A Basic Beast-Taming Skill
A critical skill in managing the Eight Vital Factors is
to learn to notice when you are starting to think about food (assuming you can't
do this alreadyJ). Whenever you're
thinking about food, it means The Beast is waking up!
The Eight Vital Factors have a cumulative threshold
effect---when you are simultaneously above all of their eight thresholds, The
Beast remains asleep and you have no hunger and no interest in food. If you fall
below even one of these thresholds, The Beast wakes up and you develop an
immediate and growing focus on food. This is an automatic "built-in"
homeostatic response. You cannot ignore, deny, or suppress it. You can control
it only by controlling the types and amounts of the Eight Vital Factors in your
diet.
Fortunately, in modern industrial societies, with the
huge variety of foods, supplements, and nutrition information they make easily
available, it is easy to control The Beast by giving it the food factors it
really needs without allowing it the Calories it obviously doesn't need. (One
hundred years ago---or even fifty---this would have been nearly impossible.) The
Multi-Diet is about learning to take the control of eating away from The Beast
by using this modern knowledge and food variety. In other words, Multi-Dieters
dominate The Beast with knowledge and subtlety, not "willpower and
motivation".
Two Critical Requirements
On The Multi-Diet you therefore focus on managing two
equally important issues:
1. Making sure you don't get enough Calories to maintain
your body weight.
2. Making sure you do get enough of each of the Eight
Vital Factors to control The Beast. (Otherwise, The Beast won't let you control
Calories for long.)
We'll discuss each of the Eight Vital Factors in the next
chapter, but first a few points need to be clarified.
Calorie Restriction - It's Necessary
Calorie restriction is necessary because you lose weight
only when you eat fewer calories in a day than your body uses that day. Your
body makes up this calorie deficit by burning stored fat---which is exactly what
nature intended, and exactly what you want to happen. (So far, so good.J) This calorie deficit is the direct and
only cause of weight loss (other than liposuction, which is beyond the scope of
a mere diet book:)). The difficulty with actually using this natural mechanism
has always been that The Beast always wakes up and sabotages it after a few
days. Therefore, your mission is to learn to keep The Beast asleep and out of
the way while you restrict Calories and your body burns stored fat as nature
intended it to do.
[Note: There have been decades of sophisticated but
nonetheless failed attempts by scientists to discover some natural
physiological mechanism that the body can use to "waste" stored
energy (fat) by "flushing" it out without burning it, or by
"burning" it without using the energy produced (this latter is
sometimes called "futile cycling"). Despite what you may see in
supermarket magazines, so far there is no indication that any such mechanism
even exists, much less that it can somehow be tricked into producing
significant weight loss.]
Calorie Restriction - Only
The Multi-Diet technique requires maintaining this daily
"calorie deficit". Therefore, it does involve deprivation---but only
of Calories---not of food. This point is critically important because---besides
calories---food contains all those other things which make up the Eight Vital
Factors and which you must have in order to remain healthy. If you inadvertently
restrict any of these other things your body will wake The Beast to make you go
eat.
I emphasize this point about Calorie deprivation because
many people tend to assume it always means food deprivation---which is wrong! A
surprising number of people are actually terrified of dieting because of this
idea of food deprivation, which they correctly associate with all the usual diet
misery. These fears have also been reinforced over the years by certain
questionable "scientific" pronouncements that have frankly pandered to
the misunderstanding.
The incorrect assumption behind all this stuff is that
food is fuel---and only fuel. (They all actually know better, they just don't
think that way in practice.) So they just assume you get hungry because your
body needs energy and you'll be miserable if you don't give it energy.
Wrong! According to the threshold theory, when you are
overweight, your hunger is never caused by a need for more energy. Instead, it
is always caused by an insufficiency of one of the other Eight Vital Factors
that you also get from food---not energy.
On the Multi-Diet you should not fear food deprivation
because you won't be depriving yourself of food at all. Instead you'll be using
food to control the Eight Vital Factors---with undeviating, uncompromising,
unyielding, implacable efficiency. (Ruthless, relentless, inexorable,
iron-fisted, mother-of-all-battles, total domination!!!).
[Stage note: Maniacal laughter in background,
lightning flashes, organ playing Bach Toccata & Fugue in D minor.]
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* *
The FDA "Nutrition Facts" Label
The FDA "Nutrition Facts" Label, required
on most food packages in the U.S., is an especially useful resource for
tracking Calories, protein, and carbohydrate, three of the most critical
factors that must be managed on the Multi-Diet.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* *
A Rule-Of-Thumb for Restricting Calories
The most direct determinant of actual weight loss is how
much or little energy (Calories) you eat per day. There are accurate and
sophisticated techniques easily available to determine both your best weight and
the number of Calories you need to eat in order to reach that weight in a given
time period. The information you need in order to calculate this and use these
techniques is provided in detail in MORE ON... BODY WEIGHT & CALORIES on
page 139 in Part Two.
Here in Part One, for the sake of brevity, we will just
use a simple "rule-of-thumb".
Rule of Thumb for Managing Calories
Most women and small men should set a target limit of
about 1200 Calories per day. Most men and tall women should set their target at
1500 Calories per day. For most people this will produce a minimum 500 to 1000
Calorie per day deficit (a 1-2 pound loss of pure fat per week.)
Calories are very easy to track because labels on most
modern food packages provide the information. Additionally, food composition
tables (which include Calories) are easily available in bookstores. At first,
you will need to write down the numbers of Calories in the amount of food you
eat at each meal (and snack) in order to keep track of the total for the day. In
Part Three, I have provided several ways to make this easy. (Hint: The best way
to do this is to use nutrition tracking computer software.)
Before we discuss the Eight Vital Factors of the
Multi-Diet in detail, there are two other types of diet I want to define because
people get on them by accident and I'll be referring to this from time to time
throughout this book. | 
