If you are looking for a common-sense approach to weight loss without feeling deprived, there is an increasingly popular American diet system that claims to shrink your stomach naturally.
The technique, known as DietDirectives, is the brainchild of Meredith Luce, an American dietician who works with gastric bypass patients at Florida Hospital. According to Luce, a normal stomach is the size of a 6in sausage, and is designed to hold just under a litre of fluids and solids. “The stomach is a muscle,” she says, “so it responds to repeated demands, such as too much food or fluid, by increasing in size. Surgery has been known to reduce stomachs that were four times the normal size — that’s a capacity of up to 3.7 litres.” Luce believes it is possible to shrink your stomach to normal size naturally in about three weeks, and once you have managed that, you will feel full after you have eaten a small amount of food.
You can tell if your stomach has stretched by consuming a large quantity of food, or several pints of beer, in one sitting without feeling uncomfortable. “People with stretched stomachs have constantly overridden that naturally full feeling, so they are no longer sensitive to the threshold and there is nothing to stop them from overeating,” Luce says.
“The stomach can stretch to an enormous size,” agrees Stephen Pollard, a consultant surgeon at Bupa St James’s Hospital in Leeds, who carries out around seven gastric bypasses a week. “It’s a muscular organ, and if you fill it with large quantities of food, it will simply grow to accommodate it and never burst. Of course, this feels extremely uncomfortable, and you have to become immune to the discomfort to allow yourself to overeat to this extent. It will, however, return to normal size when empty.”
The DietDirectives stomach-shrinking programme takes 21 days and is centred around “bites”. Your total food intake should not exceed more than 85 bites a day. So, a breakfast or afternoon snack should take 12-16 bites to finish, and a lunch or dinner between 18 and 22 bites. Interestingly, there is no specification as to how big a “bite” is, because, Luce believes, there is a limit on how much you can actually fit into the average mouth. “Bite counting is a training tool to reprogramme your hand, mouth, brain and stomach to know and feel quantity,” she says. And once a “bite” is in your mouth, it’s important to chew it at least 10 times before swallowing. As well as being central to digestion, chewing is a signal to the brain that eating is in progess, which is essential to trigger that “full” feeling. “It’s about reconnecting with the physicality of eating,” she says.
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Menus on the programme include steak and roast potatoes, pasta in tomato sauce and Thai stir-fry. Desserts and wine are allowed three times a week. But it’s not just food that can stretch the stomach; Luce believes many of us also consume too much fluid. “I advise people to pay attention to their own thirst, rather than trying to glug back eight glasses of water a day,” she says. “That recommendation came from a study that was largely misinterpreted. Eight glasses refers to total fluid consumption, including the water content of food and beverages other than water.”
At the end of 21 days, you will know if your stomach has shrunk because your eating capacity will be severely limited. “You resensitise your stomach to the feeling of fullness, so you find it difficult to overeat,” Luce says. Slipping back into old overeating habits requires a certain amount of dedication to consistently override the pain and discomfort of fullness, until you no longer register it. The problem is, there are plenty of us who are more than willing to put in exactly that kind of dedication.
The DietDirectives 21-Day programme costs $29 (£16) from www.dietdirectives.com