August 9, 2006--The Gravity Diet

With growing concern about the obesity epidemic and, of course, about just looking good on the beach, there have been a series of diets through the years that have attracted devoted followers—

Some have been named for locations: The Scarsdale Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet, the South Beach Diet. Others for their inventors—The Prtitkin Diet, the Jenny Craig Diet. While yet more are descriptively named—The Lo-Carb Diet; the High-Carb Diet, the Low-Fat Diet, the High-Fat Diet.

Though these diets call for very different approaches to eating and are often controversial, there is one thing all neutral observers agree about—they do not work. Yes, all produce some short-term weight loses, but nearly 90 percent of dieters over time regain the weight they lost.

So what to do? I stumbled on the answer in yesterday’s Science Times section of the NY Times—go on the Gravity Diet.

The best news about this one is that it is guaranteed to work; and, if you don’t move about too much (more about this below), you will keep the weight off. But best of all you do not have to change any of your eating habits. If you can’t give up dessert or like extra fat on your steak or can’t let go of bread at dinner, not to worry because you will still lose weight and it will not come back.

The article linked below is not in truth about dieting. It is about how the giant Tsunami of 2004 affected the Earth’s gravity. But if you track along with me for a moment, you will quickly see the dieting implications.

The story’s headline indicates how the Tsunami “shook gravity.” This caught my attention since up to now I have always thought that the force of gravity was invariable. That it was locked into the elegant simplicity of one of Newton’s most famous equations, his 1687 Universal Law of Gravity, which states that objects that have mass tend to accelerate toward each other: F = MA. The force of gravity (the F) equals that total mass (M) times the rate at which they accelerate toward each other (the A).

In a world of infinite, unpredictable variability, I cling to the certainty and security of those few things, such as F = MA, that are universal and unchanging. But the Tsunami, in addition to all the physical destruction it caused, also apparently shook up gravity itself. This was discovered by slight changes in the relative positions of two polar-orbiting satellites. As a consequence of the shifting in the mass of the earth that was the result of the magnitude 9.1 earthquake that caused the Tsunami (thousands of square miles of sea floor were ruptured and raised, thus affecting the mass of the Earth—it made the Earth in places less dense) the force of gravity itself where this occurred was diluted—the M was less than before the earthquake.

And as another consequence, if you’re following me, in certain locations where gravity was thus reduced, if you lived there and of course survived, you would weigh less. To be precise, if before the Tsunami you weighed 150 pounds, after it you would weigh one-25,000th of an ounce less.

Admittedly not that much, but at least a good start.