The "Cup" Diet

I recently saw a patient in the office after he underwent a gastric bypass procedure. By the time he saw me, several months had elapsed since the procedure, and he managed to lose about 50 lbs! He felt good, and his blood glucose was much improved. While talking about his eating habits, he remarked that he can't tolerate meat, and that his meals are very small in volume. "In fact", he said, "if I go beyond a certain measure, it comes right out". I asked him about that measure, and he said that it's one cup. His stomach, I thought, has been made the size of a cup, and that is all it can tolerate in volume. It's not your normal stomach that can extend and stretch in order to accommodate the nutritional whims of the typical citizen. It's stitched up into a miniaturized version of a normal stomach. So from that little anecdote, I began thinking about the volume of our meals, and came to the obvious conclusion that we must do better regarding this measure. None of us really think about the volume of our meals. We think calories, carbs, fat, etc., but we never think volume. I have a hunch that if we started restricting our meal volume, and demanded from ourselves that the meal should fit in a cup, a lot of food would end up staying on the plate. The typical cup is about 8 oz, how about if we double that to 16 oz, and demanded from ourselves to restrict our meal to that weight/volume. We could get a little scale and weigh our meal prior to consuming it, verifying that it's under 16oz. Doing so would liberate us from calculating the number of calories, or ever from paying too much attention to carbs/fat, etc. Think of it, when you survey the frozen food isle, all you need to do is look for the ozs on the labels. Easy and simple, and I propose we call it : The cup diet.