I’m OK with my current weight… at least for awhile.  I’m no longer obese and can do just about any activity.  My blood pressure is now completely in the normal range.  All other health factors are OK.  I have maintained this weight now for several months.

I do eventually want to lose another 40 pounds though.  And the switch diet isn’t all that practical in my current situation.

I recently moved to Costa Rica.  We hired a nanny and cook.  It’s kinda standard here to have a nanny and cook.  You won’t have many local visitors if you don’t keep your house immaculate since all Costa Rican’s are clean freaks.

Our cook doesn’t speak English.  It was relatively easy to translate our basic diet (based on the results of the switch diet study), but it would be very difficult to get her to continue switching diets for me weekly.

That leaves me two choices:

1) Continue to maintain weight and be happy with that.

2) Try something different outside of diet.

I’m really not much for exercise for the sake of exercise.  I enjoy the new activities I can now do (like horseback riding), but the idea of running around in a circle or pedaling a bike that doesn’t go anywhere is not attractive to me at all.  I like my activities to have a purpose other than just being activities to burn calories.

I might still do something in the activity area.  I haven’t decided yet.

The thing I am more immediately considering is a supplement study.  Early in this blog, several people asked me if I planned to try the switch diet approach with supplements.

Of course, it’s possible.  The reality is that supplements are just food put into a concentrated form of some kind.  Why not gather data for supplements?

I generally think an eating plan that doesn’t include supplements is more maintainable (what if you have a life situation where you can no longer obtain supplements for financial, political or other reasons?)

But, it wouldn’t hurt to gather the data.  And some weight loss might occur on some supplements during the process of gathering the data.

This week, I will take 10 grams of psylium husks every morning immediately after breakfast.

I’ll try some other supplement next week.  Over time, I will repeat the psylium husk week with a different supplement before and after it to try to isolate the repeatable effects of psylium husks on my weight.  That will be repeated until the data is statistically significant.

That’s the same thing I did with the eating plans to lose the 40 pounds.  At the end, I know several things that are problems for me and several things that always produce weight loss.

Let’s do the same thing for supplements.

-James D. Brausch