[liessi]

This is not a comment on the Gabriel Method since I haven't had a chance to look at it personally, but I'm the biggest skeptic there is and having read the posts, I thought my recent experience might help some people achieve similar results.

First, let me start off by saying that obesity is killing us all. I was obese, now I'm fat, and I no longer wish to be fat. The first step is to admit hey, I'm not "chubby" -- I am in grave medical danger and doing serious harm to myself. (Now if only your doctor had the sense to voice this.)

I lost 60 lbs (from 240 lbs) in 7 weeks through the Dr. Bernstein program (drbdiet.com), following several months of counselling (shelleysangels.org) so I could prepare myself to stop shoving food in my mouth as a means of consoling myself in times of grief, punishing myself when things went bad, or congratulating myself when things went right. The critical part was how and why I was eating -- it clearly wasn't for sustenance. Once that was relatively under my control, I could focus on the actual food part.

Your brain is made up mostly of fat and needs fat to survive--healthy fat, as in oil, not lard. If it doesn't have access to fat, it will look for sugar. If it doesn't have access to fat or sugar, it will look for protein.

Note: This is where most diets really suck: your body starts to eat its own lean muscle mass for the protein. Yes, you lose weight (muscle is quite dense) but you don't lose any fat. I cringe every time I see a beanpole padded with flab. Dieter. Yuck.

Ideally, you would only eat as much as you need to get through the day's activities. In the wild, the day's activities typically consist of a) not getting eaten and b) finding food -- and occasionally mating, if you're lucky. Eat, run, eat, run, eat, sleep. Repeat.

Not so for us. Wake up, eat, sit in car, ride elevator, sit at desk, eat, ride elevator, sit in car, eat, sit on couch, sleep (I'll skip the lucky part). We're busy to the point of insanity but physically, we don't earn our keep. For many of us, we saturate our bodies with the maximum fat it can take in a day by breakfast: butter x 2 toast, 2 eggs and a glass of 2% milk is more than enough (and this is all lard, mind you!) and any other fat we eat that day will be stored. Our bodies turn into fat silos. And the body is a machine! Once it turns into a fat storage system, it just can't get enough fat and sugar. You crave it all day (go on, tell me you don't).

If you spend 6 hours a day pumping iron, you can eat like this. Otherwise, sooner or later, you'll get obese. So the only solution is to start using what we've stored. Let's skip the 6-hour workout as an option. No one has that kind of time. You can switch to eating right, and eating six small meals per day but that just stops you from getting more obese. It doesn't get rid of the fat you have (maybe over years it will, but you're obese now and it's killing you). The only other option is using up the stores.

The brain needs fat to survive. You cut off its fat intake, AND its sugar intake, and feed it just enough protein to stop it from eating your muscles, and it will suck the fat off you so fast, you'll wonder where it's going. The trick is to make sure you're still getting enough vitamins, minerals and other good things to avoid malnutrition.

Essentially, the Dr. B. diet is a medically (!critical!) supervised "starvation" diet that ensures you are getting sufficient nutrition through lean protein, vegetables, supplements and vitamin shots, while cutting out lard and starch, and limiting your sugar and oil intake so that your body enters ketosis, which is just a fancy word for eating its own fat.

Your body is in ketosis when it switches from fat storage to fat usage in order to feed the brain. During ketosis, your body releases ketones, which is nature's appetite suppressant. Returning to the wild for a moment, it's easy to imagine how critical it would be to have enough energy to find food during times of scarcity. The last thing you would want is to feel hungry, tired or in any way incapable of getting to the next food source. The other amazing things about ketosis is that fat is a high-test fuel, providing unbelievable amounts of energy. It takes about 3 days to enter ketosis, so it's very important to be prepared to ride out those first few days but once the change occurs, it is unmistakable.

The food plan is easy to follow and although it sounds like very little food, as long as you're in ketosis, you will not feel hungry (if you're obese, hunger is probably not your top reason for eating, or over-eating anyway -- that's where the counselling part comes in). You'll get a list of allowable vegetables, limited to 460 g per day, and a few servings of select fruits. You also get 200 g of allowable protein (that's plenty) per day plus select snacks to keep your palate entertained. Very quickly, you learn how to spread these out over the day, and that it's actually quite a challenge to eat everything that you're allowed. There are other restrictions as well (good-bye red wine and root beer), but it's manageable. If you think of it as a temporary, fast-track solution to a problem that would otherwise take years to fix (while obesity takes years off your life), it's easy to give up stuffing your face for a few months while your body returns to normal. Too blunt for you? Hey, nobody loves chocolate and Guinness more than yours truly. If I can do it, so can you.

A word of caution: it's absolutely foolish to try this on your own, since ketosis (the natural result of starvation) can kill you if you're just a few pounds overweight, or if you're not taking the necessary vitamin shots and supplements. These are expensive so it's tempting to try this on your own but you risk severe malnutrition and a host of other serious medical problems if you're already suffering from health issues.

Good luck!