In the first place, get yourself into the proper frame of mind. The diet is not arduous or hard. It is a diet of protective, mineral-vitamin foods which are healing, restorative, and health-bringing.
Practically the same kind of diet is used to treat successfully certain types of heart trouble, gall bladder crises, and other important ailments. The diet regimen is good for you, f at or no f at.
If you wish, the strict seven-day reducing diet can be continued (or used in alternate weeks) until your weight is within 10 per cent of normal. Some people have followed it for weeks and months, practically in its pristine form. As long as there is surplus fat in the body, you can afford to eat foods which will not augment or replenish such a store.
Most dieters, however, make food substitutions in the diet as indicated and allowed. They fit the diet much more to their own taste and food likes or dislikes, and thus make weight reduction a more comfortable process.
Many have chosen three daily menus which they particularly like and used these over and over again. The only caution necessary to give about such a plan is that at least one of those menus should include a glandular meat.
Many, many people, of course, have given enough study to the principles involved in reducing to plan their own menus, using as a basis the general program outlined here.
Essentially, the principle of the diet is one of food substitution; you are substituting low-caloried, catabolic, protective foods for fattening foods. As you are probably aware, most people have no great decided food preferences -they desire only to be “filled up” three times a day. Our diet is filling-try it and see.
Take the trouble to study each day’s menu, and if there are foods allowed as substitutes which you prefer to those on any given day of the diet, make your substitutions. Plan to make each day’s meals as pleasant and attractive as possible. You will enjoy some agreeable surprises after the first day. When you discover and begin to appreciate the delicate flavor of vegetables (some of which you might never have known), you will like the diet, and your way to permanent fat control will be easier, too. Obviously, being a fatty, you have been too partial to the concentrated foods.
Follow the plans and principles of the menus without any deviation. Guard, above all things, the table salt intake. Make no mistake: small amounts of salt are necessary to body health; we must not cut salt intake entirely. But salt demands a very definite percentage of water to be retained in the body. An excess, through its machinations with the water balance, actually helps you to remain fat. So hold down the salt.
Drink no water during the meals. Drink it half an hour before or half an hour after, and drink all you please between meals. If hungry between meals or before bedtime, chew celery. No other food or drink, not even fruit juice, is permitted. After all, you are on a therapeutic diet; you are attempting to accomplish a definite chemical purpose. Discipline is important.
Make absolutely certain of a complete bowel elimination every day. Actually, your entire weight loss is going to be gauged by the type, quantity, and degree of this elimination. Here, too, is a long and involved story. Briefly, any consideration of body nutrition must be linked with the question of waste riddance. The digestive system is not only the larder of the body; it is also the chief channel through which unwanted food residues are expressed. Some breakdown tissues and results of catabolic f at destruction going on in the body are also eliminated.
If a person becomes constipated while on the diet, he will not only fail to lose weight, but will also feel exceedingly miserable. Such a situation is not to be tolerated.
Personally, I do not approve of the use of laxatives and cathartics of a chemical nature. They act by irritation. The use of mineral oil is taboo on the catabolic diet, too, because mineral oil has a tendency to leach Vitamin A from foods, and it interferes with absorption o$ various food nutriments. Thus, if mineral oil is used, the nutritive value of the diet will be diminished and the intricate mineral and nitrogen chemistry will be upset. Since the diet is swung on very fine balances, we must insist that mineral oil not be used.
Any pill or laxative that causes a watery or diarrheal stool (dehydration) is strictly forbidden. It will upset the delicate water balance which we have taken into careful consideration and so deliberately balanced the diet to maintain.
I approve and even urge the use of the hydrogels. They are aids to elimination which contain no chemical cathartics, and act because they absorb water and provide a soft bulk. A hydrogel added to the diet provides a gentle stimulus to the movements of the digestive system.
Hydrogels are composed of vegetable pentosans. You might ask your doctor to recommend one; use it in conjunction with the diet as a prophylactic against possible constipation.
The diet is not intended to interfere with your daily activities. As a matter of fact, exercise and work will encourage the destruction of fat in your body. Obviously, the more active you are, the more weight you will lose. Many of those who went on the “test” diet aided fat destruction by taking a daily walk, of at least half a mile.
It is easier to reduce in summer, when the skin pores are more active and the heat loss from the body is greater than in colder weather. Two hundred-pound John Smith, who can lose ten pounds in ten August days on the catabolic diet, would probably lose only eight and three-quarters pounds in winter, and nine pounds in the spring or fall.
Because perspiration carries a considerable amount of salt from the body, summer dieters might take a pinch of salt once in a while. This is not a bad plan for any fat person who perspires freely, whether he is on the diet or not, because salt depletion in the body causes most uncomfortable symptoms.
Winter dieters can compensate somewhat for their lack of summer-heat losses by taking, daily, a hot sitting bath. The bath technique is as follows: Run enough hot water into the tub to cover the hips; lean back and rest. Heat will escape from the body, the body thermostat will move up, and your metabolism rate will increase.
When swirling currents of air strike the nude skin, the body metabolism increases amazingly. If you will devote twenty minutes in the morning or evening to lolling without clothes in your bedroom (window shades adjusted) , you will increase your metabolism rate noticeably and so help your weight reduction.
We have already discussed the problem of food allergies and sensitivitY. If you failed to understand the importance of those passages, please reread them. When the question of food intolerance is involved, the formal diet -must be modified to suit the individual.
Final Directions
Immediately following these directions, you will find menus for seven days outlined for you. These are the original seven-day reducing diet menus which we gave over the air on the famous reducing party, and printed in our reducing notes.
On pages 145-147 there are twenty substitution lists. Each one of these contains foods which may be substituted safely, one for the other. There are numerous reasons why we have selected these allowable substitutions-chiefly because important vitamin and mineral values have been taken into consideration.
It would be best, although it is not absolutely necessary, to preserve as nearly as possible the allowed calorie values. In other words, if you wish to substitute some other vegetable for the one cup of mashed turnips given in Monday’s lunch, you would turn to Substitute List 11. There you find that beets, for example, have a higher calorie value than turnips. It might be best to eat only seven ounces of beets instead of the eight ounces of turnips.
Don’t concern yourself too much with this, however, because beets entail a slightly greater digestive load than the turnips. As a result, the increased calorie cost of digestion makes up, in some degree, for the slightly higher calorie value.
While there have been mutterings about the possible evils of saccharin, no harm from its use has ever been demonstrated. Saccharin received a black eye in 1906 when the Food and Drugs Act was passed, and candy makers were enjoined from using it without stating so on the label.
This ruling was not made because of any bad quality in saccharin but simply because to substitute saccharin for sugar is cheating. Many diabetics have used saccharin over long periods of years. During 1914-1918, it was part of the daily diet of most Germans. It is safe to use saccharin for sweetening if you choose. Your druggist can supply it and tell you how to use it.
A pure celery salt may be used in place of ordinary salt for seasoning, or salt substitutes can be purchased at a drug store. The latter are now commonly used, for a salt-free diet is quite often prescribed by doctors in cases of high blood pressure, hardened arteries, kidney disease, allergy, and so on.
Any and all foods suggested can be used either canned or fresh; fresh, of course, are preferable. However, modern canning methods take such exceptional notice of delicate vitamin values that no fear need be felt in using a canned instead of a fresh food. In fact, canned vegetables often have better nutritional values than those purchased in the market, for canneries demand that their produce be lush ripe.
Frozen foods may be used, if desired. They too, because of the care expended in their selection, may be nutritionally better than fruits and vegetables as purchased in the market.
May we remind you that the seven-day diet is really only a spearhead thrust against Debble Fat? It is only relatively important to take off eight pounds in seven days. The big gain is that you learn how to use the catabolic foods. You get the feel of your weapons against fat.
You can settle back, after opening his lines, for a more or less easy-going war on the enemy. You will have Debble Fat on the defensive-or, let us say, where he has you now.
Whenever canned fruits are prepared for any meal on the diet, please wash off all the syrup. Water-packed fruits can be purchased-these are canned without sugar. However, it is more convenient to drain the syrup from those you use and let the rest of the family benefit by the syrup that is left.
A few people have reported that they felt “woozy””not good”-for a day or two while on the diet. This may be due to the fact that certain stimulants like coffee, tea, or alcohol are missed. Coffee, tea, and chocolate each contain a drug: caffeine, theine, and theobromine, respectively. The abrupt withdrawal of these produces headaches in some people.
A baker who stayed on the job while following the diet developed feelings of faintness. I suggested that, because he perspired so heavily, his condition might be due to a salt depletion. The guess proved to be right. A pinch of salt followed by a glass of water did away with the symptom.
Some people have a very low sugar content in the blood (technically called a hypoglycemia). For example, diabetics taking insulin may use too much and develop a hypoglycemia. Some reducing diets produce such a state.
Under ordinary circumstances, this could not happen with our diet, as it is rich in fruit and vegetable sugars. However, it is possible that some people with a hypoglycemia might have it aggravated by our low starch diet. They would feel all in or acutely tired. A lump of sugar would restore them.
For the last time, w:, remind you that while the sevenday reducing diet is very low in calories, its catabolic feature is what causes rapid weight reduction: For example, if you tried to reduce by eating six pieces of bread a day (a very low-caloried diet), you would have very little success.
When you are watching your calories, always remember that it is more important to eat a catabolic food to reduce than simply to eat few calories. It is the catabolic feature that counts.
Let us remind you again that body fat is an oily liquid, not a solid lump. It is a fuel oil which is eradicated by chemical means-food chemistry.