Drink beer and eat sausages to lose weight.

If you think that is the craziest diet in the world, it probably isn’t. But it was done for fun, but as we went through this we discovered that it was quite scientific and fit into the data about how people lose weight and keep it off.

Mention the word diet, and people think weight loss.

Have you see how many diets are available to a person to lose weight?

There are a lot of silly diets out there, because weight loss is pretty simple: eat less calories and you lose weight.

Of course, there are those who say the calorie is the wrong way to look at things, and that is a valid point, but it is, for now, our best measure of what a person does and how much they expend. And your body is a perfect calorie counter.

It started out as a fun project, but then as we got into this idea we became more serious about the science of weight loss. So we decided to do an experiment, and our hypothesis was this:

Take the best practices of weight loss and apply them to a silly diet and see what happens.

Best practices of weight loss:

(1) Calories matter.  Calories in should be less than calories out

(2) 1500 calories a day – translates to six beers a day (which are nicely packaged in units of cans or bottles). It also means a limited amount of sausage so you have to measure that amount, or in this case – weigh the sausage.

(3) Journal everything that you eat and drink that contains calories

(4) Weigh yourself  once a week , or more.  If you are not making progress then something is wrong with your calculations of calories

To ensure this was done in accordance with the best informed consent, not only was Evo provided with a lot of information, but we drew blood from him weekly to check all parameters to make certain that he was not getting into trouble with things like- cholesterol, liver enzymes, inflammatory markers, anemia, and some other blood work. If he started showing signs of any issue- we were ready to end the process.

Here are the Five big lessons we have learned from this experiment:

(1) Science Rules

No matter what you wish to say, there is nothing like a scientific experiment to prove if something works or not. This was not a “fad” diet, this was a carefully controlled experiment, where the conditions were controlled and his blood chemistry was examined on a weekly basis as well as his body measurements. Doing this experiment still shows that what we think we know, when placed to the test, may not stand the test of science.

(2) A Calorie is still a Calorie

1500 calories a day for Evo would predict weight loss – and it did. He lost weight while drinking 6 beers a day and eating sausages — total caloric intake was 1500 calories a day. In fact, he lost more weight than would be predicted by the calorie model. Did those calories just disappear into thin air? Evo is not immune from the laws of physics, but what a person does with the calories is every bit as important as the calorie itself. While his body consumed 1500 calories on average, his body didn’t use them all – some were used by bacteria inhabiting his gut, some were not absorbed and passed on. He clearly didn’t store any calories.

(3) Scale or Fail

Weighing food helps you know how much you are eating. It is part of science-

Evo was very careful about his calorie intake. He weighed his sausages, and he knew precisely how much sausage he was going to eat. This was not unlimited sausage and beer diet, this was portion controlled – calorie controlled experiment.

In over 20 years of weight loss successful patients follow the dictim “use the scale to measure what I eat or fail because my eyes will overcome me.” This is balanced against people who say they eat “unlimited” amounts of “fats and meat” or unlimited amounts of “raw vegetables.” The raw vegetables are more easy to understand – it is difficult to get the calorie requirement if you eat a lot of vegetables and even fruits. A cup of blueberries is 85 calories. One cup of chopped broccoli is 31 calories. But a 12 ounce New York strip steak has over 500 calories. I don’t think someone will eat a three steaks a day- but if that was all you ate, you would have about 1650 calories, which is less than most people will burn.  In my book “Losing the Last 30 pounds” I noted that most diets that say you can have something unlimited really gets translated to “you are going to get sick of eating this, and when you get sick of it you will eat less.” The science of this is your palate is overwhelmed with a single flavor and you tend to eat less of it.  So you can start out eating steak every night on an Atkins diet and after a month you won’t ever want to see a steak again.