RUSH: I just checked the e-mail here at the top of the break. ‘Rush, I saw you stand up. I’m watching on the Dittocam. You look like you’ve lost more weight even from last week.’ It’s true, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve lost 35 pounds now. I think it’s been 42 days. I started February 14th, so this is March the 26th. Yes, it’s 42 days. Something like that. People are saying, ‘You’re losing weight too fast.’ No, no, no. One of these common myths is that the faster you lose it, the faster you’ll put it back on. There are so many myths. Don’t talk to me. I’ve done so many diets, and they all work. I’ve lost so much weight over the course of my life. I know everything about it. I know the relationship exercise has to losing weight: zip. I even got a note from a doctor about this.
From Patricia Benjamin in St. Cloud, Florida, she’s an MD. ‘As a physician I’m grabbing this minute as I just wanted to send along my personal thanks for advocating your listeners never to exercise, walk or do anything but play golf. I know, you did it your way.’ Even the medical community is mad at me. I wrote her back, I said, ‘That’s not what I said. I didn’t say that exercise is bad. I just said related to losing weight, it’s irrelevant.’ Get on the treadmill, folks, jog a mile at four miles an hour, whatever. See how many calories you burn, like a hundred? It’s not even an Oreo. Anyway, and how fast you lose weight is irrelevant. I’ve always lost weight fast. I don’t know why. I didn’t expect it to come off this fast, obviously, because I’m a little older now than the time I did this. What is it, 35 pounds in 42 days? I was at a plateau for about nine or ten days. But I knew it was going to end. I don’t panic on these things.
Some people say when you hit a plateau, ‘Well, go off the diet. Really chug up a couple days and that will jump start the metabolism.’ That’s not the way you do it. The problem of going off a diet before you’re through is you don’t gain weight back right away. You know why most people gain the weight back? Aside from they go back to their old eating habits which I fully intend to do and I’m going to lose enough weight so that it takes me four years to put it back on instead of one, but you get yourself on a weight loss metabolism with your body burning stored fat and you go off the diet it just doesn’t stop that metabolism, that metabolic process continues, in some cases for three weeks. You can sit out there and eat what you want for three weeks and don’t gain any weight back. You think, ‘A-ha! I’ve got it licked!’ That’s a bad, bad, bad move. Pretty soon you’re going to switch back to a fat-gain metabolism and then no matter what you eat you’re going to gain weight. It’s just the way it is, at least the way it is for me.
It takes about a week to get the fat-burn metabolism going once you start a diet. But the speed, the rapidity at which one sheds pounds — and I always love hearing about this from people who have never been on a diet. The skinny crowd out there, the crowd that’s normal and okay, they’re the ones that are the experts. They’ve never done it, but they all know. Everybody is trying to get you off this in their own subtle ways because they think they should be on one, too, and they feel a little guilty when you’re out there losing weight and they’re not, when they think they should be. So they urge you, ‘Come on, a little adult beverage won’t hurt you.’ Oh, yes, it will! I won’t do it. People have said, ‘Boy, I really admire your willpower, your discipline.’ I don’t have any. This is fear. Fear if I go off the diet I’ll blow it, and I don’t want to blow it. I’ll go off the diet. I got a plan. I know when I’m gonna go off the diet, only I’m gonna go back on it after these two days. I got a big wingding coming up in middle of April and I’ll go back on it after that.
H.R., in the IFB, says, ‘I found if you exercise, you can drink a lot.’ Now, see, one thing about drinking, one thing about alcohol, the reason a person that’s disposed to being overweight cannot lose weight consuming alcohol, I don’t care if it’s window cleaner or wine, you can’t do it because the alcohol gets metabolized straight sugar, which triggers insulin, and insulin is the beginning of the fat storage process. Any diet you want to eat as little sugar as possible and if you do, you’ve got a eat things with it that cut the amount of insulin. Alcohol just blows that. You’re saying, ‘I’ve seen some people that do nothing but drink and they’re skinny as a rail.’ They’re probably not eating much. I’ve seen those people, too. I’ve seen a lot of people drink a lot and they’re nothing but the Michelin tire man. Now, some people just puff up — everybody’s different.
You have to learn your own metabolism and yourself and what’s bad and what you can get away with and what you can’t, and then you’ve got it pretty much understood. Well, you say you’re eating a thousand or 1400 calories. Well, what do you do? I’m not going to tell you what every meal is here, but basically the emphasis on low anything, it would be low fat, but I still eat fat. I’m not watching the carbs; high protein, low fat. Carbs are what they are. There are good carbs and bad carbs. Carbs are getting vegetables and things like that. I’m not going to post the menu on the website. Somebody will do it, and they’ll die, and I’ll get sued. Everybody is different. I don’t write diet books. I don’t do that. Look, I’ve done this enough to know how what works for me works and what doesn’t work. But all these diets work. The South Beach Diet, the Palm Beach version of the south beat diet, sugar bust — every diet in the world works, they’re great, they all work.
Some work faster than others, but there’s not one diet that by itself that will keep your weight off. Look, a thousand to 1400 calories, I will tell you, I will tell you, I will promise you, I’m not going to live the rest of my life like that. But what does that mean? Math is math. So what I think I’m going to do this time — I’m joking about giving myself four years to gain it back. What I’m going to try to do this time is do this diet that I’m on now three or four days a week and then the other three or four go to town. Because just what you eat in one day is not going to affect you. It’s a succession of days and weeks one way or the other that lead to failure or success. Mix ’em up. That’s the one thing I have not tried. I like this one. I’m not hungry that much. That’s the amazing thing to me. It’s cut the appetite as well. This business that the stomach shrinks, that’s another thing the thin crowd tells you. ‘Oh, yeah, stomach shrinks, that’s why you’re not eating.’ No, has nothing to do with it.
The stomach is the stomach. When it’s not empty it can be no bigger than a finger, but I mean it doesn’t shrink. You can stretch it out in one meal, folks, believe me, and get it back to where it was. Appetite is a function of blood sugar, primarily, particularly in people who have a tendency to overweight. Therefore what you eat can make you hungrier. Like the old candy bar story, you eat a candy bar — nothing against candy bars here — and a half hour later you’re hungry. It’s because of blood sugar, whether you’re hungry or not. You talk to some people and they’ll tell you, ‘I never get full, I don’t care what I eat,’ and that’s brain chemistry. It’s just different from person to person to person. But don’t tell me that you’re losing it too fast or you’re going to put it back on. There’s so many myths associated with this.