Dan G. lost over 20 pounds through the Diet Shock Somaception Method in a little over 10 weeks. His astonishing progress rivals some that have chosen gastric bypass.
Dan himself was chosen as a candidate for gastric bypass since he met all the qualifying criteria. His health problems including: diabetes, a recent heart attack, diminished lung capacity due to an industrial accident, and damage from a car accident that resulted in a fractured neck and back, all serve to limit his ability to do traditional exercise. The doctors told him that at 61 years of age, a gastric bypass was his best chance to lose weight. In the past he had also tried Weight Watchers, the Veterans Administrations Weight Loss Meeting Program, a Slim Fast Program, hypnosis and a variety of other programs with no success; that was until he tried the mindful eating approach using the Somaception method. He has lost this weight without counting calories, without expensive supplements or crazy fad diet aids, and even without any additional exercise. He has done it all by changing his lifestyle and forming new habits. He describes it as a kind of self-hypnosis that helps him feel full with very little food.
Dan reports that his energy levels are way up, he’s enjoying his food more, and he’s even been able to better control his diabetes. He’s no longer dependent on insulin shots.
We are exceptionally proud of Dan. His boundless enthusiasm for this program is catching on. He wants to lose 80 pounds more over the next year! You can talk to Dan and root him on through our Diet Shock Message Forum. We will continue to post updates about Dan and his progress.
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. – Aesop’s Fables
Stress! We have it. It’s part of the fabric of our daily lives. Some of the words we use to describe stress are very telling as to the physiological effects of the experience. We get: hot, worked up, fired up, butterflies in the stomach, antsy, tense. What’s happening to us when we experience those feeling is that some conflict has stimulated our adrenal cortex to dump hormones into our system to better prepare us for “fight or flight.” And stress makes us HUNGRY.
The hormones like the steroid cortisol, promote the breakdown of fats and proteins so they can be synthesized by the liver into glucose (blood sugar) for our “fevered” brain and to prepare the muscles for action. Bodily systems not essential to the conflict are suppressed so that all of our available resources can go towards prepping us for action: the immune system changes, our digestive system slows way down. The sour feeling we feel in our stomach is now attributed by researchers not to increased acid production but rather a slowdown of the flow from our stomach to our intestines; as blood and oxygen are stolen away from our stomach to be used by our brain and muscles. The stomach contents sit there longer, churning away, making us nauseas or causing acid reflux.
When the stress hormone levels drop, our blood sugar levels drop. Oxygen and blood flow return to our digestive system. These two effects combine to make us feel very hungry. This can promote weight gain if we didn’t actually burn very many calories during our stress. Most modern stress, such as a boss hovering over your shoulder while you’re at your computer, doesn’t burn calories the way running from a bear might have for some ancestor. We can very easily end up over compensating by eating far more calories than what we burned. The opposite state of “fight or flight” is “rest and digest.” Food has enormous power to help us to relax. Turning to food in times of stress is actually quite natural but it has to be done very consciously. If your body hasn’t exercised away the stress, to physically burn off the products of it, then you are in real danger of overcompensating.
The purpose of food is to take care of us, to comfort us, it is what we should turn to. But what we must acknowledge is that it isn’t just the nutrition that calms us, it’s the sensation. Think about the last time you were really hungry to the point it made you tense and anxious. When we are in that state it’s usually the very first bite that calms us down. This is long before any of the nutrients of the meal have hit the bloodstream. Your mind is sated before your body. This is the proper way to eat when we feel strong emotions. Ideally you’d like to physically burn off the products of stress with exercise to relieve it but that’s not always possible. It is always possible to take a morsel of food and fully experience it; to lose oneself in the sensations of it. The more of your mind that you concentrate on your food the less of your mind left to concentrate on your troubles. The quicker you can lower the stress the less effect it will have on you.
A few tips for eating after you’ve been stressed:
• Be aware of why you’re hungry. Don’t try to shut your hunger off or tune it out. You are supposed to be hungry after stress!
• Find some way to do some exercise when you’re stressed to burn off the effects. Climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Take a walking break outside. Do some stretching.
• Focus on the calming aspects of the food. It’s not really the nutrition, it’s the ritual of preparation, the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations that are truly calming. A very small sensual morsel can accomplish more than a banquet.
• Realize that the feeling will pass. It’s best to think of stress hormone swings like a pendulum: the harder they swing one way the harder they will swing the other. To stop a child on a swing you can’t just push hard from the other side! Try to dampen the swings to achieve a sense of balance.
It’s very important to keep in mind the relation between food and stress. Stress makes us hungry and unquenched hunger is a stress of its own. So now you have two stresses, but only one that can be relieved by food alone. The usual dynamic is that we get stressed and through biology we become hungry… and then hunger becomes its own stress. We eat some and we feel better, since we’ve relieved the stress of hunger, so in our minds we do the math and figure if we eat more we will feel even better. But we can’t relieve non-hunger stress with food… unless we use food as a platform for meditation.
Food can be an excellent distraction. One can focus all of one’s concentration on it and completely lose oneself in the sensual pleasures of a small morsel of some really good grub. If we eat a small amount when we become hungry after stress, using the somaception exercise, we can transform the eating experience into a meditative relaxation experience. Food is therapy. A small amount to quench the hunger eaten with full concentration can calm the nerves and bring far more comfort than a stuffed belly.
The story of Pavlov and his dog is important to our understanding of artificial sweeteners, say researchers from Purdue University. In the late 1800’s Ivan Pavlov conducted a study on “conditioned reflexes” based on work he did with his dog. What Pavlov would do is ring a bell when it was dinner time for the dog. The dog soon associated the sound of the bell with the sights and smells of dinner. Later Pavlov found that the sound of the bell alone, without the stimulating sights and smells of food, could make the dog salivate.
As simple or as obvious as the experiment sounds, it was important in establishing that there is a complex interplay of the body’s functions with the mind’s perceptions. Saliva is a digestive juice. It contains enzymes that start the breakdown of food. He showed that if the mind’s perception is that dinner is coming, the corresponding bodily processes are put in motion.
Most of us have experienced this at one time or another. We can see or smell some food and become instantly hungry for it. We crave it. Our mind sets our body in motion.
Consider that from the time we sit down to a meal and the time our bodies actually begin the digestive process there is a lag… But taste, smell, mouth-feel, and other senses are sending signals to our brain immediately. What we don’t have a thorough understanding of is how our body uses the signals from the brain. We don’t fully know what processes are set in motion by the taste of sweet, for example.
The researchers Davidson and Swithers at Purdue found that artificial sweeteners can produce conflicting signals. They propose that the body has a natural calorie counter. The body has some ability to regulate and determine when enough is enough… until artificial sweeteners are thrown into the mix. The artificial sweeteners break the mind – body connection. It may be that the mind is stimulated by the sweets but never receives the feedback from the body, that the body is satisfied… so the natural calorie counter is disrupted.
An excellent article in Wired about the placebo effect:
To test products internally, pharmaceutical companies routinely run trials in which a long-established medication and an experimental one compete against each other as well as against a placebo. As head of Lilly’s early-stage psychiatric drug development in the late ’90s, Potter saw that even durable warhorses like Prozac, which had been on the market for years, were being overtaken by dummy pills in more recent tests. The company’s next-generation antidepressants were faring badly, too, doing no better than placebo in seven out of 10 trials.
The science is in. Burn more calories than you take in and you’ll lose weight, right? That’s basis of most medical advice on the subject. Diet and exercise is the mantra.
In theory that’s great but in practice if you’re overweight and your diet is not right first, you probably don’t have the energy to exercise. Without the proper energy, really trying to level up your exercising is miserable. There is some sort of psychological law that states: The more miserable a thing is to do the easier it is to find excuse not to do it. Since the approach is always diet AND exercise, when we give up one we usually give up the other too; bargaining with ourselves that some day in the unknown future the proper motivation for both will hit us. Some people break through, most don’t.
The traditional approach puts the cart before the horse. It makes it easy to get overwhelmed with the process so we lose the will to follow through and end up dropping both. The proper way is diet and THEN exercise. For most people that are significantly overweight that means taking three months or so to get one’s eating habits in order. For most people significant weight loss achievements can be made with diet alone. As the eating habits become healthier the body responds by boosting the energy levels. Exercise becomes both more enjoyable and more effective when the nutrition is right.
Exercise is very important for long term health and we should all do our best to maintain a healthy level of exercise but a starting a very ambitious exercise program combined with the beginning of a new diet is usually a recipe for failure. We stand to benefit the most by changing our approach to a diet then exercise program… it’s a lot easier to follow through.
Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating
Study suggests that mindful eating can play a key role in long-term weight maintenance
SEATTLE — Aug. 3, 2009 — Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating, and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
The study was prompted by initial findings reported four years ago by Alan Kristal, Dr.P.H., and colleagues, who found that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-age spread in normal-weight people and may promote weight loss in those who are overweight. At the time, the researchers suspected that the weight-loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger and satiety than the physical activity of yoga practice itself.
The follow-up study, published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, confirms their initial hunch.
“In our earlier study, we found that middle-age people who practice yoga gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. We hypothesized that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behavior,” said Kristal, associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center.
The researchers found that people who ate mindfully – those were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression. The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating.
“These findings fit with our hypothesis that yoga increases mindfulness in eating and leads to less weight gain over time, independent of the physical activity aspect of yoga practice,” said Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Kristal, a yoga enthusiast for the past 15 years, said that yoga cultivates mindfulness in a number of ways, such as being able to hold a challenging physical pose by observing the discomfort in a non-judgmental way, with an accepting, calm mind and focus on the breath. “This ability to be calm and observant during physical discomfort teaches how to maintain calm in other challenging situations, such as not eating more even when the food tastes good and not eating when you’re not hungry,” he said.
To test whether yoga in fact increases mindfulness and mindful eating, Kristal and colleagues developed a Mindful Eating Questionnaire, a 28-item survey that measured a variety of factors:
• disinhibition – eating even when full;
• awareness – being aware of how food looks, tastes and smells;
• external cues – eating in response to environmental cues, such as advertising;
• emotional response – eating in response to sadness or stress; and
• distraction – focusing on other things while eating.
Each question was graded on a scale of 1 to 4, in which higher scores signified more mindful eating. The questionnaire was administered to more than 300 people at Seattle-area yoga studios, fitness facilities and weight-loss programs, among other venues. More than 80 percent of the study participants were women, well-educated and Caucasian, with an average age of 42. Participants provided self-reported information on a number of factors, including weight, height, yoga practice, walking for exercise or transportation and other forms of moderate and strenuous exercise.
More than 40 percent of the participants practiced yoga more than an hour per week, 46 percent walked for exercise or transportation for at least 90 minutes per week and more than 50 percent engaged in more than 90 minutes of moderate and/or strenuous physical activity per week.
The average weight of the study participants was within the normal range – not surprising considering that the study sample intentionally consisted of people more physically active than the U.S. population in general. Body-mass index was lower among participants who practiced yoga as compared to those who did not (an average of 23.1 vs. 25.8, respectively).
Higher scores on the mindfulness questionnaire overall (and on each of the categories within the questionnaire) was associated with a lower BMI, which suggests that mindful eating may play an important role in long-term weight maintenance, Kristal said.
“Mindful eating is a skill that augments the usual approaches to weight loss, such as dieting, counting calories and limiting portion sizes. Adding yoga practice to a standard weight-loss program may make it more effective,” said Kristal, who himself scored high on the mindful-eating survey and has a BMI within the normal range.
Moving forward, Kristal and colleagues suggest that their Mindful Eating Questionnaire, the first tool of its kind to characterize and measure mindful eating, may be useful both in clinical practice and research to understand and promote healthy dietary behavior.
“Beyond calories and diets, mindful eating takes a more holistic approach that can empower individuals to build positive relationships with food and eating, said first author Celia Framson, M.P.H., R.D., C.D., a former graduate student of Kristal’s – and former yoga teacher – who now works with adolescents with eating disorders at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “The Mindful Eating Questionnaire offers a new and relevant dimension for measuring the effectiveness of dietary behavior interventions. It also encourages nutrition and medical practitioners to consider the broad scope of behavior involved in healthy eating,” she said.
Other authors on the paper included Denise Benitez, owner of Seattle Yoga Arts; Alyson Littman, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the UW School of Public Health and Department of Veterans Affairs; Steve Zeliadt, Ph.D., of VA Puget Sound Healthcare; and Jeanette Schenk, R.D., a research dietitian in the Hutchinson Center’s Cancer Prevention Program.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center funded the study.
A lot of us feel guilty about eating out of boredom. But food can be a wonderful way to express creativity. All of us are cooks in some manner even if it is just seasoning our food or heating it to the temperature we like. The cure for boredom is creativity. The cure for guilt is pride.
If you are bored and want to eat then don’t eat boring. Do something interesting with your food. Make the experience creative and exciting. Something you can feel proud about later.
Check out what some very creative individuals are doing with fast food. www.fancyfastfood.com
Raw foods can be pretty good for you. Some of the nutrients in vegetables can be washed away or destroyed by cooking. Since some raw foods are good… all raw food must be better… right? Actually… no. Human beings can’t get enough nutrition or energy from raw foods alone. Up to half of women on raw foods diet have bodies in the condition of persistent famine to such a the degree that they stop menstruating.
This is even after the raw foodists go through very elaborate preparations as extreme as actually rotting some of their foods to soften them up in hopes of making them easier to digest.
Cooking opens food up to the digestive processes. It denatures proteins so they can be more easily absorbed. Cooking breaks down starches into digestable forms. Recent studies are showing that humans can’t live by raw foods alone. Other studies show that something around 85% of raw foodists admit to “cheating” regularly.
Raw foods certainly can help with weight-loss but a 100% raw food diet is an impossible way of life. Even so… the movement is gaining strength with a kind of religious fervor. I wonder if the rituals of raw food preparation combined with the feelings of spiritual elation that are associated with religious fasting contribute to the belief in their system?
The chewing diet was popularized in the Edwardian Era by Horace Fletcher. He believed that chewing allowed food to be properly absorbed into the body. Insufficient chewing would lead to constipation and clog up the digestive tract, said Fletcher. He lost 40 pounds in just four months using the diet he created. Dr. Kellogg was a friend and fan of Fletcher and he required patients at his sanatorium to participate in the chewing diet as well as a variety of other weight loss methods.
To properly implement the chewing diet, a person must chew each bite over 32 times, which takes approximately 30 seconds. After chewing is done, the person then tilts his or her head back and allows the food to trickle down their throat. Anything that is still too big to swallow must be spit out. The desire to eat things likely diminishes after a period on this diet, so it does work as you begin to eat less food.
Possible Side Effects May Include: A sore jaw. Much longer meal times. Annoyed and disgusted friends.
Dan G. lost over 20 pounds through the Diet Shock Somaception Method in a little over 10 weeks. His astonishing progress rivals some that have chosen gastric bypass. 
The science is in. Burn more calories than you take in and you’ll lose weight, right? That’s basis of most medical advice on the subject. Diet and exercise is the mantra.
A lot of us feel guilty about eating out of boredom. But food can be a wonderful way to express creativity. All of us are cooks in some manner even if it is just seasoning our food or heating it to the temperature we like. The cure for boredom is creativity. The cure for guilt is pride.