Dr Bridell’s logical and rational & poetic and beautiful & completely guaranteed Diet
#3: What Your Body will Do for You
By the Mysterious Dr Bridell

Author’s note:  This is the latest installment of a column that explores a new diet based on spiritual rather than physical paradigms. It is arranged in "bite-sized chunks" that come each Friday and that build on each other.  The first few concepts sound deceptively simple but require discipline and commitment to implement — and they lay the foundation for the more enlightening and revealing concepts to come.  Your challenge as a participant is to put the principles into practice each week as they come to you.  If you missed earlier columns, catch up by clicking here to go to the Bridell archives.  Good luck!

With a concept as simple as the challenge in last week's column (just doing exactly what you already do, but cutting each thing you eat in half and stopping when that first half is gone), you’d think there would now be some much more complicated follow-up column that outlines just what you can and can’t eat and telling you how to count fat grams or calories or carbs and instruct you to buy herbs or supplements or organic food.  In other words, if phase one is about the quantity (eating half) then phase two must be about the quality, right?    

Yes and no.  Yes, this week's column is about quality and nutrition but no, it doesn’t require you to count anything or plan elaborate menus or buy specific kinds of food.  In fact, it isn’t about you doing anything for your body.  It’s about what your body will do for you in phase two as a reward for the effort you make on phase one.
   
As your body gets used to less quantity, it will start demanding more quality and you will essentially be training and developing a more selective appetite.  You’re not trying to kill or eliminate your appetite; rather, you’re developing it so it will give you more joy and better results.  Vegetables and fruits and grains will become more appealing.    

The secret to phase two is this: Your body knows what it needs.  Every cell in your body knows what it requires to stay alive and to thrive.  But your body doesn’t wrest control from your appetites and obsessions and bad habits unless you train it to. 

The body is an instinctive mechanism.  Unlike the mind, which can choose and determine its own thoughts, the body — untrained and ungoverned — will take the path of least resistance.  Thus, if you’re eating twice as much as you need, and much of it is junk food or other unhealthy stuff, your body doesn’t fight you, so long there’s enough food coming in to provide what your cells need. 

Say your body needs “3n” of nutrients each day and it can extract that much from a “6v” volume of fairly bad food.  Your body is okay with that even though the over 3v may be making you fat or tired or full of cholesterol.  If the food you’re eating gets even worse in quality (say it now takes 8v volume to get the 3n of nutrients), your body will push you to eat even more.    

But what happens if the mind takes control by “eating half” and limits the body to 3v volume of food per day?  If it’s all the same fairly bad food, the body will be getting only 1-1/2n and the appetite will push you to eat more.  But if the mind stays strong and holds the quantity line at 3v, the only recourse your cells have is to work on the quality.  Gradually, you start craving better, more nourishing, more wholesome food until your body can get its 3n of nutrients from a volume of 3v.    

So if you stay true to phase one, your body will gradually give you the gift of phase two.  Your tastes (as well as your taste) will change, your body will lose weight, and every one of your cells will be happier.
Can it really be that simple?  Absolutely!  But simple things are often incredibly hard.  How in the world are you going to eat only half of your food? If you've tried it for a week by now, you know how hard it is! How can you do it — not just for one meal or one day or one week, but from now on?  It is an extremely difficult proposition because any weakness in your conscious, choice-making mind will be exploited mercilessly by your instinctive body and your subconscious appetites.    

And nobody else can do it for you.  No one can make it easy or give you some magic pill.  What I can do for you — what this column is written to do — is to motivate you by making the whole idea as appealing as possible by giving you some interesting and stimulating new ways to think about it, and by helping you see that it’s not only the results that will make you happy, but the process — that eating twice as slow and half as much is, as you get used to it, more enjoyable.    

The thing to work on this week is the "slow" part.  Make your bites smaller, chew them longer, so that eating half takes as long as eating twice as much used to.  Think quality over quantity. Sip, Savor and Smell instead of Guzzle, Gulp and Gorge. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, in fact, that is the title of next week's column. See you then.