Practical Methods
Introduction

Below is an excerpt from Part Three of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

Five Practical Techniques

Your body triggers hunger and cravings only when it needs more of one of the many nutrients it must get from food in order to stay healthy.

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

You can lose weight without hunger or cravings only when you know how to select foods that give you lots of the “building block” nutrients your body needs but at the same time do not give you enough Calories to maintain your body weight. Simpleminded low-fat or low-Calorie diets that merely cut food and Calorie amounts won’t work. Neither will “high-protein” or other diets that don’t bother to control Calories. You must do both—and do them at the same time. Although this may seem like a “tall order”, it’s easy enough after you’ve learned how.

The modern world provides everything you need to not only limit Calories but also to “fortify” your low-Calorie meals with large amounts of all the other necessary nutrients that otherwise usually get cut along with the Calories. Modern agriculture, transportation, and food technology have made many suitable foods much more cheaply and easily available than ever before in history.
These foods include vitamin and mineral supplements, concentrated natural oils, fish, chicken and other low-fat sources of protein, high-fiber cereals, fresh & frozen vegetables, low-calorie sweeteners and flavorings, and so on.

The available selection of suitable foods is now much bigger than you probably realize (see pg 331). However, the selection of unsuitable foods is even bigger than that, so you probably still need guidance. You will find a list of foods and suggestions for using each for Multi-Dieting in FOODS YOU CAN USE on page 331. In APPENDIX A: MULTI-DIET RECIPES on page 355 you will find a number of recipes that use the foods on this list.

The next few chapters are where we give you a concentrated dose of practical everyday methods to implement the Multi-Diet concepts we “overviewed” in Part One and discussed in detail in Part Two of The Multi-Diet. Many of these methods have been contributed by other nutrition professionals or by readers who wrote or e-mailed my publisher or me.

You will probably find many of these methods obvious. Some may seem a bit more “creative and unusual”. How-ever, all are suitable if used properly (or I wouldn’t have included them here). For most methods there are also several alternative methods that accomplish the same thing, so you should use the ones that work best for you and just experiment a little with the others. Each method is a powerful technique for getting enough of at least one of the Eight Vital Factors into your diet without also get-ting a lot of those obviously unneeded Calories.

You will probably notice that we have a bias in this section. We are mainly interested in foods that are easy to find in ordinary supermarkets, easy to store at home, quick to prepare, and relatively inexpensive. They are summarized in FOODS YOU CAN USE on page 331.

You will also notice that with all methods we make full use of the beneficial creations of modern food technology. This primarily means fat-free and reduced Calorie foods, vitamin and mineral supplements, low-Calorie sweeteners & flavorings, and some partially prepared foods (e.g. frozen vegetables). Those who wish to do so can certainly achieve the same results with more “natural” foods. How-ever the process is more complex and difficult to track and for this reason I highly recommend using computerized food and nutrient tracking software if you attempt to do it that way (see page 309).

These detailed methods are organized into five general techniques. You should feel free to use any one of these techniques on any given day.

Five Practical Techniques

In the next few chapters, we give you no less than five practical techniques for using Multi-Diet principles. We do this simply because no single technique is convenient for all people or at all times. These five different techniques will each suit different situations or different personalities. You should use any one of them whenever you decide it is appropriate.

TECHNIQUE ONE: THE MULTI-DIET “JUMP-START”

The Multi-Diet “jump-start” on page 313 is a limited technique designed mainly to get you started or to break you out of a “rut” if you fall into one. It is a fixed set of meals that take almost no effort or time to prepare yet provide large amounts of nutrients with very few Calories. We created it for those times when you suddenly “wake up” realizing that for several days you haven’t been paying attention and you’ve been eating stuff with more Calories and less of the other nutrients than you should. In other words, you’ve put yourself on the Liar’s Diet without noticing (see pg 55 for a definition of the Liar’s Diet).

Advantage: This no-nonsense technique makes a clean break with whatever you’ve been doing wrong and gets you on, or back on, the Multi-Diet in just one day.

Disadvantage: It’s not designed to be used for more than a few days because it may not provide sufficient variety.

TECHNIQUE TWO: THE MULTI-DIET MEAL PLANS.

The Multi-Diet meal plans starting on page 317 each tell you exactly what foods and how much of them to eat for exactly one day in order to get all the nutrients you need to eliminate hunger and still not get many Calories.

Advantage: Using a meal plan is the easiest and most precise way to control Calories and nutrients. You just do what it says and you won’t have to count Calories or pay any kind of special attention to the other nutrients—the meal plan does that for you.
Disadvantage: Meal plans structure your day into three approximately equally spaced meals that require specific ingredients and specific preparation times or methods. This type and degree of structure probably won’t always fit your situation. There are days when you won’t have all the ingredients, or you won’t have the time, or the energy, or you just “don’t want to think about it”. On days like that you should use one of the other techniques.

TECHNIQUE THREE: THE MULTI-DIET GENERAL FOOD AND SUPPLEMENT ROUTINE.

The general routine on page 327 increases your chances of getting the right things into your diet and decreases your chances of eating too many Calories. When using it, you take certain supplements and eat more of certain concentrated natural foods but do not precisely track Calories or nutrients.

Advantage: This is a single, simple routine that you can do every day. It requires little time or planning. Compared to the normal pattern of eating random meals and snacks it dramatically increases your chances of getting the right nutrients with fewer Calories.

Disadvantage: Weight loss often takes longer because you are not precisely counting or otherwise controlling Calories and nutrients. Compared to using a meal plan, this means you will still sometimes eat too many Calories and not enough of some of the other nutrients.
This method provides lots of suggestions for types of foods that are suitable for Multi-Dieting, as well as preparation tips, tricks, and techniques. It is designed so that you can “mix and match” foods and methods, and create your own diet to fit your own situation and your own preferences. It’s for people who don’t like highly structured diet plans and probably wouldn’t stay on them for long.

TECHNIQUE FOUR: CALORIE AND NUTRIENT TRACKING COMPUTER SOFTWARE.

There are several very good and inexpensive personal computer programs that allow you to enter all the foods & amounts you’ve eaten each day and will then tell you how many Calories and amounts of the other nutrients these foods provided. Knowing this, you can then use supplements or concentrated natural foods to make up any deficiencies and to eliminate unnecessary Calories.

Several of these programs also have recipe functions that allow you to create and or modify your own recipes and even your own meal plans. One such program is Dietpower (www.dietpower.com), which is well designed, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. (We have no connection with Dietpower, Inc. I mention Dietpower only because I know it is well-designed product that can help people use the concepts and methods I discuss in The Multi-Diet. There is probably other software that is just as good.)

TECHNIQUE FIVE: HOW TO DIAGNOSE A “FOOD FOCUS”.

Like the “jump start”, this is a special purpose technique. Sometimes, even when following meal plans or using one of the other methods, you may still develop a “food focus”. A “food focus” is when you find yourself thinking about food and vaguely wanting to eat something even though you’ve been “eating right” or even though you’re “not really hungry”. This can happen even when you are precisely and correctly following another method. It happens because activity levels and lifestyles (and people) differ.

In other words, sometimes you run low on some nutrient simply because for some reason you’re using it up faster than normal. So even though you’re getting “normal” amounts of it with the meal plans or other methods, your body still starts to run out.

A mild food focus means your body is beginning to run low on something it needs from food. (A full-fledged craving means it’s gotten seriously low.) But obviously, it never needs more Calories—you still have plenty of those stored in your fat cells. So to fix the food focus, you will need to figure out what your body really needs—and give it some of that—without giving it more Calories at the same time.

Experience shows that the first most likely culprits for food focuses are potassium, sodium, water, or carbohydrate—with fiber, phosphorus and calcium running next in likelihood.

Diagnosing a Food Focus or a Craving.

To figure out the most likely cause of a food focus, follow these steps in order.

1. Take about 500 mg potassium supplement (tablets are best) with 12-16 oz water. Wait about 1 hour. If the food focus diminishes or disappears, potassium (or water) is probably something you should be getting more of. (A more pleasant alternative to supplements is to drink a 12-oz glass of tomato juice (unsalted) which has about 800 mg of potassium and only about 60 Calories.)

2. Dissolve exactly ½ teaspoon of table salt in 16 oz of water and drink. Pay attention to how it tastes. When your body needs more sodium, salty water tends to taste mildly pleasant. When it doesn’t need more sodium, salty water tastes slightly bitter or “harsh” or “metallic”.

Experiment a little with this and you’ll soon be able to tell the difference. If this seems to be the cause, add more sodium to your diet for a few days. A more pleasant alternative is to dissolve a bouillon cube (has about 1000 mg sodium) in a cup of hot water. (However, you won’t be able to evaluate the above-mentioned changes in taste with this alternative.)

3. If neither of the above tests seems to have a noticeable effect, put one tablespoon of sugar (has 50 Calories) in 16 oz of water and drink it. This dilution of sugar will barely taste sweet, but will be absorbed into your bloodstream within about 20 minutes and will end any food focus caused by low blood glucose levels. If this test works, you probably need to eat a little more carbohydrate. (Note that 1 tablespoon of sugar (12 grams) is not enough to cause noticeable glycemic effects unless you are diabetic or very sensitive to sugar.)

If none of the above seems to eliminate the food focus, you can test fiber, phosphorus, and calcium by eating a cup of very high fiber cereal with skim milk. However, this last test is really like a small meal so it should be a last resort. You will probably find that potassium, sodium, or carbohydrate was the thing your body really wanted more of.

The next few chapters go into these methods in more detail.

If you use any of the techniques in Part Three of The Multi-Diet and if you have any kind of medical condition, it is very important that you let your doctor know that you will be supplementing minerals, particularly potassium and that you will be taking a multivitamin daily. In that situation please do what your own doctor says, not what we say.

Note: Most of the techniques use safflower and flaxseed oils to provide EFAs. This is done because oils are usually more appropriate for (e.g.) salads & cooking. However, you may always substitute 1 oz of walnuts for your EFAs.

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