Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Board-Certified Cardiologist
Since 1994, my LORD has opened my eyes to a dreadful health problem that predicted certain mortality and humbled my very best efforts at treatment. Cardiovascular problems, endocrine abnormalities, and even cancers were more responsive to
treatment than this increasingly more common "ailment."
Yes, the problem is obesity. Despite valiant counseling by clinic
nutritionists and dietitians... despite calorie counting... despite food journals... despite exercise... obese patients typically (more than 90%)
gained rather than lost weight.
Americans are getting fatter! Over the years, airlines in the U.S. have widened the seats on their planes to accommodate this trend of
increasing obesity. Even more alarming, coffins and hospital stretchers have also been widened.
Through knowledge of genetics, it is clear that this trend of increasing girth is occurring too fast to be a
phenomenon of newly inherited obesity genes. Instead, there is the increasing success of the food industry toward
getting people, including our children, to eat and drink more. There are dedicated TV channels such as the Food Network and their ever-popular celebrity chefs. There are the
extra value meals, the biggie fries, and the supersizing. There are the buffets and the all-you-can eateries. There is the over-emphasis of three
meals per day and four food groups (Got milk?). There are the soda and snack machines at every corner and now even in our children's schools. There are the cholesterol free, low-fat or
fat-free foods that prey on the popular myth that eating *more* of these foods is healthier and would somehow promote weight loss.
We
know that the avoidance of "fattening" foods does not help people lose weight.
Indeed,
current research has shown that even eating "healthy" foods like fruits and vegetables does not help folks lose weight.
This has got to stop.
In 1997, my LORD cleared out
my heart (HIS Temple), and then the Holy Spirit led my wife and I to watch an IMAX
film about climbing Mt. Everest and learned that despite their exhausting regimen, the climbers consumed
only 10 lbs of food per week. That's less than 2 lbs of food per day! Since none of the climbers died
from starvation, an inspired thought was that 2 lbs of food per day is more than adequate for us
non-climbing folks.
At the time, I was about 10 lbs over my ideal body weight (ok, it was more like 20 lbs) so I decided to
find out how much I was eating per day... 3-4 lbs. I cut back to 2 lbs and was at the more optimal weight
in a few months. Could it really be this simple ?
So I started a little experiment with the agreeable obese patients in my care. I gave them ordinary food
scales with instructions to weigh everything substantial that passed into their mouths. The only things
exempted were water and zero-calorie drinks. What I learned was that my obese patients was consuming
between 8 to 12 lbs of food per day! This was corroborated by a
paper published in 2000 revealing
that in 1970, Americans were eating about 4.1 lbs of food per day and that by 2000, this had increased to
4.9 lbs. From studying laboratory animals, it has been observed that there is a tendency to eat about
twice what is optimal, thereby halving lifespan, and we are now observing that humans are now even
exceeding this tendency thereby explaining the currently observed accelerating rates of obesity with
the associated co-morbidities and cardiovascular deaths.
However, using the 2PD-OMER Approach to stop overeating, obese patients steadily lost weight eating less
just as I did except they have taken longer to reach their ideal weight because of having more to lose.
Admittedly, some folks were especially slow at losing weight. They also happen to be the ones with a
propensity for accidentally knocking their food scales off the table and taking weeks to buy replacements.
Despite this, no one gave up on this method of eating less. In 1998, the 2PD Approach (later renamed the
2PD-OMER Approach as described below) was placed in the public domain when it was published on this
web site.
Here are the instructions given to patients:
How to permanently lose weight if you are not taking diabetic medications.
How to permanently lose weight if you are on diabetic medications.
Here is a list of on-line places to get a portable digital food scale (provided by a friend):
**CLICK HERE** for my answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the 2PD-OMER Approach.
Here are links to other sites hosting the 2PD-OMER Approach instructions:
(please let me know when you find other similar links)
Here are links to unsolicited testimonials concerning the 2PD-OMER Approach:
(please let me know when you find other testimonials either "positive" or "negative")
"Simple Truth. 2PD-OMER. Be hungry. Be healthy. Be hungrier. Be healthier. Truth is simple. www.heartmdphd.com/losewtnd.pdf.
Thank you Dr. Chung. Love, Laura"
Laura Halvarson
"If you want to lose a lot of weight, check out this link:
the idea here is to eat regularly, and not worry so much about the minutae of counting calories and figuring
nutrient percentages - just limit total food intake over the course of the day. Read the FAQ on that site and
it'll provide some useful information. I am in no way affiliated with the author and have no way to gain from
you reading - but I'm offering this as a simple, free way to think about your diet."
Geoff Sample
"His 2 pound diet is a service to people who have trouble with the complexity of many diets. It is foolish to
argue much of what is argued when it has been known for centuries that the principle cause of obesity is eating
too much."
Jerome R. Long
"I carefully weigh and measure everything. Just for fun, I calculated the weight of a couple of days worth of
my meals and consistently came up with between 5 and 6 pounds of food a day."
Dolores Santos
"If you are familiar with the works of Geneen Roth or Judy Wardell,
proponents of the diets-don't-work genre, I actually see some merit in the
2 Pound Diet approach. If some people can't keep to the regimen of
dieting because the long-term deprivation of good tasting food sets off
the small cheat which ends up in a landslide, then the theoretical idea of
limiting portions but still providing good tasting food may indeed work
for some people."
Noreen Cooper
"Anyways, I am sorry for rambling. Everyone has their own "plan" with
food. Mine is to not diet. In my life, when I restrict myself and diet
and beat myself up when I "cheat", it has always led me to a binge. In
one way or another. (Any kind of diet has done this for me, low fat,
low carb, low cal, fasting, etc. Hell, even though I haven't tried
the Two-Pound Diet and have no plans to ever EVER do it, I know for a
fact that that diet would be the worst offender of them all."
Sharon "Happycat"
"I'm not an unbiased supporter of anyone or any one diet. But I will say this
about the 'two pound diet': it is simple enough for the average Joe to follow.
Yes, there are exceptional cases -- the person who wants to eat 2 lbs of
chocolate, for example. But a goal seems to be: make people THINK about how
much they are eating, by giving them something to quantify. The average US
dietician table -- '250 calories per cup' -- just gives the average person too
many ways to cheat, and if you start to talk to people about grams of protein
etc., you will lose your audience very quickly."
H.W. Stockman
"This kind of approach seems to me to be more meaningful than just looking at
calories."
"Bill"
"Wow-this sounds like a cool thing.
I'm only about 20 pounds over since I had a baby, but I can't get it to go
away. (and the baby just turned five)
Portion control is key!
Thanks!"
Shanna Shields
"I do fully understand the concept of the 2PD I just disagree with it.
As stated before I agree that under most normal circumstances the 2PD
will cause weight lose. The concept in its purest form is simple, "eat
less food" however "if you apply an ounce of common sense" to the 2PD
you must not call it the 2PD. Simply because 2 lbs of any food will
not sustain all people doing all things. "
"MJuric"
"To be sure, if I ate two pounds of food a day, I would most assuredly
lose weight."
Bob Pastorio (was a retired chef who hated the 2PD-OMER Approach)
"I think it's perfectly well scientifically substantiated, based on a
reasonable hypothesis about human nature. That is, specifically, that
the average extractable caloric density of food that people will
actually eat in the long run will be fairly constant. That is, say
over the month to year long timescales in question, not in any one
meal or two.
This implies that the likely source of obesity is the consumption of
excess mass. A diet that focuses on precise control of what is
precisely measurable seems like a good idea in the circumstances.
Lots of diet books focus endlessly on "what" to eat but I suspect the
overweight make consistent errors in the portion sizes.
"Dr. Chaos"
"I agree that many diets will result in weight loss. The point and
advantage of this one is the simplicity in tracking intake."
Carol Frilegh
"This 2PD is obviously a simple approach. These generally work up to a
point and humans, being crafty bastards, frequently find ways to abuse
the system. Someone could eat 2 lbs of jelly beans a day and not lose
weight but that's hardly what's being suggested."
Lyle McDonald
"It is obviously right in the sense that if you follow it rationally, you will
lose weight - assuming you are overweight. (Don't know about a 90lb person in
a wheelchair - but they would not need it.)"
"Bill"
"I have been able to lose about 10 pounds over the last couple of
months using this approach with no pain at all. Other dieting appoaches I've
tried such as low carb (Atkins) only succeeded in aggravating my atrial
fibrillation. 2PD is easy, doesn't require me to do anything special except to
- eat less - and specify quantitatively how much less. I have always eaten a
well balanced diet - my wife is an excellent cook - just too much of it. 2PD
is just what I need. Thanks, Dr. Chung, for thinking of it and for sticking to
your guns here in the newsgroup."
"John"
"For a frightening look at America's recent obesity epidemic see
http://www.bantransfats.com/obesitymap.htm
There's been a lot of talk in SMC about promoting heart health through
exercise and limiting food intake rather than by focusing on type of food
consumed. Harvard comes down on the side of the 2PD (though not in those
words) at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats.html where they
say:
Most studies show that over the short term, a low-fat diet does result in
weight loss. But many diets show such benefits over the short term. On the
other hand, low-fat diets appear to offer no substantial advantages over
diets with fat levels close to the national average.
Although more research is needed, a prudent recommendation for losing weight
or maintain a healthy weight is to be mindful of the amount of food you eat
in relation to the amount of calories you burn in a day. Exercising
regularly is especially beneficial."
George
"Just as a vote of thanks to the originator, I'd like to say that the 2
pound diet works. My husband lost a significant amount of excess
weight over a 9-month period."
Jenny and her tribe of survivors.
"I am your age and have lost 25 lbs using the 2PD, going from BMI of 29.5 to 26."
John
"That's what I was kicking around. Find something that will cause weight gain that fits his two pound rule, gain about 20 pounds, then claim his $2,000,000 guarantee. Then sue him when he doesn't come through on his
promise."
Robert Weldon
(note from Dr. Chung: The seven-figure guarantee has remained in force to date since 2006 because the 2PD-OMER Approach continues to invariably work)
It has been observed that the "negative" testimonials support the 2PD-OMER Approach
*more* than the "positive" ones.
Moreover, since publicly citing passages in the Holy Bible that support the 2PD Approach (1/16/2005),
the "negative" testimonials have been crescendoing to such an unprecedented degree that this has led to renaming the 2PD Approach to the 2PD-OMER Approach. OMER stands for Original Method
of Eating Reduction while also reminding us of the "omer" described in Exodus 16:16. The
suggested way of pronouncing this is "the two pedomer approach."
Since updating the name of this lifestyle change to the 2PD-OMER Approach, there is now data on more than 625,550 people who have had more than 5 years experience
with this Approach which has a new name. There has been weight loss in every instance with no regain. Each has discovered that
they have been suffering from a powerful delusion that made them unable to see from the outset that they were overeating. Each is now helping
their friends and family overcome their delusions by doing special homework.
They have also discovered the need to guard their heart from relapsing
into the powerful delusion that had previously trapped them in the compulsion of overeating, where the only solution is being forced to eat less by the pain of surgery.
It is now clear that our LORD has given us a cure for the obesity epidemic. May we wisely give
HIM all the thanks, praises, and glory so that we will all be that much more blessed by HIM.
Laus Deo!
Prayerfully in Jesus' awesome love,
Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Lawful steward of http://EmoryCardiology.com
Latter-day disciple of the KING of kings and LORD of lords.
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