Recently I ran across a series of three articles about the basic Intutive Eating Concepts by UK addiction counselor, Gillain Riley, who appears to share my point of view about the general ineffectiveness of this Diet. Ms. Riley states her professional knowledge about these concepts in a thoughtful and precise manner, and I am sharing this series here at DietHobby. 

Advocates of Intutitive Eating insist that this diet / manner-of-eating / way-of-eating / lifestyle is "not a diet". My belief is that every diet works for someone, and this includes Intutive Eating.

The first of the three articles can be found at: "Does Our Body Tell Us WHAT to eat - Intutive Eating 1"

Are You Hungry? 
      by Gillian Riley, Author of Ditching Diets (Revised edition of Eating Less)

The assumption behind this advice is that hunger means you are depleted of energy or nutrients, and therefore in need of food. But it's considerably more complicated than that. For example, when people fast or follow extremely low calorie diets, their hunger doesn't become increasingly more intense as time goes on and nutrient stores dwindle. Any anorexic will tell you that after a short time without food, their hunger fades away. If hunger accurately reflected nutritional status, this wouldn't happen. The reverse would happen, and hunger would intensify day by day.

To make the same point in a different way, if hunger expresses genuine nutritional need, it would begin to subside after the first few mouthfuls of a meal. But this doesn't necessarily happen either, and most people have at least some experience of the reverse occurring. Many people can begin a meal not feeling especially hungry, and then, after just a few bites of tasty food, feel a strong sense of hunger suddenly arrive. It doesn't make sense that your body would signal depletion after those bites but not before. (1)

We often think of those first few bites as a way to stimulate hunger, to awaken it. After all, the whole point of the 'starter' course is supposed to be to awaken our appetite and get our 'gastric juices flowing'. But how can we rely on this hunger signal if it needs to be stimulated to appear in the first place?

Rather than a signal of nutritional need, hunger is, to a great extent, a response to cues, at least some of which will be learned. The cue prompts an expectation of eating, and it's this expectation that sets off all those hungry sensations in our stomach. The cue could be the time of day, or the sudden availability of food along with the sights and smells of its arrival. There may well be no problem at all in responding to this by eating.

The problem arises for those who have overeaten so much that the cues triggering feelings of hunger happen much too frequently. It's okay for the expectation of eating to produce a sensation of hunger, unless you expect to eat every 15 minutes or so. Trying to follow the advice to eat when hungry isn't helpful if you feel hungry all the time.

Then there are those who tend not to feel hungry, even though it would be a very good idea for them to eat something. I've had a number of clients attend my seminars who have told me similar stories when they previously participated in a seminar promoting Intuitive Eating. They complete the seminar, quite excited by the prospect of looking out for hunger signals before eating. They go past breakfast time and don't feel hungry. They don't feel hungry at lunchtime, so they don't eat anything then either. Then, by the end of the afternoon, they feel weak, faint, irritable and shaky. They can't concentrate on their work and there's no food available except chocolate and sweets.

One factor here could be stress, which can have the effect of blocking hunger signals. When an animal is genuinely stressed, perhaps because they are about to be attacked, the last thing they are going want to do is eat. Part of the automatic stress response is to direct blood to the limbs in order to fight or take flight. The digestive system shuts down until it's needed again when the animal is safe and the stress has subsided.

Our present day human stress, though, is usually a more chronic state. Stress builds throughout the day and many people, not feeling hungry, go for many hours without eating. Typically they eat something when they get home and then overeat throughout the evening, probably on food that is not the most nourishing.

A paper published in the medical journal Physiology and Behavior proposes a phenomenon called 'hedonic hunger', which is hunger specifically for the more desirable (but less nourishing) kinds of food. (2) 'Hedonic hunger' is one manifestation of what I call the 'addictive desire to eat'. For example, if you feel hungry for toast and jam while completely uninterested in cucumber, you've probably got some hedonic hunger (addictive appetite or desire). The crucial point is that it feels like hunger, so it's very easy to assume you have an entirely appropriate need of food.

Again, it helps us to take into consideration the food environment in which our bodies evolved. A paper from the Journal of the American Dietetic Association makes this point: "...there is no clear adaptive advantage for an organism to consume just enough food to maintain energy balance. Such a system would fail to protect against future gaps in food availability. A strong hunger drive would act to encourage overconsumption and promote energy storage for use during intermittent food shortages." (3)

The question remains, if we have such an unreliable experience of hunger, why is Intuitive Eating so widely recommended?

The reason is that Intuitive Eating is presented as an alternative to prohibitive thinking (restrictive eating). It's well known - both in research and in many people's everyday experience - that it is counter-productive to think prohibitively about food. Trying to follow rules to restrict and deny yourself may work initially but creates stress, a miserable sense of deprivation and eventually a rebellious return to overeating. So the idea is to replace prohibitions around food with Intuitive Eating; to wait, for example, until you are hungry before you eat.

But these two ideas are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of people who will think prohibitively in order to prevent themselves from eating before they're hungry. 'I mustn't eat if I'm not hungry' is just another rule to obey - or not!

The alternative I teach is neither of these alternatives. I do encourage people not to think prohibitively because it certainly is destructive. And it's fine if you are hungry when you eat, so by all means make your best guess as to when you think you'll need food again. But the way that's done, I believe, is through intellectual evaluation. We can quite simply develop a fairly good idea of what, how much and how often to eat, put together by our grasp of our nutritional needs, our schedule and the availability of nutritious food throughout our day.

Of course you also need to be able to manoeuvre yourself around the addictive appetite you may well have for all that food you don't need. But don't trust your body to tell you what's addictive and what isn't. If your pattern of eating isn't producing weight loss (assuming you are overweight) it's likely that eating even less will deliver the result you're after.

NOTES
1. What can hunger teach us about drug craving? Kassel JD, Shiffman S Addictive Behaviors Research and Therapy (1992) 14: 141-167
2. Hedonic hunger: A new dimension of appetite? Lowe MR, Butryn ML Physiology & Behavior (2007) 91: 432-439
3. Appetite: Measurement and Manipulation Misgivings Mattes RD, Hollis J Journal of the American Dietetic Association (2005) 105 (5): S87-SS97
More on this topic in the chapter "The Trouble with Hunger" in EATING LESS.

Here's a link to my book review of Ditching Diets (2013) by Gillian Riley.

NOTE: Originally posted on 3/16/13. Reposted for new viewers.

 
Intuitive Eating is a Diet which claims it is not a diet.
I've shared about the IE concepts here on DietHobby before, and I personally believe they are ineffective for almost everyone. However, it is NOT a one-size-fits-all world, and I am certain, that ... just like every other diet ... Intuitive Eating works for someone.

One of the primary eating concepts of Intutive Eating is:

 "eat whatever you want - because your body has natural wisdom about what it needs, and it will provide you with that information."

Unfortunately, this is an Untrue Statement,... merely a crock of magical, wishful thinking with no basis in reality,... not through Basic Science, Research Studies, or documented Real Life Experiences of People. I find it amazing that Nutritionists and other Medical Professionals continue to adopt and broadly disperse that totally flawed concept.

Recently I ran across a series of articles about the basic Intutive Eating Concepts by UK addiction counselor, Gillain Riley, who appears to share my own point of view on this matter. She states her professional knowledge about these concepts in a thoughtful and precise manner.

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO EAT?
                  by Gillian Riley, Author of Ditching Diets (Revised edition of Eating Less)

'Intuitive Eating' promotes eating when hungry, stopping when full, and eating whatever you want. I've heard people say that this makes so much sense, they don't understand why they can't manage to do it. Well, this advice doesn't make any sense to me at all, so maybe you'll let me know what it is that I'm not understanding!

These ideas are widespread, having been promoted by Susie Orbach for years, among many others. Just google 'intuitive eating' and you'll see it's all over the place. This will take a while to cover, so I'll start with the suggestion to 'eat whatever you want' (because the innate wisdom of your body lets you know what it needs) and continue with the other aspects of this advice in my next newsletter.

The experience of 'wanting to eat' something is going to feel very different to each person, and even for each person from occasion to occasion. It's feeling attracted towards some food, certainly, and most likely thinking you would enjoy eating it, that you fancy it. This attraction could be barely conscious, but when we are aware of it, it often gets called a craving. (I think of attraction, desire, urge and craving as the same thing, with varying degrees of intensity, just as irritation is a less intense form of rage.)

I have heard people say that they crave greens sometimes, and perhaps that's true for you. But if you had some raw spinach leaves in a bowl in the kitchen and a slice of cake on a plate next to it, we surely know which one would be more likely to grab your attention and not let go. A 'craving for greens' may be no more than the awareness that you haven't had any for a while, a purely cognitive process rather than an expression of your body's need for B vitamins. The reason I say this is because what is craved by most people most of the time is food that contains various combinations of high-density, starchy carbohydrates (such as sugar, potatoes and processed grains) salt and fats.

A Tufts University study looked at the eating habits and self-reported food cravings in a group of overweight women over a period of six months. (1) They found that those foods that were craved were more than twice as high in energy density as other foods in their diet. Not only were they high in energy density, but the craved foods had higher fat content and lower fibre and protein content. The reason is simply that the starchy carbs and fat have greater reinforcing properties, biochemically speaking, and this has been well established in research.

Of course all food contains some reinforcing properties, but a natural food, such as broccoli, has those reinforcing properties in a natural balance. When a 'food product' is manufactured, it has a far greater proportion of these highly reinforcing elements. And that 'food product' might be manufactured outside your home, or it might be put together by yourself and called dinner!

I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to accept that this is always a matter of degree. Fat in particular is what makes our food enjoyable, and it's very important to enjoy what you eat. But for many who overeat, they enjoy too much. They satisfy an appropriate delight in food but on top of that they satisfy excessive, addictive desire too often. They do this because they have trained themselves to expect more of the more addictive elements more often. So they eat more fat and more starchy carbs at meals, often quite literally mixed up on the plate with the food that's really needed. Then more fat and sugar for dessert after the meal. And maybe some more fat, carbs and salt for snacks later on that evening.

They develop that habit and repeat it daily for years. And then, whenever they stop to listen to what their body 'needs', guess what? It 'needs' sugary fat! It's like a smoker asking her body if it needs a cigarette. Of course it seems to, but this is the twisted reasoning of addiction speaking.

There isn't a great deal of research on this aspect of 'intuitive eating', I suspect because the people who do the research on appetite don't take it seriously enough to study. One study, though, at the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania sums it all up for me. (2) They put the pharmacological elements of chocolate into capsules and gave them to self-confessed 'chocolate cravers' to see if the capsules would satisfy their cravings. They didn't. At all. As you might expect.

I could go along with this idea of tuning into my genuine needs if I lived in an environment where I had only ever encountered and eaten purely natural foods, and where sugar and fat were very occasionally on offer. But why would a reliable, natural system exist when it's only relatively recently that we have had access to such abundance and such an enormous variety of food available year round, and especially so much high-density, manufactured food? It makes no sense (to think) that my body has evolved with built-in intuition to help me manage my appetite for all this stuff.

I know I used to think that there were probably some nutrients I needed that were contained, for example, in ice cream. It's just not true, though. Ice cream is just more processed carbs and lots of fat. By all means eat it if that is your choice. It tastes good because anything with that much fat and sugar in it is going to taste good. But it's still not nutritious.

So how do I know that? I read books. I read the most thoroughly well researched books on nutrition I can find, such as The China Study (outstanding, although a hefty read) and Anti-Cancer. (3) I educate myself about what my body needs because both the quality and the quantity of my life depend on it.

If you don't have the time or inclination to read, remember the idea is not to cut this stuff out entirely, but clearly if you want to eat less, then it's most likely low-nutrient, high-density processed carbs and fat that you would do best to cut back on. Getting clear about the nature of your desire for them will help you to achieve that, so the first step is to let go of this idea that your body transmits its wisdom about what you need.

How you eat less of the food you crave - without feeling like you're missing out, being restricted or deprived, without becoming obsessed with the food you're not eating, and without becoming rebellious and eating even more - how to manage all that is contained in the technique I write about and teach. The end result is that you learn to enjoy food that has less fat and starchy carbs. You realise that the less you eat of it, the less you feel like you need it. As that happens, the more you will enjoy the food that doesn't have so much of those highly reinforcing, addictive elements.

Just one more point, and that is that my body does tell me what to eat but in a completely different way, and this is after eating, rather than before. When you tune in to the different effects eating various foods have on your body - in terms of energy, sleep, digestion, joint aches, head aches, mood, to name a few - you tune in to the most powerful and effective motivation there is to eat differently and to eat less.

NOTES
1. "Food cravings and energy regulation." Gilhooly CH, Das SK, Golden JK International Journal of Obesity (2007) 31(12): 1849-58.
2. "Pharmacological versus sensory factors in the satiation of chocolate craving." Michener W, Rozin P. Physiology and Behavior (1994) 56(3): 419-22.
2. The China Study (2006) is by T. Colin Campbell, PhD and AntiCancer (2007) is by Dr David Servan-Schreiber.
Also see pages 192-193 in EATING LESS by Gillian Riley

Here's a link to my book review of Ditching Diets (2013) by Gillian Riley.

NOTE: Originally posted on 3/15/13. Reposted for new viewers.

As part of my ongoing Dieting Hobby, and my personal weight and food struggles, I've been investigating and experimenting with the Three Principles concept, which involves a shift away from the techniques of traditional Psychology.

The following article is an interesting, and thoroughly researched, overview of these concepts by a Cal Poly professor. He does not appear to a "practitioner", nor does he seem to support or to oppose the "Three Principles", and I find his outside perspective to be of value.
 

A Unified Field Theory of the Interior Life  (The 3 Principles)

         by Robert Inchausti, PhD

“Everything rests on a few ideas that are fearsome and cannot be looked at directly.” —Paul Valery

Sydney Banks (1931–2009) was a Scottish welder who had a mystical experience in 1973. He wrote a few books about his spiritual revelations and gave lectures. More importantly, he transformed the lives of a cadre of “post-therapy” psychotherapists who recast his ideas under variety of names, most notably “Health Realization Therapy” and “The Psychology of Mind.”

Banks’ ideas are currently experiencing a new resurgence under the moniker “The Three Principles.” Put simply, “The Three Principles” are a way of looking at the relationship between mind, thought, and consciousness that offers a kind of unified field theory of the interior life. Human beings are experience-generating animals, but the individual experiences we generate are the product of thoughts. It is our thoughts that shape the formless unknown into meaningful events and images. This is both a useful and disorienting thing since the process of human thinking takes us away from the limitless potential of absolute reality for the sake of a single, limited event or interpretation.

As a result each one of us lives in small, separate, psychological worlds of our own making. The problem is that we innocently believe that these worlds are outside of us, shaping our lives, when they are actually created from the inside out. When we move more deeply into these little worlds by thinking, we move even further from reality (limitless potential) into various narrow, imagined roles, needs, and identities.

This is really not something we can overcome. Human beings, by nature, must give up consciousness to engage in tasks and projects, and so end up innocently assuming their perceptions reflect reality when they are almost always and inevitably what the psychologists call projections.

We take our moods and insecurities as directives to think harder or take even more control over our lives — lives which we have already cut down to fit our small, particular culture-bound ambitions. The better road to mental health and happiness is to see these uncomfortable feelings as a signal to question our beliefs in order to rise to a higher level of consciousness.




According to Banks, our insecure feelings and anxious perceptions are always the product of emotionally driven ego states. In order to experience the deep security and peace of mind innate to every human being, we need only take our personal thoughts less seriously which, in turn, opens our minds up to natural contemplation and present-mindedness.

As human beings, we don’t know we have chosen such limited awareness or made habits of our fears, anxieties, and addictions until someone points this out to us because it seems so natural to be perpetually stressed and unhappy. It is only when something breaks through the complacency of our everyday lives — an illness maybe or a death in the family, great love or exceptional beauty — that we see through our false selves and limited worlds. Until this happens, we continue to blame our feelings of futility on the human condition. In fact, until we wake up from ordinary everyday despair, we will continue to imagine that all our problems are coming at us from the outside world and not through us via our own thoughts, ideas, and assumptions.

This is the “innocent” mistake all human beings make: forgetting that we are experiencing our thinking and taking our thinking for reality, and it takes a rebirth of innocence to overcome this convincing illusion.

Many of us, it turns out, are relatively high-functioning depressives suffering from general anxiety disorder and don’t even know it. And yet once we wake up to the fact that there is another part of us that sees through the roles we play and the thoughts we have, a formless consciousness peeking out at the world through a limited meat-spirit overlay conditioned and hypnotized by a conspiracy of illusions — we find our lives instantly transformed and return to our “normal” state of natural contemplation and psychological health.

Suddenly the hope we may have talked ourselves out of ten years earlier returns as an antidote to a self-inflicted despair. Or the dark thoughts we once worshiped shrink down to human size as we now realize how limited they are.

All human thoughts — even the thoughts of our so-called geniuses — are mere moments in the eternal, formless scheme of things. Once we see how we are situated with respect to thought, mind, and consciousness, we begin to appreciate — perhaps for the very first time — our own originality and existential uniqueness. We begin to see the ignorant perfection of ourselves as ordinary people whose ideas are just as limited and contingent as those of Kant and Hegel, but whose souls are just as limitless and large.

Luckily, as God and or as nature would have it, our feelings of alienation drive us to seek out a sense of true being to replace our limited thinking. This intuition of a transcendent absolute is our experience of the universal mind. It is that part of us that remains unconvinced by the world and unconvinced by our mere thinking. It is that part of us that recognizes the truth when we see it and connects us with being rather than becoming. This innate psychological health — or natural contemplation — then replaces the stressful thoughts born of our anxious, ego-driven attempts at self-management with present mindedness. In a phrase “The Three Principles” teach what Teresa of Ávila called “the thinking without thinking.”

Unlike other psychological systems that advocate various practices and protocols for achieving such liberation, Sydney Banks taught that it is enough just to see how we are situated within our own minds for the trance to be lifted. Any attempts to control thinking adds fuel to an already runaway fire of self-involvement. To get to our second innocence, we need only recognize ourselves as partial, yet unique, manifestations of universal divinity. Once we do this, even if just for a moment, we cannot go back to believing in our self-generated worlds of experience.

When this happens, all our private perceptions become suspect, and we suddenly find ourselves looking down upon and through ourselves from a new state of intellectual freedom. This gives us enough distance from our mistakes and life-long illusions to undo years of false posturing and self-limiting beliefs. Our anxious feelings settle down as our neurotic thinking becomes less real to us, and life’s hitherto unseen possibilities become present in ways not experienced since childhood. The unknown — which once frightened us — shows us a positive aspect we had previously. in our fear-driven state, not dared to take seriously.

Admittedly, there is not much new here, only the succinctness of the formulation and the operational definitions of the terms. Perhaps, most importantly, the willingness to believe in innate human goodness.

Sydney Banks, in a way, discovered a country already inhabited by every mystic, artist, and enlightened sane soul that ever lived. But what makes him important — and useful — is that the post-therapeutic therapy born of his revelation speaks directly to the prevailing neurosis of Western civilization: its self-mystification by its own ideas and media which have become echo chambers of false consciousness and fear.

Banks and his followers have not only noted, but described and explained exactly how this false one-dimensional emotionally driven consciousness multiples itself within and around us. In our ego-driven, meme overloaded lives, we have become occupied from within by false names and pseudo-hierarchies — by thought idols, images, heroes, and terrifying systems — which take precedent over our own native intelligence and self-worth.

The good news announced is that our depression, self-doubt, and addictions all exist in our consciousness first and foremost as thoughts we choose to entertain, and so we can decide whether or not we wish to be duped by them. We are the ones creating the pain and suffering for ourselves held hostage by our intellectual interpretations. Michael Neill, author of The Inside Out Revolution put it this way:

“When our thoughts look real, we live in a world of suffering. When they look subjective, we live in a world of choice. When they look arbitrary, we live in a world of possibility. And when we see them as illusory, we wake up inside a world of dreams.”

As any meditator or contemplative will tell you, thoughts condition our experience but thoughts are not who we are nor do they accurately mirror the world. Thoughts are partial, functional, and transitory metaphysical fixes and forms — momentarily efficient causes and disposable mantras that make up our fleeting experience of formless existence.

Our so-called identities are composed of the thoughts we choose to take seriously. Knowing this, we can unravel the imaginary selves we believe ourselves (or others) to be, the selves we struggle against or despair over. Our minds can then take their rightful place as servants to the universal mind, and when this second innocence occurs, we begin to live unconventionally again, spontaneously, joyfully, and creatively.

I do not think it was any accident a Scottish Canadian welder formulated these ideas in 1973 at the height of the counter-culture where thoughts such as these were floating around in the lyrics to almost every song one heard on the radio. Sydney Banks wasn’t the only one enlightened in those days, but he was unique in the way he articulated what he had come to see, and he was able to inspire an impressive array of authentically inspired students and disciples who continue his work.

In the 1980s Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys rock 'n’ roll band coined the slogan “Don’t Fight the Media, Become the Media,” and that turned out to not be the best advice. It matters very little who broadcasts illusions or how large an audience one garners for one’s thoughts if those thoughts merely spread more false beliefs and negative values. And although in a media culture, it may seem that perceptions are reality, in an enlightened state of consciousness and being, they never are.

The so-called war of ideas that makes up the intellectual life of our republic is a war of thoughts. And thoughts are never what they appear to be, never the solid things our egos think they are.

Thoughts, as Sydney Banks has pointed out, are merely projected illusions that have at best a temporary usefulness but no actual metaphysical substance. Seeing their true relationship to pure consciousness should breed in all of us a tolerance for one another’s tiny thought-driven lives, for our own past blunders, and from the intellectual overreach of both our friends and enemies. Only then will the war of ideas give way to a world where no one takes themselves or their leaders too seriously, and we all recognize each other for who and what we truly are: equally empty, equally divine, equally becoming the Christ-Buddha.

The human mind, as it turns out, contains its own self-correcting mechanism in its perpetual longing for beauty and truth — feelings that take us back to natural contemplation if we would only get out of its way.


Robert Inchausti is a professor of English at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly). He is the author of five books and the editor of two anthologies of Thomas Merton's writings. His first book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People was nominated for a National Book Award. His book on classroom teaching, Spitwad Sutras, is taught in teacher education programs across the country.


Books by Robert Inchausi:

• Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times (2014)
• Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, (2012, 2005)
  
• Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing (2007)
  
• The Pocket Thomas Merton (Shambhala Pocket Classics), (2005)
  
• Breaking the Cultural Trance (Insight and Vision in America), (2004)
  
• Seeds (2002)
  
• Thomas Merton's American Prophecy (1998)
  
• Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation (1993)
  
• The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought)  (1991)
  
   

For more about my personal struggles and the 3 Principles concept, see my previous article: Beliefs.  Also, my article on Navigation issues could be helpful.

Here in my digital scrapbook, DietHobby, the collection of articles and videos involving that Three Principles issue are under BLOG CATEGORIES - The 3 Principles so that clicking on that link on the right-hand side of this page will provide easy access to all of them.

Also, the link on the right side of this page entitled: Contents Directory can help with DietHobby Navigation issues in general.

NOTE: Originally posted earlier in 2016, and reposted for new viewers.

The Simple Diet - A Diet Review

In "The Simple Diet" (2011) Dr. James Anderson, a professor of medicine and clinical nutrition at the University of Kentucky, shares his scientifically based nutritional plan.  He says that he, himself has used it successfully, and that he has also used it to successfully treat many patients. Dr. Anderson considers his diet to be a budget-friendly weight-loss plan which he favorably compares with commercial diet plans like Nutri-system and Jenny Craig.

The Simple Diet is a replacement meal plan, in which one eats only shakes and packaged entrees of one’s choice, together with any type of fruit (except dried) and/or any type of vegetable prepared without butter or additional fat.

The diet relies on frozen entrees and diet shake mixes … plus fruits and vegetables … to meet one’s nutritional needs, and Dr. Anderson doesn’t take issue with processed foods or artificial sweeteners. The diet requires the purchase of diet shake mixes like SlimFast or various Protein powders (to be mixed with water or fruit, not skim or soy milk); frozen dinner entrees like Lean Cuisine or Smart Ones; high protein snack bars like Luna (optional); some soups (optional); and fresh, canned, or frozen vegetables and fruits. There are a large selection of "diet friendly" meal options offered in the plan, most widely available in American supermarkets, and the diet does not allow for any foods (except those existing within the frozen entrees) which are typical household staples, like breads, pastas, rice, cereals or dairy products (nonfat plain greek yogurt is considered an acceptable protein shake substitute).

The rules of Phase 1 are to eat only 3 protein shakes … either a ready-made brand like slim-fast or protein powder mixed with water (soup also qualifies as a shake), 2 packaged frozen entrees, and 5 or more fruits or vegetables a day. Ordinarily one would have a shake for Breakfast; a shake mid-morning; a shake mid-afternoon; a frozen entrée for Lunch; a frozen entrée for Dinner; and fruit and vegetables at any time. One is to also drink at least 8 glasses of water or other non-caloric beverage. Coffee, tea, and diet sodas are acceptable. 

If necessary or desired, one can also have up to 1 protein bar daily, but this is additional, not a replacement for the shake or entrée. If a person is still hungry, additional shakes and more fruits and vegetables are recommended instead of adding extra foods, or eating additional bars. Phase 2 gradually brings in other foods.

The plan is based on the premise that by exercising a bit more and eating pre-measured low calorie entrees, diet shakes, occasional protein bars, and fruits and veggies, one will lose weight. This is a calories-in/calories-out plan, and one’s total calories depend on the specific food items that one chooses. Dr. Anderson provides guidelines for choosing shakes, entrees, soups, and bars; and when followed, the plan will provide between 1100 and 1600 calories daily.

This is a prescriptive plan, but does offer plenty of variety (in shakes, entrees and produce). The cost depends on where one shops and what one is willing to spend. If one goes to Target or Wal-Mart, most entrees will cost $1-2.50, and Slimfast is about $6-8. If one goes to GNC for shake powder, one’s cost can be $30. Snacks and meals are quick to prepare with a minimum of cleanup. “Simple” is the point of the Simple Diet, and it definitely meets that requirement.

The premise of Dr. Anderson’s book, "The Simple Diet"(2011), is that it is possible to lose weight easily in a relatively short period of time using foods that are readily available in any supermarket if you are following the right plan. Dr. Anderson promises that very obese dieters can lose up to 50 pounds in the first 12 weeks of their diet, and that the weight loss can be permanent. In addition to shedding unwanted pounds Dr. Anderson claims that (through weight-loss) this diet will help lower high blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure; that it can help reverse heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and a variety of other obesity induced conditions. The rules of the diet are fairly easy to follow and require little measuring or calorie counting, however, optional tracking of food and calorie counting will be helpful.

Since I am already normal weight with a total energy burn of less than 1200 calories (for details see my previous articles), I modified the diet to reduce it to a daily total of about 900 calories in order to make it a weight-loss possibility for me personally. I did this by being careful with my choices of fruits and vegetables, replacing the lunch entrée meal with vegetables only… having only one entrée daily, and by limiting protein bars.

My shakes were made from 1 scoop of Designer Whey protein powder at 100 calories per scoop. I made them with ice and 4 oz sugar-free Almond Milk which added 20 calories per shake. I occasionally added 1 fruit serving for additional calories. See my recipes for  Chocolate Milkshake, and Strawberry Banana Smoothie.  Fage 0% Greek Yogurt (6 oz container=100 calories); my homemade egg-white custards (50 calories);  my chocolate protein cookie (50 calories); and my protein cream cupcake (substituting sugar-free vanilla syrup for cream) (100 calories) also qualified as shake substitutes.

I enjoyed my bit of experimentation with The Simple Diet, and liked the food choices far better than with Nutri-System, or Jenny Craig. I’ve no personal objection to eating processed food, and found that eating on the plan actually provided me with a more balanced, low-fat diet, than my normal maintenance eating. I plan to do additional experimentation with this diet sometime in the future. 

 "The Fast-5 Diet and the Fast-5 Lifestyle" (2005) by Bert Herring M.D. is a weight-loss and weight-maintenance plan based on the concept of intermittent fasting. It consists of a single rule: limit calorie intake to no more than five consecutive hours in each day. The Fast-5 Lifestyle is an indefinite continuation of that diet for weight maintenance after the weight loss goal has been reached.

Dieters using the Fast-5 diet fast for nineteen hours total each day. This nineteen hours includes sleep. After the nineteen hours of fasting is complete, dieters then have five hours in which they can eat whatever they choose.

The suggested eating window is from 5pm - 10pm, but Dr. Herring indicates that the nineteen continuous hours of fasting time is the key to the diet's effect, and that the five-hour eating window may be set whenever it is most personally convenient.

The Fast-5 approach does not stipulate a calorie intake level. It relies on the eating schedule's effect of correcting appetite to determine proper intake, but doesn’t discourage the addition of a calorie counting approach. The Fast-5 Diet also does not specify food content or forbid any foods, allowing the approach to be used with any dietary preference.

The Fast-5 diet was developed based on the personal results Dr. Herring experienced while working at the National Institutes of Health and incorporates estimates of the eating schedule of ancient hunter-gatherer humans who ate without benefit of food storage or refrigeration.

Dr. Herring distinguishes Limbic hunger, which comes from that part of the brain that connects primitive drives, emotion, and memory, from Somatic hunger, which is the sensation of discomfort in the stomach area that is commonly known as hunger, or hunger pangs. Somatic hunger is the result of the interaction of many hormonal and nerve signals and incorporates more information than just whether the stomach is empty.

He says that Limbic hunger is the reason why it is hard to eat only one potato chip. Eating one chip triggers more appetite because primitive limbic signals tell the brain we should eat as much as we can while food is available. This leads to more eating, connecting in a vicious circle that doesn’t stop until the bag of chips is empty. The ancient instinct takes control of behavior, ignoring higher thinking and preferences. Limbic hunger in a land of plenty causes one to eat too often and too much.

Two ways in which the Fast-5 plan is helpful, according to Dr. Herring, is that:

• Having a 19 hour short-term fasting period eliminates the potential…during that time period, for eating to-drive-more-eating, and keeps limbic hunger from taking over control.
  
  
• 19 hours of daily fasting enhances the body’s fat-burning capabilities by providing a long period every day when the body’s fat-burning machinery is switched on and stays on. Once the body is using energy from stored fat, rather than from fresh glucose absorbed from digesting food, continuous fat burning is more efficient than when the body flips back and forth from fat to glucose and back again. Also, changing back and forth causes fluctuations in the levels of hunger related hormones (insulin, ghrelin, leptin and more) resulting in the sensation of hunger.

I have had brief and limited experiments with the Fast-5 diet, usually in combination with alternate day eating. I am currently involved in another entirely different Fast-5 experiment.

My normal pattern is to wake up about 4am. and go to sleep about 8pm.

During my past experiments, I chose an eating window of 2pm until 7pm, which in my lifestyle is the equivalent of a 5pm to 10 pm window. This did not work well for me because during the entire Fast-5 dieting experiment I found myself simply killing time every day until 2pm, totally focused on wanting to eat, while I did everything possible to distract myself from food until the time finally came for me to eat.

I am a morning person, and normally prefer my breakfast and lunch over my dinner, so with a late-in-the-day window, my preferred mealtimes were not available to me.

I had difficulty in getting myself to set a morning 5 hour window because of the idea of how hard I might find it to go without food during the long afternoon and evening period.

Recently, I decided to try Fast-5 with a morning window from 9am to 2pm and found that this suits my body and personality a great deal better. A five hour window from 9am to 2pm allows me to eat at my preferred mealtimes. It also seems that so far…..I, personally, feel less physical hunger and less desire to eat after 2pm between lunch and bedtime, than I do in the mornings before 2pm. Whether this will continue to be the case over time, is something that I just don’t know.

My present Fast-5 experiment is in the early stages, and is combined with calorie counting and other dietary preferences. I haven’t set a time-period for how long I’ll continue on with it. Right now, it’s day-by-day, and I’m deciding each morning whether or not to go forward with it.

I know that there are times when I find eating zero food easier than eating a tiny amount of food, and other times when this isn’t true for me. I’m interested in learning more information about that difference. I’m also curious as to whether this way of eating will cause me to eat less overall, for more than just a few days, and if that behavior will provide me with any weight-loss results. I mention this just as another example of how I treat Dieting as a Hobby.