Below is an excerpt from Part One of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

The Heroic Diet

Any time you lose control of the Eight Vital Factors and wake The Beast, the Multi-Diet quickly degenerates into a Heroic Diet. I use the term "Heroic" for this type of diet because once The Beast wakes up, you will have to fight heroically day and night just to stay on the diet at all---right up to the time The Beast wins anyway. All diets that I've ever tried or heard of are more or less heroic---because they force you to use willpower to make up for their deficiencies in understanding and technique.

Heroic diets always fail to provide enough of some nutrient your body must have in order to stay healthy. This "wakes The Beast" almost immediately. Then it does all those things that make you miserable and use up your willpower and limit the amount of time you can stay on the diet or maintain your Calorie deficit.

Not only that, but it almost seems as if The Beast remembers that diet! And it often won't let you go back on that type of diet for months, if ever. (Actually, it doesn't really "remember". There's a much simpler explanation for the effect. But the result is the same. See MORE ON... THE THRESHOLD THEORY.)

Heroic Diets are always "willpower" diets (no matter what other name their authors give them.) A willpower diet is any diet on which you find yourself thinking about food most of the time and forcing yourself not to eat.

Once you understand and can properly control the Multi-Diet's Eight Vital Factors, will-power diets will be a thing of the past, because you'll rarely even be aware you're on a 1200-1500 calorie per day diet, much less have to force yourself to stay on it.

The Liar's Diet

Restricting Calories (not food) is critical to the Multi-Diet technique.

This means that if you set your "official" Calorie limit at (e.g.) 1500 Calories per day---but you're really eating 2000 or even 3000 calories a day---especially if you don't even know it---then you're not on the Multi-Diet at all. You're on the Liar's Diet. (And I'm sure I don't have to explain just who you're really lying to.)

Controlling Calories is the way you ensure you've created an actual, rather than a fake, Calorie deficit. But you must really do it, not just pretend (even "unconsciously").

[Note: You use the Eight Vital Factors in order to control The Beast in order to protect your Calorie deficit---because it is the Calorie deficit, nothing else, that gets rid of your fat.]

Of course, I have no idea whether you in particular are susceptible to this kind of self-deception (perhaps you're not). I bring it up because a serious amount of well-designed, replicated research shows that a surprisingly large number of overweight people routinely deceive themselves in this way.

Beginning in the 1980s, and contradicting some earlier erroneous conclusions, modern scientific calorie measurement techniques such as the "doubly-labeled water" method became precise enough to demonstrate conclusively that many overweight people "grossly deceive" both themselves and others about the actual amounts of food they eat.

Because of this deception, some earlier researchers ended up wrongly concluding that some overweight people can actually gain weight while eating less than normal people.

You will find a discussion of the issue with references to the research in "UNDERESTIMATING" THE AMOUNT OF FOOD YOU EAT: OR THE LIAR'S DIET, PART TWO on page 159. (And if you really are one of those who've been doing it, go stand in front of a mirror and "turn yourself in" to that person you've been lying to, you're busted!J)

You avoid the Liar's Diet by deciding you will really know how many Calories you put into your body every day. (You don't have to tell anybody else, but you must know this for yourself.) You do it by recording everything you eat; by reading labels; by writing down the calories they tell you about. In fact, if at any given moment of the day, you don't know to within about a hundred calories how much you've already eaten, you should suspect that you've already switched over to the Liar's Diet.

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Although I would like to be "kinder and gentler" about this phenomenon I've called the Liar's Diet, you need to take it seriously, because it really is a BIG problem for some people.

If you believe you're doing the Multi-Diet when really you're only on the Liar's Diet, it's not going to do you (or me) any good whatever.

Please be vigilant about counting Calories. Excess calories are what made you fat and you have no chance of reversing the process, even with the Eight Vital Factors, if you don't know it's happening.

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If you would like to know more about the phenomenon I have irreverently called "The Beast" please turn to MORE ON... THE MULTIMIND on page 129 in Part Two.

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Is "The Beast" a Creature from the X-Files, or even (gasp) The Devil?J

No.

I'm sorry to disappoint fans and other lovers of such melodrama, but it's nothing so apocalyptic. The term is merely a "literary device" and is intended to be fun, not frightening.

Think of The Beast as an internal phenomenon that behaves somewhat like a house pet - let's say a large dog. Owners of such pets know that if you feed them regularly, pet them daily, and give them proper care and attention, they behave themselves, can be easily trained, and become pleasant, useful companions.

On the other hand, if you starve them, ignore them, beat them, or just try to shove them out of the way, then they behave badly, make messes everywhere, and are constant obnoxious pests. This is similar to the type of Beastly bad behavior produced by the typical simple-minded "high-this or "low-that" diet.

On the Multi-Diet you don't mistreat your Beast, you tame it by taking proper care of its real needs (and only its real needs).

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