So, there was one of our viewers - Ford50 started talking about the potato
diet in the comments under one of our videos. I don't think it was received
very well and I'm not surprised. The folks on our channel tend to focus
on the - on the biochemical aspects and macronutrients; low carb diets, the impact
of insulin resistance, and diabetes; and if you look at the potato diet, it - it's a
real diet. There are some famous people that abuse it. This is one of them. I'll
tell you who it is in just a minute. Many of you recognize him already. The
the diet has been criticized by a lot of medical experts. I'm not as negative
about that diet as a lot of folks and here's why. Look at that picture - Penn
Jillette; and if you don't know who Penn Jillette is - Oh, I'll tell you in just a
minute - keeping a little suspense over that
too. Penn Jillette lost a hundred pounds. The Penn on the left is 322 pounds; The
Penn on the right, 83 days later, had lost 100 pounds. He - he did this by
doing the potato diet. Now with it - was it - he started off with two weeks of eating
nothing but potatoes. He made a good point and many of us know this, sometimes
we forget it - Yes, diets are very - the biochemical
aspects, the hormonal impact of our diet is very, very important but what drives
diet is habit. So according to him - it's all habit; and yes, especially for a lot
of young people and older people as well, it is habit. Now, so speaking of habits, he
said "I quit eating meals. I just ate when I was hungry and I
didn't necessarily - I didn't like potatoes. I certainly didn't, if I had
wanted to eat something that I liked, it would've been chocolate syrup and I
don't think that would have worked" and I agree with him; I think it's -
"I didn't put butter on those potatoes; didn't put pepper; didn't put salt; didn't
take anything off either; kept the skin on them." and he just ate when he needed to
eat. So, as you can see, this is a massive change in terms of his focus on diet and
the habits surrounding his diet. Now, a couple of other things about - about- about
this diet. Now, it was developed - he - he got this from a fellow named Ray Crownice -
I'll talk about him in just a minute as well. He did go on to say "Look, I went
into a winter. I did not exercise during the time that I was working out. I felt
that was the way my body needed to receive this and in my mind, my habits
needed to receive this. I workout now and here's the other thing,
I eat foods that I love to eat now. I
don't like pizza anymore. I used to - I just don't like it anymore.
I don't like burgers. I don't like steaks. I don't like - I don't even like chicken
which was one of my favourite things before this weight loss. I have totally
reprogrammed my gut biome, my tastes, my habits around food." Now, speaking of those
habits, he - he doesn't never eat things like pizza. In fact, every couple of weeks
he goes out with his kids and he eats pizza because he said "My son tells me
look, dad, you got to still eat like a man." So maybe his son is gonna need some
dietary habit changes and improvements as he grows up as well, but I agree with
this. Janice uses that concept in her coaching and I agree with it as well.
Sometimes, when people see me taking a break from my routine diet, they said
"Wait a minute... You're eating ice cream." or "Wait a minute... You're eating - I don't know -
things I think I shouldn't eat; and my response is - I don't understand what you
mean. I mean - you think I'm cheating, I don't cheat.
Just like - tell - Gillette says - pendulous is - I don't cheat, I take vacations.
They're planned vacations. Cheating sets up this whole, again, this is all
psychological, and the cheating - the - the statement that I'm cheating set up - sets
up this whole psychological thing that I wouldn't be doing this. That's not true.
You should be taking a break; you should be doing what makes you comfortable in
terms of the diet that you use because, again, go back to something like Jenny
rules Diet 101. She studied a lot; She did a good job in
that book studying a lot of what the - the randomized clinical trials showed about
diets and the one thing they did show - there are a couple of things to this
show - No. 1 Low-carb Atkins style diet, even, is not
unhealthy for you. In fact, it tends to have a better impact on things like
cholesterol. That was a big surprise until a few years ago when the clinical
trials started coming out. The other big thing that those clinical trials on
diets show is this - but there's one thing about a diet. It's not macronutrients - I
mean micronutrients is important. Well, it's a lot of what this channel is about
but the biggest thing about success for a diet is the diet that you can do from
6 months or more and get stable on it and stay with it.
It's a behavior thing. It's the diet you can do. So, speaking of the diet that Penn
Jillette could do, let's go a little bit deeper into this. Okay, for those of you
who didn't know who Penn Jillette was, he's a - he's the guy that talks in the
magician pair - Penn & Teller. And speaking of magicians, he does go on
to say he wrote a book about this and in the book, obviously, that's Teller - the
short guy. Teller never speaks on - on stage. I can tell
you from - from having seen him back - elsewhere, he does speak. He's a very
eloquent gentleman and he's actually directed a lot of Broadway plays like
The Tempest; Very, very interesting guy. Now, Penn - the way they - they construct
their show is - Penn does all the talking and he - he says - look, by nature, magicians
are liars and so, therefore, I'm a liar. This will come in handy when you - when he
talks about the scale and the blood pressure cuff that he used - he says are
tools that he had to have for this diet. He also goes on to say, I'm sure, in this
book, as well as in many of his videos on this issue, that look - if you take medical
advice from a Las Vegas music magician, you're an idiot and you deserve to die.
If you haven't seen any of their shows, that's just their style and, again, this
is the cover of his book - Presto (very well titled) How I made over a hundred
pounds disappear. This is the back - oh gosh, there was a back cover for that
book. That back cover shows and, maybe, we'll find it. It looks like I've lost it
right now. It shows Penn holding up the pants of the - his previous pants. He's
able to fit in one leg of those pants at this point. What's this picture about?
This is a fella that he got the diet from a fella named Ray Crownice;
There's actually a group of people that were dieting this way and they called
themselves the Cronuts. Ray Crownice was an engineer at NASA
and this is an illustration of him going up and what they called "the vomit
rocket" This is a - I think it's available and open to - to the public where you go
in a zero-g atmosphere which is created by this plane and then after the zero,
and you see Crownice in that zero-g atmosphere - no gravity, zero gravity - and
then, as they come down, evidently, they go into a much higher or maybe it's the
other way around - going up, it's a multi G atmosphere and then coming down, it's
zero-g. Now, this is a close-up of Crownice, this is his author page out of Amazon,
and what you see about him is that not only was he an engineer, he's - he went to
culinary school. Matthew Kenney culinary school and he's
gotten into - he's one of these plant based diet guys, but I think he's
probably most - maybe most well-known for - was it thermogenics? or something like
that? and for this potato diet. Again, very unusual types of diets but, again, given
my background, I would say - if you can make it work and make somebody like Penn
Jillette lose a hundred pounds, that's a big deal. Now, I talked about the - the
Withings tools that - that Penn talked about and said were critical to his
effort. Here you see Withings. Now, what is - this is the scale and what's critical
about this is the electronics. It's - it's hooked up to Wi-Fi so the minute you
step on and according to Penn, all your friends know what your weight is,
according to him you can't lie and, again, magicians are liars so he needed
something to help him not lie to himself, not lie to his friends. The
Withings is set up where your friends, including your doc, can get this
information and you - you set it up and select who you will give that to. He said
his friends were not nice people. They're all tough guys,
so if he got on the scale and he was going the wrong direction, he got a lot
of negative grief from guys that loved him and his point was - again, this is a
psychological issue. Much more - the psychological issue drives the
biological issue and he needed that help. So in one of the videos that he's
describing that he pulls out his iPhone and shows the text that came in recently
from a friend of him, another performer in Broadway 3,000 miles away, who was in
a - doing something, it was a performance or rehearsal or something, but he got a
text from this friend's Withings scale and it said "Look, you've just lost
another pound and a half" Years off, you've lost 42 pounds total,
Congratulations. So Penn and several others sent congratulatory texts to this
guy so - and I will say this - there's another component about this which is
clear or not and not so obvious to a lot of folks and that is because of the
psychological components driving diet. It's a good thing to make a public
commitment to what you're doing. That's part of - that's a major part of the power
of Withings, Now, according to Penn, and I don't totally - I have a little bit better
or maybe different medical background from Gillette, I agree with a huge
portion of what he said and, especially for him - his blood pressure was getting
way up there and his point was - it's not weight at all - it's blood pressure. Well, I
would say it is weight; it is blood pressure; but he really needed to work on
his blood pressure; He was getting some readings, I think he said like 200 - this
is the whiffing 's blood pressure cuff; and the critical thing that he talked
about with this is that because his blood pressure had gone so high,
he was on some heavy-duty blood pressure medications and he was dropping, again,
over a pound a day. When you drop weight like that, your blood pressure responds.
So his doc needed to be getting this information on
a regular basis or the blood pressure medicines that, in his words, were saving
him short-term, were quickly turning into poisons as he lost weight and his doc
needed to be involved with him, in terms of adjusting those medications. So just
one more - one more point before we go. A brief introduction of myself and my
channel - My name is Ford brewer F-O-R-D Brewer B-R-E-W-E-R. I started off as an ER
Doc and learned, very quickly, that the vast majority of things that a - the
patients bring into the ER are things that they - that should have been
prevented but prevention takes major knowledge - more than anything else. It
takes understanding of our own psychology and how to change our
lifestyle as we talked about today. So I went to Johns Hopkins to learn
preventive medicine, loved it; ended up running the program there; left and have
worked with large groups; have been the medical director, chief medical officer
for groups - several groups; over 800 Docs, mostly primary care Docs, helping them
but also some cardiologists, some surgeons - helping them understand how to
prevent disease rather than waiting to - for the disease to happen in their
patient and then try to cure it because and maybe you haven't thought about it -
if you have it - the major killers and disablers in our world - things like heart
attack, stroke, dementia, and a lot of cancers are things that we don't have a
good cure for. So yes, it is very, very difficult to change our lifestyle. Just a
spin - Gillette and some others, and it's very difficult to lose a hundred pounds,
but it's a heck of a lot more difficult to come back from heart attack or stroke.
Thank you for your interest.