RUSH: You know, this really is mind-boggling. I mean, I’m sitting here minding my own business, bothering nobody (yet), doing daily show prep; and about ten minutes ago, 15 minutes ago Cookie sends me the audio sound bite roster; and I find out looking at the audio sound bite roster that they trashed my diet on Good Morning America today. Then the babes at The View got involved trashing the diet and me. They even had some female doctor, their medical correspondent on Good Morning 
America, come on and talk about my diet. If they want to talk to me about it, I would be glad to tell ’em but they didn’t. They just play a couple of little sound bites and react to it anyway. Greetings, folks. I’ll play the audio for you as the program unfolds. There frankly are things more important than my diet. (laughing) Telephone number if you want to be on the show today, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Screw it! Let’s just get it out of the way now. The poor people at Quick Weight Loss! I said I was only going to mention it one time, last Friday, and those poor people have been overwhelmed. Their website shut down for a couple hours and they’re still having trouble with all the phone calls. Look, I don’t know if you people watch Good Morning America. I don’t. So I didn’t know about this ’til I got the sound bite roster. Co-host Robin Roberts talking to their correspondent, Yunji de Nies, about me and my weight loss. Robin Roberts says, ‘For months we didn’t know what was going on as the pounds came off.’ I didn’t even know they noticed or cared! ‘But radio host Rush Limbaugh’s now revealing he’s down nearly 90 pounds,’ no, 80, ‘in less than five months.’ No, it’s not less than five months. I can say six: March, April, May, June, July. I guess it is five. All right. They got that right. ‘How did he do it? Can you do it? Is it safe?’
DE NIES: Rush Limbaugh is big. Big voice, big audience, big opinions, and simply a big guy. But the radio giant is getting smaller thanks to his diet secret.
RUSH ARCHIVE: It’s the easiest one, and it’s the fastest, and I’m 58 years old.
DE NIES: That secret? Quick Weight Loss Centers, a Florida-based company that combines a low-calorie diet, office visits, and supplements; including protein boosters, carb blockers and appetite suppressants. Doctors say diets like this do work but often the weight loss doesn’t last. That’s because to maintain it you essentially need to stay on the diet forever.
RUSH: (groans) Ugh, gee.
DE NIES: Hours after Limbaugh revealed his secret weight loss weapon, the company’s name became the fastest-rising search on Google. Like the host, many in his audience are undoubtedly looking for a quick fix.
RUSH: (laughing) Gee! (laughing) All right. Now, we’ve got three more, four more sound bites here. Let’s just take this one. The appetite suppressant, that’s early on. It’s hoodia and it’s a multiple vitamin pill and I don’t know that it worked. I’m not hungry on this diet! It’s a lot food. It’s more food than I’ve ever eaten on a diet. It’s about 1500 calories a day but you don’t add them up. That’s not how you did it. The point… You know, all these people are out there saying obesity is a big problem, right? ‘Get on a diet! You gotta lose weight!’ So I get on a diet and lose weight and they say, ‘It won’t work! He’s going to put it right back on. He’s been starving himself.’ I have not been starving. These people — these doctors, these medical people — can’t get it straight.
Either we shouldn’t lose weight or we should, and when we do it — and I’ll guarantee you this: If Obama were on this diet, they would love it. It would be the best diet that the media had ever heard of, and they’d be reporting it coast to coast, and they’d put Obama’s picture on the Quick Weight Loss Centers logo and so forth. The point about staying on the diet forever, I made that point last Friday. This is a diet where you can do that. It’s real food! It’s just… Everybody says you gotta relearn how to eat to keep your weight off. That’s what this diet does. Now they went out and they got their medical babe, Dr. Marie Savard, and Robin Roberts said, ‘What’s your take on the diet that Limbaugh used, Dr. Savard?’
SAVARD: I do applaud him for making the attempt. I call it ‘the four S’s,’ but in fact what we’re talking about first is Starvation. To lose that much weight — and he talked about losing as much as a pound a day, which is not safe —
ROBERTS: Mmm-hmm.
SAVARD: — you need to severely cut your calories, which means you’re in the starvation mode, has potentially dangerous health effects. Second is the notion of structure, and he talks a lot about the structure. That means limited choices in the diet — and as he described, he wasn’t allowed to have two proteins together like chicken and beef —
ROBERTS: Mmm-hmm!
SAVARD: — on the other hand he contradicts it by saying for breakfast, ‘I have both a milk and an egg product.’ So structure helps people, but it’s limited and that’s the opposite of what we need to learn to do.
RUSH: (laughing) That doesn’t make sense to me. The diet works. It works and it works well, and it’s solid. Of course there are going to be limited choices on any diet. Life has limits! These people are so contradictory. Here they are targeting obesity as one of the main things we’ve gotta fix in order to bring down health care costs, and then they trash virtually every way people come up with of losing weight. ‘It will never work, doesn’t keep the weight off,’ and there is no starvation (zip, zero, nada) and there was no contradiction on the two proteins because at breakfast you can combine say a cottage cheese with an Egg Beaters® or whatever, but that’s the only time. Other than that you’re not allowed. I don’t know why. I didn’t question it. I tried it and it worked. Robin Roberts said, ‘What about the supplements, Dr. Savard? Usually there’s something extra.’
SAVARD: Third S: Supplements, both herbal supplements and vitamins along with food supplements. So the herbal supplements that they’re promoting — and they make a big point saying, not ephedra, not the high stimulant ones.
ROBERTS: Mmmph!
SAVARD: But it does have hoodia. Also vitamins, minerals, fish oils in the diet, and then food supplements — things like shakes and highly processed powders that you kind of mix into liquids. So supplements are costly. That’s a third factor. And fourth, a good thing: is support. So if you go in, you have personalized counseling, you can do it online. That fourth S is really important.
RUSH: Yeah, support. Like the kind I’m getting now from Good Morning America. ‘It won’t work. It’s too fast. You starved yourself. You’re going to have health problems. You’re gonna die. You shoulda not even done it.’ Finally, Robin Roberts says, ‘Men we know lose weight a little bit faster, a little bit better. It’s not fair, but it happens. It happens.
SAVARD: He’s still losing up to a pound a day, which is a lot of weight loss and it’s unsafe. He’s not going to keep that off. Sustainability is the ultimate bottom line. He can’t do it with that type of a diet. What is key and is missing is exercise. He admits that he golfs but otherwise does not exercise.
ROBERTS: Mmm-hmm.
SAVARD: That’s the foundation. It builds muscle mass. That’s what works. It’s kind of a lifestyle pill that we don’t want to swallow.
RUSH: All right. So I don’t know what I’m doing. In fact, I cannot do what I’ve done. I didn’t really lose the weight — and, by the way, it’s 80 pounds. Now, that’s five months times 30 average days in a month. Five times 30 is 150 rebuke right? Eighty pounds in 150 days is not a pound a day. What I said was, ‘Up until about 30 it was pretty close to a pound a day,’ and I was amazed by it. So I can’t do it what I’ve done. What I’ve done that I can’t do won’t work — and even if it does work, it won’t last ’cause I’m going to not exercise enough to satisfy Dr. Savard. And so I’m going to regain the weight. It’s just automatic. This also came up on The View today. Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd and Joy Behar have this exchange about the diet.
GOLDBERG: Rush has dropped 90 pounds in less than six months thanks to the Florida-based Quick Weight Loss Centers. That’s a short amount of time to lose that much weight.
SHEPHERD: He’s taking appetite suppressants.
BEHARD: Yeah, which are dangerous. It screws you up.
GOLDBERG: Looks good.
SHEPHERD: Thing is you don’t keep that weight off.
RUSH: Not taking appetite suppressants. But anyway, there you have it. They wish I was dead anyway! All these people wish I was dead anyway so why aren’t they celebrating here? I’m going to die! I’m starving! I’m not going to be able to keep the weight off. I’m engaging in terrific health risks here — and since they all do want me dead I think it maybe would be good if they were just happy about all this. As I say, folks, it kinda… In all seriousness here, these people… I’m going to be repetitive. These people, whoever they are — be they in the media, be they in the medical community — are really focused on obesity how much it’s costing us health care-wise how unhealthy it is. They’re out there urging people to do something about it and then when somebody like me goes out and does something about it, ‘Bah, it won’t work! He won’t keep it off. It don’t work, that diet!’
They say that about every diet. I have yet to hear a medical person on television tell me the diet that works. I hear ’em say, ‘Well, reduce your calories and exercise.’ Well, I’m doing half of that, and it’s not like I’m sitting around vegging. (laughing) At any rate, what bothers me about this is that these poor people at Quick Weight Loss Centers are having their diet maligned and I just want to reiterate to you — and I’m not being paid for this. This is one of the reasons I didn’t mention this at all during the whole process of being on the diet was that I didn’t want to have any official tie-in, and I don’t. I’m just telling you — and I’ve done every diet that there is. I have done every diet there is. I’m 58 years old. This is the first diet that I have not felt deprived, have not felt sorry for myself because I feel like I’m in denial because I’ve been satisfied. I’ve lost weight faster than I ever have at age 58, and I think it’s probably the healthiest I have been eating in years.
So you can believe me who has done it, or you can believe them who haven’t done it. (interruption) They said I couldn’t do it. They said you couldn’t do what I’ve done. Well, they’re talking about keeping it off. They don’t know what they’ve done now. They don’t know what they’ve done now. They say I… (interruption) No, no, no. I’m not going to exercise. No! I’m going to keep it off. I’m not through losing. That’s going to bug ’em even more. They’re just mad that I look studly. When you get right down to it, they’re just mad that I look good. That’s why they hate Sarah Palin, and now they can add my good looks and my studly behavior and appearance to all the other reasons that they hate me. I mean, they used to make fun of my weight all the time, and now I’m losing it too fast. You cannot… That’s why, folks, you can’t go through life trying to please other people. You can’t open yourself up to the approval of others for anything that you do.