[Karl Loren Comments Added In Blue]
This new, and yet ancient, approach is going to seem just a little bit like going back to school again.
At least, in the early part.
We plan to be extremely comprehensive, and leave nothing to chance. We are going to assume that you have a great deal of knowledge about weight loss - and yet, very little knowledge that matters.
One thing to accept is that it really is extraordinarily easy, when you apply the right approach. And you do not have to be a genius to understand or use our material. The time for being afraid of food, and afraid of failing again is over.
Initially, for very good reasons, we are going to be hopping around like fleas in part one. This is necessary. All the parts will come together, beautifully, as we get to the heart of the matter.
The first port of call is, perhaps, not needed in your opinion. ARE YOU OVERWEIGHT? Are you significantly overweight by more than 20% of the norm?
Many doctors and nutritionists still use those pretty colored charts that relate weight to height and build, in colored bands. So do most newspapers and magazines.
The dire truth is that these charts are OBSOLETE, and bear no relation to the world at the start of the 21st century. They were designed in the 1940s and 1950s, and are virtually unchanged in half a century. That period was wartime, and post-war. A time of hardship and deprivation, a time when food was very basic, and not necessarily over-abundant because there was food rationing. That time had its upside - people were fitter and leaner than at any recorded time since the early 1800s. Unfortunately, the charts used then have little to offer the world of today.
It means that if you have been relying on guides such as these to help you, it has meant inaccuracy, and you have led yourself up the garden path. Unwittingly. So, lets start again and do it right. We have used only three methods for assessing weight factors over the last 15 years, at the Rea Centre. The first is remarkably useful, despite being a very old Taoist formula, from China. Grab a pencil, and lets do it now.
Take your height in feet and inches. Using as an example 5' 4.5'', here is the formula.
[Karl: I'm 5' 10", so my weight should be, according to this, 110 pounds plus 50 pounds for the extra 10 inches -- or a total of 160 pounds. I actually weigh 222, so that makes me 62 pounds overweight by this measure!! I started my research on diet in large part because I have been a failed dieter and wanted to lose weight, so I come by my interest "honestly!"]
- 5 feet is represented by 110lbs
- every inch over 5 feet adds 5lbs to this figure So, 5' 4.5'' = 5'.....110lbs plus 4.5 times 5lbs (22.5lbs) = a total of 132.5lbs. An acceptable range variation is 7lbs above this figure or 7lbs below it, giving a spread of 125.5lbs to 139.5lbs, within which is absolute normality.
The second method is Body Mass Index. This may need a calculator if your arithmetic isn't up to pencil and paper.
- Take your height in METERS. For example,
1.80 meters.
- Take your weight in kilos. For example 68kg.
Now, fill in the worked example, using your own figures.
68
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(1.8x1.8) = 68/3.24 = 20.99 (This is the BMI)
Rough and ready reckoner
· If your BMI is well under 20.00, i.e. below 18.00, you are UNDERWEIGHT.
· If your BMI is between 20 and 25,
BRILLIANT.
· If your BMI is between 25 and 30,
STARTING TO LOOK HEAVY.
· If your BMI is over 30, WATCH OUT.
Clinicians classify this as obese.
The third method, and probably the most significant. Are you happy with your weight? You can be over the odds, technically, love your life, enjoy being you, and while doctors may suggest you could lose a few pounds, it is YOUR life and YOUR body. Don't let anyone grind you down. If you are NOT happy, then, of course, this is entirely another ball game. Do method one & two, above, to get a rough idea of where you stand.
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OK. Now we are ready to start looking at the myriad aspects of the world of eating, food, weight, etc. Not so many years ago, farmers grew, millers milled, bakers baked and shopkeepers sold.
A cornucopia of fresh foods, available by the season.
Not so far behind this was a time when canning was in its infancy, and preserved foodstuffs were basically limited to dried, smoked, salted, pickled, and bottled in syrup. Imported foodstuffs were relatively limited, and exotic imports virtually unknown.
Now if you look into a fairly average supermarket, year round, it will have a range of over 30,000 food products. Bigger supermarkets will exceed this.
Different lines of fresh and processed foodstuffs available all year round, with no heed to seasonal availability. If you want strawberries on Christmas Day, you can find them. As we go on, further, you'll discovered that this can be a mixed blessing, and it is certainly relevant to what comes later on weight reduction.
There is another element to this. In an age when technology is all, and we have every labor-saving device imaginable, life has never been busier or more stressful. We have more pressures and less leisure time than any Kalahari Bush People group of nomads. On some levels. We actually work less hard physically than in the past. Your grandparents had to haul the food home, prepare it, cook it, stack up the stove, take out the ash, and do a thousand other tasks we regard, today, as quaint museum pieces. Formerly, work was physical and few jobs were sedentary. Radio was relatively unsophisticated. Television was rare, even in the late 50s. If you went to the cinema, it involved quite a trek since door to door car services were a rarity.
There were no home delivery food services, offering menus from, literally, round the world, if you came home exhausted and didn't fancy cooking a meal. Time has become a very precious commodity today. The pace of life is such that it is no longer in our best nutritional interests, unless we bring a little bit of sanity and common sense to bear.
Lets look at it from this perspective. You are born onto this wonderful planet, you grow up, you form a new life of your own as an adult, and, eventually, you hand over to the next generation. It is a one way ticket, with no return, and no refunds. Every minute that passes is a minute gone for ever. So, in a way, life is a little like an egg timer, with the grains of sand dropping from top to bottom. Unfortunately, none of us know how many grains of sand lie in our individual timer, our life timer. But, each grain is yours, to use, as you will. Within the constraints of your individual circumstances, you make the choices, you make the decisions, you are in charge, and you make your own life.
Or do you? In this mad-cap, helter-skelter modern world? There is too much to do, too many calls on your time, and too many sources of stress. So, you have to delegate to others in the hugely complex network of modern society. You do not grow your own food, you buy it. You may not have to prepare much of it. There is no time for reflection, there is no time to fully care for your body. You delegate this, too, to professionals. It all leaves you free to live you own life, with a veritable armada of professional support systems.
But, are you not missing something? This is your life. This is your body. You only have one of each.
If you turn over too much to others, and take too little responsibility for your own well-being, then, unwittingly, you create a recipe for mischief. Worse still, you end up knowing very little of value about the needs and working of your own body, and, at a loss when something isn't working. By default, you become reliant on the skills and professionalism of outside agencies. And these may not be in your own best interests, because they, too, have pressures, and they may have a less than ideal agenda.
In the field of nutrition and weight loss, the first port of call is, frequently, the doctor. Their training is long and arduous. Once a doctor has qualified, he or she will be gaining experience and confidence in that experience over the years. Plus there is new knowledge and new learning almost by the month, so the doctor is able to constantly update. So when it comes to nutrition and weight loss, the doctor is the obvious expert to call upon for sound advice.
You think?
Apart from the fact that the medical profession has one of the worst health track records of almost any profession, the one area most are not capable in is the field of nutrition. After years of diets, the chances are that you know more than your doctor -and yet be as helpless. The average UK doctor has about six weeks of nutrition lectures in the years of training, and these don't come under the heading of "mandatory". The teaching content is archaic, and ineffectual, in practice. As for updating, use a little common sense. You have a life and so does the doctor. After a long day, do you really think the physician closes the surgery and heads off home to break out the books for a night of study?
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After some 15 years we are quite accustomed to local doctors cadging the printed matter we give out in sessional work, and photocopying it for their own practice use. Or coming direct, and asking us for the source material and references. They haven't the time, and to all practical purposes in modern medicine, nutrition is not their priority field of expertise. Which is a little ironic since the doctor is seen as the expert to approach for nutrition and weight loss advice.
Then, there is food itself. Judging by all the artistic labels on food products and packages, outside any town or city lies a pastoral paradise with Farmer Joe ploughing and harvesting, in the midst of fields full of happy cows, pigs, sheep and chickens. The media and advertising industries have this off to a fine art.
You may not actually believe them, but you might like to, and you are too busy to look deeper anyway.
Well, farming probably has not been like this for centuries, if ever. Over the last 50 years, the farming industry has been completely revolutionized. No more Farmer Joes with a tractor and a couple of fields. Farming is high tech, mechanized to the nth degree, and as much a corporate business as any company making and selling widgets. You don't require an MBA to figure out some facts. A corporate entity has shareholders, and it has pressures to come up smelling of roses and in profit. Or else the shareholders are not going to be happy. A healthy margin is mandatory, and goes far beyond the survival needs of farming in the past, where the farmer only had his kith and kin to worry about.
Worse still, in days gone past, the farmer would take his produce to the local market, and sell at the rate prevailing to producers and wholesalers. Now many farms work under contract to companies outside farming. And the contract companies have the same pressures on them. It used to be a legend in banking that if one particular company awarded a contract to a farming organization, it was nicknamed "the kiss of death". All freedom was lost to the farm, and their margins were squeezed to the limits. But let us leave farming for the moment.
We'll dip back later as necessary.
What of food producers? They work hard to ensure that you buy well-prepared, wholesome foods, at an affordable cost. True? Perhaps in the land of dreams. The reality is somewhat harsher. If a food producer is producing for the mass market, then a line has to be drawn between excellence, and what is economically possible, given the constraints of running a business. Excellence tends to be fairly low on the scale of priority. From both a nutritional and a weight loss perspective, we need to delve deeper.
But perhaps you can begin to see why an element of curiosity, an element of awareness, a healthy amount of skepticism, and some knowledge becomes essential. Don't worry. By the time you reach the end of the second e-book, you'll have more competence than many experts, and it won't be difficult, or time consuming. The food chain from grower to your plate is long, complicated, and confusing - and so Byzantine in its twists and turns that no two official viewpoints ever seem to coincide. You may, for instance, have been buying, scrupulously, low fat food products for health reasons as well as your waistline. Leave aside that for weight loss, eating a low fat diet is a dead duck, its also not sound for the body systems in the first place. The body needs fats, specific fats, and if you manage to eliminate them, it will simply set to work and produce its own supplies. The term is also something of a con-trick. Realistically, applied to foodstuffs, low fat means about 3-5% fat content.
[Karl: I agree that low fate is foolish!]
Of specific types. A beef cow contains up to 30% or more body fat whereas a wild steer will only have about 3%. This, in itself, is problematic if you want to lower fat intake because if you cut away the visible fat, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the fat is stored in the cells, and it isn't accessible for removing. If you fall for the ploy "85% fat-free", this is a real three card trick. It means the product contains 15% fat, and may not specify what type of fat - we'll cover this. Furthermore, it is 15% of WEIGHT of the product which means that you can be ingesting a huge belt of fat in a low fat food product. Particularly true in a lot of pre-processed vegetarian meals aimed at the healthy eating marketplace. Low fat they are not, and frequently they contain higher fat levels than the traditional alternatives.
Ah, but you say, it is vegetable fat in the products, and this is healthy, and won't affect my weight. It isn't that nasty saturated stuff that furs up my arteries and sits on my hips. Give common sense a nudge - it should start to pay attention. The healthiest vegetable oils are cold-pressed olive oils, corn oils, sunflower oils, that type of product. The operative words being "cold-pressed". These oils are certainly high on the scale of healthy eating, or at least, if not over-done. In Mediterranean countries, it is quite common to drink the finer olive oils in a glass as a delicacy, and certainly the cooks don't hold the hand when sloshing the oil onto the cooking. Yet, the peoples of this region don't seem to have the same high levels of heart disease, and obesity on the scale of the UK or the USA is almost unheard of.
[Karl: I agree and emphasize! Any time you HEAT fat you have health problems. This applies to butter also. Butter made from pasteurized milk is made from heated milk, is BAD fat!]
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Our processed foodstuffs, and bottles of oil and packs of vegetable fat and low fat spreads are not quite in the same league of excellence. Economic corners have to be cut, and no food processor in his right mind is going to ladle costly virgin olive oils into a product destined for the mass market. Not unless he wants to put the prices up or see his margins decimated. The oils will come from every source short of a gasoline waste dump, and given time....
Most food products contain blended oils from many sources, a composite cheap, functional, vegetable oil. These oils are not cold pressed but heat extracted which irrevocably alters the chemical structure of the oils. Tweaking the flavor in the R & D laboratories will cover up the worst flavor deficiencies. But, to produce a solid vegetable fat product from a liquid vegetable oil involves a process of nickel catalization. If you take a virgin olive oil and look at its chemical composition, it is jam packed with something called cis acids, and very few trans acids. If you look at heat process oils or the solid fats produced from vegetable oils, there are few cis acids, and it is mainly a trans acid chemical picture. Forget the rocket science. Cis acids are the goodies, and trans acids are the baddies that plaque up your arteries. And ANY oil or fat that carries the caption "hydrogenated vegetable oil" is NOT a healthy product for arterial well being OR waistline. Hydrogenated oil containing products are not in your best interests.
[Karl: While I probably agree that Trans acids are bad and CIS acids are good, the author here is apparently unaware of the newer concepts of heart disease and plaque, and the role played by toxic metals and free radicals. It is often true that an expert in one field (nutrition, perhaps) can be quite ignorant in another (heart disease) and accept data from his "colleagues" in the other field without investigation. As my view of "plaque" is already described in literally hundreds of pages, and confirmed by many others, I won't present that story here. However bad fat might be, unless you look at the difference between fat (oil) which has been heated, and that which has not been heated, you can miss the picture. This author acknowledges above that "cold-pressed" oils seem to NOT cause problems in areas where they are used.]
And this includes all those disgusting vegetable spread substitutes for "unhealthy" butter you have been using for years, with the best intention in the world, and on the best medical advice. It is pure baloney. These fat substitutes will do as much harm to your arterial system as an excess of butter,
[Karl: Note, again, that the author does NOT differentiate between raw butter (never been heated) and processed butter!]
they certainly won't help you lose weight, most of them taste vile, and the three card trick is an insult to your intelligence e.g. made from pure olive oil -which triggers off the thought that if its from olive oil, that's what the Med folk use and, hey, it must be good. Well, cold-pressed and poured from a bottle, it may be true, but your spread contains the cheapest and tackiest olive oil available at the lowest cost possible, its been highly processed, and synthetically tweaked so it doesn't taste as revolting as it might. And your friendly local nutritionists and medics are telling you that its good for you, and will help you lose weight. Incidentally, there is usually a tiny footnote on the packets "as part of a calorie-controlled diet". Few ever read and absorb that bit of bad news so we'd better take a break here and give you the GOOD news. We'll let one of our happy band at the Rea Centre tell it loud and tell it true.
"If low fat isn't and healthy vegetable fat isn't, then why am I punishing myself with these horrible foods when I could murder a pack of real butter?"
You've got it, friend. Almost anyway. The hydrogenated oils and fats are as lethal in excess as saturated animal fats, and they really don't taste brilliant, and they really don't do your overall health any favors. Not even your waistline. The best place for them is the garbage dump, and walk on past the colorful displays when you shop and head for the butter counter. Fortunately, the more aware and enlightened doctors are sticking their heads above the parapets now and giving the same advice for much the same reasons. Butter, in moderation, will do you no more harm than using these vegetable substitutes, and you'll enjoy it more. The only caveat is that moderation means moderation.
[Karl: I have already made my point, but he continues to talk about butter as it had limits to its use. You see how he is unaware, apparently, of the difference between raw butter and butter made from heated milk sources. Ultimately I would endorse a diet that included more than 1/3 pound of raw butter every day -- but don't take that out of the context of the full explanation of the full raw food diet!]
Treat it like liquid gold, spread it thin, and enjoy the transformation on the taste buds. In moderation, a little butter is not going to put your heart at risk, and nor is it going to substantially overload your efforts to lose weight. That's a hint of the good news to come when we get to the nitty gritty. If you cook with vegetable oils,
[Karl: "COOK" is the operative word here. You cannot cook with ANY oil of any kind and have a safe food result!]
the chances are that you may be sloshing in quite a belt, and the oil is the one that contains more trans baddies than cis goodies. So, again, moderation will get you out of a hole. Look out for COLD PRESSED vegetable oils, and use them instead.
[Karl: NO! NO! There is no sense getting "cold pressed" oil if you are then going COOK with it. This is absurd and even this author should see that!]
They will taste of more than the bland standardized products, and because they really are the best type of oils, they'll cost more to buy. If this is a problem, approach in the same manner as butter. A little goes a long way, and the price differential evens out, and the impact on waistline is neutralized.
Time for some more practical stuff to demolish more of the fairytales that have been sabotaging your weight loss efforts.
[Karl: You see that while he may demolish SOME myths, he is working hard to create another -- that raw butter is bad for you in anything more than very moderate amounts.]
We'll start this piece here but the end point is reached in e-book 2 where it makes more sense. There is a tiger trap device we use in group meetings when a doctor or other health professional sets out to demolish our arguments.
They tend to be absolutely sure of their facts so there is rarely a problem in asking them to volunteer to assist in some practical experimentation. There is already egg flying at that moment but they just don't realize it.
We are all encouraged to drink skimmed and fat free milk for the sake of our health as well as for lowering our calorie intake. All modern medical advice supports this. No disagreement. We drink milk as a source of calcium and as a source of vitamins, particularly A and D. No disagreement.
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So we make a suggestion that since most milk is. factory farmed, there would be little harm involved were we to fortify a glass along the lines of the late Dr Kellogg with his Cornflakes. No disagreement.
And the volunteer will happily pour a beaker of milk from a sealed carton of standard skimmed or low fat milk, break the seal on a bottle of pediatric vitamin A and D drops, and add the requisite number of drops to the portion of milk. At which point, expressions freeze, horror passes over the face, and the unfortunate is in the tiger trap, with no way out but the truth. This is basic first year chemistry stuff. Oil does not dissolve in water, skimmed, fat free milk is virtually 100% water with all the fat spun off and sold back to you as cream, and the vitamins are ONLY fat soluble. No matter how frantically a volunteer stirs the beaker with a glass rod, the vitamins will not dissolve but remain floating on top of the watery medium left after the fat has been removed. So, if the vitamin content has been removed along with the cream and fat, why should orthodoxy be so insistent that we drink milk to increase our intake of vitamin A and D. When, clearly, there can be none left in the fat free milk. It is an embarrassing tiger trap, but a cruelly educational one for the professional volunteer. One of the arguments in favor of using low fat milk demolished beyond reconstruction. A second experiment takes care of the calcium argument just as effectively. In milk, as permitted by law in the UK, the calcium is bound in an inaccessible form as far as absorbing it is concerned. You'll find more absorbable calcium in a portion of dark green vegetable or even a humble can of sardines, but that in milk is a dead loss. You may as well chew on a stick of blackboard chalk for all the good it will do you. If you want to try the vitamin experiment at home to prove the point to your satisfaction, any pharmacy will sell you a small bottle of pediatric vitamin drops for babies. Simply add five drops to a glass of skimmed milk and stir, until completely frustrated.
When we were talking about farming and food production not being all that it claims to be, there is always going to be the confident one who points out that none of this applies because they only eat organic foods. And these are pure, uncontaminated, unadulterated and taste far superior as well as being better for you. OK. Shall we look at this area in closer detail.?
14 years ago, a journalist challenged one of us on a food issue when we said that the fresh produce available in shops, markets and the supermarkets was seriously defective. She produced a sheaf of evidence from official sources demonstrating that an adequate selection of fruit and vegetable in the diet supplied all the vitamins and minerals we need for health. In theory. In practice, this was a sporting lady and she took up the challenge happily. We agreed to make the object of test, the orange.
A fresh orange, picked ripe, in, say, California, can contain up to 400mg of vitamin C. The UK rda for vitamin C is 60mg per day. So, a fresh juicy orange gives you all the vitamin C, science says you need in just one portion, plus a healthy surplus above the rda. The rda, incidentally, is the MINIMUM level of intake needed to stave off deficiency symptoms. It is NOT the level that promotes optimal health.
We'll come back to this as appropriate. If, for instance, you smoke, one cigarette is sufficient to denature 25mg of vitamin C in the body; so, clearly, smokers need a higher intake than non-smokers.
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Juicy Oranges Full Of Vitamin C?? |
We gave the editor of the newspaper a sealed envelope stating our expectation of the vitamin C content of commercially available oranges, and he sent his journalist off armed with bags, labels, and a small budget for purchases. She visited a range of shops and supermarkets, bought from market stalls and other outlets. Each purchase was bagged and labeled. Then dispatched to the public health laboratories for the vitamin C content to be assayed. When the reports were in, the moment of truth arrived and the editor fetched our envelope from the safe. In all the orange samples assayed, from all sources, including one hugely rare (in those days) and expensive organic purchase, the AVERAGE vitamin C content of any one orange was 4mg. In other words some had slightly more than 4mg and some had ZERO vitamin C. Yet all the oranges purchased were in perfect condition, looking ripe, juicy and appealing. What made it worse was when the editor opened our envelope and read the line "0 to 5mg per orange". So what has happened to the massive vitamin C value of the orange picked from the grove for breakfast in California? Something was seemingly tragically out of balance.
In a nutshell, the length of the food chain from grower to plate. Food is no longer "fresh" even though it is sold as fresh produce - some apples , for example, can be 12 months old or more before they are moved from cold storage to retail shop. Fruit, in particular, is picked green and immature, and it travels from the country of growth to the country of consumption, where it is artificially ripened using processes such as the gas tunnels used to ripen tomatoes. Then it has longevity agents applied, and off it goes on its way to the shop display. It may have traveled many thousands of miles, in many temperatures and air pressures, by air or by sea.
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It has been hot stored, and cold stored. It has been shaken about in transit, and finally it is on show in the display baskets in premises lit by strip lighting -which is known to have a denaturing affect on vitamin C. After all this, is it amazing that the vitamin content has plummeted to insignificant levels? And yet, to look at the fruit, it appears absolutely perfect and ripe. Clearly, all that glitters................but the sad thing is that all these official statistics compiled to show you how much of a vitamin or mineral to expect in an individual fruit or vegetable are based on assay of absolutely pristine samples, picked at maturity and handled with extreme care and no lengthy delay in unsuitable storage conditions.
The organic sample, incidentally, registered 3mg of vitamin C, no better than any of the others, but an unexpected result in a product grown without synthetic chemicals, not permitted to be chemically ripened before sale, and presumably with a known provenance from grower to seller. Sadly, it may be organic, but it has traveled the same horrendous distances, endured the same unsuitable conditions, and may, in fact, have been on display for longer because the cost is much higher, and the retention time past the perfect stage is therefore likely to be longer - a retailer does not earn from unsold produce dumped in a garbage skip.
| Right across the fruit and vegetable spectrum, you will find similar areas of problem. The carrot is one example. In days gone past, we used to import a lot of carrots from the States. The American soil is sky high in selenium, so the carrots contained it in abundance. Selenium is one of the elements needed in minute amounts, and sometimes referred to as the anti-ageing factor. It has other uses to, one of them a protection against some forms of cancer. |
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In the UK, the soil is deficient in selenium over the last few years and produce grown contains virtually zero. Since the UK joined the Common Market, American imports have disappeared under the EEC rules. Yet the carrots available look perfect, unless you have access to laboratory facilities to assay the various contents.
So not only does the conventional produce have nutritional deficiencies, so too does the much more expensive organic produce which is supposed to be better for you. It simply isn't necessarily so. In February, one of us was talking to a lady who had just had a delivery of one of these farm box organic produce batches. It was neatly wrapped and packed, and out came the usual carrots, and potatoes, and swede, and cabbage. Then some apples, some tomatoes, and perched on top, a pineapple. What has happened to that element of common sense?
Tomatoes do NOT grow in the UK in February. As far as we are aware, pineapples aren't exactly proliferating over half of East Anglia, in August, let alone frozen February.
More than 70% of organic produce sold in the UK is imported because we do not grow enough to supply the large and growing demand for it. If it is imported, often over thousands of miles, the same flaws appear in the chain as appear with conventional produce, and there may be others due to the unwillingness of retailers to throw away less than perfect produce because the price they pay at wholesale is much higher too. All that glitters?
Dust off your common sense on this angle too.
Organic farms are still quite small operations in the UK. Because of the growing interest, there is more demand than supply so it is an attractive proposition to switch production from conventional to organic, even though this involves a period of three years when organic status cannot be claimed. The yields are lower, the growing time may be longer so the produce attracts premium prices. But most of the farms are relatively small and nestled in the midst of their larger, sometimes gigantically larger conventional neighbors. Doesn't this suggest something? Lets use farmer Joe to identify the organic farm. The water table is common to the whole area, organic and conventional. The water table is polluted by agricultural chemicals and effluents of all descriptions including those from industrial processes and factories. Is there some magical process whereby the water table reaches the boundary fences of farmer Joes patch, and magically self cleans before irrigating his prized produce? If his neighbors are spraying fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides in powder or liquid form from land based spraying equipment or by air on the larger farms, does the rain and the wind stop at Farmer Joes fences, and clean out the pollution before continuing onto hallowed organic land and produce? Wake up! There may be LESS chemical contamination than in conventional produce, but chemical free it is not, and never can be. There is not one solitary square inch of planet earth that isn't contaminated by man-made pollutants so what makes Farmer Joes organic farm so special that it remains untouched?
The actual difference at assay may not be sufficient to countenance paying the over-inflated premium prices for organic produce which simply doesn't cut the mustard. So, in the end it comes down to an individual personal choice, and the purity of the food vis a vis conventional produce isn't such a significant factor. Both can be extremely deficient nutritional.
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If you believe organic tastes better, fine, this is a reason to purchase. But if you purchase because you think it is healthier, caveat emptor.
One throwaway tip. For reasons we cannot even begin to fathom, for many years, produce grown in Israel has been effectively grown organically without intensive use of chemicals. Yet Israel has never claimed organic status for its products which is really strange since the premium prices available to growers are singularly attractive, not to mention the margins for retailers. It is a curious anomaly, and one worth picking up on, because the costs are those of conventionally grown produce. Useful for citrus fruits like oranges, grapefruit lemons, etc.
Where there MAY be a significant benefit is in the area of organic meat, but even here, the field has become extremely murky, and there are so many legal loopholes that caveat emptor seems to be exceedingly appropriate. The meat may have a lower fat content since the animals are fed appropriately rather than on synthetic feeds. The meat will have lower chemical and contaminant levels because routine prophylactic antibiotics are outlawed, along with hormones, growth promoters and the rest of the conventional arsenal of tips and tricks. But it can be confusing because there is almost a tendency to try and get away with terminology which effectively says "almost organic". About as accurate as "almost a virgin"!
There are loopholes which give rise for concern.
One is that the feed by law only has to be 90% organic. That missing 10% can hide a lot because the content does not have to be defined or publicized. Chickens for instance can have 10% recycled faeces mixed in with 90% organic feeding materials. And if labeling of the 10% content is not required, food additives are not bulky and wouldn't have to be declared by law. This may seem overly suspicious on our part, but already the scams are happening, already the consumers are being deceived by perfectly legal slight of hand. Slight name changes can make a monumental difference e.g. Scottish beef refers to cattle such as Aberdeen Angus born, reared and slaughtered in Scotland, and grass-fed. No synthetic foodstuffs used. Apart from the superior taste, many people are more inclined to look for Scottish beef because the provenance of the herds is known, and the animals involved have bypassed the BSE crisis. So, people assume that Scottish beef is safer. Perhaps it is, but there is a lot of Scotch beef on sale too, and this isn't the same thing. This can be, and often is, an ordinary English beef cow trucked across the border, slaughtered, processed and trucked back with a better price tag attached. There are an awful lot of suspect practices appearing in the organic meat market so caution is a matter of common sense. Don't get bamboozled. If you do want further information on this area, email us your request and we'll fish something out of the archives for you. No cost. Email details at the end, or on the web site. So far, we've been looking at some of the areas associated with food, food production and food growing. What of your desire to be slimmer?
[Karl: I certainly agree here. I have put my trust in the research done on the individual ranches where "Coleman Beef" is raised, and buy only that beef from one of the few markets where it is sold. It does cost more, but without my personal inspection of the ranch, I believe that those who I trust have done the inspection. Organic meat is an important part of my diet.]
Well, we tend to lead more sedentary lives today. Over the last half century life has changed out of all recognition, and forever. There is no turning the clock back possible. Virtually every sector of our lives is different to, certainly, our grandparents, and our great grandparents have gone from the horse and trap era to the comfort of Concorde. This does mean that a lot of the parameters which applied in our parents day no longer apply. This fast and revolutionary period has produced taller, larger, heavier individuals, and many benefits as well as some disadvantages. Unfortunately, it has also spawned the mass market fashion industry with its pilot fish of advertising, marketing and promotion, as well as the global slimming industry and its pilot fish of the exercise industry. Maybe time to look at some of the more interesting features. Does dieting work?
You are the expert, you know, you can answer. If you are lucky, you've only done it to yourself a few times. But if you are an experienced long term dieter, you may have been through 40, 60, 100 different diets, and the results will be roughly at the same point as the novice.
Zilch. None of the diets have given you your dream fulfilled, and allowed you to keep the results, long-term.
Does that answer the question adequately?
[Karl: Yes it does! "Diet" is a misleading term. Life-long style of eating and living would be more cumbersome, but more accurate. You don't "get on" a diet, you "adopt" a food eating pattern for the rest of your life!]
Lets start plugging in the common sense factor again. Firstly, dieting is a bit of a strange term in itself. Medical diets such as fasts, juice regimes, etc, have a long and honorable history of highly specific usage. But slimming diets are something of a misnomer. You are overweight, you don't care for it, you spot a diet plan that promises to correct things, and off you go. Maybe you even complete the course - some folk do. But, the point is that it is a process designed to correct a hiccup, and once this is achieved - assuming that you make it through -, you conclude the diet, and life returns to normal. Only it doesn't. In fact it does, because over time you get back to where you started and frequently with a little extra poundage added. Its eerily like drinking vitamin free milk to get your daily vitamins, the experiment we showed a while back. You diet, in good faith, to lose excess weight, and you finish up fatter. What on earth is going wrong?
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Many diets are based on the premise that if you consume less calories than the body actually needs, you are bound to lose weight because the body systems will dip into the fat reserves to make up the shortfall. Unfortunately, biochemically, it doesn't happen this way. The body will utilize lean muscle in preference to fat stores because the chemical breakdown to glucose is simpler and less arduous. Muscle weighs more than fat so the scales looks good, for a while. But you don't want to shift muscle, you want to shift excess fat. And you may have come away from the diet before the point is reached at which the body will start to utilize fat reserves, assuming that you have lost weight and all is well. Sure, you have lost weight, but from the wrong direction entirely.
But, there is a bigger handicap in the biochemistry and physiology of the body. We'll keep it simple here but later you'll figure out a lot more for yourself. We aren't just mechanical bodies, we have a brain that is, effectively, a giant computer system, and going on a diet becomes real bad news to the computer system. here is one routine. You pick a diet that cuts down on calories, fat intake, whatever, a rational plan sanctioned by your doctor, and requiring no improbably outlandish and expensive diet aids. In other words, a simple mainstream reduction diet. Off you go. Well, cutting out some of the bits you already know like the "plateau" effect where the scales stops and seeming refuses to budge, here is what happens.
Your system has been used to plenty of food, indeterminate foodstuffs all hurled down the hatch with gusto. The excess is shuffled into fat storage, you got fat, and now you are out to empty and spring clean the fat stores. So, you cut down to 1000-1200 calories a day, depending on the diet.
Are you out of your gourd? You haven't the FAINTEST chance of slipping this sort of scam unseen past your brain computer systems. The drop in food intake will be instantly registered as a sort of "nuclear raid imminent" warning. The brain systems scan for all un-necessary processes and sources of energy expenditure and closes them down, into "famine mode". In other words, it cuts its cloth according to the food supply you take in. For reasons, unknown, there has been a calamitous plummet in fuel supplies, so the systems will adjust to the new situation, and, effectively, become super efficient in a lean time. If you are seriously overweight, then the first days and week or two will register a drop in weight, and then it tails off.
Trouble is already set up, only you may not realize it. The excitement of the first days will give way to boredom, disappointment, frustration, cravings (and the last, if responded to will set off cycles of guilt and loop back to anger, disappointment, etc).
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You'll start to modify things, or you'll get so angry and fed up that sooner or latter the diet hits the bin. And then the real trouble starts - the revenge of the yo-yo. |
You come out of famine mode, and return to normal eating habits and patterns. You know what is going to happen next. You've been there, maybe a hundred times. The brain has, of course, registered that the former plenty is back on tap, but its a bit like stopping a tanker on the open seas. The body processes have been shut down into "famine mode", but the famine is gone and its waving fields of plenty arriving at the hatch. The body is tricked because it cannot reverse the shutdown as fast as it set it up. So what was "normal" before the diet is now grossly abnormal. A huge excess over actual needs. The excess cannot be excreted unprocessed so what happens? Right! It is stored as fat against future famine, and back to square one you go, plus a bit because things just aren't that accurate. That is the yo-yo in a nutshell. Unwittingly, you tricked the body into famine mode, then reversed the process too suddenly, so the fat slinks back, the diet was a miserable waste of time, and you probably didn't figure out the process. Now you know. This type of dieting is a pure waste of time. And it doesn't matter whose name is attached to the programme or how many degrees are paraded to exhibit evidence of competence. No magic bullets to be found here. The failure mechanism is built in, and you won't winkle it out.
Apart from which, how many diets have you been on that had you feeling great? Life isn't supposed to be a torment, food isn't supposed to be a cross between must eat to preserve life and a punishment.
Its crazy. One of the reasons for the feeling rotten aspects is that many reduction diets have a loose and distant relationship with some of the more medically respectable variety. Under supervision by someone who knows what they are doing, these medical regimes can be hugely useful, but they are not generally regarded as reducing diets, though there may be some reduction as a side effect. Detox diets. They supply the essentials in such a form that the body can switch emphasis to housecleaning the organ systems. So, the kidneys start to clean and perk up, and the liver breathes a sigh of relief and grabs a broom. And for a time all this junk being tossed out will be floating around in the blood systems as a pretty toxic mess awaiting excretion.
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So, the earlier part of this sort of medical regime is often characterized by feeling like death on wheels -though drinking plenty of water will lessen the worst impacts. Quite a few of the very low calorie and severely restricted reduction diets will mimic the effects of a detox regime. And the organs will start to move into that sort of process, with the toxins uncovered chucked into the blood stream to be disposed of. And far from feeling great as you go along with the reduction diet, you'll feel terrible.
[Karl: This is exactly accurate. What is left out here is the concept that it makes no sense to be doing some diet for detox while, at the very same time, adding more toxins into the body. THAT is the foolish action! And, if this author could realize how toxic are some of the "foods" which he recommends, he might just take those next few steps to a truly rational diet.]
With a further drawback, particularly if you have opted for one of those unbalance "mono" diets, although it applies to many of the mainstream reduction diets as well. Most of them, particularly the "mono" type are so unbalanced that they cannot possibly do any favors to your general health and well being, and repeated dieting over years is simply going to have an accelerating affect on your ageing factor.
Scan back to the first part where we took a look at food production today. Sure, in modern society, we eat a lot, and we probably overeat for our best long term interests, but that isn't the point. We eat a heavily chemicalised, heavily de-natured and highly processed diet, plus we rely on fruits and vegetables that may look perfect, as we illustrated, but are actually seriously deficient in nutritional terms. So, from the point of view of optimal nutritional intake, in balanced forms, well absorbed and easily utilized, well, our normal day to day affluent diet may not cut the mustard. It may look superbly over abundant in comparison to the appalling nutritional levels prevalent in many less well off areas of the world, but it is still less than adequate, in nutritional content and essential factors. So, it follows as a truism that if our apparently magnificent diet is deficient, then cutting down on food intake by going on a reduction diet that limits food intake, is actually making the nutritional position worse, not better. You cut down on already lows levels of essential nutrients.
Phew, you gasp. That's ok because I take supplements. Thirty years ago, probably very few had ever heard of vitamin or mineral supplements outside the health food circles, and they were regarded as neuters. Certainly, they were not openly on display in pharmacies. Today, you look at a chemists counter and its like looking at the flight deck of Concorde. It is extremely confusing, and to know what is good, what is useless, what is potentially harmful, is an almost impossible task for the non-specialist. Supplements, whether in powder or pill or liquid form will always, effectively, be an artificial medium at best. The components may be synthesized or stripped out of normal foodstuffs and reassembled in the formulation. But, the chances of getting the exact balance right is hazardous at the best of times. If for example, you buy a calcium supplement, because you are female and you want to protect yourself, there are umpteen you can select from. Many will have seemingly huge levels of calcium, and you might assume, well, its basically chalk, so harmless, and the bigger the pill, the better. Unfortunately, if the calcium isn't blended with exactly 50% magnesium, then most of it will pass through the body, unabsorbed, excreted, wasted. You'll think that you are safeguarding your health and, the reality is that you waste your time, and your money, for absolutely no benefit whatsoever. By mixing supplements willy-nilly, you may be creating synergistic reactions which deplete body reserves, rather than enhancing them, or you may be popping brightly colored pills that are simply A1 useless, but cute and costly.
You CANNOT substitute for a wide, varied and balance diet by popping a handful of supplements and assuming that they'll do the business. They will not. You cannot take a load of unbalanced formulations and hope to avoid creating a situation of biochemical chaos in the cells. And the overall long term results will overtake the short term placebo effect of thinking, wow, I'm really doing myself a power of good with these supplements.
[Karl: I waiting to see if he thinks the food contains enough vitamins to handle your needs. He has acknowledged the lack of selenium in the UK soil, so he is aware of this problem. He has acknowledged that the orange in the store has less than 1% of that same orange as it came off the tree. It is going to be hard to criticize vitamin usages with these earlier comments!]
Guaranteed.
And if you are foolish enough to take the view that more is better, then the results can prove lethal.
We've mentioned that some folk have killed themselves by overloading on carrot juice and wiping out their liver. Some early polar explorers made the error of shooting a bear and dining on fresh liver. They died in agony of a toxic overload of vitamins A and D, since the bears liver can safely store huge quantities, far above the human toxicity level.. These are extreme examples, but the principle is sound. More is not necessarily better, and more in unbalanced or non-absorbable forms is just plain stupid. And expensive. The last is a valid comment. Vitamin supplements actually cost very little to make, but the retail mark-up is gigantic. 12 years ago we got a copy cat formulation made up for our own people. We sold it at £1 for a months supply, including contents, label and bottle, and still made a minuscule profit - which wasn't the objective. The aim was to bring the formulation within the reach of some who found it difficult to pay £10 for the virtually identical product in the chemist. Today the same formulation would cost no more than £1.50 against the "pro" £16. Unfortunately, the copycat was just too close to the original and we had to cease and desist or face legal action. \
[Karl: I don't know about the laws in the UK, but certainly in the US there is no law of any type that can prevent anyone from a making a complete copy of any formula. I feel certain that this is also true in the UK. Here is an area where I think the author, not trying to be an expert in "vitamin marketing, misses the mark. The simple truth is that the mere cost of materials in a vitamin formula are a tiny part of total "cost." Much of the cost of a vitamin formula is in the promotion and advertising needed to combat the constant barrage of lies from the government and medical establishment -- that you get all the vitamins you need from your food. So, just making the same formula available at 10% of the price of some competitor would definitely not automatically prove to be a success!]
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But, in general, there is a gigantic motivation to move into the supplementation market because people are far more aware and sophisticated and concerned to protect their health.
So, same old story. Out come the sharks and charlatans. But the adverts promise miracles. Snake oil selling lives, and lives rather well.
[Karl: Why can he not allow for one or two honest folks!]
And yet...we are all too aware that in this frenetic modern world, most people are simply not getting adequate levels through diet, of essential nutrients, and the world has become so fast and stressful that requirements are likely to be higher than they might have been in the past. We take the view that if your diet is good, varied, reasonably balanced, it is sensible and valid to back it up, if you so choose, by taking a GOOD multivit/multi mineral supplement as a baseline insurance. Over the years, we have recommended just two that we trust. Both are well-balanced formulations, comprehensive, and contain components not found in "other" brands. They do not contain by-products of the petroleum industry, and they don't contain yeast which puts a lot of folk off by giving a strong urine odor, as well as causing allergic reaction in more than a few. With both, all that is required is to take one of the pills with your breakfast, and that is it.
[Karl: Well! Perhaps I'll see this formula somewhere, but I certainly know enough about vitamins to know that one-a-day will never provide you with what I think is necessary! Also, I am writing at this point without having read the details of what follows, but it becomes more and more clear that this author is not addressing the issue of toxic metals in our bodies -- derived from silver fillings, smog, and many other sources, and the fact that these toxic metals increase the number and activity of free radicals, and that free radicals are the single cost of most diseases! Next, given this data, there is no possible way that any food, any diet, or any drug, can remove those toxic metals -- they can be removed with "chelation." So, here is a vastly important health subject that will probably be completely ignored by this author.]
The pills are time release products i.e. compressed so they dissolve very slowly over the day and through the digestive system so there is little or no wastage. Worth consideration. One company is Quest (Super-Once-A-Day), and the other is Solgar (multivit/min). For the mistrustful, neither company pay us, we have no shares in either, and we haven't even asked permission to recommend their two products though it is unlike they would object. And if either did come to us and offer some sort of recompense for recommending them, the answer is two letters, not three. Both products are available through good pharmacies, or you can ask us for local sources via email. For any levels of supplementation above this basic common-sense insurance level, don't guess, don't be swayed by advertising. Consult a nutritionist whose experience is in supplementation - and check their credentials twice. It is not a field for amateurs.
[Karl: How could you possibly "check credentials?" Anyone who has "studied" nutrition in college has learned virtually only false information. Most "nutritionists" are selling some brand of products. It is NOT easy to find someone you can trust in this area, but there is no such thing as a "credentialed nutritionist." They all have something to sell, even if it is only consulting and books!]
Back to diets. Have you ever noticed how some diets seem to pop up in cycles every few years, with just a minor tweak here and there, and a brand new name? It doesn't mean they've cracked the problems, just that the originators are trotting back out to refill the corporate coffers with a new market place full of the innocent and trusting, who missed the scam first time round. This particularly applies to the diets peddled in newspapers and magazines.
[Karl: The same is true in the vitamin industry. I have watched in amazement while, in the past few years, the "HGH" products have become fads again. They are same old stuff that was sold years ago, under different names, and are fine enough, but far more popular now because of a new marketing gimmick!]
Check back over five years or so and the cycles cease to be funny and become irritating. And as most of them are free for the price of the paper, it begs the question that if they actually worked, there'd be no need to keep re-introducing them because they would go into oral folklore as a standard and the monolithic dieting industry would start to crack at the foundations because no one would need them or their products - new or old.
Common sense again.
One of the biggest areas of the dieting industry is probably the group format organization. We aren't about to get sued for naming names, but you'll know the main ones like the back of your hand. Sign up and trot along for a session a week and a weigh in.
[Karl: I don't worry much about being sued. The Jenny Craig "group organization" is certainly an example of what he says and I agree -- it is a foolish way to go with very expensive and very poor quality "food."]
The content of the last paragraph is pretty apt. The best known of the organizations actually produces brilliant take-home literature that is fully comprehensive and fully detailed. Yet it has thrived for years, and there is little hope of it closing down, happy with the knowledge that its task is accomplished and the world is losing weight without needing to come and give them money.
Most of these companies base their approach, basically, on calorie reduction in one shape or another, or on low fat diets, and at least one has a huge sideline in promoting its own brand low fat mass market processed foodstuffs. The futility and flawed nature of this type of dieting, we have already covered, but we suspect that their popularity also lies in the group support and encouragement area. It doesn't stop the results from inevitably going belly up for most, over time, but its a more pleasant way of actually "getting through" the diet if you are together with others in the same situation. Maybe we need to touch on some of the wider issues.
There is more to weight loss - and less to weight loss - than meets the eye. The tendency is to see it as a mechanical issue. Eat less than you actually use, and the body will deflate. Well, clearly, this is not the case. Unfortunately, we are more than just flesh and blood mechanical systems, despite the increasing view that we are somewhat similar to a motor vehicle - a bit fails, whip it out and shove in a new chunk.
We have showed you some of the factors involved in this huge subject to demonstrate that most of what you have been taught about successful weight management is wide of the target, and almost worse than useless to you. But, if we are serious about helping you to your dream, and you are serious about getting there, then we are going to have to take you in some new directions. There is more to weight loss and weight maintenance than just what goes down your throat.
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You will need to learn a little of how the brain gets involved with success or failure, only a little and its interesting and easy. And we don't intend to get you chanting affirmations or running autohypnotic sessions in your spare time. Both these have their points, but not in the field of weight loss.
[Karl: OOOPS! Here is a clue?? There is ZERO place for autohyhpnotic sessions or "affirmations" in any of my philosophy -- these being inherently self-defeating. While he is not advocating them for diet, he is foolishly allowing them the prospect of usefulness "somewhere else."]
The problem is that the site title is quite apt and so is the explanation on the home page - the quotation from Ricard Leakey, the paleontologist, that he views the human as an uneasy mixture of psychopathic genius and bewildered caveman.
[Karl: A cute phrase but useless as a metaphor!]
We seem to be under the illusion that the bewildered caveman is dust in history, and the psychopathic genius arose like a phoenix from the ashes to rule the modern world. We use our brains to run our lives, to run the country, to run the world, to send rockets to the stars, to solve complex problems, and yet when it comes to losing weight and leading healthy non-obese lives, all this genius deserts us, and we turn into a bunch of helpless, hopeless idiots. Remember how we mentioned the brain biocomputer hitting back and defeating your best and craftiest attempts to slip a reduction diet past it? You stand zero chance of success down this road.
[Karl: I am a bit peeved at this beginning down the path of explaining the mind. This guy doesn't have a clue. As much stupidity as man may have in selecting a diet, he surely has in many areas of society -- certainly including government. Stupid diets are not the only form of stupidity in our midst!]
Only we weren't really talking about the psychopathic genius side of things because if this sector were involved and competent, then solving your weight problems would be a complete doodle, even for the most intellectually challenged. But there is a second side to the biocomputer and its more important, more competent, and so little utilized that its a bad joke. Bringing it into play can be a major factor in removing a whole raft of factors linked with weight loss failure, and again, it isn't complex, and by the end of this e-book you'll be more proficient and more aware than most of the experts in the field. At zero cost. We must be mad!
Does this second part of the biocomputer exist?
Well, find yourself a pen or pencil and place it on a surface in front of you or beside you. Pick it up, wave it in a little circle and put it down again. A very simple exercise? True. Now have a think about it. What you have just down involves umpteen thousands of neurological message transfers, and thousands of minute and very precise muscle movements dictated by the message transfers. To accomplish one simple task you have just done on autopilot without thinking about anything other than the request to pick the pen up and put it down. The messages passed un-noticed but at the speed of light so the result seems almost instantaneous and it is smooth and flowing. NO deep thought involved.
Now, for a joke, do it again, but this time switch off autopilot and think through every one of the muscle movements and issue every one of the separate instructions, one by one. Joke, innit? Not satisfied.
Well, go big time, switch off autopilot and take over your FULL breathing function for two minutes, thinking about every single separate element involved in inhalation, exhalation, balancing the carbon dioxide/oxygen ratios, balancing the cell biochemistry, blood exchange mechanisms, the whole works. Start to see the complexity? If you actually had to do any of this stuff day to day, well, forget it, its impossible, and any mistakes would be catastrophic. Don't worry, you can't do it because the biocomputer isn't dotty enough to let you disengage autopilot and take over manual control.
You would make a total pigs ear of it in seconds, and we are not being insulting. Come and look under the bonnet to see what the works look like. An average person has about 40 BILLION body cells, plus or minus a few. There is skin, bone, muscle, connective tissue, organs, nails, hair, teeth so countless different types of cells amongst the 40 billion. If you were to take a tiny (painless) sliver of the skin surface and look at it under a microscope, you would see what an individual human cell looks like. or have a look at a picture in a biology book.
Each cell is like a miniature capital city. It has government in the DNA and chromosomes, power supply in the mitochondria, nutritional services, gas exchange services, waste disposal services, just about every aspect of big city life you will find duplicated in each and every cell.
Only....there are 40 billion of them in that structure called a human being. You couldn't run ONE cell single-handed let alone 40 billion, all grouped into so many different areas of function. That little lot has to be co-ordinated and regulated and adjusted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from the womb to the point of death - or you die. You can't do it, we hope we've shown you that much. The biocomputer of the brain does it for us. Tirelessly, accurately, wonderfully, every second of life and you don't have to do a darn thing except get on with the business of living. The real work is done on autopilot at this subconscious level of brain biocomputer function. Its the same in all species but we'll stick with us.
It begs a question which is common in the many fields of psychology. Is the brain one computer system or two. Clearly two, and we'll stick loosely with the terms conscious and subconscious to distinguish them. Conscious is effectively the psychopathic genius part. We run our daily lives and our external world and all that's involved.
[Karl: If this man is trying to equate "brain" with "thinking" he is so far out of any field of science that he becomes laughable! I suspect he is going to bring up psychiatric and psychological concepts -- two fields that are completely bankrupt of truth!]
Subconscious is more properly the area of the bewildered caveman, and we've shown you a glimpse of what it does for us. If you accept Freud's assessment, conscious mind function is 10% tops of the whole biocomputer mechanism and subconscious is 90%.
[Karl: Fortunately for my friends and customers, I do NOT accept Freud as an authority on anything except his own sexual perversions and his own drug addictions!]
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MEMORY SUBCON CONSCIOUS INPUTS
After all these years, we don't agree and reckon the split is closer to 2%/98%. So, if you think about it for a moment, we run our lives, run the world, make all these marvelous decisions and inventions with what amounts to a cheap pocket calculator. Is it any wonder the world could be in better shape?
Underneath the dinky toy function is housed what has to be the biggest, most powerful, most sophisticated computer system ever designed and built, and fortunately the chance of it ever being replicated in plastic and chips is remote. The sheer immensity of our subconscious mind function, its speed and accuracy makes our superior conscious mind function look like a very bad joke in appalling taste. And don't get us wrong - we are NOT talking about cleverness, intellectual or scholarly abilities because that's the funniest and most ironic bit of all.
[Karl: This is all hogwash now, and not worth further comment!]
People can differ in ability so widely at the conscious level from the genius to the village idiot and all points in-between. But at the subconscious biocomputer level all are equal because its power, ability and range of functions is identical in all members of the model labeled Homo sapiens.
The tragedy is that we have this gigantic area of biocomputer beavering away, day in, day out, and we never pay the least attention, and probably a lot of folk never even give a thought to the fact that they have one. Maybe they assume 40 billion cells just run themselves like magic in perfect balance and harmony. Now you might say, fine, but what has this to do with my weight loss problems? More than you think, friend. Get things aligned correctly and a lot of the current hurdles just disappear in a puff, get it misaligned and you're stuck with the toy of the psychopathic genius, which hasn't done too brilliantly so far. So stick with us!
If we stay with the computer analogy, and its a reasonable if grossly simplistic one, then it may help from the perspective of weight loss to see how the different bits actually work together - or work in opposition. 15 years ago, we designed a model called the "Marylebone Model" to illustrate biocomputer mind function. Its horribly simple but its done the trick over the years because it doesn't involve jargon or any knowledge of psychology, biochemistry or anything complex, and you can use it to learn how simple it is to button push and get the biocomp to stand up and do tricks. Useful ones, not circus turns. A chips and plastic computer has a keyboard and mouse to feed in information and control function instructions, it has a processor system, some memory systems, and that's about all we need to translate into biocomputer terms.
Not super elegant but adequate for our purpose. The plastic and chips computer has keyboard and mouse for data input. The brain biocomputer has the five senses of sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch.
Sometimes we use all simultaneously. Imagine, for instance, walking absent mindedly in a flower garden on a humid summers day. You brush your hand against a rose, and consciously think "nice rose" if you think of it at all. But, the input systems have registered hundreds of bits of data about color, size, shape, smell, temperature, sound of petals on the breeze, even taste of the scent on a humid day, and none of it is exactly state of the art need to know information for conscious. So, it bypasses the toy box (bottom dotted lines) and feeds all the information into the subconscious side of things. Where it has no immediately useful purpose either, so it is promptly passed down the line into memory storage. (con and subcon being the dual equivalent of the computer processor system - we have two - linked up to a point!). Now here is where it starts to go all wonderful on us, meaning us at the Rea Centre becaus
