Phen-Pro Weight Loss

Magnets

A year ago I began giving students a reminder-magnet to stick to their refrigerator. Using my computer I printed a gleaming rendition of the Six Lessons (and my name & phone number) onto 4" x 6" white magnets from www.MagnaCard.com The magnets considerably improved the students' learning and retention of the Six Lessons, and increased the frequency of follow-up appointments.

Buddha Teaches Marx & Jefferson

The fact that so many Americans are obese is strongly connected to the fact they are so unhappy. Listen to what fat people say. "Do no harm" is not the first principle of medicine (it can't be done); instead, it is "listen to the patients". That isn't done enough. You cannot make unhappy people stop overeating, but you can make some people happy. I'll tell you how in a moment.

Keeping It Simple

A good way to help people deal with a problem that appears, to them, complicated and intractable is to give them a simple way to think about the problem. Besides telling fat people to cut back on starch and sugar, the other helpful approach, I find, is to remind them that in a country like the U.S. where everything is so flaming big, you are not dieting or losing weight unless one of the following is true, really truly and for real:

Exploring The Mind

These are questions I ask patients to show them their errors in thinking. Sometimes the sunshine breaks through.

HAZMAT

This morning I mailed a copy of Life Between Meals to Dr. Malcolm Kendrick whose book The Great Cholesterol Con convinced me, and would convince anyone, that cholesterol does not cause coronary atherosclerosis. The fact that so many "experts", editorials and...

Vicious Cycles

Two vicious cycles play a major role in the eating of obese people. One cycle is biological, the other habit. The habit-driven cycle is this. People make or order extra food . . . because, well, god forbid, anyone shouldn't get everything they want. Then the people eat the extra food so none of it will "go to waste". (See "The Notion of Waste" MOW Dec. 16, 2007)

Experimenting On Myself

I spent last week in San Diego, visiting my daughter, missed the snowstorm back home and gained 6 lb in six days sort-of-on-purpose as an experiment. At the free hotel breakfast, I made myself a waffle everyday, one only but it wasn't small. With the large intake of carbs at breakfast I found I was hungry by eleven, "ravenously hungry" or "starving" as my patients might say. I ate lunch and dinner in Mexican restaurants. I figure I was eating 5000 calories a day.

Changing Patients to Students

I'm not going to call my patients "patients" anymore; I'm going to call them "students", instead. The word "patient" comes from Latin patior meaning 'to suffer'. The idea is that the doctor's sick patients are suffering. But most of my obese patients don't think of themselves as sick, though they should; they will be in the doctor's office or the ER soon enough. And my formerly-obese, now-cured patients think of themselves as still suffering, but I want them...

Leaving The Nest

Most of my patients graduate, reaching a point where they have lost so much weight that they feel less hunger, and by golly they have learned the Six Lessons. I nudge them out of the nest; they can fly on their own. They usually don't gain weight back, or lose a little more, or don't gain back much. How do we know? We do regular call-backs.

Brown Lumps

Often, in teaching, it is helpful to give a visual image of an idea. An example is when I talk about brown lumps. Explaining Lesson #2 (the Anchors' Pyramid) I say, "Eat more fruits and vegetables, and by vegetables I don't mean potatoes [I can hear myself saying this]. You have to eat some salad, some soup. Everything fat young men eat is a solid brown lump. In a typical week--pizza, hamburgers, chicken, mexican food, pizza again. It's amazing those boys don't get scurvy. Didn't...

Thanks Giving

For Thanksgiving I give thanks for the intelligence and creativity of my patients which makes my high success rate possible. Something I did has ensured that nearly every one is realistic and sharp. Maybe because so many come by referral from other patients (smart people tend to have smart friends) or through the internet, patients travel from other cities to see me. Whatever I did, I don't want to change it.

Labeling in Restaurants

On NPR today I heard that the state of Maryland passed a law requiring fast food chains to display on their menu the calorie count of the food items on offer. All studies agree that calorie counts on menus have no effect on calories eaten, in both high- and low-class restaurants. No surprise. The overweight people among the aristocracy as well as the hoi polloi ignore calories; and the lean people, who might be influenced by calorie counts, don't do much of the eating. Since this fact is...

Pizza

It's not true that the U.S. never developed its own cuisine. That illusion arises from the fact that so many of the foods we think of as Mexican or Italian or (you name it) were really developed in the U.S. The chimichanga, enchilada and hard-shell taco, all created here, the first in California, the rest in Texas. Caesar salad? San Francisco. Chop suey? Ditto. The hamburger? Not Hamburg.

Getting the Right Focus

The most frustrating thing I face is patients and doctors who focus on the pills and pay no attention to the Six Lessons. Such people will never lose weight or help other people lose weight. The greatest thing achieved in my life is not my plays and novels, not my scientific publications (textbooks omit that glucose-6-phosphatase plays a role in the brain), not my own children (my wife did most of that work). The best thing I ever did was the Six Lessons. The trouble is, in our...

More Funny Diet Books

Twice before I gave you a list of funny ideas for new diet books. This year one of my funny ideas actually became a book, The Cookie Diet, and it is a best-seller, the most searched topic on the Internet. No publisher ever went broke banking on the stupidity of the American people--I am not the first to say so. Here are more funny ideas. Borrow any of them if you want to get rich.