Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Weird question

I had a really bizarre conversation with a customer today about various weight loss methods, and now I have a strange question for everyone.

What is the weirdest way of losing weight that you've ever heard of?

To start the list of candidates, I just read recently that laughter burns calories.

Irene

Yes, laughter does burn calories. It also stimulates the release of endorphins, which will improve your overall mood.

Still, the report that I heard said that 10 minutes per day of boisterous laughter will allow you to lose 4 lbs in a year. Not exactly a crash diet...

Other odd ways of losing weight? If you ask me, Atkins. Starve your body of usable calories while tricking your stomach into thinking it's full by stuffing it with difficult to digest food, thus forcing your body to digest its own stores in order to continue to function (which may well cause a variety of long-term side effects).

Odd in another way were some old exercise machines. Notably this thing:



Basically, you stand on it and strap the belt around your waist. The machine vibrates the belt, shaking your muscles. This was supposed to provide excerise and help you lose weight, but in fact did almost nothing more than shake you. Didn't stop it from being popular, though.

The modern version of it does actually work, though, and it is also rather odd. You lie down on a table and technicians glue electrodes to various points on your body. The electrodes fire in ways that the muscles interpret as neurological commands. The muscles basically twitch back and forth, exercising them with tiny amounts of effort over lots and lots of reps. So, you lie more or less still, and let the electric shocks tone your muscles.

Also on the odd but effective side are people who get stomach bypass surgery. Basically, they surgically take your stomach out of the digestive tract with a tube that goes over and around it. So you can eat as much as you like, but almost none of the food is actually digested. It's obviously a temporary measure. Once you lose the weight, they preform more surgery, allowing some or all of the food to once again actually be digested.

I'm sure there are plenty of others. People are willing to try some pretty wierd things to lose weight, especially if it means getting around a self-controlled diet and a healthy amount of exercise. Can't say I blame them. Not like I've had all that much luck going the sensible but high willpower route (though I have actually lost 15 pounds in the last few months by eating less... We'll see how long it lasts).

Paul

Some odd ways of losing weight I've heard of that do actually work:

Accepting yourself for who you are and not dieting. Yeah, I know it sounds contradictory, but think about it. Most people gain weight on diets because of the forbidden food syndrome that comes with it. If you eat healthy stuff most of the time, and allow yourself a candy bar once in a while, you're not going to be craving candy bars.

Now if only everyone would eat in moderation instead of starving themselves to death (yeah, many diets are starvation according to the World Health Organization standards), we might actually be healthier.

Also, a recent study showed that people who do not diet have higher self-esteem. Self-esteem doesn't necessarily come with pretty looks. If it did, there would be no anorexic people who keep losing weight despite the fact that they don't need to. It comes with loving yourself for who you are.

There is a size acceptance community on the Internet for those who are interested. Do a google search for size acceptance and it will come up. No, I'm not hugely obese, I'm a size 16. That's average size, unless you live in Hollywood.

I'm sorry for the rant, but I'm very tired of hearing about dieting, weight loss, and why we should force ourselves to be someone we're not. If our genes lean toward not being thin, why in the world should we have to try to be thin if we're healthy and already eating what we should?

I recommend the Obesity Myth by Paul Campos, for anyone interested in the subject of weight loss in general. It really does blow away the junk science leading to the hysteria that is out there right now.

Oh, let's see what I remember...I've tried tuning out my dad for years now, but unfortunately it doesn't always work. He's a gastroenterologist, so this isn't a weird question. It's dinner table conversation at my house!

The Cabbage Soup Diet. I personally can see myself losing weight on this just because I would never remember what to eat! In addition to soup everyday, there are certain foods you eat on certain days...like day 4 is bananas and skim milk or something...you can eat a potato one day and you can't the next...And it's only for 7 days at a time, which sounds sketchy to me.

I don't find the Atkins diet that weird except I'd rather just cut the carbs than rule them out all together. I mean, carbs are part of the food pyramid for a reason, right? But, be that as it may, I know a ton of dad's colleagues that have lost a bunch of weight with the diet.

Now of course if we're talking about weird diets, my own household qualifies by itself. <g> I'm home with the parents until I move into my new apartment in August, and they don't eat carbs, sugar, or salt, the latter two for health reasons. I can always guarentee that when I stay here for any period of time, I'll lose weight.

There's some kind of diet plan catered to one's blood type. ??? That just sounds weird to me without knowing the specifics.

Anywho, that's all I've got for now. I'll report back if I hear anything interesting at the dinner table. Mostly I've just heard the latest about the grosser middle of the night stories in the ER...nevermind. <g>

As for me, I think it's all a bunch of hooey. I've heard dad's speech the past 21 years of my existence to just eat less and exercise more. I see diets as really frustrating because people get obsessed with results.

JD

Oh yeah! Jen's mention of the Cabbage Soup Diet reminded me of the Grapefruit Diet. They claim that grapefruit has some kind of "fat-burning enzyme," but as far as I know, there's no actual evidence of such a thing. The diet does work, however, in the short term because people on it eat less. That may be because the grapefruit is filling while relatively low in calories. It may be because the diet really restricts portion sizes. Personally, I think it's because the rule is that you have to eat grapefruit with everything except your (rather limited) bedtime snack. "You mean, if I eat this, I have to eat a grapefruit, too?" That'd be a good motivator for me not to eat.

... Actually, a quick net search turned up this page , which lists a bunch of food-based diets, including cabbage soup, grapefruit, chocolate, vinegar, raw food, peanut butter, and popcorn.

If you scroll down the page, you can see a bunch of other things listed on the sidebar, including a huge list of fad diets with some very random-sounding names. There's a blood type diet, a hay diet, a negative calorie diet, and a caveman diet, among others.

Oh my. Just decided to do a net search for "weird weight loss" and came up with this article about a very interesting Japanese product.

Paul

I once knew someone who thought that if you let ice-cream melt before you ate it it contained no calories...

Yeah. We wish.

LabRat

Well, the calorie is a unit of heat...

I did actually calculate at some point that it took about 4200 calories to raise 1/2 a cup of water from freezing point to body temperature. At about 100 calories per half cup of ice cream, that sounds like a pretty good deal...

Of course, some friends were quick to remind me that the calories listed on food packages are actually kilocalories, which means that you save just over four calories when you eat ice cream, because you have to raise the material to body temperature. <g>

(Oh, and my earlier net searches also turned up a chemistry student who reccomended drinking lots of cold water as part of your diet for exactly that reason. He calculated that you could save up to 60 calories per day doing that...)

Paul

ROTFL at Paul's comments about the grapefruit diet

This is not exactly a diet, but when I'm stressful, I gain weight. Which makes sense, since being stressful gives me chocolate cravings. But the weird thing is that when I'm not stressful, I don't gain weight, even if I eat (much) more than usual. During the Christmas season, for example, I ate *a* *lot*. And yet, fifteen days later, I hadn't put on one single gram.. I don't know how to explain this.

And... do you know the pineapple diet? "You eat everything except for pineapple" But I've been on that for my entire life and don't see any results

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

"Half the population of Earth is starving.
The rest is on a diet."

P.S.: A calorie is a unit of energy, actually. Heat is energy, of course, but all forms of energy can be measured in calories. In terms of food, it's the chemical energy they contain. (All these hours of Advanced Physics and Chemistry did teach me something )

Actually drinking the right amount of water will help you burn fat anyway. I think it's something like a pound per month of fat is burned just by being well hydrated.

gerry

You could eat celery. According to the Urban Legends web page
http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/celery.asp
When you eat celery, you burn more calories digesting it than it contains.

TEEEEEJ

Yes, energy is energy, but the calorie is defined in terms of heat. 1 calorie is defined as the amount of heat energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree celcius. 1 food (kilo) calorie = 1000 calories.

Diets vary, but 2000 calories per day is a reasonable rough average. Now, you do need extra heat for a phase conversion (to turn ice into water or water into steam), but 2000 kilo calories = 2,000,000 calories. The freezing point of water is, of course, 0 c, and the boiling point is 100 c. At room temperature, 1 gram of water takes up 1 ml of volume (and it doesn't vary *that* much in between). This means that you eat enough in one day to bring 20 liters of chilled water (liquid at 0 degrees) right up to the boiling point.

Impressive, no?

As for celery, you do burn off a couple calories more per stalk than you gain, but that isn't very much. It should also be noted that that same stalk contains over 100mg of sodium -- about 8% of your reccomended total daily intake.

Paul

Off topic - funny (or just plain weird?) calories/energy incident...

Yesterday, I was studying Chemistry for today's exam. Among other things, the book talked about natural gas, and it said that one 1 m^3 (sorry, I don't know any other way of writing it) of natural gas can give 9000-12000 Kcal when burned. So I told my Mom, "do you know how much is that? It's the energy you would produce if you ate 1000 apples and then rowed until you burned all the calories you took from them."

You should have seen the look on her face. It was kinda like And it got even worse when I started explaining her that cows are a great source of energy, because the... umm... waste... they produce gives large quantities of fuel (CH4) when it rots. (Also taken from the book.) But the worst was when I told her that there's so much cow waste going in... waste, in fact, and that somebody has to do something about it. Yep, she thought I had gone nuts. And then I ROTFLed because she looked so funny! Which is when she started wondering if what had happened to me was reversible...

I think I have a crazy scientist in me...

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

Irene, this question brought back fond memories of my senior year college roommate who, as a drama major looking to drop a few pounds for a part, took up an approach called Intentional Eating.

With Intentional Eating you can eat anything you want in three square meals a day. But you must eat it... intentionally. There was a long list of musts which went with that.

Must be seated. Must eat off a plate. Must use silverware. Must savor and mentally describe each taste. Must concentrate on the act of eating-- this means no talking, no watching television as you eat, no reading. Just... sitting and eating and soaking up the experience of, well, sitting and eating.

I admit that after she'd been at it for a week, I started skipping the dining hall at lunch and going back to our apartment just to watch. It was like the greatest food show ever.

Intentional Eating encouraged using foods of all colors and textures. Meal time should stimulate all the senses and last at least 45 minutes.

And I can see how that approach *can* work, since it solves the problem of thoughtless eating, or just continuing to eat even when you're full, and it doesn't deny you anything. If you want chocolate cake you can have it. Just describe and savor it as you do...

But still, who has time for that three times a day??

Anyway, I'm not sure she lost weight. And I can still remember some mornings when she overslept and didn't have time for 'ritual breakfast' and so was just mumbling, "Good cereal, the milk's nice and cold," as she ate as quickly as she could, half-croached over her chair.

However, she did develop this fascination with food. And I sort of did by proxy. Before then, food was what I ate when I was hungry and I never gave it more thought than that. *I* might have put on a few pounds just watching her eat. And while she was a gifted actress, she went straight from college to culinary school. She now owns her own catering service and is successful, gorgeous, and yeah, slightly round... but so what??

CC

My favorite diet is the seafood diet... you see food, you eat it!

I think a lot of it is just inborn metabolism stuff. I used to be able to eat anything and never gain a pound. Then I got pregnant. Then I got pregnant again. Then I got depressed... (or more depressed than usual ) and had *major* sugar cravings for a few years. Combine that with feeling too tired to move around, and guess what happened? Going on anti-depressants saved me (although some of them have weight gain as a side effect, the one I'm on doesn't) -- cleared up the cravings and gave me energy and motivation to move around. So now I'm back to being able to eat whatever I want without gaining weight. It's just a good thing that I don't need to diet, because I guarantee you I would be *awful* at it.

PJ

I love the seafood diet! I just lament the fact that I have a bird stomach. So much good food.... *sigh*

I seem to subscribe to the Forgetful & Broke Diet. "Hrm, forgot to get my poptarts for breakfast. Cheeze-its for lunch because I forgot to bring a sandwich and I could only scrounge up 40 cents. Now it's 9pm, and I've been too busy reading/chatting/watching tv/being lazy to get dinner. Crud, just make a sandwich." Or the hubby will ask if I've eaten, and I think... and think... and think. Oh, guess I haven't. oops.

How about the 'smash your body to pieces' diet?

It works like this. Break your dominant arm. Smash one of your front teeth in half. That way, even if you could manage to prepare food and bring it to your mouth one-handed, you can't actually eat it!


Wendy (whose dentist told her this morning "the tooth is toast." :p )

Well, I was going to say that this has turned out to be a fun topic, but then Wendy posted.

I've been ROFLOL at some of these crazy ways to lose weight - especially loved the Potty slippers!

Keep the insanity coming; this is great!

Irene

I'll consider it, Irene, if you give me some assurance that I'll get something for my continued efforts. Perhaps something which involves an indignant Lois Lane?

Paul

I hope that I didn't mislead anyone. This is definitely not fanfic related, but if someone else wants to hijack some information from this thread for a fanfic, they're welcome to do so!

Irene