First, plant yourself a crop of high grade fat…

Seriously though, I have some ideas for how I would set up and run a weight loss clinic, and today, I will share them with you.

First, it should be somewhere somewhat remote. It doesn’t have to be way out in the middle of nowhere, but it should be far enough away from the nearest town to discourage people from fleeing. After all, the likely clientele are not exactly going to be in shape for a fifteen mile hike across the wilderness.

And even if they are, think of how many calories they will burn!

The basic idea would be to have the whole thing run on a points system. ^[1] Healthy food costs nothing, or very very little. The unhealthy foods would be more expensive. and the less healthy a food is, the higher the price.

Patients would be given a small amount of points each day, which will be more than enough for healthy meals with a little slightly naughty food for dessert with dinner.

Anything else you will have to either save up for or earn.

You earn points by doing healthy things. Small amounts of points can be earned from doing small healthy things, like drinking water and keeping body and teeth clean. But if you want to get points-rich quick, there is only one way : exercise.

This is where a certain amount of fine calibration of the system will be required. The idea would be that exercising results in enough points to be motivating but not enough to earn more calories than the exercise burned.

This way, the supra-normal rewards of unhealthy choices actually work toward the patients’ health. If a patient craves that piece of chocolate cake enough, they will be willing to earn it via exercise. If not, then they have at least avoided eating dangerously unhealthy foods.

Either way, the patient’s health wins.

Towards this end, it is vital that the staff maintain an attitude of bright and friendly indifference. No pressure is to be applied to any patent towards any particular solution to the patient’s needs. This way, the patient has to find their own balance between diet and exercise, and that is exactly the lesson they need to learn.

And speaking of staffing, the staff will have to be top notch because they will be dealing with people who are, in essence, addicts experiencing withdrawal. As such, the patients will likely be experiencing a high level of emotion, the most common of which is likely to be anger. But sadness, withdrawal from social activity, hysteria, and even suicide attempts are not out of the question. These people are trying to overcome a massive problem. One must be prepared for anything.

To that end, counseling is to be available 24/7, both in the formal sense and in the “just someone to talk to” sense.

In order to put the patient at ease and minimize the feelings of deprival, there is to be absolutely nothing clinical about the facility. Instead, everything should be luxurious, comfortable, and pleasing to the eye. The facility should look more like a high class luxury resort than any sort of medical facility.

In addition, there should be a strong emphasis on pleasures other than eating. Toward that end, anything goes, as long as it’s healthy. Again, it should be like a luxury resort, able to support any sort of sport, game, or body treatment people desire.

Personally, I would also include some very deft, subtle, and skilled sex workers. If there is anything that could distract people from food cravings, it’s amazing sex. Not sure if this service should be free or cost points. I could go either way.

However, I realize that prostitution is illegal in most places, so this might not be practical. At the very least, then, there should be no rules whatsoever about the patients fraternizing with one another.

If anything, it should be encouraged. Whatever can keep their mind off food long enough for the withdrawal symptoms to die down and let them adjust to a healthier way of life.

Health should be the central focus of the facility’s mission – NOT weight loss. Weight loss has many health benefits, true, and if the plan works as well as it should, weight loss will likely result.

But there should be no weigh-ins whatsoever. There will be scales available for those who like to track their progress, but their use will be entirely voluntary and there will be no official records of the results.

A certain amount of encouragement to socialize should be available. Again, nothing mandatory, but a wide variety of functions like dances, mixers, speed dating, and lightly silly group games should always be available. There is often an element of loneliness to overeating. Socialization can go a long way to easing that loneliness.

Again, no pressure towards anything in particular. And no unsolicited advice. If a patience asks for guidance, then they must receive it. A lot of patients will feel quite lost and out of place, and they will need someone to point them in the right direction from time to time. It is very important that these people do not feel abandoned or bereft.

But there is to be no unsolicited guidance. The patient must remain in control of the process as much as possible.

Oh, and I should note that there should be a concentrated effort to find the best tasting healthy snacks and meals as possible. A top notch chef experienced in healthy cooking would be ideal. And there is to be no monotony to the healthy fare. Every effort is to be made to make the healthy foods as exciting, tasty, and filling as possible.

After all, we’re not trying to teach people not to eat. We’re trying to teach them that eating healthy does not mean completely giving up on enjoying one’s food. It just means making better choices.

There’s more, no doubt, but those are the broad strokes. Obviously, this is the ideal system. Realistically, a facility like this would be extremely expensive to build and to attend, so no doubt in the real world, sacrifices would have to be made to keep the budget down to something affordable.

Nevertheless, I think the system as described would be highly effective, even if scaled down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or so it seems today.

Having one of those sleepy days I talk about now and then today. Every time I have one, I feel the need to blog about it, even though they are all the same.

But they’re such a drag.

Slept for most of today, and I am still sleepy now. Slept from around three in the morning to 11:30 am, so that’s eight and a half hours, then went back to sleep at 1 pm and didn’t wake up till 4, so that’s another three.

So we are looking at almost twelve hours of sleep, and it doesn’t seem like nearly enough. I feel like I could sleep for a week.

Partly, this is due to a medication change I initiated. For a while I was taking only 1 Quetiapene with my Trazadone every night instead of the two I started out with. And it worked okay for a while.

But then I started having nights of insomnia where I didn’t get to sleep until 6 or 7 in the morning, and that sucked. The whole point of these pills is to prevent insomnia and ensure that I get at least six hours of decent sleep a night.

Trust me… good sleep is a precious thing.

Abd aksim as I have mentioned before, I want the ability to decide to go to sleep, and have that decision stick. I want something that can override whatever level of mental stimulation and hence mental agitation I have and just plain make me go to sleep.

Basically, I need a drug powerful enough to quash all the noise in my head and take me off to dreamland.

That would be nice even without sleep being involved, to be honest. Something to reduce the overall noise lever in my head would be wondrous beyond measure. I sometimes feel like I live in a stressful environment, like a war zone, because of all the noise and chaos and battle. It would do me a world of good to be able to spend a week in the country, far from battle.

But the battle is in my head, and I kind of have to take that with me wherever I go.

After all…. I live there.

True to form, I am not even half way through this blog entry, and I have already come close to dozing off at the keys twice.

So far, my sleep has not been packed with dreams, or at least, not that I can recall. So perhaps that’s why I am still so very sleepy. I haven’t gotten to the part where I catch up on my highly necessary dreaming yet.

Humans need to dream.

I definitely feel like I did dream, though. I just can’t remember anything in particular. But I have a very strong feeling that dreams did happen. I can’t tell you what they were but I can feel the footprints they left behind in my consciousness. Making forgetting them more irritating.

I hate knowing that I have forgotten something and that no amount of brain wracking will bring it back. It’s frustrating as hell to know it’s in there somewhere but I can’t get it out.

Oh well. At least it spares you lovely people from having to read my long rambling dream descriptions. I have heard that listening to other people’s dreams is one of the dullest things ever, and I can see why. There’s no way for you to put another person’s into context, because the context is their own very personal inner world.

So what seems very important to the dreamer because it resonates with their deep table of symbols is just stream of consciousness oddity to everyone else.

Personally, I love hearing about people’s dreams. Dreams are amazing. When we dream, our mind is open in a very powerful way, and we can perform operations on the contents of our minds that would be far too dangerous to do consciously.

But when we’re dreaming, the consciousness as we know it is inactive. So in a sense, it’s like putting something under anesthetic in order to perform surgery on them,

In sleep, your mind can heal itself.

That doesn’t make it a sure thing, though, sadly. The deep structures (and strictures) of our minds do not disappear when sleep comes. That which you cannot accept when awake will likely still be unacceptable in our dream worlds, no matter how good a job our subconscious minds to at disguising the truth in order to make it more palatable.

Near-sleep experiences : 4, and counting.

If only there was a way to fully relax the mind and cease all resistance to its attempts to fix itself. We could probably save ourselves years of therapy that way. All the unresolved emotions would express themselves and then fade away, and we would have minds that are fully healed, balanced, and clean.

But of course, that’s not possible, because all that detritus becomes part of our identity and preserving identity has an extremely high priority in the human mind, possibly the highest. Once something becomes part of our sense of who we are, our sense of identity will preserve it no matter how self-destructive or poisonous it is.

That’s why so many gurus teach that in order to find salvation, one must overcome the self. Enlightenment comes from understanding who we really are underneath all our false assumptions about ourselves and returning to the state of identity of a young child, who has no thought of who they are in the eyes of others and experiences life directly.

Hence the question, “Who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?”.

Perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated with the amnesia story. You wake up somewhere with no idea who you are. From that point on, it’s up to you who you are. You are freed from all the accidents that formed you and can start over from scratch.

To most people, I suppose, that sounds utterly terrifying. But to me it seems like…. salvation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.