Warrior Diet?

Here's an article you can't miss. My comments are in red

One million years before Atkins--By Julia Llewellyn Smith

It's 6pm and in her kitchen in Boston, Massachusetts, Lucy Frost, is preparing dinner. For her starter, she will have tomato soup pepped up with sour cream. Her main course will be a deluxe cheeseburger and fries with coleslaw, delivered by the local burger joint, and being kept warm in the oven. For dessert, she will have some Ben & Jerry's ice cream with fudge sauce. In the meantime, she will keep herself going with some Doritos dipped in salsa and a handful of Chewy Chips cookies.

(Calorielab.com source for this: soup-247 cal, sour cream-52 cal, burger 510 cal, fries 350, slaw 148, fudge sauce 120, ice cream 216, Dorrito's 280 and cookies 210, that means our sedendary warrior consumed: OVER 1900 Calories!--of ALL junk. NO where in here does it say she got water, fruit or veggies! AND, no where does it say she got exercise!)

Frost, 36 and an English-born, divorced mother of two, has been eating dinners like this every night for two months and has lost 11lb. "It's amazing," she enthuses. "I've tried every diet - Atkins, Zone, South Beach - but this one actually delivers"

(If this "diet" delivers ANYTHING excpet weight gain and a screwed up sense of what one "can" eat, I will eat my hat!!--there you go, the hat diet!)

Last season's diet, the GI, is as passé as gypsy skirts and Ugg boots. Make way now for the Warrior Diet, the latest US weight-loss plan to hit these shores. The good news about the Warrior is that followers can eat three hearty meals a day, consisting of whatever they want. The bad news is that they have to eat them all in one sitting - and then wait 24 hours for the next fix.

Its philosophy is simple. Aeons ago, our bodies were happy to survive on just one meal a day. Stone-Age woman would starve all day before gorging on the woolly mammoth carcass her man dragged back to the cave. Then she would starve again. The result - as we know from watching Raquel Welch in her fur bikini in One Million Years BC - was spectacular. Over the centuries, however, food became more abundant and we adjusted to a new pattern of three meals a day. But the Warrior Diet's creator, Ori Hofmekler, believes that our bodies are still programmed like our ancestors. A 50-year-old former member of the Israeli Special Forces and now a satiric artist based in New York, Hofmekler, who poses shirtless on the cover of his book, says that all great empires, from the Arabs, to the Romans, were founded on "warrior lifestyles", which involved crossing deserts by day before setting camp and bingeing at night. "Look at wild Arabs today in the desert he recently told an interviewer. They look like rocks. Same people. When they move to the city, they look like roly-polys By returning to feasting then fasting, he says, our natural metabolism will kick in and the pounds will disappear. In defiance of traditional dieting creeds that promote breakfast as if it was the solution to world peace, Hofmekler advocates subsisting all day on small handfuls of fruit and nuts until 5pm, when - for the next two hours- you can eat whatever you want.

(ah, the hidden truth "LOOK at Arabs in the WILD today--they have to be nomadic, they have to walk alot, grow some foods, hunt....I don't think that THEY are getting burger joint meals, Ben & Jerry's or soft chocolate chip cookies for their staple nutrition!"

Before then, he says, it's good to be hungry. "It translates into wonderful, creative energy that can feed you. It gives you a hunger for life. It may sound like yet another fad up there with the Coconut Diet (huge amounts of coconut oil) and the Beverly Hills (unfeasible quantities of pineapple), but this week researchers at the US National Institute of Ageing conferred respectability on the Warrior with a study that showed that people who ate one enormous meal a day showed a decrease in insulin levels and a reduction in body fat, compared with those who followed traditional eating patterns. Previous studies of Muslims, fasting between sunrise and sunset at the feast of Ramadan, showed that skipping meals appeared to have lowered the risk of heart disease by reducing cholesterol and improving blood flow. Yet nutritional experts are still sceptical of such regimes.

(Sorry Aladin, but you are going to have to find more than a genie to give people who are eating 1900 calories of pure crap a day "creative energy". YES, the overweight hunger for LIFE, but it isn't found at the bottom of a fast food bag or a carton of icecream!)

There are pre-existing studies that show that eating a single large meal actually causes more fat to be put on than eating the same amount of food spread across the day," says Professor Steve Bloom, of the Department of Metabolic Medicine at Imperial College, London. "Eating in the way the Warrior Diet suggests is typical of a seriously obese person, who starves all day in an attempt to be good, then overeats at night. Despite the proliferation of miracle fixes such as this Stone Age diet, the US population continues to be more walrus than warrior, with Britain not far behind. "Seriously obese people will soon be as common a sight here as they are in America and fad diets won't help them," warns Professor Bloom. "If you want to lose weight long term you have to think in terms of preparing and eating delicious vegetable stews and salad dressings. It's tedious. It's boring. But it works.

In fact, closer inspection of the Warrior small print reveals a familiar emphasis on dull diet staples, such as salads and grilled chicken, fish and steak and no mention of unlimited deep-fried Mars Bars. This, Hofmekler explains, is because once you develop a "warrior hunger" the body naturally craves healthy foods. The instinct will kick in and you'll enjoy your protein or veggies like nothing else.

(ah, the ever present FINE PRINT disclaimer! YOU see, our warrior mom wasn't doing the diet right and therefore you CAN'T eat whatever you want whenever you want or even ONCE a day!)

Whatever the pros and cons, the US public, veterans of - among others - the Hay, Oprah, Scarsdale, Cabbage Soup and Bikini diets, has now gone crazy for the Warrior. Hofmekler's philosophy has translated into a multimillion-dollar business selling everything from Warrior Bars (in Creamy Pumpkin or Graham Cracker flavours), Warrior protein shakes in vanilla and chocolate, to Warrior mousepads, T shirts and mugs, all essential components of the macho, nomadic lifestyle.

(And creamy pumpkin bars were available to our early warriors and when trying to emulate their dietary habits we should buy these bars so that we are JUST like them? hmmmmm. Ah, and a warrior mousepad, that should peel off the pounds. Stop by the store before logging off and be sure to by your Julia Barf Bag, you are going to need it if you keep falling for FADS!!!!)

According to Lucy Frost, in her soccer moms' social circle, everyone is a Warrior. "We all went through an Atkins phase, but it gave me terrible constipation and I felt not eating fruit and vegetables had to be wrong. Then we were doing GI but having to find and cook all those obscure ingredients, like quinoa, was hard work and the kids didn't like the recipes, so I had to make separate dishes for them. Warrior is great because you eat what the whole family eats and you don't have to give anything up. I thought if I fasted all day I'd be dead by late afternoon, but if you snack on fruit and nuts it's actually quite easy to keep going. You focus on the fact that from five until seven, you've got a licence to Hoover scraps off the kids' plates or scoff a dish of Brownies without feeling guilty. And the fact is that even though you're allowed to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at one go, of course you only end up eating a big dinner - there's no room for anything more. Even so, you get so stuffed, you fall into a stupor and in the evenings you're no good for anything except bed.

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