Editor’s Note — This week’s Masters in Business interview is with Joel Kremer, founder of Sediment. In this podcast, Kremer discusses three different approaches to weight loss that may seem surprising and controversial to some but not to him. The idea behind the “red wagon diet” is simple — go shopping with all the food you want, buy each food as it goes in the cart, and fill up on the leftovers before you shop again. Let’s call it “nutritional mule fuel.” It was helpful for Kremer.
It came after discovering my young daughter’s diagnosis of epilepsy after many years of very obsessive behavior in which she wanted to eat everything in sight for long periods of time.
Her history is one of the top one percent of epileptic cases — and one of the worst because of a faulty central nervous system. So when she was diagnosed, she got a tremendous amount of medical attention. She had to have EEGs, MRIs, EEGs, MRIs, all of which were an absolute waste of time and money. She was on a couple of different medicines, but of course some of them were tantamount to hypnosis.
She went through all these cycles — dieting, dysmenorrhea, depression, appetite loss, re-addiction to food, this is all playing out. We tried diets that you don’t hear about that much — just changing the way you eat and changing the environment, like “the wild west diet.”
It’s really an all-or-nothing diet, but it has been very successful and since that point my daughter has been reduced dramatically from 25 stone to 14 stone. All of it is about exposure. She has to eat the food once — and it needs to be at least 50% of her calories. And if she tries to overeat she’s highly motivated to be weaned off of that food. So it’s really the foods that we like — she goes around a little bit exploring the foods — and we fill them up each time she goes and she eats less, right? I call it “nutritional mule fuel.” It’s not a diet, it’s really my version of nutritional advantage.
It can be a very effective weight loss medicine — better than prescription drugs. It helped our daughter, because I would get discouraged. “What am I doing wrong? What do we have to do differently?” I think if I have to do it again, I might do it another way.
It’s a different brand of medicine — and it’s less expensive. It doesn’t impact the quality of care she gets — so we bought one box that we keep in the pantry, every night, and we’re on this one diet. There’s not really anything else.
Bottom line — if you have a seizure disorder or epilepsy, you should not rely on diet alone. And if you’re a regular reader of this podcast, you know that when I say medicine, I mean that in the most literal sense. You need to be getting tested every year for seizures to make sure that you’re getting the right medication.
This is the first in a series of Masters in Business conversations featuring Joel Kremer. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.