sneakily making you eat
too much (or too often) in its attempt to make up the deficiency. Naturally,
this made you get fat. But even worse, it also means that whenever you restrict
food to go on the ordinary type of simpleminded low-cal, low-carb, or low-fat
diet your marginal deficiency quickly degenerates into a definite deficiency or
even into a dangerous deficiency in terms of this marginal vital factor (and
probably several others as well). This just makes The Beast react more
desperately and vigorously with those unpleasant sensations, intense food
cravings, sluggish metabolism, and v-e-r-y s-l-o-w weight loss.
Not only that, but when simpleminded diets of any sort
create serious vital factor deficiencies or make them worse, this also means
that whenever you go off the diet your body wants you to "make up"
whatever factors you became deficient in. So when you start eating
"normally" again you are likely to lose control and binge-eat until
you have made up these deficiencies. Naturally, in the process of bingeing you
are more than likely to also get far too many Calories and gain back most, or
all, of the weight you lost (and maybe even more).
By paying strict attention to both Calories and the Eight
Vital Factors, you will be able to decisively interfere with this depressing
progression of events so that your weight-loss can proceed indefinitely without
those miserable cravings, binges, and other diet-destroying unpleasantness.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Self-denial through will-power is always the wrong
way to lose weight. If your mind is focused on food and you are having to
use will-power to stay away from it - then you're not eating the right
things on your diet - it's that simple!
You need to figure out what that diet lacks and
correct that problem - without getting a lot of Calories besides. The
Multi-Diet gives the information you need for this.
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