Dr Bridell's logical and rational & poetic and beautiful & completely guaranteed Diet
Column One: Introduction
By the Mysterious Dr Bridell

This Diet is Different

There are way too many diet books out there, and most of them, in the long run, do more harm than good.  (You may notice a tone of candor starting about right here, and you will understand more and more why the mysterious Dr. Bridell does not wish to have his location or his true identity revealed.)

Anyway, lots of diet books — lots of promises — lots of bull.  This one is different.  First of all because it is not a book, it's a column, and it will present a series of concepts, starting with the deceptively simple, and building to a deeper understanding of what a diet really should be and why it should be thought of spiritually rather than physically.
   
Remember as you read (particularly the first few columns) that all physical things are "types" for the deeper reality of the spiritual.  Let me go this far:  I think God could have devised any number of methods for refueling our physical machines.  We could have plugged into trees or had some kind of built-in solar batteries, but he gave us the FOOD method, with all of its nuance and variety and with the marvelous aspects of taste and appetite BECAUSE it is a way of learning some things about mastery and about the relationship between body and spirit that APPLY to all aspects of life and of eternity, and that provide us with the tools we need to find and to create the mortal JOY that we were sent here to find.
    
(If that last paragraph didn't make full and completely coherent sense, don't worry.  After all, this is the first column in the series.  I promise you that by the end of the series you will be able to go back and read the paragraph and it will seem absolutely elementary — and absolutely true).  In fact, while I am promising things, let me give you this column's guarantee:

Guarantee:

1.    If you read and follow this column, you will lose weight — quite a lot of weight in most cases.

2.    Your weight loss will actually be the least important thing this column does for you.

3.    If 1 and 2 don’t prove to be true, you can contact me and I will send you an apology, a free book and a bunch of other goodies, including some questions about the level of your implementation.

Sincerely,Dr. Bridell

Why Read it?  Why Do it?

Well, there are lots of good reasons to go on a diet: to feel better, to think better, to work better, to play better, to look better, to live longer.  The bottom line is that we really are what we eat, so there is genuine merit in having some kind of strategy for what we put in our mouths (and what we don’t). But you've got to find one that makes sense to your soul.

Who is this column for?  Well, first, it’s for folks who've tried other diets that didn’t work, or didn’t work for very long — or who heard about other diets and knew, without even trying them, that they wouldn’t work or that they couldn’t stand them or couldn’t do them.  And, it’s for people who want to go beyond food progress toward gaining control of all appetites.  This column is for people who want a higher, more intelligent, more spiritual approach and who want to understand and then to win the greatest of all personal battles, the one between one’s spiritual soul and one’s physical appetites.

The Difference Between Man and the Animals

Maybe you've had a discussion something like the one I had on an airplane the other day, sitting by a scientist I had just met who was telling me that man was just an advanced animal — perhaps not even the most advanced (she really liked dolphins).  I must have looked disagreeable, because she challenged me to name a really substantive "difference in kind" (she had already minimized the physical and mental differences as "differences in degree."  Judging her to not be too receptive to spiritually oriented ideas, I tried this one:  Men and animals are polar opposites — 180 degree opposites — in terms of their purpose and the manner in which they "fulfill the measure of their creation" (I used different words on that part of course, but you see what I was saying). My punch line was this: "Animals become all that they can be by following their instincts and appetites.  Humans become all that they can be by mastering and controlling their instincts and appetites."     

I want you to think of this diet as an exercise or an experiment in fulfilling the measure of your creation.  The food is just part of the laboratory or the gymnasium we call mortality.

Come and Discuss This With Me Right Here Every Friday

Two more things for now, to prepare you for the real beginning next week: 

1. We already have the greatest diet ever devised, and it comes from our Heavenly Father, and it is called The Word of Wisdom.  But we oversimplify it and overlook its nuances.  One way to view this column is as an interpretation of The Word of Wisdom.
2. This column will appear every Friday.  There are two reasons for this, first, it stays up on the top of the Meridian page through the weekend as a "new" article so more people can find it, and second, the weekends are the best time to think about and implement diets.

A final word of introduction:  Don't be frustrated by the weekly, one bite at a time approach.  There will be weeks when you really want to read all the rest of the diet right now and just do it!  But it doesn't work very well that way.  I know because I've tried it.  It's better to do this in sequence — to master one principle and implement it for a week, get used to it and comfortable and committed to it, and then to be ready for the next step the next week.

So enjoy it with me and remember that this is what it is about: JOY.