Dear Gramps,
Congratulations on your diet, but I’m quite concerned. Once you reach your goal weight and you consume solid foods again, what happens to your weight then? I hope all goes well with you and your efforts.
Faye, from Williamsport, Maryland

Dear Faye,
Thank you for your interest. Perhaps I can set your mind at ease. Most diets are called the yo-yo diets because as soon as you get your weight down, you begin eating what you did before, and so you being weighing what did before. The most important phase of dieting is not the weight loss phase, although that phase is critically important because of the importance of losing NO body protein in the process. But if one wants to lose weight and keep it of, one must plan to adopt a new life style.
There exists what is called the body weight set point. The body is accustomed to a certain weight, and normally if over a short period one either loses or gains rapidly by modifying the caloric intake, and then goes back to eating normally, the body will return to its initial weigh. An experiment was performed with inmates of a prison some time ago in which the prisoners were fed 4000 calories a day for some period of time, and they all gained significant weight. Then they were told that the experiment was over and that they could eat anything they wanted. With no restrictions on their diet they rather quickly returned to their prior weights.
So, here’s the plan. After I reach my weight goal–in another two weeks–I will continue using the Cambridge diet and add to it one 400 calorie meal a day for a week. (We don’t actually count calories, but some care must be taken to maintain an appropriate balance of protein and carbohydrate). A couple of good 400 calorie meals are a simple hamburger or half a cantaloupe filled with cottage cheese.
Beginning the second week one adds a second 400 calorie meal each day. Beginning the third week, again another 400 calories. A 400 calorie increase per week is kept up until one beings to add a little weight. At this point one knows how many calories to consume each day without gaining weight, and a new body weight set point for the body is established.
However, the new dietary regime must be sensible, and it is well to avoid sugar like the plague! In the first place, sugar is not a food. It is an addictive drug. There will be no yearning for sugar once it gets out of your system. But overcoming addiction to sugar is very similar to overcoming the addiction to alcohol. Actually, the two substances are very close together in chemical composition. Soda pop is another taboo. Look at the ingredients on a can of soda and you will find that it contains approximately 42 grams of sugar! There are three teaspoons of sugar to a gram. That means that with every can of pop you drink you are ingesting 12 teaspoon fulls of sugar! The stuff is so habit forming that I understand that in many foods that do not use sugar in the recipe, sugar is added anyway and is not listed on the label. The food industry makes a good share of its income from sugar addiction in food products.
I first used the Cambridge diet in 1984. I lost 30 pounds it 30 days, and I never varied from plus or minus two pounds from 154 pounds for six years! And I never had, nor did I miss, a single piece of candy or gum in those six years.
Good diet.
Gramps