Frequently Asked Questions About
The "One Day Diet" Plan
A Weight Loss Program That Works.

Yes you can use the tasty Hoodi-Chews, if you think you need some extra help in controlling hunger on the Diet Days while using the One Day Diet plan - or when you have finished your diet program and are back to eating normally. Hoodia fools your brain into thinking it is not hungry, so you are not tempted to eat more food than is necessary. Test subjects in a double-blind scientific study were found to eat an average of 1000 less calories per day while taking Hoodia Gordonii, so Hoodia works great as an appetite suppressant. But please take careful note of the following warning...

On each and every Food Day, you "eat normally" and YOU DO NOT DIET - so it does not make sense to try to control your hunger on the Food Days or eat less food, when you MUST eat as many calories as would be "normal" for your body, based on your present height and weight and activity level. If you used an appetite suppressant like Hoodia on a Food Day and then did not eat as many calories as your body needs, then you would run the risk of having your body lower its metabolic rate and store fat, and resist any further attempts to diet or lose weight. It would be wise to take the Hoodia only on the Diet Days, and only if you need extra help with hunger control.

Most users of the One Day Diet plan do not have any trouble with eating just the Diet wafers and water and some optional raw fruit on their Diet Days. But everyone has a different body with a different metabolism and chemistry, so some may need to deal with feelings of hunger on the Diet Days. In that case, the Hoodi-Chews may be a helpful way to keep from feeling hungry when the Diet wafers and fruit just don't seem to be enough.

But even if you use the Hoodi-Chews to suppress your appetite, you MUST continue to eat the two Diet wafers every hour for ten hours on each Diet Day. You need the nutrition supplied by the vitamins and minerals, you need the carbohydrates to maintain your blood sugar level and prevent feeling fatigued or faint, and you need the protein they supply to prevent any loss of muscle cells while you are dieting.

When you have completed your weight loss program and wish to use the Hoodia Gordonii to help control hunger at the times you are most tempted to snack on fattening foods or to over-eat at meal time, then the Hoodi-Chews can be eaten on alternate days - but should not be eaten every day or you risk lowering your metabolism, as mentioned above. Do not consume more than 4 Hoodi-Chews per day.

The "One Day Diet" plan really IS a "one day diet". You diet for 1 day, called your Diet Day, then you stop dieting for one day, which is called a Food Day. If you want to lose more than a pound or two, you simply do another Diet Day followed by another Food Day, for as long as you want to or need to. You can stop and start again anytime you want. You just don't do two Diet Days in a row, without a Food Day in between.

The Original One Day Diet is a very special kind of low carbohydrate diet which does NOT cause your body to lower its metabolic rate when you reduce the amount of carbohydrates you are consuming. It also contains protein so you don't lose muscle mass. Other low-carb diets like the Atkins Diet or South Beach Diet literally starve your body of carbohydrates, and if this continues for several days it can cause your body to react by lowering its metabolic rate to survive on less calories. At that point it would resist any loss of weight, no matter what you do.

But the One Day Diet drastically reduces carbohydrates and calories for just one day, and then you always eat your FULL normal amount of carbs and calories the following day. If you follow the guidelines faithfully, your body will never sense an ongoing reduction in calories - and will NOT react by lowering its metabolic rate. The lowering of metabolic rate which often occurs on other calorie-reduced or "starvation" diets is the reason so many of these diet plans fail, and why some of them actually cause you to gain more weight than you started with.

You see, your body cannot know how many calories it is going to get tomorrow - it only knows how many it has been getting in the recent past. As long as you keep from lowering your usual calorie intake for three days in a row, it will not sense this as impending "starvation" - and so it will not try to protect you by lowering the rate at which it burns calories for energy.

Even though you get only 180 calories from the 20 Diet wafers you eat on Diet Days, this diet is safe to continue for weeks at a time because you are always eating "normally" every second day and getting your usual healthy diet. Your body won't even sense that you are "dieting".

A 24-hour "Diet Day" starts in the morning when you get up, and ends the next morning when you eat some food. You will be burning fat and losing weight, even while you are asleep all night. If you are on an unusual sleep cycle, such as when traveling by jet across time zones or when working night shifts, just start and end your Diet Day at whatever hour you wake up from your sleep period.

The "end" of your One Day Diet plan is when you have lost all the pounds and inches you wanted to lose. When you get to that point, you just stop doing the Diet Days - and every day becomes a Food Day again.

You could also do a period of "adjustment" when you are close to your ideal weight, in which you introduce an evening meal to your Diet Day. Eat the Diet wafers from breakfast time to late afternoon, then eat "normal" food for your dinner or evening meal. Continue eating "normally" on your Food Days, and eventually all your days will be Food Days after your adjustment period ends and you stop eating the Diet wafers.

You can "take a break" from your One Day Diet plan for a while by doing a series of two or more Food Days in a row, anytime you want. If you want to lose a few more pounds later, you just start with another Diet Day and continue until you reach your weight loss goal, even if it's only for one or two days. Some people can lose 1 to 2 pounds in just one Diet Day. Your One Day Diet wafers will last for a long time without spoiling, so keep them around in case you want to lose a few pounds quickly, or use them as a low-calorie "snack food" (9 calories per wafer) if you get hungry between meals, or keep some as an "emergency food supply". Keep the container tightly closed to keep the air out and avoid oxidization for as long as possible.

Just don't do two Diet Days in a row, and don't try to "diet" on your Food Days!

You can always do more than one FOOD Day in a row if you want, which really is the same as NOT being "on" the One Day Diet for a while.

You lose weight only on the Diet Days, and you can basically do a Diet Day whenever you want to lose one or two pounds - as long as you NEVER do two Diet Days in a row. You must never go "3 days in a row with reduced calories" or you will risk lowering your metabolism - which would result in not losing weight, and perhaps actually gaining weight later. (Going 3 days in a row without getting your usual supply of calories would be "starvation", and your body will react by storing more fat and lowering your metabolism.)

Please make sure you have read the "Warning" about eating "normally" on your Food Days, and why this is so critically IMPORTANT. Here is an extra link to the FAQ answer that provides this information...

What Is the MOST Important "Rule" For The One Day Diet, the Rule I Must Never Break?

If you want to lose a lot of weight, you can just keep up the "one day on, one day off" cycle for as long as necessary - or until you run out of Diet wafers.

NOTE: If your weight loss goal is to lose more than 15 or 20 pounds, you are going to need more than 1 bottle of One Day Diet wafers (a 14-day supply). You can save money by ordering a 42-day (6-week) supply in the form of 3 bottles of Diet wafers for US $102 (compared to 2 bottles for $79.90 you get the 3rd bottle for about $22). As soon as you have seen that the Diet really is working for you, make sure you re-order in time (at least a week ahead) so that your next bottle will arrive before your first bottle is empty! On the other hand, it may be a good idea to take a little "break" from dieting after you have lost 15 or 20 pounds. You can start again anytime, just by doing another "Diet Day" to start the "one day on, one day off" cycle again.

Here is the link to the Order page on my web site that shows how to order by phone (MON-FRI, 8 AM to 5 PM Pacific Time, or 11 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time) and how to order on-line anytime, 24/7. Affinity is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, which is in the same Time Zone as California. (There is no sales tax charged unless your order is shipped to a location in Nevada.)

Click here to ORDER ONE DAY DIET

In summary, just do the One Day Diet over and over again until you achieve your desired weight loss. It's as simple as that. But if you are going to be on the Diet for a long time, it may be best to "take a break" occasionally and just eat normally for a week or so. And if you are losing more than 7 pounds per week, it would be a good idea to take a break for a while to slow down the rate of weight loss and stay healthy.

Be aware that once you lose weight, your body mass is less than before. You'll have a different body which doesn't NEED to get as many calories per day to produce the extra energy it once required to move around the excess weight you just lost - so you should be eating less food per day now, or you will start to gain weight. Eating less may just happen naturally, but do be aware of this if you want to keep the weight off and not gain it back again.

When you get thinner, you get to start eating like a thinner person! Start to "see" yourself as that thinner person now, and it will help you "act" like the thinner person you really have become.

I lost over 40 pounds using the One Day Diet, and went from a 44-inch waist to a 38-inch waist pant size. (or size 36 jeans). Knowing I was going to be losing a lot of weight, I did not go out and buy new pants for a while - I just wore some of my older pants that started to fit me again as my waist size got smaller. That was nice to see!

I still wanted to lose 20 more pounds to get down to my "ideal" body weight. But one day I decided to just go out and buy some really nice new pants in my current size - and I am glad I did! I didn't really know what size would fit me right, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that I could wear a size 38 dress pant, and it was even a little loose. But I also tried on some jeans, and I could easily get into a size 36. THAT made me feel even better!

Sure, when I lose that final 20 pounds, those new pants won't fit me any more - but it was worth the money just to KNOW and FEEL that I was now a "size 36" instead of a "size 44". It became more REAL to me that I was now this guy who wears size 36 jeans - because I WAS WEARING THEM. Now I am imagining myself getting into some size 34 jeans pretty soon. I haven't worn a size 34 for years! I think the last time I bought a size 40/34 suit was when I was in my early 20s!

But now I am even more determined to get into some size 34 jeans and buy a nice new suit with a 40 inch jacket and 34 inch pants. I should be looking pretty good when that happens. And, best of all, I am going to FEEL GOOD when I see myself in that 40/34 suit! In fact, I think I will get myself a tailor-made suit, no matter what it costs. It will fit better and look better, and really seeing myself as that thin person will make me feel better. As they say in the Master Card(tm) commercials... "Value: Priceless."

I hope that my little fantasy has helped motivate you to imagine yourself as a thinner person, and maybe promise yourself a nice "reward" when you finally reach your own weight loss goal. Don't be cheap with yourself. Give yourself something really GOOD - for YOU ARE WORTH IT! You DESERVE it. And you can HAVE it!

I'd like to hear about the amount of weight you lost, and what pant or dress size you were wearing "before" and what size you are wearing "after" you reached your weight loss goal. And I'd really like to hear what you bought for yourself as your own personal "reward". Send me an email, and enclose a digital picture file if you care to. I'll even put up a page on my One Day Diet web site(s) and show your picture to the world if you want.
(Then you could send the URL to your picture page and show off your new body to all your friends and family who aren't around to see it live and in person. And maybe to anybody who once made a disparaging remark about your old body. Maybe to an old boyfriend or girlfriend? They say, "Success is the best revenge!")

Here's my email address: michael@star-company.com

First, please understand that your REAL goal is not to lose "pounds".

What you really want to lose is FAT.

Think about this example... A champion body-builder ready for a competition may weigh 220 pounds, but have only 3 to 5 percent of that mass as fat. He is all bone and muscle, and very little fat, and his muscles show through because there is less fat to hide them. Now you would not say "He WEIGHS too much" at 220 pounds, would you? It's not the weight, but the FAT that counts. You want to lose FAT without losing MUSCLE. You want to look trim instead of flabby, and the less fat and more muscle, the more shapely your body will be.

And the more muscle cells you have, the more calories your body burns to feed those muscle cells, because they need a constant supply of fuel (glucose) even when they are not moving. On average, about 25 percent of your daily calories are used up by your muscles.

The same volume of muscle weighs nearly three times as much as the same volume of fat, so "weight" is not a very reliable indicator. If you were gaining as much muscle as you were losing fat, your overall weight would actually increase because of the muscle you add weighs more than the fat you lost - but you would look better and be healthier!

We are not talking about gaining muscles while on the One Day Diet (but it helps prevent losing muscle while losing fat). We are using muscles and body-builders to make a point about getting our priorities straight. Measuring your weight by the pound is convenient, but it is not the pounds that really matter - it's the INCHES!

Trust the inches on the waist of your pants, or the size your dress, as the best indicators of success with any Diet plan.

Now let's discuss your desire to have some reassurances that you can lose a certain number of pounds in a certain period of time. That's a reasonable desire, to have some kind of "guarantee" that you will succeed before you start. But unfortunately it's not realistic. It can happen in the fantasy world of advertising hype, but it really can't happen in real life. And here's why.

Please be aware that every individual has a different body, different body mass, different metabolic rate, and different eating habits. These things all affect how fast you gain or lose weight, so there is no way to make any blanket statements or claims about the expected weight loss in pounds that will be true for EVERY person. As they say... "Individual results will vary." And YOU are an INDIVIDUAL, so your results may not be the same as others'.

You can look over the testimonials provided on this web site to get an idea of how much weight SOME individuals have actually lost while using the One Day Diet. And I can tell you about my own personal experience with the One Day Diet, where I lost 20 pounds in 20 days in April 2003, the first time I tried the One Day Diet as a new customer. That was a surprisingly large weight loss for me, and I am not implying in any way that YOU will lose 20 pounds in 20 days like I did. I can only say that "I did it." THIS individual did it. But I'm not you, and neither are those people who gave testimonials about their personal weight loss.

There are several factors which will make one person lose more or less weight than another person, and I will list some of them here.

The most obvious factor is HOW you personally DO the One Day Diet. Are you going to follow the guidelines exactly, and not ever do anything or eat anything you are not "supposed to"? Will you get out and do some walking on Diet Days or get some other kinds of exercise to help burn off even more fat? Are you going to eat a healthy diet on all of your Food Days and not gain weight that day by over-eating? Or are you going to eat things that will just add more fat on Food Days that will have to be burned off on the next Diet Day?

All these things depend solely on YOUR choices and habits. They are going to affect how much weight you lose on ANY diet plan, and how FAST you lose the weight. Nobody can guarantee that YOU will follow the Diet plan instructions, so nobody can really guarantee that YOU will lose the amount of weight that others have lost on the same Diet. It depends on YOU and your own actions.

The second thing you should understand is that you will likely lose MORE weight the first time you do the One Day Diet, because the weight seems to come off faster when you weigh much more than your "ideal" body weight. As you lose some weight and get closer to your ideal body mass, the pounds seem to come off less quickly. The second time I used the One Day Diet, in January 2004, I lost 15 pounds in 20 days, which was 5 pounds less than the first time. So take that into account when you compare your own rate of weight loss to anyone else's.

The third thing you should know is that men tend to lose weight faster than women of the same body mass, because men usually have more muscle mass (more muscle cells in their body) than women, who have more fatty tissue than men. Muscle cells require energy at all times, whether they are being used or not, so they burn calories "just sitting there" and while you are asleep. Fat cells, on the other hand, don't burn calories at all, they just sit there and store energy in the form of fat. So the higher the percentage of muscle cells you have in relation to your overall body mass, the more calories those extra muscles cells are constantly burning for you. You can eat more food without adding fat, and you can lose fat more quickly by eating less food.

So men, with their higher percentage of muscle cells, have an intrinsic advantage over women, who have a higher percentage of fat cells than the average man. Because women bear children, they have those extra stores of fat in strategic areas - and that is a good thing! But it does make it harder for women to lose weight, compared to men.

And you should understand that because of this, women should be eating LESS food than a man of comparable body mass. If you are a woman who goes out for a restaurant meal, you are likely being served a "man-sized" portion of food, which is TOO MUCH FOR YOU. Don't be afraid to "just say no" to the extra food, and just leave it on your plate. Otherwise, you will eat more than your body really needs, and it will store the excess food as fat!

The fourth thing you should know is that when you are NOT drinking enough water, your body will STORE water to survive when it senses a shortage in the water supply. But if you follow the instructions for the One Day Diet plan, you WILL be drinking enough water, and this will cause your body to sense that there is no water shortage any longer, which will make it start to shed the stored water because it just doesn't need that emergency supply any more.

Thus if you were not drinking enough water before the Diet plan started, you will likely lose some extra pounds of "water weight" in the first week or so, which can make you think, "What a great diet! I am losing weight fast with this one." But once your body stabilizes the amount of water it is storing, you will lose that little "fast start advantage" you experienced in the early days on the Diet. So don't let a sudden slowing of the rate at which you lose pounds discourage you. It was a temporary shedding of water weight that made your scale show a larger loss of weight per day at the outset, but what you are seeing in the second week is the REAL rate of weight loss you are likely to experience. It may not be as great as you experienced in the first week or so, but it can still be a rapid weight loss, more than most diet plans will produce.

I bought an expensive scale that measures in one-tenths of a pound, and it shows that I typically lose 2.0 pounds from the morning of a Diet Day to the next morning on the following Food Day. Others I have talked to are losing 1 to 2 pounds this way too.

I should also mention that in the summer of 2004 I was often gaining back half a pound on my Food Days, but that's still a net loss of 1.5 pounds in 2 days. Yes, I went back on the Diet... not because I gained any weight afterwards, but because I still needed to lose another 25 pounds to get down to my ideal body weight. (I now wear size 36 jeans, not the size 44 I was wearing last year before the Diet.) It's harder now, being closer to my ideal weight - and wanting to get out and use the barbeque a lot during the summer months is not making it any easier! Those ribs and chicken wings are just too tempting (on Food Days only, of course).

The fifth thing you need to understand is that people who do any kind of "exercise" while on their Diet plan will lose even more weight, or lose it more quickly. You don't "have" to exercise for the One Day Diet to work, but it does work better if you can use your muscles on the Diet Days, for that forces your body to burn even more fat to create the glucose it needs to "fuel" your moving muscles. So even a 10 or 20 minute brisk walk on your Diet Days will help you lose weight faster. Walking is more effective for losing weight than running or jogging - and it doesn't have the high risk of stressing your heart and blood vessels and triggering a heart attack.

It's also good to exercise on the Food Days, but you don't get the same effect because your body will have enough carbohydrates available from the food in your system which it can burn to create glucose, so it doesn't need to go to its store of fat for energy.

So if you only have time to walk or exercise a few days a week, try to do it on the Diet Days if you can. Since the exercising increases the rate of weight loss, then you have to realize that others who exercise while on the Diet will likely lose weight faster than you, if you are not getting much exercise yourself.

The sixth thing you need to realize is that the only way to lose weight is to consume less calories than your body needs to create the energy it needs - and that you will gain weight when you consume MORE calories than your body needs that day, for it will store the extra energy as fat to be used later if you need it. On a Diet Day, you are only getting 180 calories from your 20 Diet wafers, plus a few hundred more if you eat a typical amount of fruit. That is a VERY low carb diet, but you do it for only 24 hours at a time.

The following day is always a Food Day, and the amount of calories you consume on a Food Day is up to you. You are SUPPOSED TO eat "as many" calories as your body was used to getting BEFORE you started dieting, for this is what prevents it from sensing a "food shortage" and then reacting by storing fat and lowering your metabolic rate - which you definitely do NOT want it to do! But if you eat TOO MANY calories, more than your body needs to supply its energy needs for that Food Day, the excess will be stored as fat.

So try to eat the amount of food and calories that is "just right" for your daily energy needs on your Food Days (and also every day after you finish your Diet plan), and you won't gain any weight. But if you indulge yourself too much on Food Days, you will slow your rate of weight loss on the One Day Diet Plan. Yes, you can have some of those tasty treats on your Food Days, but if you have TOO many sugary or fatty foods, or eat TOO MUCH food, you will gain some weight on your Food Days - the same way you were doing before you started dieting. And that will make your One Day Diet produce less than optimal results for you, compared to the dieters who eat a more healthy diet on their Food Days and don't put on any weight that day.

And there you have six reasons why "individual results may vary." And that's why we can't make any claims or predictions about how many pounds YOU will lose from 14 days on the One Day Diet (one bottle of wafers is a 14-day supply if you keep doing one Diet Day followed by one Food Day for 14 days).

We can only claim that the One Day Diet does work for the vast majority of people who follow the Diet plan faithfully. If they do that and are still not satisfied with the weight loss they achieved, then we will gladly honor the "30-day, money-back, satisfaction guarantee" which was promised at the outset. Nothing works for every person, but we can see that this Diet is working well for so many people that only a small percentage are claiming a refund under the satisfaction guarantee. All we ask is that you give it a fair try, and try to do it the way it was designed to work.

If you stick to your One Day Diet and follow the instructions exactly, I think you will be pleased with how fast the pounds come off, and how easy it is to do this Diet. You may not lose 20 pounds in 20 days, or 25 pounds in a month, but if you can lose even 5 or 10 pounds using one bottle of One Day Diet you are probably doing better than you did on your own or on some other diet plans you tried.

I know that I would still have been happy to lose 10 pounds in 20 days. I was suprised to have lost 20. But to me it is not how fast I lose the pounds and inches that is most important - but that I DO lose them. If someone else can do it faster, good for them! But I WILL lose the weight I want to lose, even if it takes me longer - and that's what really counts.

Here's a "twist" on an old motivational saying by a famous football coach, which we can adapt to losing weight.

"Losing is not the important thing - it's the ONLY thing!"

FAQ Index  |   PRICES and How To ORDER

FAQ:  What Are The Things I Should NOT Do While On The One Day Diet?

Here's a quick summary of what you should NOT do, if you are serious about losing weight...

(1) Don't eat ANY refined sugar, sucrose, glucose, or alcohol on your Diet Days. Just eat the 20 Diet wafers, some raw fruit (not vegetables) and drink lots of water. Nothing else. Eat as much fruit as you feel you need to be comfortable, but don't eat more than you really need - the less, the better. Don't try to "cheat" or make up your own rules and exceptions. It's only for ONE day. Many others have done it. I did it. YOU can do it too.

(2) Don't "diet" at all on your Food Days! Eat the way you were eating BEFORE the Diet. Don't skip meals, don't cut calories, and don't do any other kind of diet. Don't get too many LESS calories than is "normal" for you, but eat sensibly and don't consume too MANY calories on your Food Days.

Those are the two key things to watch for while doing your One Day Diet plan. Now here are a few other things to be careful about...

DO be sure to EAT BREAKFAST when you wake up on your Food Days, preferably just some raw fruit, not a lot of protein like bacon and eggs. And eat your 2 Diet wafers and maybe some fruit when you wake up on your Diet Days. You should ALWAYS eat breakfast, while on or off a diet. Skipping breakfast is only going to contribute to weight gain, not help you lose weight.

If you don't have time to eat breakfast, grab an orange or apple and eat it on the way to work or school. You need to eat SOMETHING nutritious, or you are going to be craving some sugar-laden snack food before lunch, like a donut or muffin. If you eat something with refined sugar, you will likely get hungry and want MORE sugar in half an hour.

Remember this... You may have gone 12 hours without any food (such as from 8 PM to 8 AM), and you need to "break your fast" in the morning. Raw fruits and unprocessed and unsweetened oatmeal or shredded wheat are good choices for breakfast foods if you want to lose weight.

You often hear that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but more recent discoveries now indicate that while it is important to eat some food to "break the fast" after your night's sleep, it should not be the typical breakfast of mainly proteins and carbohydrates - such as eggs and bacon and toast. Your body is still in its "elimination" cycle when you wake up after a night's sleep, and it is not really ready to start digesting and "assimilating" a new intake of hard-to-digest food for several more hours - typically not until 12:00 PM noon.

The only food which does not require more energy to digest than the energy it provides to your body is raw fruit, so your ideal breakfast food would be a piece of fruit or some mixed fruits, or a glass of natural fruit juice with no sugar added. The second best choice of breakfast food would be mainly carbohydrates and only a little protein, such as a bowl of all-natural, unsweetened oatmeal or shredded wheat WITHOUT any sugar frosting or sugar added, with a small amount of skim milk. Read the label on the box of cereal to check for sugar or sucrose content. The worst breakfast food would be too much protein (eggs and bacon), for proteins require much more energy to digest than they supply when digested. Hold off on those high-protein foods until lunch time or later.

And stop eating those sugar-coated, sugar-loaded cereals if you are serious about losing weight. Learn to like whole wheat or whole oat plain cereals with pieces of fresh fruit as the sweetener instead of refined sugar. Having sugar for breakfast just depletes your energy and makes you want to eat more sugar later on.

If you were to try eating just fruit for breakfast, and eat ONLY raw fruit before Noon for a week or more, by that time you would probably notice an increase in your energy level throughout the morning. Try it! And when you don't experience that "mid-morning slump" with fatique and hunger, you won't be tempted to grab that "double-double" coffee and donut or some sweet muffins or some sugary snack food. Remember, eating refined sugar (sucrose) just makes you feel hungry again in about half an hour, and it depletes your energy level after the initial "sugar rush" dissipates. (And excess sugar consumption can eventually lead to the serious disease called Diabetes.)

It is actually your mid-day meal which is the most important, and the one where you should consume the most food, for your body is starting its "assimilation cycle" and is fully ready to start digesting food at that time. Your evening meal should actually be smaller, since you are soon going into your sleep cycle. You should not eat any solid food within 3 or 4 hours before going to sleep at night.

According to some nutrition experts, the healthiest way to eat is for a man to have 6 small meals per day, and for a woman to have 5 small meals per day. This is the regimen many champion body builders use to get ready for a competetion, and they have become experts at reducing body fat while maintaining or increasing muscle mass. It's not healthy to have only 3% to 5% body fat - but you DO want to lose fat without losing muscle, so knowing their general method of dieting can be very useful to you.

By the way, your personal physician may not be the best person to give you advice on nutrition. There is very little education given in medical school concerning nutrition - less than half a day. Unless your doctor has further educated himself on nutrition or practices "holisitic" medicine which looks to prevent disease instead of just curing diseases with drugs, he may not know much more about nutrition than someone who has been on a diet. If your doctor is obviously overweight, you might want to take that into consideration when you get advice on what foods you should be eating.

Please understand that I am NOT implying that you shouldn't consult your personal physician before you undertake any kind of weight loss program or exercise program, for there may be medical considerations which require a doctor's expert advice or treatment or warnings, and things which could be harmful to you if you tried to diet without considering the effects of a change in personal diet or activity level. I am only talking about advice on "nutrition" and foods here, not professional advice concerning medical conditions. Just ask any Nutritionist or Dietician what he or she thinks about the level of nutritional knowledge held by the average medical doctor, and you might see what I mean.

Here's a general, all-purpose "DON'T" that can help you. Eating refined sugar or any processed foods which contain sugar are the worst things you can eat if you want to lose weight and keep it off. So DON'T eat so much sugar, and cut down on the sugar intake by cutting down on the number of processed foods you buy. Not only do they cost you a lot more money than preparing your own food, they almost all contain sugar that you don't really need.

The worst sugary foods are the soft drinks - the ones with the billion-dollar advertising budgets and the slick commercials you see all the time on television. One 12-ounce can of those "national brand" cola drinks contains 8 to 9 teaspoons of sugar! Can you imagine how much MORE sugar is in a large bottle of that stuff?

You can try to satisfy your need for colas or soft drinks or sodas by switching to the so-called "diet" versions, but did you know that all but one brand of those "diet colas" are sweetened with Aspartame? Do a little searching (or "googling") for the word "aspartame" and you will find many references to what medical doctors have said about the SERIOUS health risks this man-made substance exposes you to - the least of which is "weight gain"!

Yes, that stuff which you were led to believe would help you lose weight actually helps you GAIN weight. The application for approval of Aspartame was turned down by the FDA nine times in a row, until a new FDA commissioner (appointed by Donald Rumsfield on the day afer he took office in the Regan administration) suddenly railroaded through its acceptance single-handedly - and then shortly afterwards took a high-paying job with the very company that manufactures Aspartame! In spite of many complaints about conflict of interest, this allegedly dangerous substance still remains on the FDA approved list and is consumed by millions of people in thousands of food products under the brand names NutraSweet(tm) and Equal(tm).

If you are addicted to a certain diet cola, you might find the personal testimonies at this online forum called More Diet Coke Posts could scare you away from Aspartame and its many nasty side effects. The government of the European country Austria is aware of the dangers of Aspartame and does not allow Diet Coke(TM) to be imported into their country.

And if that isn't enough to convince you to stop drinking those unhealthy soft drinks and "diet colas", consider what a high price you are paying for a product that is mostly just water and sugar. Water is free and sugar is cheap, so why do you pay so much for a bottle of sugar water? It might be the cost of the billion dollar advertising budget that is coming out of your pocket, including the ridiculously high salaries for the latest hot celebrity to sing to you about the desirability of drinking one brand of cola instead of the other one. The two major cola brands spend a billion dollars each per year just to convince you to buy their brand instead of the other, and YOU have to pay for all that useless advertising when you pay those highly inflated prices for their cola product, even when you already decided which brand you prefer. You could have more money and better health if you decided not to drink colas and soft drinks at all.

A similar situation exists with those so-called "fruit drinks" which are only about 15 per cent real fruit juice and mostly water and sugar. It would be cheaper to just buy some healthy natural fruit juice for your children, and keep all that excess refined sugar out of their bodies. And those so-called "energy drinks" with the athletic-sounding brand names being touted by famous athletes are really just a lot of water mixed with some cheap electrolytes and sugar or glucose. Again, you are paying way more than those products are worth, and you would be better off to just drink some real fruit juice, or drink a free glass of water then eat a piece of fruit for energy. The fructose in fruit juice does not cause the "sugar rush" and the ensuing "insulin reaction" and energy drop caused by consuming refined sugar or glucose.

Remember, every time you eat refined sugar you will force your pancreas to release the hormone insulin to quickly metabolize the excessive amount of glucose produced from the sugar, and get your blood glucose level back down to a safe and normal level. Excessive sugar consumption has been shown to wear out the pancreas and impair its ability to create and secrete insulin to control hyperglygemia (a dangerous excess of glucose in the blood). When that happens, you will likely require artificial insulin injections because you will have developed "sugar diabetes".

Diabetes will make your life complicated and inconvenient when you have to constantly monitor your blood glucose level through small blood samples, and always have to eat a controlled diet and avoid certain foods. Diabetes often causes some very serious complications such as blindness and loss of limbs, higher risk of heart disease, and a shorter life expectancy. Please take the warning against consuming too much refined sugar seriously, because it could cause you some serious health problems! It's just not worth it to eat too much sugar, especially when there are alternative, safer sweeteners available to you. You could use the safe herb, Stevia (zero calories), or just use fructose ("fruit sugar") instead of sucrose (refined cane sugar).

Learn to live with much less refined sugar, and you may never need to diet again. Read the nutrition and ingredient labels on all the processed foods you buy, and learn to look out for the words "sugar", "sucrose", and "glucose", especially if they are near the top of the list, or if you see all three listed. Using different kinds of sugar instead of just cheap refined sugar is a sneaky way to avoid having to list "sugar" at the top, which would make you notice that sugar is actually the MAIN ingredient by weight. Then DON'T buy those sugar-laden foods which were specifically designed to make you want to eat more of them. The food manufacturers who knowingly add sucrose and glucose to foods which do not really need to taste so sweet are not looking out for your health - they are just looking to get you to eat more and buy more of their unhealthy products and take more of your money.

Those foods are not your friends! They are false friends, and they make you fat. And they could be contributing to the increasing epidemic of adult-onset diabetes that now affects even young children who are eating too many processed foods and too many soft drinks with too much sugar in them. Spend less time with those so-called friends, and you can have a better, healthier life without them.

Remember that on Food Days you "eat normally", which means eating all the foods you normally eat, and even some "treats" to reward yourself for doing another Diet Day successfully. The One Day Diet is not a "deprivation diet", for you only "diet" for 1 day, then eat your favorite foods the very next day. So enjoy yourself on those Food Days!

Now, let's list those things you CAN eat and drink on your DIET DAYS.

#1 - Eat 2 Diet Wafers Per Hour for 10 Hours. This is NOT optional! You NEED these on Diet Days, or you are going to feel hungry.

And if you feel hungry you will be tempted to "cheat and eat" and feel guilty. Or you will just give up and quit your diet plan altogether because it felt too uncomfortable to be hungry. So it is VERY important not to feel hungry at all, and the Diet Wafers are designed to keep you from feeling hungry - as long as you keep eating 2 per hour.

When you will be away from home on a Diet Day, put your 20 Diet wafers into a zip-lock sandwich bag and carry them in your purse or pocket or briefcase.

The One Day Diet wafers are designed to work for most people, but everyone has a different body size and body chemistry. So for some people the 2 wafers per hour may not be enough to fully control their hunger. If you do have a problem with hunger, then it is okay to eat 3 diet wafers per hour, or eat an extra one whenever you really feel hungry. They are only 9 calories each, so it may be better to eat an extra wafer than eat some raw fruit.

Remember, the raw fruit is OPTIONAL - a kind of "emergency back up plan" if hunger making it hard to get through your Diet Day. It is NOT part of the One Day Diet - you ONLY eat some raw fruit if you feel really hungry on your Diet Day. You will lose more weight per day if you can avoid eating any raw fruit at all. You will NOT lose much weight if you think you can just go ahead and eat a LOT of fruit on your Diet Days! Do NOT eat bananas, grapes, raisins, or pineapple, and do NOT drink fruit juices - for all of these contain too much fructose and will slow down the fat-burning process. Hold onto the thought that you will be able to eat anything you want on the day after each Diet Day!

On your Diet Days you must start eating 2 Diet wafers each hour from the time you would normally eat breakfast - or from the time you get up if you usually skip breakfast (which is not a good idea, since it can contribute to weight gain, not loss). If you work nights or are traveling by jet to a different time zone, assume the time you wake up from a night's sleep is your "breakfast" time.

You can eat either the milk chocolate or French vanilla Diet wafers, or any mix of the two, since they contain the same ingredients except for the flavor (real cocoa or vanilla). You can eat one wafer every half hour if you want, as long as you get 2 per hour. But it is IMPORTANT to eat your 2 Diet wafers EVERY HOUR for at least 10 hours, and I'll tell you why...

The Diet wafers do three things for you. One is to supply the essential nutrients you need for one day, since you will not be eating "regular food" except for some raw fruit. The wafers contain vitamins and minerals and other things that your body needs to stay healthy, including a day's ration of salt. They do not contain refined sugar or drugs or anything that is not "natural". They do not contain any exotic herbs. They contain zero cholesterol, and contain only 1% saturated fat.

The second thing they do is supply some protein.

Proteins are long-chain molecules made from various combinations of smaller molecules known as "amino acids". There are about 22 "essential" amino acids which you must get from your food supply because your body cannot make these by combining other amino acids (you can get all of these essential amino acids each day by drinking an ounce or two of our tasty Sea Energy or triple-strength Sea Energy PowerMax product). All the other amino acids can be made from various combinations of some of those essential 22, and all the types of proteins in your body can be made from those amino acids.

An amino acid is a relatively short chain of molecules, and many combinations of these can be formed into longer chains of molecules to make many kinds of proteins. Your muscles are made mostly from protein.

Your body can store lots of fat for a long time (as you well know), and it can also store a small amount of carbohydrates - about a day's supply. But it cannot store proteins or amino acids at all. So while your body is continually building new cells of every kind to replace the old and worn-out cells, it needs a constant supply of amino acids (or proteins which contain those amino acids and can be broken down to get them) to use as the "building blocks" to make the proteins which form part of the new cells.

When your body goes for more than about four waking hours without an intake of amino acids (or proteins which can be broken down into various amino acids) then it will actually break down some of your muscle cells to get the amino acids it needs to build other kinds of cells. You can avoid this muscle loss by eating some protein at least every four hours or so - or by eating your 2 Diet wafers every hour, for they contain some protein in the form of "whey protein" and "condensed milk". (If you are concerned about the amount of protein you are getting on your Diet Days, you can eat a small amount of LEAN meat like skinless chicken or turkey breast meat on your Diet Day and it will not slow down your weight loss much.)

The third thing the Diet wafers do for you is keep you from feeling hungry.

They control your hunger by giving you just enough carbohydrates for your body to convert to glucose and maintain your blood glucose at a normal level (mainly "natural dehydrated cane juice" - and which does NOT create the problems that eating refined sugar or "sucrose" does). Eating the 2 Diet wafers each hour is what keeps your blood glucose at a constant level. If you don't eat the Diet wafers every hour, your blood glucose level keeps dropping down and you start to feel hungry. You definitely DON'T want to feel hungry while you are on a diet, so it's very important to eat those Diet wafers every hour!

You start eating your Diet wafers when you first wake up after your sleep cycle, and continue eating 2 per hour for 10 hours, which is 20 per Diet day. If you are a shift-worker or an international traveler, start eating your wafers after you wake up, whatever time that may be.

"Glucose" is a simple sugar which is the basic "fuel" for every cell in your body, including your brain cells, and it is transported as a component of your blood. If the level of glucose in your bloodstream drops below a certain level, you will feel hungry and crave food. This is definitely something you DON'T want to happen while you are on a Diet Day!

Now I don't mean to scare you, but it is a fact that if your brain does not get enough glucose, you will feel faint, and if it goes too long without any glucose then you will become brain-dead. Fortunately, your body will have stored enough fat in reserve so that your liver can convert it to glucose and get that glucose into your bloodstream to feed your brain, even if you have to go without food for several days. You will survive as long as you still have some fat in your body to convert to glucose - and if that's not enough, then your body will start breaking down your muscles and organs to convert them to glucose so your brain can survive a little longer.

Does that help convince you to keep eating those Diet wafers every hour? You don't want to start feeling faint or fatigued because your blood sugar level gets too low. After a while, you will learn to sense that your blood glucose level is low, by some strange feeling in your head or in your body. When you feel that, you should be getting ready to eat another 2 Diet wafers. (When you are NOT dieting, if you sense that feeling, you should immediately eat something "good for you" like a piece of fruit - or you will soon be craving a sugary or fat-laden snack food because you feel so hungry. And then eating that sugar or "sucrose" will just make you feel hungry again in half an hour. Eating the raw fruit which contains "fructose" will not have that effect.)

So you must eat those 2 Diet wafers each hour to keep your blood glucose level from dropping down and making you hungry, which would tempt you to "cheat and eat" and feel guilty - or cause you to feel frustrated and discouraged, which might make you want to give up on your weight loss plan the first day!

NOTE:  If you are used to eating at night after your regular dinner, you might feel hungry after you have already eaten your 20 Diet wafers in the first 10 hours. In that case, it's okay to eat another 2 Diet wafers per hour until you stop feeling hungry or go to sleep. You can try eating some raw fruit instead, but 2 Diet wafers have less calories - only 9 per wafer.

There is kind of a "trade off" involved between getting JUST ENOUGH carbohydrates to let your body convert them to glucose and maintain your blood glucose level to avoid hunger, compared to GETTING TOO MUCH.
Carbohydrates supply calories (a measure of energy) and too large an amount of carbohydrates on a Diet Day will slow down the rate at which your body burns off fat, so you won't lose as much weight. On a Diet Day, your body is burning stored fat BECAUSE it can't get enough carbohydrates to convert to gluose and supply your body's energy requirements for the entire day. So you don't want to eat too many carbohydrates with too many calories, but you do need some to avoid that hungry feeling all day.

There are two factors involved here. One is HOW MUCH fructose or other carbohydrates you give your body, and the other is HOW OFTEN your body gets it. The raw fruit contains fructose and other carbohydrates, but it is hard to measure the quantity in every kind of fruit and in all their varying sizes. By using the Diet wafers which all contain exactly the SAME amount of unrefined sugar, and eating the SAME number of wafers at the SAME time interval (every hour), you can carefully regulate how much your body gets, and how often it gets that particular amount. This way, your blood glucose level is carefully controlled and feelings of hunger will not occur - if you remember to eat your 2 Diet wafers every hour!

Each individual has a different body chemistry and body mass, and also a different metabolic rate (the rate at which your body needs to burn glucose for energy to survive). As an analogy, think of how much gas your car needs per hour to keep the engine running at "idle" speed. That would be similar to what is called your "basal metabolic rate".

The 2 Diet wafers per hour will work just fine for the average person on the One Day Diet, but some people may need more carbohydrates to avoid those feelings of hunger, so that brings us to the second thing you can eat on your Diet Days...

#2 - Eat some fresh raw fruit whenever you feel like it. If you don't feel like it, don't eat any.

Now this advice assumes that you actually LIKE to eat some kind of raw fruit. If you DON'T like to eat raw fruit... then perhaps the wording should be changed to "If you don't feel HUNGRY, don't eat any fruit." But if you DO feel hungry... sorry, but you are just going to have to eat some raw fruit to keep from feeling hungry. You COULD eat some extra Diet wafers instead if you just can't stand to eat any kind of fruit, but please TRY to eat fruit because it is healthy for you - and it can teach you to use fruit as your "snack food" instead of fattening snacks like potato chips, corn chips, or candies. When you get used to reaching for some healthy raw fruit while ON your Diet plan, you will develop a good, healthy habit of reaching for fruit instead of sugary or fatty snack foods when you have finished your Diet - and that will go a long way towards keeping the weight off!

You are not advised to eat vegetables, with one exception. Raw celery is mostly water and has very few calories. It is also very fibrous and takes a lot of chewing to eat, so it can satisfy your need to "munch" on some food without adding calories. You might also be interested to learn that celery is the most "alkaline" of all vegetables and serves as a very effective, natural, and healthy "antacid" for heartburn relief or acid reflux symptoms.

I'm going to tell you something important about fruit and "antioxidants" and aging.

But I don't want to side-track you if you are just looking for a quick answer to that FAQ about what you can eat on Diet Days, so you can click here to SKIP the following paragraphs about feeling better, looking younger, and living longer.

Most raw fruits (and vegetables) contain a fair amount of antioxidants - unless they get reduced or destroyed by excessive heat in home cooking or in processes used by food manufacturers, such as canning and pressure cooking. The U.S. government recommends a certain number of servings of certain fruits and vegetables per day to ensure that its citizens are getting ENOUGH antioxidants - but only about 9 per cent of Americans are actually eating the recommended minimum quantities of these foods each day! No wonder we are all getting old before our time, and getting diseases we could avoid if we just ate a healthy diet with a sufficient supply of antioxidants. Some of those diseases include cancer, and they are avoidable!

In your grandparents' time, cancer was quite a rate disease. Nowadays one in two Americans will contract some form of cancer. What is the main cause of this recent epidemic? It is an ever-increasing amount of "free radicals" produced by our air, water, and food supply from pollution and pesticides - combined with unhealthy eating habits and the stress of daily living.

You don't "catch" cancer. You allow it to be created in yourself by not keeping your body's immune system at peak potential. In fact, the three leading causes of death from disease today are NOT something you can "catch" - they are CAUSED by unhealthy habits that weaken the body's natural immunity to disease.

So what ARE antioxidants? They are molecules which have an EXTRA electron or two available to "donate" to other molecules which are missing one or more electrons. And molecules which are MISSING an electron or two are known as "free radicals" - those "bad guys" which you may have heard about before. They are substances which act like tiny, tiny "terrorists" in your body, stealing electrons from the molecules which make up your body's cells, even from your cells' DNA! This damages your DNA, so when that damaged cell reproduces it makes an imperfect cell, not a perfect copy of an original healthy cell.

It's something like trying to photocopy a nice sharp picture, then using that less perfect copy to make another even less perfect copy, instead of using the original picture which is sharper. If you keep making copies from successive copies, eventually the copied picture gets so degraded it doesn't even look like the original. So when less than perfect cells (the ones with DNA damaged by free radicals) make new cells, they are less healthy than the original "parent" cells - and thus make your body less healthy and young-looking. Over time, your body cells just wear out and you die from old age - unless you die from some disease or accident first. But you could live longer and in near-perfect health if you can control those free radicals that damage your DNA.

You are continually replacing old and worn-out cells with new ones - in fact, most of your body is never more than seven years old! Even at the time you die of old age, most of your body's cells are less than seven years old. Brain cells are well-protected and not replaceable, but most other cells wear out or get damaged and are replaced within 30 days (all your blood cells) to 7 years (it takes about 7 years to replace ALL the cells in your skeleton).

So if your body is only seven years old, why do you look so old? Blame it on those nasty little free radicals! Your body was made to last at least 110 years, and in some isolated areas today there are populations where most of the people live in good health through old age, and many live to be well over 100 years in good health. What is going wrong here in North America? It's the free radicals, and our inability to control them. We are just not getting enough antioxidants to keep us looking and feeling young and healthy.

This is why you "age" and don't look as good or feel as good as when you were young. You are re-creating your body constantly... BUT if you create imperfect cells then you will have an imperfect body that looks "old" and worn-out - and IS wearing out! And those imperfect cells cannot re-create perfect cells, so you end up on a downward cycle towards aging and degenerative diseases and premature death.

Let's face the truth... when we don't take care of our health, we are killing ourselves before our time.

What is even worse about damage from free radicals is that some of those damaged cells become "tumor cells" or even "cancer cells" - and when they reproduce, they produce more cancer cells! Most serious diseases and cancer deaths are caused by free radicals which damage your body at the microscopic cellular level. What keeps these tiny terrorists in check is the "A-Team" of antioxidants, substances which are naturally found in fruits and vegetables and herbs.

The number of antioxidants per gram of a food can vary widely, so some foods and herbs are much better sources of antioxidants than the more commonly eaten fruits and vegetables available in grocery stores. There is a short list of common fruits and vegetables with the highest antioxidant content on the left margin of the AntiOxidant Specialist page.

Affinity no longer stocks the Antioxidant Specialist product, but is now selling an immensely popular bottled water contining alkaline and ionized water that actually acts as an antioxidant - Affinity Real Water. It is also sold in a concentrate form which can transform ordinary drinking water or juice or tea or coffee into healthy water that hydrates your cells much better than ordinary bottled water or tap water, letting them absorb more nutrients and eliminate more waste. Just a 1 milliliter droplet can transform an 8-ounce glass of water or water-based drink. Click here to learn about Affinity Real Water Concentrate and exactly how it works.

Antioxidants "neutralize" free radicals by giving them the extra electron the antioxidant carries in each molecule. Molecules are groups of atoms combined together. When the free radical atom or molecule gets its missing electron from an antioxidant molecule or any other molecule, it stops trying to steal an electron from the molecules in your cell or DNA. But when the "victim" molecule is NOT an antioxidant that actually has an EXTRA electron, that victim molecule ends up losing an electron and will then seek to steal one back from some other molecule! One free radical got neutralized, but now it has created another one! They are sort of like microscopic "vampires", you could say, where the bite of one vampire creates another vampire. But a chain reaction of millions of molecules stealing electrons can take place in just a tiny fraction of a second, and much damage is inflicted on the cells whose molecules are involved in this destructive cycle.

Only when a molecule has an EXTRA electron it doesn't really need does the vicious cycle end. And those antioxidants are special because they all DO have an extra electron. So when they come close to a free radical they neutralize it by giving up that extra electron to it - and thus keep it from spreading havoc among other molecules. It's like the "A-Team" antioxidant has captured a free radical "terrorist" and put him out of commission for good, by giving him what he needed most and turning him into a "good citizen" who doesn't want to do harm to others.

But now that antioxidant molecule doesn't have any more electrons to give, so it is "retired" from being a free radical fighter. More "replacement" antioxidants must now be called in to fight the next invasion of free radicals.

Every time we inhale air or eat food or drink water, we introduce more free radicals into our bodies - especially if the air and water is polluted with toxins from automobile exhausts and industrial waste products, and if our foods have pesticide residues or have absorbed toxins from the soil or water. So we continually need lots and lots of antioxidant molecules to keep things under control and protect us from the damage the invading free radicals do to our cells. Pollution is getting worse, not better - so we need to get more antioxidants, not less.

You can learn more about free radicals and antioxidants from Dr. Paul Ling Tai by visiting the AntiOxidant Specialist page on this web site. You will see that less than 10 percent of North Americans today are eating enough foods with antioxidants to get enough to neutralize all the free radicals that are invading their bodies through the polluted air we breathe, the polluted water we drink, and even the foods we eat which are poisoned by pesticides and other chemicals used in agriculture. It is far worse than it was for our grandparents, and we are starting to get diseases our grandparents didn't get in any significant numbers. Cancer was not a common cause of death for our grandparents' generation. Nowadays, about 1 out of 2 North Americans will have some form of cancer.

Basically, free radicals cause aging, degenerative diseases, all kinds of cancers, and suffering and death from those degenerative diseases and from cancer. We can reduce our risk of dying and being debilitated, simply by getting more antioxidants in our diet so that more get into our body.

We don't HAVE to suffer needlessly, or look too old, or die too young. We can DO something to prevent it. Antioxidants can help us stay looking and feeling younger, and living longer. The "A-Team" is on call for us at all times, but WE have to call them in!

These days, we really NEED to supplement our diets with things that supply us with A LOT MORE antioxidants than we are getting in our daily diet - even if we are one of the small percentage of people who actually DO eat a well-balanced diet. You can take a powerful antioxidant supplement like AntiOxidant Specialist to be SURE you are getting all the antioxidants your body needs to fight free radicals and slow down the aging process and prevent degenerative diseases, but you can also improve your health to some degree BY EATING MORE RAW FRUIT (and more raw vegetables too). So help yourself live longer and look better by learning to eat more FRUIT while you are doing the One Day Diet!

I know a man who is 94 years old, a good friend of my 86-year-old mother. He still looks pretty good, more like a trim 75-year-old, and he walks around without difficulty and even drove his own car up until his 93rd birthday - a sporty Honda Accord. He and my mother - who also is still pretty healthy and good-looking at 86, even though she has a pace-maker in her heart and broke her hip two years ago - are both mobile and almost fully functional at that advanced age. But many of the other people who live in that same retirement complex, including many who are quite a bit younger, are sitting in wheelchairs and unable to fully enjoy their later years.

A friend reminded me recently that we could be living 20 to 30 more years AFTER we reach retirement age at 65 (as my mother and her friend have done). So... do we want to keep living an active and interesting life for 20 or 30 more years? Or do we choose to be sitting in a wheelchair watching TV all day, or be sitting doped and drooling in the hallway of an understaffed nursing home?

I'm going to choose Plan A - to be active and healthy and younger-looking after I reach retirement age.

I know I will have to work on my health NOW if I want to be healthy later. So I eat my fruit, and I take dietary supplements like Sea Energy PowerMax to get the good nutrition I need to stay healthy and energetic. The Aloe Vera juice in this product is a strong antioxidant, and the Ginkgo Biloba herb in it helps maintain mental clarity and avoid senility. I'm 56 now but people say I look 45, probably because I have been taking supplements and lots of natural Vitamin C with bioflavonoids (not man-made ascorbic acid) since I was 30. This year I bought myself a brand new motorcycle. Soon I want to start playing squash again after I lose all the excess weight, and start getting back into shape.

I didn't work hard all my life to just sit down and vegetate when I finally get to retire. I want to live it up and be able to do all the things I couldn't do when I was too busy working to earn a living and build up a comfortable retirement income. Wouldn't you?

Surveys and statistics show that 95 percent of North Americans end up dead, dead-broke, or dependent on others at age 65 - and that's scary! The "American Dream" is a myth that your parents may have told you. The corporations you work for will not "take care of you" very well when you retire after years of faithful service. Some, like Enron, will even lose the pension funds you thought you could depend on. Nowadays, few people ever work for one company all their lives, and their retirement income plans and pension plans are often a "hit and miss" affair.

The only way most of us are going to have a really comfortable lifestyle after retirement is to work for ourselves and build up our own profitable business - or to invest a lot of our income into building up a million dollar pension fund (and not lose it on some risky investments). But when most people can barely pay their bills and have little left to save or invest, how will they build up a retirement fund to live on for the rest of their lives?

Becoming one of the OTHER 5% and having enough income to enjoy life is worth working for - but that is not going to much good unless you ALSO have a healthy body. So it's worth it to me to start working on that body now, before it's too late.

What is the point of gaining the FREE TIME and the GOOD INCOME, if you don't have the GOOD HEALTH to be able to enjoy it all?

So I eat my fruit, and I am losing all the excess weight I let build up over the years. How about you? Do you want to keep living a good life - and a longer one? Then eat your fruit. Take supplements to get the vitamins and minerals your store-bought fruits and vegetables and processed foods can't supply. Your body is capable of fighting almost any invading microbes, but only if you keep your immune system in an optimal healthy state. (End of sermon.)

See the FAQ below for details on what KINDS of fruit you should eat on your Diet Days, and why you should eat the fruit but NOT drink that same fruit's juice as a beverage on your Diet Days.

First, note that the raw fruit is "optional".

You don't HAVE to eat fruit if you don't feel hungry. And the less fruit you eat, the less calories you will consume. Any extra calories will need to be burned off, and that means there will be less stored fat being burned off on a Diet Day when you eat too much fruit. You will already be getting 180 calories from the 20 Diet wafers, and eating raw fruit will add to that number. The more calories you put into your body on a Diet Day, the more will have to be used up before your body goes back to burning fat. You only lose weight by burning off fat when your body is getting less calories than it needs at the time.

But in spite of the calories, eating some raw fruit on your Diet Days IS IMPORTANT if you do happen to feel hungry, or if you get thinking about food and feeling any frustration because you can't eat "regular food" on that Diet Day. The fruit is like your "Plan B" - "just in case" the Diet wafers don't work for you exactly as planned to keep your body's blood glucose at a level which prevents any feelings of hunger. Your body is not like everyone else's body, so you might need some extra carbohydrates, even if others don't.

And then there is the "psychological factor" to deal with too. You are used to eating bulky foods whenever you feel like it, so getting only 2 small Diet wafers to chew on each hour can take a little "adjusting" to. When you are just starting your One Day Diet, let yourself have as much raw fruit as you want on your first one or two Diet Days, and don't worry about the extra calories or how much weight you will lose that day.

It is more important that you feel comfortable with the One Day Diet - for if you don't, then you are not likely to continue your Diet plan. And then you won't lose the weight you wanted to lose. If you stick to the plan you WILL lose weight, but you don't have to lose it so fast in the early stages. You will get used to the wafers, and will need less fruit, so the amount of weight lost on Diet Days will increase soon enough.

I can usually eat just an apple on my Diet Days. I call it "dinner". I sometimes will also eat an orange or grapefruit for "breakfast" or "lunch". But on some days when I was busy concentrating on my work or just too busy with things to be "thinking" about food, I have gone the entire day without any fruit at all. I don't ever remember actually feeling HUNGRY - it is usually just the THOUGHT of food that makes me want to munch on some fruit, or have that delicious red apple for my dinner. It kind of "keeps me going" to know that I will get to eat that apple for dinner.

So you can always eat a little raw fruit of the type you like best, or any mix of fruits you like, whenever you feel a need for it. If you want to keep the calories down, then just "nibble" at a small portion of the fruit, and then only eat more if you really feel you need to. Eat slowly and enjoy what you are eating, and you may find you don't need to eat more. Try to distract yourself from thinking about food, and you may not feel a need for much fruit. The Diet wafers really do a good job of keeping your BODY from feeling hungry. It's your MIND that often makes you want a snack even when your body doesn't need it.

Here's a Diet Tip: wash and cut up your raw fruit in the kitchen, then put HALF of what you expect to eat on a plate and leave the kitchen to eat in another room. If you really need more fruit to eat, you will get up and go back to the kitchen to get it. If you don't really want it, you won't bother to get it, and you will end up consuming only half the calories!

Eating raw fruit as your "snack food" after you have finished your diet program will help keep the weight off, too!

#3 - Drink lots of good drinking water - at least 8 eight-ounce glasses if possible, plus one more for each 25 pounds you are overweight.

Here is where some dieters just want to "groan and moan" about having to drink more water. I used to feel that way too, so let me give you some "INCENTIVES" to help you WANT to drink lots more water than you may be used to. First, here's what happens when you DON'T get enough water every day - which you could call, "First, the Bad News" ...

(A) Just as your body will store fat when it senses you are not getting enough food, your body will also store water when it senses you are not getting enough water. So NOT drinking enough water each day will just add more "water weight". Drinking MORE water will actually cause you to REDUCE weight and bulk because your body doesn't need to store so much water now. Sounds kind of "counter-intuitive", doesn't it? But it does make sense when you think about it.

(B) Over the years, your body has used its fat cells to store away many of the toxins it has absorbed from foods, water, and the polluted air you breathe. When you start to burn off stored fat, some of those toxins in the fat will end up in your bloodstream, where thay can cause feelings of fatigue, reduce your ability to concentrate, and create other negative conditions. So while you are losing fat, you need to drink lots of pure drinking water to help your body flush out those toxins through your kidneys and bladder.

(C) When you don't drink enough water, your digestive system doesn't get enough water to keep things "soft" and moving along, so you get constipated and may have to pass some painfully hard stools, which can create some painful hemhorroids. Drinking more water helps avoid the pain. How's that for an incentive?

If you drink caffeine drinks, you need to drink even MORE water, because that drug caffeine acts a "diuretic" which causes your kidneys to flush out more water than you normally do through urination, and this will further rob your digestive tract of the water it needs, so you could gain more pain if you don't compensate by giving your body more water.

This is going to look like a "shameless plug" for another Affinity product, but I want to tell you about Dr. Tai's Digestion Specialist because it really worked for me - a formerly-constipated coffee consumer. To avoid embarrassing myself, I will just say that I used to have some of those problems related to "softness" and sometimes sufferred some quite unpleasant pain, and for most of my life I was not a "regular" guy. I was more of an "irregular" kind of guy, if you know what I mean.

This year I tried the new Digestion Specialist herbal formula to wash out the old and toxic fecal matter in my intestines and colon. I had read how people who are chronically constipated can be storing up to 40 POUNDS (!!!) of old fecal matter in their digestive tract. "Hmmm...", I thought to myself, "If I could get rid of even 5 or 10 pounds of old fecal matter with this stuff, that would sure help me lose weight the easy way!" So that was kind of an "extra incentive" to try the Digestion Specialist formula.

So I did try it, and within a day or two I achieved "softness" and have avoided that unnecessary pain ever since. Even though I still drink about three mugs of coffee per day, I am now a "regular guy" too - as long as I keep taking one pleasant-tasting drink of Digestion Specialist at least a few times a week. Thank you, Dr. Tai!

If you have food allergies, food cravings, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, or chronic constipation, then you should take a look at Digestion Specialist to see if it may be of help to you. That toxic waste in your digestive tract can cause all kinds of problems if it gets into the rest of your body or your bloodstream, including some ailments which even your doctor may not realize are connected to the condition of your colon. Read what Doctor Paul Ling Tai has to say about all this.

I once tried that "other" product which is very popular with the "mature" crowd - the one that is supposed to add lots of fiber to your digestive tract and clean out the toxic fecal matter and make you "regular". Recent clinical studies have shown that it just doesn't work effectively - and never did. It didn't work for me, because it tasted so bad that I stopped taking it after one day! But Digestion Specialist tastes pretty good - like a sweet orange-vanilla drink. And I KNOW it works, because it worked for me. This product ADDS water to the digestive tract and makes things soft, which counteracts the effect of the caffeine which was REMOVING water and making things hard. It makes more sense to moisten and soften the stuff and wash it out, than to try to use fiber like bran to scrape out the stuff that is hardened and hiding in the little nooks and crannies of your colon. The impacted stuff is probably harder than the bran, anyway, so how can you scrape out something hard with something softer?

I also heard from Dr. Tai on one of his weekly conference calls that Digestion Specialist is also an excellent source of organic calcium and magnesium. The caffeine in coffee contributes to acid reflux disease, while calcium helps control it. (Eating antacid tablets is counter-productive, and prevents your food from being digested. Eating a stick of raw celery does a better job of stopping the burning sensation. Try it, then tell your doctor about it.)

Let's get back to our discussion of Water. "And now for the Good News"...

(D) Drinking water puts some "bulk" in your stomach and creates a "full" feeling, so you can drink some water whenever you start thinking about food, and this might help relieve any feelings of hunger, whether they are physiological (in your body) or psychological (in your mind). Just getting "something" into your stomach can help satisfy your "need to feed".

This is also a good tactic for keeping the weight off later. Just drink a glass of water about 10 or 15 minutes before a meal, and it can help you avoid over-eating. (By the way, when you are not doing a Diet Day, you shouldn't drink water WHILE you are eating, for it will "water down" and weaken the acids and alkalines you need to digest the food. Drink your water at least 10 minutes before eating, then don't drink while eating or for a while after eating, if you want your food to be digested properly.)

Incentives (A) to (D) can help you when you are "on" a diet AND AFTER you stop dieting. Now here's the BEST INCENTIVE for drinking lots of water when you are "on" the One Day Diet...

(E) On your Diet Days you will not be getting "enough" carbohydrates to convert to glucose to supply all your body's energy needs for the next 24 hours - just enough carbs to keep you from feeling hungry. When your body doesn't have carbs in the stomach and intestines to convert to glucose, it has to use "Plan B" and start converting stored fat into glucose to meet the demand for "fuel" for all your body cells. Converting fat to glucose, or "burning fat", is a function of the liver, and during this process there are always some partially-burned fats (called "ketone bodies" or just "ketones") being produced and circulated in the bloodstream. When there is an excess of ketones in the blood it makes the blood too acidic, and the body will try to rid itself of these partially burned fats by flushing them out through urination. (Your body monitors and seeks to adjust the pH level of your blood - the acid/alkaline balance - because TOO much acid or alkaline can actually be fatal. Many diseases are caused by too much acidity in the blood. And your body will actually take calcium from your bones in an effort to reduce excess acidity in your blood.)

So if you help your body do more "flushing" by drinking lots of water, you can rid yourself of some of those partially-burned fats - which you now won't even have to burn off completely! You can burn off some of the other stored fat instead, and lose more weight on your Diet Day. Is getting rid of that extra fat a good "incentive" for you to drink lots of water? I thought so.

Now let's hope that you are planning to make a valiant attempt at drinking eight 8-ounce glasses or more per day (and not just on Diet Days, every day - but at least do it on the Diet Days to help flush out those fats called ketones). So let's see if we can make this water drinking a more pleasant experience for you.

First, you could treat yourself to some really good bottled spring water that tastes better than your local tap water. Or you could invest in a water filter to take out the chlorine taste and any bad-tasting impurities from your tap water. Chlorine is toxic to you, but at least it will have killed off all the bad bacteria in your water supply. A charcoal water filter will remove most of the chlorine from your tap water, and leave you with a safe and nicer-tasting drink.

There is an Affinity product called "M-Water" which seems to make water "taste" better, and some people who don't like drinking water have reported that they do like drinking water which has been treated with M-Water concentrate (2 teaspoons treats a whole gallon of regular drinking water, so just one bottle makes over 50 U.S. gallons of treated water). The M-Water also helps "hydrate" your body cells and enhances the absorption of nutrients and the elimination of toxic waste material from inside the cells, which might have the effect of giving your body better nutrition and reducing the need to eat more food simply to get some minerals or vitamins you were not absorbing in sufficient quantities. Also, your body has deposited many toxic chemicals inside your fat cells over the years, so while those cells are losing some stored fat you need more water to flush out those old toxins that start getting removed along with the fat and carried into your bloodstream. (Look for the M-Water link on the left side of this page under "Affinity Products".)

I never drank enough water until I tried treating it with M-Water, but when I started adding a little splash to each 500 ml. water bottle as I filled it with cold tap water, I was surprised to notice that I seemed to be drinking more water than usual by the end of the day. It wasn't due to any conscious effort - I just seemed to reach for that handy water bottle more often without even thinking about it. The first time I tried this, I drank four 500 ml. bottles in one evening, which is 2 liters (close to half a gallon).

It seems that drinking M-Water also helps restore your body's normal "thirst mechanism", which gets weaker when you habitually don't drink enough water - which is why such large numbers of North Americans are chronically dehydrated at the cellular level. So now you can actually feel those thirst signals, and just naturally reach for another sip of water whenever a slight thirsty feeling arises. I suggest you give M-Water a try and see if it works for you too. It comes with Affinity's 30-day, money-back, "empty bottle" guarantee, so you have nothing to lose by trying. And since M-Water has absolutely nothing added to the natural Oregon spring water it is made from (by a patented "mechanical" process, not a chemical process), it's completely safe for adults and children, even if you drink the concentrate right from the bottle.

If you like herbal teas, you can substitute a mug or two of just about any herbal tea (without caffeine) for one or two of the glasses of water per day, since the herbal tea is mostly plain water and may only have a few calories, or none at all. It is also easy to drink without cream or sugar. Don't add any honey or syrup to your tea on your Diet Days!

Another herbal tea which can help you lose weight is Dr. Miller's Holy Tea. It tastes good, is caffeine-free, and helps detox your entire body and reduce abdominal bloating.

Now would be a good time to start drinking Green Tea, which is an herbal tea that can help increase your metabolic rate as well as help protect you from cancer. If you were wondering why all the tea manufactures are now promoting their brand of Green Tea, there is your answer.

You can also drink decaffeinated tea or coffee, as long as you don't add sugar or coffee whitener. Sorry, tea or coffee with caffeine doesn't count as a water substitute because it makes you LOSE more water, which you will just have to compensate for by drinking MORE ordinary water, not less. But you CAN drink regular coffee or tea, as long as you don't add any sugar or coffee whitener.

By the way, the healthiest kind of "decaf" coffee or tea is one which was made using the "Swiss water process". Most other methods of removing caffeine use chemical treatments and often leave some chemical residues in the finished product - and those chemicals may be toxic to you.

If you really need to have your "caffeine drink" on your Diet Days (and I would suggest you DO keep drinking it if you are already addicted to caffeine - or else you will experience some "caffeine withdrawal symptoms" such as headache, fatigue, or drowsiness by the afternoon) - then it will not be too bad to drink regular coffee or tea, as long as you don't add ANY sugar, honey, syrup, or artificial coffee whitener (which contains refined sugar and/or "corn syrup solids" and/or sucrose or dextrose - so read the label before using, and then don't use it).

If you absolutely must have milk or cream in your coffee, then use a little bit of skim milk if possible. I have actually used 10% cream ("half and half") in three cups of coffee on a Diet Day, and did not seem to lose any less weight. (But don't tell anyone I told you that.) The most important thing is to NOT use any kind of sugar, or anything that contains sugar or corn syrup (like those coffee whiteners and cream substitutes).

You can use artificial sweeteners made from saccharin such as Sweet'n'Low(tm) (safer than cyclamates) or ones made with cyclamate such as Sugar Twin(tm), but I would suggest you avoid the types made with Aspartame, such as Equal(tm) or NutraSweet(tm), not because they will hurt your diet plan, but because there are too many concerns about possible health risks from ingesting Aspartame (which is also used in diet soft drinks and many so-called "diet" or "sugar-free" products). We don't use Aspartame or refined sugar in the Diet wafers or in any of the Affinity products. In our Digestion Specialist product for constipation (heavy coffee drinkers might want to check out this product because caffeine can contribute to constipation), the herb Stevia is used to sweeten the good-tasting vanilla/orange digestive drink (which tastes much better than Metamucil(tm), in my opinion).

While you might find it only in your local health store, this natural herb "Stevia" is healthy and safe - and much sweeter than anything else! Raw Stevia is about 300 times sweeter than raw sugar cane. It comes in liquid or powder form, and some brands are much better than others, so ask for advice or try more than one brand. You would be wise to use Stevia instead of any kind of "artificial sweetener" like Aspartame that may later be found to have some harmful side-effects (or already does). I have seen Stevia available in those little paper one-shot packets too, though it is hard to find. You might find Stevia useful as a sugar replacement in many other drinks and foods.

Refined sugar is not your friend, and may be the main reason you gained weight in the first place. If you ingest any refined sugar (or corn syrup or alcohol) on your Diet Day, it will quickly stop the fat-burning process and you will be wasting your Diet Day.

I would suggest you try to avoid too much refined sugar on your Food Days too, and after you finish your Diet plan. Stevia has an insignificant amount of calories, while refined sugar adds 15 calories per teaspoon. Stevia will not upset your blood glucose level and make you feel hungry again 20 minutes later, but refined sugar or corn syrup will. And that may be the reason the food manufacturers put sugar into almost every kind of processed food - because it gets you to want more and eat more and then buy more, which makes more profits for them.

It also forces your pancreas to secrete more of the hormone Insulin to control the elevated blood glucose levels caused by ingesting sugar, and this could contribute to eventually developing the debilitating disease called diabetes (also known as "sugar diabetes"). Diabetes can cause blindness and loss of limbs, and can shorten your life span, so you really don't want to do things which could cause you to develop this disease!

There is no refined sugar in any natural food, only more complex sugars like fructose. It's just not natural, and your body was not designed to deal with it. You don't really need refined sugar when there are other ways to make things taste sweet. Using fructose (it looks like regular white sugar) would be better, though it does have about the same number of calories per teaspoon as sucrose. But fructose does not cause the insulin reactions or "sugar highs" and cravings that sucrose causes. Being very close in chemical composition to glucose, sucrose can easily and quickly be converted to glucose right in your stomach, while fructose has to get into your intestine to be fully digested, and thus takes longer to be converted to glucose.

The "sugar rant" will end now. But you will hear more about sugar in another FAQ answer.

Yes, you should. There are some basic vitamins and minerals in the Diet wafers, but you really need to take a good vitamin and mineral supplement too, both while on the Diet and at all other times. The foods we get in our grocery store these days are almost devoid of useful mineral content because all the factory farms in North America are almost depleted of mineral content in the soil.

Were you aware that "hard" vitamin pills have two things going against them, which makes you wonder why they even offer vitamins in that form?

(1) Pressing the ingredients from a powder form into a hard "pill" form takes a lot of pressure, which generates heat, which can destroy some of the nutrient value. Enzymes are particularly sensitive to heat, which renders them useless. Without the proper enzymes, the processes in your body which require a certain vitamin or mineral just do not take place efficiently. All the fruits and vegetables you eat contain the enzymes your body needs to utilize the vitamins and minerals they contain, but many vitamin pills do not even contain any enzymes. What you really need is a "whole food" vitamin and mineral supplement that provides the natural enzymes along with the natural vitamins and minerals (such as Sea Energy and PowerMax).

(2) Hard pills are only 10% to 20% absorbed by the body. Most of the useful nutrients simply pass through you and are excreted with your bowel movements. In some cases, the entire pill is passed through the digestive system in its original state without being absorbed at all! You are just flushing most of your money down the toilet. In other words, 80% to 90% of what you paid for is wasted and does your body no good. As a result, you might think you have taken care of your minimum daily requirements, yet may not really be getting enough vitamins and minerals - and not even know how little is actually being absorbed.

But liquid organic vitamin and mineral supplements like Sea Energy are 92% to 98% absorbed by the body. Only 2% to 8% is wasted.

This is why we recommend our Sea Energy and Sea Energy PowerMax liquid vitamin and mineral supplement. They contain sea vegetation from the pristine ocean waters of northern Canada to supply 52 minerals and trace minerals, 16 vitamins, all 22 essential amino acids, and hundreds of natural enzymes, plus some health-enhancing herbal ingredients such as certified organic Aloe Vera juice (a powerful antioxidant), Ginkgo Biloba, Pau d'Arco (a.k.a. Taheebo), Ginger Root, Black Cherry, and Cranberry. The formula also contains some of Affinity's Real Water to further increase the absorption of the nutrients into your body cells through their cellular membrane (which acts as a filter for each cell) and to increase the flushing of toxins from within the cells. Your energy can increase both from getting more nutrients absorbed and from getting more toxic waste flushed out of your system than before.

I personally drink some PowerMax every day to ensure I am getting all the essential nutrients I need every day, no matter what I eat or don't eat. If we are missing even one essential mineral, it will eventually cause a certain disease in our bodies. I'd like to avoid that! All you have to do is take a little drink from the bottle. Or you could pour 1 ounce into a shot glass or the bottle cap and drink from there. If you want to see if you can FEEL the difference in energy it gives, try taking 2 ounces per day for 2 weeks, then cut back to 1 ounce per day unless you need the extra nutrients to build up your immune system. But if you have a large body, then you should drink more ounces per day in proportion to your higher body weight. As a very rough guide, a 250 pound man may need twice as much as a 125 pound man or woman. Just as you would need to eat more food to support that larger body mass, you would need to take more nutrition supplements too.

When your body gets and absorbs all the vitamins and minerals it needs, it will not get you to crave certain foods which would supply the missing nutrients - like the way a pregnant woman sometimes is compelled to seek certain foods to get the missing nutrients for her baby's development in the womb. Not having those cravings to eat those extra foods with the extra calories can help you keep your weight down, which is probably why some users of Sea Energy report a spontaneous weight loss without even trying to diet.

So, by all means keep taking your vitamin and mineral pills while doing the One Day Diet, or try our Sea Energy liquid nutrition product when you start your One Day Diet plan.. If you are going to order 2 bottles of One Day Diet for a one-month supply, you could add a one-month supply (32 fl.oz. bottle) of Sea Energy PowerMax to your order for about an extra $22 (15% Discount on orders of 3 to 5 iterms). There is no sales tax unless you live in Nevada.

If you really want to feel more energy, take a look at Affinity's amazing Performance Specialist product too. Aside from all the other health benefits, it keeps me going even on days when I only got 3 or 4 hours of sleep the night before. The more alert and energetic I feel, the more I get done in a day - both business and pleasure - so it is definitely worth the price to me!

The main purpose of the fruit you eat on Diet Days is to give you something more substantial than the Diet wafers, IF you feel you need it. The fruit is "optional" - and the less fruit you eat, the less calories you will have to burn off to lose weight that day.

Let's be perfectly clear about eating raw fruit on your Diet Day. You CANNOT expect to stuff yourself with raw fruit and lose much weight. Eat some raw fruit ONLY if you find that you are uncomfortably hungry even after eating your 2 diet wafers - for the more fruit you eat the LESS fat you will burn!

Do NOT eat the sweet-tasting fruits like grapes, raisins, bananas and pineapple! Why? Because they contain TOO MUCH fructose - which is a kind of natural sugar. When you give your body fructose, it does not need to burn fat to produce the glucose it needs, so the less fructose you consume on your Diet Day, the more fat you can burn that day. Fruit JUICE also contains a lot more fructose than the fruit iteself, so do NOT drink ANY kind of fruit juice on your Diet Days.

The One Day Diet wafers are designed to control hunger for the average user, but YOU may not be one of those average users. In general, the women dieters seem to need to eat some fruit more than the men, who usually get through their Diet Day easily on just the wafers and water. So the raw fruit is like an "emergency back up plan" in case you still feel uncomfortably hungry.

The raw fruit is NOT a required part of the One Day Diet, so only eat what you REALLY need to control any feelings of hunger. You could also try eating 3 wafers per hour instead of 2 - because a diet wafer only adds 9 calories; while a large apple adds about 80 calories! Also, try drinking a glass of water if you feel hungry. Often you don't REALLY need more food, and the no-calorie water will satisfy your need to get something into your stomach.

Why fruits and not vegetables? Unlike other types of food, fruit generally does not take more energy to digest than it provides, so eating only fruit as your "real food" on your Diet Days will help you keep your energy level normal, so you don't feel lethargic or weaker than usual. There are SOME fruits, however, which do take more energy to digest than they provide when digested. If you are looking to burn more calories while still eating some raw fruit, try eating an apple, orange, grapefruit, papaya, or mango, which are considered "negative calorie" foods. If you like apples, they are the BEST fruit to eat while on your One Day Diet. They satisy hunger without adding too much fructose, and they provide two types of natural fiber to aid digestion and avoid constipation.

NOTE: "Raw fruit" means fresh fruit "just as it came from the tree" - NOT "processed" by a food manufacturer, NOT canned or bottled, and containing NO additives whatsoever (especially SUGAR). And do NOT put sugar or any kind of syrup or honey on cut-up pieces of raw fruit. You can do that on the Food Days, but NOT on Diet Days!

The 2 Diet wafers you eat each hour on Diet Days will keep most people from feeling any real hunger at all, but since everyone has a different body chemistry and body mass, you might feel hungry occasionally - especially if you see someone else eating, or you get thinking about "real food".

It is more important to eat as much fruit as you need to avoid feeling hungry or "deprived" and then want to give up, than it is to worry about getting a few extra calories.

During your first few Diet Days, you are encouraged to eat as much fruit as you need while you are getting used to not having "regular food" or any "snack foods" to munch on, and get used to eating the chocolate or vanilla Diet wafers all day.

You may not lose weight as quickly when you eat more fruit, but it is much more important not to feel deprived or discouraged and then be tempted to quit your Diet plan before you really see how easy it can be to successfully lose weight fast with the One Day Diet. Soon you will find that eating (for example) an orange for breakfast or lunch and an apple for dinner may be all the fruit you need on the average Diet Day. Many users of the One Day Diet (mostly men) have reported that they do not feel a need to eat any fruit at all on Diet Days.

If you are used to eating at night after your regular dinner, you might feel hungry after you have already eaten your 20 Diet wafers in the first 10 hours of the day. In that case, it's okay to eat some more fruit or eat another 2 Diet wafers per hour until you stop feeling hungry or go to sleep. It won't hurt your Diet plan to do this, but you may lose a little less weight on that Diet Day - and your bottle of 140 wafers will not last a full 14 days if you eat more than 20 per Diet Day. The Diet wafers contain only 9 calories each, so it's more important not to feel hungry or discouraged than to get a few extra calories.

It is always healthier to avoid eating within 4 hours before bedtime (both during and after your Diet program) so your body can finish digesting your last meal before you lie down to go to sleep. Not only will this help avoid any "heartburn" (acid reflux) from the acid which your stomach may still be secreting to digest that last meal, it also lets your body focus on its normal maintenance functions and rest cycle instead of having to use energy to digest that food you ate before bedtime. You might find it helps to go to bed a little earlier at night - about 4 hours after you have had your evening meal. You will be less tempted to "snack" at night and add those extra calories, and you will feel more rested and energetic in the morning if you don't have any food in your stomach for 3 to 4 hours before going to sleep.

By the way, acid reflux is not really helped by taking antacid tablets - the problem is not the hydrochloric acid, which is supposed to be digesting the food in your stomach, but the valve at the top of your stomach which is supposed to close tightly enough to keep the partially digested food and stomach acid from flowing into your esophagus. Drinking coffee can contribute to the problem. Getting enough calcium in your diet can help this valve work properly - and if you really need to neutralize the acid to avoid pain, just eating a stalk of raw celery works as well as any antacid tablet! I bet your doctor didn't tell you that. Maybe you should tell him about the celery. It is the most alkaline of all the vegetables, and alkalines neutralize acids. Stewed tomatoes are the most acidic, so avoid them if you suffer from acid reflux. Note that pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce are often made from stewed tomatoes.

Fruits with less "fruit sugar" (fructose) will have less calories per gram. Apples and peaches and apricots are recommended because they have relatively few calories, contain lots of fiber which makes you feel "full", and are generally very good for your health and digestion. Pears and plums are also good choices for your Diet Days, but they contain a higher proportion of fruit sugar per gram than apples or peaches. Fruits like grapes, blueberries, bananas, and any fruit which tastes quite "sweet" contain the most fructose and calories, so don't eat too much of these on Diet Days! Better yet, don't eat any.

Note that avocados have a surprisingly high fat content, and should be avoided on Diet Days. On Food Days and after you end your diet plan, remember that avocados and guacamole dip are VERY high in fat and calories. Tomatoes are actually a fruit (a type of berry) and not a vegetable. Eating tomatoes is up to you, since they are a fruit, but it may be best to avoid them on Diet Days. And "Hold the mayo!" Mayonnaise is also one of the most fattening foods! (So is bacon - so those BLT sandwiches with mayonnaise may be one of the reasons you gained weight.)

Avoid all CANNED or CANDIED fruit and any jams or jellies because they will contain refined sugar or syrup. Some FROZEN fruits such as cherries or blueberries may also have sugar added, so check the label for "sugar" or "sucrose" or "glucose" if you want to eat frozen "fresh" fruit, and avoid it if it has any of those sugary ingredients. Otherwise, frozen raw fruit (frozen fresh, as it came from the tree) is okay to eat on Diet Days.

Also avoid most DRIED fruits which may have sugar added, such as banana chips - but dried apricots and apples are usually okay if there is no sugar added. Raisins and dates naturally have a high fructose content, so don't eat much of those, or avoid them entirely on Diet Days. Those bright red Maraschino cherries (used in cocktails and sundaes) contain sugar and should definitely be avoided (they also contain a red dye which has known carcinogenic properties). Natural cherries are fine.

Drink very little or NO fruit JUICE on Diet Days because the juice contains too high a concentration of fructose, compared to the raw fruit. One 8 ounce glass of apple juice or grape juice contains about 180 calories, and fresh orange juice about 150 calories. Remember, you are only getting 180 calories PER DAY from the Diet wafers, so the calories in just one glass of juice could equal your entire day's supply of wafers.

But if you happen to be out somewhere and feel a need for more than your Diet wafers (or you forgot to take some with you) and you can't get any raw fruit, then drinking a small glass of 100% pure fruit juice like orange or grapefruit juice (not any "fruit drink" or any fruit juice with sugar or alcohol, such as apple cider) is a good "emergency" plan to avoid feeling hungry. Remember that consuming any sugar or alcohol will quickly stop the fat-burning process, so you won't lose much weight that day.

In summary, the fruit is "optional" and you may not need to eat very much fruit on your Diet Days. But eat a small portion of your favorite fruit if you really feel hungry or get thinking too much about food, and then eat a little more if that was not enough to satisfy you. Stock up in advance with your favorite low-fructose fruits so you can have a little variety to make your Diet Days more enjoyable.

A little "diet tip"... Clean and cut up your fruit in the kitchen, then only take a small portion with you into another room where you eat it. If you really feel like eating more, then you will have to make the effort to get up and walk to the kitchen to get it. This can help discourage you from eating the extra fruit if you don't really need it.

Actually, you CAN drink 100% pure fruit juice (except "sweetened" apple juice or any sweetened juice, because it has sugar added). But don't drink very much. The juice of a fruit has a much higher concentration of "fruit sugar" (fructose) than the raw fruit itself, which means you will be getting a lot more calories from the juice than from the same volume of raw fruit. An eight-ounce glass of apple juice supplies about 180 calories. A raw apple has about 80 calories. Your entire day's supply of Diet wafers supplies about 180 calories, so just drinking two glasses of apple juice would mean that you are consuming more than double the number of calories on that Diet Day!

If you want to drink your favorite fruit juice, just drink a small amount on your Diet Days. Drink all you want on your Food Days. But this applies ONLY to "all natural" and "unsweetened" fruit juices - NOT to any kind of "fruit drink" or "energy drink" or lemonade or cocktail mix. Those products usually contain SUGAR, and you must avoid ALL sugar on your Diet Days (except the natural "fruit sugar" in the raw fruit). And beware that some brands of canned apple juice are "sweetened", which means they contain SUGAR. Natural apple cider usually contains too much fructose or sugar, so cider should be avoided. And "hard cider" contains ALCOHOL, which must also be avoided on Diet Days.

Don't be fooled by labels which don't actually say "refined sugar" or "cane sugar". Sneaky food manufacturers often use other kinds of sugars with names you might not recognize, such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFC) or galactose or mannitol or sorbitol. Don't drink a juice which has those ingredients, for they are sugars and they will slow down or stop the fat-burning.

Remember that the rule for Diet Days is "eat only raw fruit" - fruit in the natural form, as it came from the tree. That does NOT mean things which are "fruit flavored" - especially products like soft drinks or KoolAid(tm) or Jello(tm). And it does NOT mean any kind of processed fruit or fruit that comes in a can or jar. They usually contain SUGAR, and consuming any sugar will mean the fat-burning process will stop because your body can use the sugar to make glucose instead of having to convert body fat into glucose.

It will probably not hurt your Diet plan to drink a soda pop which contains NO sugar, sucrose, or glucose at all - such as the ones sweetened with Aspartame or its brand names NutraSweet(tm) or Equal(tm). But be aware that Aspartame is regarded as VERY unhealthy by many medical professionals, and if you are going to drink or eat products that contain Aspartame, you would be well advised to do a search on the Internet and read up about the possible health risks attributed to the consumption of Aspartame. I suggest you start reading about the dangers of Aspartame here. Aspartame is also said to INCREASE weight and create a dependence on sweets, so you might want to check out the facts before you consume so-called "diet drinks" as a means of weight control.

Also see the CBS News July 28, 2005 story titled "Study Links Aspartame to Cancer" which describes some new medical research which appears to link low doses of Aspartame to lymphoma and leukemia.

On February 7, 2005, an Associated Press report stated that the Coca-Cola Co. announced it will begin selling a Diet Coke sweetened with sugar substitute Splenda(tm) (made from sucralose) in the spring. The report does not say exactly why, but you can draw your own conclusions (possibly it was to replace Aspartame with Splenda). It does say that they will continue to market the original Diet cola product, but also offer this new version. So if you wish to drink your diet cola and avoid Aspartame, look for the NEW Diet Coke in mid 2005.

Ordinary soda water should be okay, but if you flavor it with some fruit flavored syrup, you will be getting SUGAR in the syrup. You should avoid anything with "sucrose" or "glucose" or "corn syrup" or honey or molasses or maple sugar in it on your Diet Days, or you will not lose weight.

If you read the ingredient list for the One Day Diet wafers, you may notice that "dehydrated natural cane juice" is one of the ingredients. What's up with that? There is a small, measured amount of this in the wafers because you DO have to get SOME carbohydrates to maintain your blood glucose level and prevent hunger. What you don't need is TOO many carbohydrates or simple sugars, so don't ingest MORE in any food you eat on Diet Days. Natural fruit does not contain corn syrup solids or refined sugar (sucrose), but does contain fructose which is also known as "fruit sugar". Recent studies have linked continued consumption of fructose from corn to kidney disease, so the NEW One Day Diet formula contains NO corn syrup solids. It uses natural cane juice as the source of carbohydrates, and to sweeten the taste.

If the diet soda or diet cola you want to drink contains no sugar or glucose, then it will probably not have an adverse effect on the amount of fat you can burn on your Diet Day.

However, as mentioned in the answer to the previous FAQ, the artificial sweetener Aspartame, which is sold under the brand names NutraSweet(tm) and Equal(tm), is regarded as VERY unhealthy by numerous doctors and medical professionals.

Click on this link to read about the dangers of Aspartame.

Aspartame is 10% methanol by weight. Methanol is a deadly poison, also known as "wood alcohol" and is often used as a paint thinner and an ingredient in windshield washer anti-freeze products. The manufacturers and promoters of Aspartame claim that methanol is naturally found in some types of edible fruit, but fail to add that methanol is NEVER found in nature without its antidote, ethanol, also being present. Ethanol prevents the breaking down of methanol into other toxic substances. But there is NO ethanol in the man-made Aspartame formula, just methanol.

Methanol breaks down in the human body to formaldehyde (which is used as an embalming fluid for dead bodies) and formic acid (a poison found in the strong venom of fire ants). Wood alcohol or methanol was once an ingredient in the liqueur called "Absinthe" which was banned because it was known to cause blindness in those who drank it regularly! There were some reports a few years ago of methanol being found in some contaminated bottles of French wine, which were quickly taken off the market because of the health risks.

In the opinions of many respected medical doctors cited on the page you can link to below, Aspartame is directly linked to many serious diseases such as brain tumors, cancer, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome - as well as anxiety, depression, addiction to sweets, and weight gain. I strongly suggest you read the published literature cited on the dangers of Aspartame listed at this link and on other web sites listed there. It may be enough to get you to swear off any kind of diet cola except the one called DietRite, which uses Sucralose(tm), a less toxic artificial sweetener. You would be much better off using the completely safe natural herb, Stevia, to sweeten your drinks. It is sold in most health stores as both a liquid and a powder. Of the artificial sweeteners, sodium saccharin is less of a health risk than sodium cyclamate (used in the yellow packets). Aspartame is used in the blue packets you see in restaurants and fast food stores in North America.

First, let's be perfectly clear about what the One Day Diet wafers are, and what they are not. (And if you can't eat dairy products or drink milk without getting cramps, please read this section now, BEFORE you order One Day Diet wafers!)

The term "wafers" could make you think they are like a biscuit or cookie, which is not true. They are small and round and solid, and resemble a very large pill or an AlkaSeltzer(tm) tablet. They are about one inch in diameter. A more descriptive term might be "round tablet". They are definitely not a "pill" and NOT like the "diet pills" sold by drug companies which contain stimulants such as caffeine or Ephedra-type herbs (Ephedra and Ephedrine or Ma Huang have now been banned by the US FDA). The Diet wafers contain NO drugs, caffeine, or dangerous herbs at all.

The Diet wafers are NOT a food bar or a candy or a meal replacement. Please don't expect them to be. They are not meant to be a tasty treat, though they do taste quite sweet because they contain a measured amount of natural dehydrated cane juice.

The chocolate Diet wafers are NOT like a chocolate bar, though they do taste very much like chocolate candy. They are flavored with natural cocoa, but the flavor is more like "milk chocolate" than "dark chocolate". (The taste is something like a hot cocoa drink or "hot chocolate" condensed into a small, hard tablet.) Please don't expect to be eating a kind of chocolate cookie or candy.

The Diet wafers are meant to provide nutrition and some ingredients which keep you from feeling hungry and help metabolize fat - and the cocoa is just there to give a chocolate flavor for those who like the taste of chocolate. Similarly, the natural vanilla in the vanilla Diet wafers is there to provide a real vanilla flavor for those who prefer the taste of vanilla. I would say they taste very much like a vanilla milk shake condensed down into a solid tablet.

The Diet wafers are NOT a "diet pill" - even though they are formed in the shape of a large pill. You do not swallow them whole, for they are too large to swallow whole and you could choke on them! You chew them or suck on them. Or you can break them up or crush them and swallow the small pieces with water.

Unlike the "diet pills" you often see advertised, Affinity's Original One Day Diet wafers do NOT contain any kind of drugs, stimulants, or dangerous herbs meant to suppress your appetite or speed up your metabolism. The Diet wafers keep you from feeling hungry simply by supplying a measured amount of natural dehydrated cane juice and other natural ingredients per hour. They contain proteins to help avoid any loss of muscle cells while dieting, and an amino acid called L-carnitine to help metabolize stored fat (i.e. burn fat as energy).

The way the wafers control hunger is no different than the way eating any carbohydrate (except refined sugar) keeps you from feeling hungry after you eat. Your body digests it and converts it to glucose. There is just enough natural unrefined sugar in the 2 Diet wafers you eat per hour to keep your blood glucose level at normal levels and avoid any feelings of hunger - but not enough to supply your body's energy requirements for the day, so it has to burn fat to get the extra glucose it needs.

The fructose in unrefined raw sugar cane is not converted to glucose as quickly as refined sugar (sucrose) or alcohol, and does not trigger an insulin reaction which drives down your blood glucose level and makes you hungry again - which is what happens when you eat refined sugar. If you consume sucrose it is quickly converted to glucose right in your stomach and you to get "too much, too fast", so your blood glucose level goes abnormally high. The hormone insulin causes the excess glucose to be stored as fat - which is why refined sugar makes you fat. You don't want to be triggering a release of insulin because it makes your body STORE FAT. That's the opposite of what you are trying to do on your Diet!

If you want to lose weight and keep it off, try to limit the amount of refined sugar you get in your food supply - which is difficult because nearly every processed food has sugar added to it. No wonder we are all getting fat! Cutting down on processed foods and soda pop is the best way to avoid sugar. Make your own food, and you can control what goes into it. Better yet, eat more raw fruits and vegetables instead of the processed versions.

The Diet wafers are quite small - about one inch in diameter. If you stack three U.S. 25-cent coins on top of each other, that is about the size of one Diet wafer. It is not their size or bulk that keeps you from feeling hungry, it is the ingredients they contain. They are meant to provide basic nutrients and keep you from feeling hungry, but are not meant to be a satisfying food.

So there you have some information about what to expect and what not to expect from the One Day Diet wafers. Now, let's discuss why a few people say they can't eat the wafers, or don't like to eat the wafers.

A small percentage of the people who try the One Day Diet have difficulty eating the Diet wafers, either because they do not like the taste or the texture - or because they are "lactose intolerant".

Being lactose intolerant means a person cannot digest the lactose (and caseine) found in milk or dairy products, and eating those foods can create cramps or a feeling of nausea. Because the Diet wafers contain "condensed milk" and "whey protein " - two ingredients found in cow's milk - if a person cannot drink milk or eat dairy products without feeling ill, then they simply cannot eat the Diet wafers either. The only solution for people who can't tolerate milk or dairy products is to NOT try the One Day Diet. It's just not for you if you can't drink milk or eat dairy products, so please don't even buy the One Day Diet. Sorry, but you are just going to have to try some other weight loss plan.

Well, there is one possible solution... there is a product which can help digest lactose, and this might work with the Diet wafers. I believe it is used to create a brand of milk called "Lactaid"(tm), which even people who are lactose-intolerant can drink. It might be worth a try, but I cannot say that it will work for you. You will have to find out where to buy the product that lets you digest lactose, and it will mean an extra expense if you have to take that product every time you need to eat your Diet wafers.

Milk products like "whey protein" are also found in most "coffee whitener" or "coffee creamer" products like CoffeeMate(tm), and this gives the Diet wafers a similar texture to those products - somewhat "chewy". While most people find the Diet wafers tasty, or at least palatable, a small percentage of people just don't like that texture and thus don't enjoy eating the Diet wafers. I would have to say that once you bite into the crunchy Diet wafers and start chewing them, it is a bit like eating CoffeeMate(tm). Yes, I have tried eating a spoonful of hazelnut flavored CoffeeMate - and I liked it. But some people do not. As with any food or food product, it's a matter of personal taste. (By the way, DO NOT use any coffee whitener powders or liquid non-dairy "creamer" products in your coffee or tea if you want to drink it on your Diet Days, for those products likely contain refined SUGAR or glucose. You cannot burn off stored fat when you are putting refined SUGAR into your body!)

Solution: If you are one of the few people who just don't like the taste or the texture of the Diet wafers, then I can only suggest that you break up the wafers into small pieces and mix them in with some fruit, or crush them into a powder and mix them with water or a little fruit juice (or a little low-fat milk if that's the only way you can do it). Or break the wafer into pieces small enough to swallow quickly with a little water, like a small pill. You don't HAVE to chew them or suck them. Whatever way you can get them into your stomach will make the One Day Diet work for you.

But if those methods don't work for you, then you might consider whether it is more important to LIKE the Diet wafers, or to like losing weight with a safe, simple, easy, and effective weight loss plan like the One Day Diet. It's a little like taking a medicine which does you good, but doesn't taste good to you... if you want the benefits, you may just have to take it anyway, even if you don't like the taste. It's up to you.

You will just have to choose whether you can put up with some Diet wafers every second day, or whether you should just give up on the One Day Diet and try something else. But please consider that you probably tried a lot of other diet plans that failed to work for you. This diet plan DOES work, and can help you lose weight fast, simply, and safely. What else are you going to do to lose weight?

I personally like the vanilla wafers, and I enjoy eating them. My wife likes the chocolate wafers best, but eats the vanilla ones too. Thousands of people have found the Diet wafers tasty and have no problem with the texture. But I can sympathize with anyone who doesn't enjoy the Diet wafers, and hope that they can at least tolerate them, because I think it is definitely worth putting up with the taste or texture to be able to lose weight so easily with the One Day Diet plan.

It's only for one day at a time, and I think you will find that the benefits of such a simple, successful and convenient weight loss plan outweigh the inconvenience of eating some One Day Diet wafers which may not taste that good to you. If you are like most people who have tried many other diet plans that failed, it might be worth your while to do the One Day Diet plan even if you don't enjoy the Diet wafers, because this diet really does work.

I was surpised when one customer told me her husband didn't want to keep doing the One Day Diet because he found it too "inconvenient" to have to eat the 2 Diet wafers every hour on Diet Days. I don't see how difficult or "inconvenient" it can be to just take out two small wafers and pop them into his mouth once per hour, but that's what I was told. Some people will come up with any excuse to self-sabotage their weight loss plans, and I think that may have been just his own personal excuse to quit. To me, taking 2 wafers per hour for 10 hours was a very small "price" to pay in order to gain all the benefits of losing the excess weight I wanted to lose. You may feel that way too - especially if nothing else you tried has worked for you.

I don't think you will find an easier diet plan than this. You get to eat all your favorite foods every second day on your Food Days, and on the Diet Days you can eat most any of your favorite fruits. The first time I tried it, I lost 20 pounds in 20 days. I never felt hungry, and I was surpised at how easy it had been to lose all that weight in less than three weeks - while eating whatever I wanted every second day. Your results may be different, but I think you will be pleased with whatever weight loss you achieve with the One Day Diet, and how simple and easy it was. Even if you don't lose weight as fast as some people do, you WILL lose weight if you faithfully follow the simple directions of the One Day Diet plan.

If there is one "rule" for the One Day Diet that you MUST never break, it is this one! If you break it, your Diet plan will fail, and you might even gain weight instead of losing weight. So please pay attention to this important weight loss warning...

You MUST get as many calories on EVERY Food Day as your body was used to getting BEFORE you started dieting. That's how much energy your body needs to survive, and if you don't supply it then you are "starving" your body, and it will automatically react to try to save you from starvation.

If you don't pay attention to this, you risk lowering your metabolism, which will prevent you from losing weight and may actually cause you to gain weight when you resume your usual diet. This is what causes the "yo yo diet" effect with many failed diet programs.

You do not have to count calories exactly, but try to eat about the same amount of food you were eating before the Diet plan started. It would be safer to eat a little MORE than to eat too much LESS. You can always burn off any extra calories, but you can't make your body raise its metabolic rate once it has lowered it - at least, not without a lot of exercise.

While it is also important to eat a balanced diet and get good nutrition on your Food Days, with regard to this "Do not diet on Food Days!" rule it is just the total calories per day than matter, not what kinds of foods you get those calories from on your Food Day. I strongly suggest you take a high-grade, full-spectrum vitamin and mineral supplement such as Affinity's Sea Energy liquid nutrition product while on your diet program (including Diet Days) to ensure that you are always getting good nutrition. But avoid taking any supplements which contain SUGAR, sucrose, or glucose.

What Makes Most Diet Plans Fail - And How To AVOID It On YOUR Diet Plan

You MUST NOT let your body sense that food is in short supply, for if you feed it LESS than its "normal" amount of calories FOR THREE DAYS IN A ROW, it will assume you are "starving" and then try to protect you by STORING FAT and lowering the rate at which it burns calories to produce energy.

This is a "survival" response programmed into the human body in ancient times when food was scarce, and you cannot do anything to change it. So be aware of it and respect it, or you may inadvertantly cause your Diet plan to fail, whether it is the One Day Diet plan or any other kind of diet program, including fasting.

When you are on a very low-carb diet and consuming far less calories than your body is used to getting to supply its energy needs, then you literally would "starve" if you kept this up for a long time. But your body will likely sense the shortage and react after just THREE DAYS of reduced calorie intake, which is why you MUST make sure that you give it the FULL amount of calories it needs on at least ONE out of every 3 days. When you are doing the One Day Diet plan with alternating Diet Days and Food Days, that would mean consuming the full "normal" amount of calories on EVERY Food Day. Don't cut calories on ANY of your Food Days if you are doing the Diet with the usual "one day on, one day off" routine.

Since in any three-day period you may have two Diet Days with 180 calories on either side of one Food Day, you MUST make sure that on the Food Day you are getting the FULL amount of calories your body usually gets when you are eating "normally". If you go three days with reduced calories, that will likely result in your body's metabolic rate being lowered - and that will effectively sabotage your efforts at losing weight! Please take this warning VERY seriously.

In other words, if you normally consume, say, 2000 calories per day while NOT on a diet, then consume that same 2000 calories on your Food Days while you are on the One Day Diet plan. Or at least eat the same amount of food you usually eat, so that the total calories you consume will be CLOSE TO that average daily calorie consumption that your body is used to.

Don't ever do two DIET DAYS in a row. Always do at least one Food Day between two Diet Days.

But you CAN do two or more FOOD DAYS in a row any time you want to, or need to. You won't lose any weight on those Food Days when you are consuming your usual number of calories per day - but you won't do any harm to your Diet plan, other than to take longer to reach your weight loss goal. You may lose some time, but you can still lose the weight. And that will be great!

You are free to choose whatever you want to do, but if you really want to lose weight with the One Day Diet, then you should choose to follow the guidelines as closely as possible and not do anything that will make you fail. This Diet plan will work, but not if you don't work the plan.

Having said that, I also know that it's human nature to bend or break the "rules" if you can get away with it, so let's be realistic and talk about how to bend those rules in an intelligent way which will not cause your weight loss program to fail like the other ones you may have tried and failed before.

If you are planning to "cheat and eat" while doing the One Day Diet, then let's make sure you can tell what foods you may be able to eat WITHOUT turning off the fat-burning process on your Diet Days, or making the entire Diet plan fail.

First, you need to go through a few Diet Days WITHOUT ANY "CHEATING" and weigh yourself each morning so you can SEE what your average weight loss per Diet day is going to be FOR YOU. It might be half a pound, one pound, or even two pounds - everyone is different. But once you know what weight loss (on average) to expect each Diet Day, then you can TELL if something you did is changing the expected results - such as making you lose LESS weight on your Diet Day, or making you gain weight on your Food Day.

When your scale tells you that something is not working, then you will know what to stop doing!

It is almost certain that eating ANY kind of refined sugar, sucrose, molasses, corn syrup, maple syrup, honey, or any food containing sugar or glucose or any of those items is going to turn off the fat-burning process on your Diet Day and cause you to lose less weight that day. Cheating by eating any foods with these ingredients is going to cost you in terms of the amount of weight you lose, and how fast you lose it - there's no doubt about it. So don't try to "cheat" that way. If you want them, eat those foods TOMORROW - on your Food Day. You only have to go without them for 24 hours - and you are going to be asleep for about 8 of those hours! How hard is that?

But there are some foods which might not affect your weight loss too much, and you may want to experiment with eating a little of one food on a Diet Day and then measure your weight loss the next morning to see if it caused you to lose less weight than usual on a Diet Day. If it makes little difference in the weight loss for the day, then you can probably "get away with" eating some of that food on your Diet Days. Personally, I found that I could put a little real table cream in my coffee on Diet Days (but I only drink about 3 or 4 mugs a day) and still lose an average of 2 pounds on my Diet Days. But if I were to try using an artificial coffee whitener (which contains sugar) I know it would cause me to lose less weight. At least there is NO SUGAR in real cream.

Some users of the One Day Diet plan ask about eating certain raw vegetables on their Diet Days because they like them better than raw fruit. I cannot tell you what effect eating vegetables on your Diet Days will have FOR YOU. You will need to experiment as above and eat just ONE type on a Diet Day and check the next morning how much weight you lost on that Diet Day. If it's close to the amount you lose when you don't cheat at all, then you can probably eat that particular vegetable (but not much of it, for it adds calories you will have to burn off) on your Diet Days without slowing down your rate of weight loss.

If you really need to eat some vegetable on your Diet Days, try eating raw celery. It is over 90% water anyway, and the fiber it contains makes you chew it for quite a while, which can satisfy your need to munch on something. Put some salt on it if you want, or any kind of spice that makes it taste interesting to you.

Just don't eat a mix of those "experimental" items on the same Diet Day, or you won't know WHICH ONE may be causing a problem! Try ONE different food you want on a different Diet Day, so you can see its real effect on your actual weight loss. Don't confuse the issue by eating more than one of those new items on the same day.

If you really feel a need to eat some of the sweeter fruits on Diet Days, or drink some fruit juice, then use the same experimental technique as above to see if one particular food item affects your weight loss on the Diet Day when you try eating it. Maybe you can "get away with" eating some other more "high-calorie" fruits you like best, or drinking some of the juice you like best.

But in general, the more extra calories you get on your Diet Days, the less weight you will lose. The difference may be too small to show up even on a scale which measures one-tenth of a pound, but you can be certain that any extra calories are going to have to be burned that day before your body goes back to burning stored fat, even if the difference in weight loss is too small to show up on the scale.

In other words, whatever you eat in addition to the 20 Diet wafers is going to cause you to lose a little less weight than you would lose if you ate only the 20 wafers and water on your Diet Day. If you are willing to lose weight more slowly, then this is not going to be much of a problem for you. But if you want to lose weight rapidly, then eat as little extra food as possible on your Diet Days. Just eat the minimum amount of raw fruit to keep you satisfied, and not feeling hungry or deprived. (But DON'T try to eat less food on your FOOD Days. Remember the warnings about lowering your metabolic rate if you get LESS calories than normal on your Food Days.)

Some people are especially concerned about losing muscle mass while on a diet to lose fat. The One Day Diet wafers do contain some protein to help prevent the loss of muscle cells, but you can also eat a little high protein food such as lean chicken or turkey breast meat (without the skin) if you wish to get more protein on Diet Days.

In most cases, what you eat on your Diet Days is not going to do much harm - other than to make you waste a day of dieting and waste some Diet wafers, by preventing you from losing as much weight as you hoped to. You might even GAIN some weight on a Diet Day if you eat the wrong food or eat too much food, but that's not very likely. So you can experiment with foods on your Diet Days without doing much harm to your overall weight loss plan. Likely, the most you will lose is TIME. You may have to lose that weight later ...but you will still be ABLE to lose it fairly quickly and easily with the One Day Diet.

But that may not be true if you break this next rule...

NEVER, NEVER ignore the "rule" about NOT CUTTING CALORIES ON FOOD DAYS. That one could make your entire weight loss plan fail, and keep you from losing any more weight at all! So don't try to diet on Food Days - just eat the same foods as you were eating "normally" and eat them in your "usual" quantity. Enjoy your Food Days and don't even think about doing any other diet or trying to cut calories or skip meals or do any "fasting". It would be better for you to consume a little MORE calories on Food Days than to consume LESS than your body expects. If your body senses a food shortage for three straight days, and it lowers its metabolic rate, then you can just forget about losing any weight. Be careful about this, and don't sabotage yourself by letting your metabolism get lowered.

You can't always measure calories exactly, so tend towards the "more" side on Food Days and don't risk letting your body sense a food shortage over a three-day period of two Diet Days with one Food Day in between. You can always burn off the extra calories on your next Diet Day - but if you let your metabolism get lowered by eating too FEW calories on Food Days, you won't be losing any weight at all. It will totally defeat your plans to lose weight by dieting, so take this "rule" VERY seriously!

If you wonder why I am "repeating" this warning here and on some other pages of my One Day Diet web sites, it's because one or two people have already made that mistake and found that now they cannot lose any weight with the One Day Diet - or any other diet program. I would hate for that to happen to you, with the result that being on this Diet plan made you worse off than you were before you started. But if YOU don't heed my many warnings, then YOU are going to make that happen. Please "Don't diet on Food Days" - so that this potential lowering of the metabolic rate never happens to you!

I also want you to be able to understand WHY this warning is so important, so read on and I will explain about how your body reacts when it senses a reduction in food intake for three days in a row or more. Dieting always involves reducing calorie intake, so this applies to ANY diet. So remember this warning even if you decide to try some other diet plan than "The Original One Day Diet" sold by Affinity Lifestyles.

Okay, so there you have learned a way to find out how much you can get away with "cheating" on this Diet plan. It might work for you in spite of a little "cheating and eating" on your "Diet Days". Just to be perfectly clear, those "Diet Days" are the days you are supposed to eat nothing but 20 Diet wafers and a little raw fruit. And the raw fruit is "optional". You don't HAVE to eat the fruit, and some users don't need to eat any fruit at all on their Diet Days because just eating the wafers is enough to satisfy their hunger.

In the sales presentation we talk about being allowed to "cheat" on the "Food Days" by eating pretty much whatever foods you want, which won't affect your weight loss unless you eat too much of the kinds of foods which would make you gain weight even when you are not on a diet - you know, processed foods with lots of refined sugar or glucose in them, cakes, candies, and ice cream, plus the "fatty" foods like fast-food hamburgers, breaded and fried chicken or shrimp or onion rings, potato chips, corn chips, French fries, bacon, mayonnaise, guacamole dip, and whipped cream (which also has lots of sugar).

We are talking about the things which have already contributed to making you overweight. They will keep doing that unless you learn to cut back on how much of them you eat on a regular basis.

On Food Days, you can have SOME of those things as a treat, and we won't call that "cheating". But don't even think you can keep over-indulging in all those fattening foods and still lose weight fast with the One Day Diet. It's a simple, speedy, safe, scientific, and successful diet plan - but it's NOT a "miracle diet" that lets you "pig out" on sugar and fat and still not gain weight! Just eat sensibly on your Food Days, and give yourself just a FEW treats in moderation (not a whole tub of ice cream or a whole bag of potato chips), and this Diet will help you lose weight fast.

But in this FAQ section I have been talking about a different kind of "cheating" which refers to "breaking the rules" of the One Day Diet plan on your Diet Days - which could cause your whole diet plan to fail.

If you are really serious about losing weight fast, then you should follow the One Day Diet guidelines exactly and not try to eat anything other than the Diet wafers and a small amount of raw fruit on your Diet Days.

With the One Day Diet, you can "cheat" all you want on your Food Days by eating the foods you like most - and you only have to go for that ONE DAY eating the wafers and fruit before you have another Food Day.

So why not try your best to do the Diet the way it was intended to be used? It's not difficult to diet for ONE day when you know you can eat your favorite foods the very next day. I did it. Many others have done it. And you can do it too.

Frankly, if you are already planning to "cheat" and not follow the guidelines for the One Day Diet plan, then you are already setting yourself up to fail. So why bother trying? Save your money and don't order the One Day Diet wafers if you aren't going to do this Diet the way it works for everyone else. If you are going to make up your own kind of diet plan, then you don't really need this one, do you?

Please do us a favor and don't order One Day Diet if you are planning to use it improperly and then claim the money-back satisfaction guarantee when YOU have made it fail. It's really not fair to make us lose money when you fail to lose weight by NOT following the instructions which DO make it succeed for most other people who do follow the instructions. We are guaranteeing that the Diet plan works, but we cannot guarantee that YOU will work at it, or let it work for you. The plan WILL work for you, if you will work the plan. But if you don't follow the plan, you won't lose the weight.

Other than under some very individual special circumstances such as a medical condition like an under-functioning thyroid gland, the only way this Diet will not work is if you have already lowered your metabolic rate on the last diet you tried, and are now unable to lose ANY weight by dieting. If that's the case, then the One Day Diet can't work FOR YOU when your lowered metabolism won't let you lose weight, no matter how much you diet or which diet plan you use.

I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to consume your "usual" number of calories on EVERY Food Day while on the One Day Diet. DO NOT DIET on any of the Food Days, do not skip meals, do not cut calories, and do not eat any less than you were eating before you started your weight loss plan. Sorry if I am repeating myself here, but I need to repeat it until EVERYBODY "gets it". One or two people have told me they were doing the Atkins Diet or South Beach Diet or some other popular diet plan on the Food Days - at the same time as they were doing the One Day Diet. Bad idea! They just didn't "get it", in spite of the repeated warnings on my web site. Do not diet on Food Days! Eat a good breakfast, don't skip any meals, and be sure to get as many calories as your body was used to getting before you started dieting.

If you DON'T follow THESE instructions, you could end up NOT losing any weight, NOT being able to lose weight on ANY diet, and perhaps even GAINING weight afterwards - or even while trying to diet. You would be better off NOT using the One Day Diet at all if you are not going to take this warning seriously.

This warning applies to ANY diet plan where you are consuming less calories than usual for three days or more in a row. But it is especially important with the One Day Diet because you are already getting far less calories than usual on each Diet Day (only 180 calories from the wafers), and if you are doing the "one day on, one day off" routine for the most rapid weight loss, then you are often having two low-calorie Diet Days with only one Food Day in between.

The idea is to break up the two very low calorie Diet Days with at least one day in between where you get your "normal" high-calorie diet - whatever is "normal" for your body and its metabolism. That way, there are never "three days in a row with reduced calories" and you don't risk having your body sense a food shortage and lower its metabolic rate. But you only have that ONE day between two Diet Days to make sure you get your "full complement" of calories and break that three-day cycle to avoid the lowering of your metabolism.

You CAN choose to lose weight more slowly by doing two or more Food Days between your single Diet Days. This will make it less likely that you could accidentally lower your metabolism - as long as you don't try to "diet" on those consecutive Food Days and get reduced calories for three days in a row. When you think "Food Day" think of eating lots of good foods you like - not eating LESS food or depriving yourself of food.

But don't go crazy and eat more than was "normal" for you, and don't "binge" on a lot of fattening foods either. Just eat like you used to eat before you went on any diet program, and try to eat a balanced, healthy diet like the one you should be eating all your life.

So if you are going to break any of the "rules" on your One Day Diet plan, be absolutly certain that you NEVER break THIS ONE - "EAT AS MUCH ON FOOD DAYS AS YOU WERE EATING BEFORE YOUR DIET STARTED - NOT LESS!". If you cut your calorie intake on the Food Day between two Diet Days, and thus let your body's metabolic rate be lowered, you can pretty well give up on losing any more weight unless you embark on a long exercise program to raise your metabolism back to where it was before. And that's not easy. You would have been better off NOT trying this Diet plan if that happens.

So if you are planning to ignore this warning or break this "rule" and are planning to diet or cut calories on your Food Days too, then please don't even try the One Day Diet. I really mean that. I don't want you to be worse off for trying this great diet plan, even if it would have been your own choice to ignore the rules which actually caused the problem. This is serious, so please take it seriously. You really don't want to let your metabolism get lowered, so don't risk it or cause it by not following this rule.

Now, having said all that, let me tell you about a way to deal with the problem if you DO happen to lower your metabolic rate, or if you seem to have "hit a plateau" where you just can't get below a certain weight no matter how carefully you are doing your Diet plan. Read about it in the answer to the following FAQ...

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What Can I Do If My Metabolic Rate Gets Lowered,
Or If I "Hit a Plateau" And Can't Lose More Weight?

Sometimes you can be losing weight with your diet plan and get down to a certain weight, but then you seem to have trouble losing any more weight no matter what you do. Why does this happen?

Before we look at the most likely reason, it would be wise to consider whether you might have been adding muscle mass to your body by exercising, or by using a product like Affinity's Lose And Snooze which helps your body build lean muscle while you sleep. Since muscle weighs three times as much as the same volume of fat, if you are adding muscle at the same time you are dieting it will increase your weight at the same time the loss of fat is decreasing it.

So, depending on the ratio of muscle being added to fat being lost, you might find your weight on the scale remains constant, or might slightly increase. Thus you may still be losing fat, even if you are not losing weight. In that case, experiencing a "plateau" in your weight loss is not really a problem, for what matters is the loss of excess FAT on your body, not the loss of excess weight on the scale.

Here is a personal account of how one user of the One Day Diet dealt with a plateau. Anne's advice is to just "stick with it!" and be patient until your body adjusts to the new weight and then resumes losing fat.

"Michael, I appreciate your calling and talking to me a few weeks back. It has been an amazing journey for me on the One Day Diet. I have now reached my goal weight of 120 pounds. I started the diet at 141 pounds approximately 6 weeks ago. This diet is unbelievable!! When I talked to you, I was a little frustrated because I had hit a plateau and could not lose the last 9 pounds, but I want to tell anybody who hits a plateau to stick with it! I even went off it for a few days, ate regularly and then went back on it, and the next day I had broken my plateau and lost another 3 pounds. I am even skinnier than before I got pregnant with my second child. It is so much fun to wear skinny clothes, and everybody has noticed the difference. The diet is easy to follow and great because you can eat what you want the next day. Anyone can follow this diet. We are travelling overseas to see family that we have not seen in 6 years, and I feel so confident that I have reached my goal!! I highly recommend this diet to everyone. All you have to lose is your unwanted weight!!" Anne Gueta, Prospect, KY USA P.S.  If anyone would like to email me or call me to hear more in depth about my success and how the diet works, please contact me at eagueta@yahoo.com or call me at 502-425-0567.

If gaining muscle is not what caused the apparent "plateau", then the most likely reason is that you have somehow caused your body to lower its basal metabolic rate, which is the rate at which it burns calories to create the basic energy it needs to function normally each day. This is most likely due to your body experiencing a shortage of food for three days in a row, and interpreting this as a sign that you are "starving". It then reacts by lowering the rate at which it burns calories to create energy, in order to conserve its fuel supply.

It's something like lowering the thermostat in your home to conserve gas or electricity. But while it is easy to lower your metabolism, it is quite difficult to raise it again if you do. It will likely take a lot of exercise and eating foods which tend to raise your metabolic rate.

One such food which does a very good job of increasing metabolic rate or "raising your metabolism" may come as a complete surprise to you. But you should learn about this unique food, because it may help you get past a "plateau" in your weight loss plan, where you just can't seem to lose any more weight. Or if you have already lowered your metabolism before starting the One Day Diet, it may help you get it back to normal so the One Day Diet can do its job of helping you lose more weight.

And if you find it very difficult to lose weight because you have an under-active thyroid gland or other thryroid condition, this food may help increase your thyroid function and let you lose weight.

This may be hard to believe at first, but there is one kind of "saturated fat" which actually helps you lose weight! It is the only vegetable oil which is a Medium Density Lipid (MDL), and it is the shorter chain of molecules that gives it some unique properties. It is the only fat or oil which is NOT stored as fat when you eat more than your body needs for energy. It is burned (metabolized) to produce energy like a carbohydrate, so it gets used up instead of being stored in your fat cells like other kinds of fats and oils.

It is also the only vegetable oil which is naturally solid at room temperature, and the only organic oil which does not go rancid when exposed to oxygen. A "rancid" oil or fat will have been partially turned into trans-fats, which are known to cause cancer. Burning an oil or fat can also produce trans-fats, but this oil can be used to cook food at very high temperatures without burning, so it's much safer as a cooking oil than any other vegetable or animal oil. If you have cooked in a Chinese wok at high heat, you know that you need to use peanut oil to withstand the high temperatures. You can also use this special MDL vegetable oil for cooking in a wok or stir-fry pan.

But let's get back to the real reason you would want to consume this particular vegetable oil, which is because it has the ability to cause your body to raise its metabolic rate, and even increase the activity of your thyroid gland. People who have an under-active thyroid usually gain weight as a result, and find it very difficult to lose weight even when they work hard at a weight loss program. So this special oil can be very helpful to them, as well as being very helpful to you if you accidentally lower your metabolism while on a diet.

Have you already guessed what vegetable oil this might be? No, it's not soybean oil or canola oil or olive oil - those oils which you have been told were "good" for you. It's actually the oil which you were told was "bad" for you! But it never was. Back in the 1990s you were lied to by the producers of a competing vegetable oil so you would buy more of their product instead. Now doctors are recommending this MDL vegetable oil to patients who have a thyroid problem. And it is even being fed to infants in hospitals, because it is the only oil which contains Lauric Acid, which is a component of human breast milk.

Still don't know which oil this is? You may be shocked when I tell you it is coconut oil, also known as palm oil. Years ago, the soybean industry undertook a kind of "smear" campaign against palm oil in an effort to gain market share for their own soy products, and it worked very well. For years, people believed that palm oil was bad and soy oil was good for them. But now the truth is being known. An organically-grown and properly processed palm oil or coconut oil is actually good for you, better than most other animal oils and vegetable oils, even olive oil. And it is the only one which can help you lose weight.

So if you end up having trouble getting below some particular weight, you can try eating some virgin coconut oil to help raise your metabolic rate and burn more calories per day. Virgin or extra-virgin means the oil has been cold pressed or naturally extracted to preserve its full nutritional value, as opposed to being treated with heat or chemicals, which destroys some of those nutrients. You have to make sure you are getting coconut oil that was processed in the right way to preserve all its natural properties. And among the good-quality, organically-grown and processed coconut oils there are many variations in taste. It may take some trial and error to find the brand you can trust, and which also tastes good to you.

Affinity Lifestyles markets a high-quality, organically-grown Extra-Virgin Coconut Oil which is ultra-pure, translucent white in color, and with a very pleasant, mild, coconut flavor. It can be used in place of butter or lard or margarine for baking, and used for cooking at even the highest temperatures, such as when cooking with a Chinese wok.

Some doctors advise eating two to three tablespoons of pure coconut oil per day to aid with weight loss, or to increase one's thyroid activity.

So there you have a possible "solution" to the problem of having lowered your metabolism. Use extra-virgin coconut oil in your cooking or baking, or just eat two tablespoons of the solid coconut oil per day and see if the weight soon starts coming off again as you do your Diet plan. It looks like pure white lard and has a similar texture, but has a pleasant and light coconut taste, so it's not hard to just put a tablespoonful in your mouth and feel it melt. It is solid at room temperature, but melts at 76 degrees Fahrenheit. You can even use it as a sun tan oil (without any additives that might cause allergies) or a skin softener or hair gel, for it melts on your skin! (Do NOT microwave coconut oil to melt it or warm it up. Microwaves destroy the nutrient value and might make the oil dangerously hot.)

Before discussing the procedure for claiming a refund under the money-back guarantee, let me say that I would be pleased to get a phone call from you if you are having any trouble with losing weight on the One Day Diet. There might be something you are unknowingly doing wrong that I could point out to you. Or you might just need some encouragement from someone who did the Diet successfully. Or if there is something about the Diet wafers or the Diet plan itself that is a problem for you personally, then I'd like to know about it. Maybe I can help you solve that problem - or if not, then I can help you get your money back under the Affinity satisfaction guarantee.

Please take a moment to read this before you decide that the One Day Diet will not work for you. The One Day Diet plan really does work for most of the people who use it correctly, so please check that you have not done any of the following things which might have prevented it from working for you...

(1) If on your Diet Days you ate or drank ANYTHING except the 20 Diet wafers, some fresh raw fruit (as it came from the tree), and pure drinking water without anything added, then please check that you have not eaten ANY of the items in part (2). If on your Food Days you were trying to do some other diet at the same time, or were skipping meals, especially breakfast, then stop doing that. EAT YOUR BREAKFAST every day. It's important. And on your Diet Days, start eating your Diet wafers soon after you wake up and keep eating them every hour for at least ten hours (yes, you can eat some extra wafers beyond the 20 if you are used to eating food at night and now get hungry at night - though you really should not eat within three to four hours before going to bed).

(2) Two things which will stop the fat-burning process on Diet Days and prevent weight loss are REFINED SUGAR (sucrose or glucose) and any form of ALCOHOL.
Refined sugar, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, sucrose, or glucose must NOT be ingested in ANY form on your Diet Days or you simply will not burn off fat and lose weight. Often these substances are hidden in many kinds of processed foods and in so-called "energy drinks" and "fruit drinks", so you really must read the list of ingredients on the label to watch out for them. Also watch out for "corn syrup solids".

If you keep drinking coffee or tea on your Diet Days (which you should do if you are already addicted to the narcotic drug caffeine, so you don't suffer "withdrawal symptoms" like drowsiness, fatigue, or headaches), then you must NOT use refined sugar or raw cane sugar or brown sugar or honey or corn syrup or maple syrup - or any kind of coffee whitener or cream substitute, for they invariably contain SUGAR.

Also note that fruit juices contain a high proportion of fructose compared to the raw fruit itself (and apple juice is sometimes "sweetened" with sugar). Fructose is a type of natural sugar with a longer-chain molecule than sucrose or dextrose or glucose, so it is okay to ingest in limited quantities on your Diet Days (it is in the raw fruit).

But too much fructose will let your body convert it to energy instead of having to burn fat to get energy, so too much fructose (and too much raw fruit) will just reduce the amount of weight you lose on a Diet Day. You need SOME natural sugar like cane juice or fructose to maintain your blood sugar level, but ingesting too much will just let your body use it instead of fat to produce glucose to supply energy for your body cells, so you will burn off LESS fat that day. You lose weight on Diet Days because you are not giving your body enough carbohydrates to supply all of its daily energy needs, so it HAS to burn stored fat to supply the energy it needs. All types of alcohol and all types of sugar, including fructose, are carbohydrates that your body can use to convert to glucose, which is the only "fuel" your body cells can use for energy.

But sucrose and alcohol have the unique property of being too easily converted to glucose right in your stomach, and they cause too rapid an increase in the level of glucose in your blood, which in turn causes your pancreas to secrete insulin into your bloodstream to quickly metabolize the excess glucose, which then causes your blood glucose level to drop down too far, which makes you feel hungry again. See how eating sugar makes you hungry? When you are trying to go all day on a 300-calorie diet, the last thing you need is to get feeling hungry!

So you must avoid all refined sugar and alcohol, and just get a limited amount of raw cane sugar and fructose from the Diet wafers and raw fruit - which is enough to maintain your blood glucose level WITHOUT causing the insulin reaction that causes hunger. You need a certain amount of the unrefined sugar to prevent hunger, but you don't want to get too much raw sugar or fructose, and you don't want to get ANY refined sugar or alcohol on your Diet Days.

(3) On Diet Days you are advised to eat only RAW FRUIT - not canned fruit, not processed fruit, not fruit jams or jellies, not fruit juice, and certainly not "fruit drinks" or fruit-flavored syrups (they contain SUGAR). You should not eat any dried fruit unless you are certain there is no SUGAR added (such as in banana chips), and you should avoid raisins and dates because they have too high a concentration of fruit sugar (fructose).

And you are NOT advised to eat any VEGETABLES - just FRUIT. Avocados and tomatoes are actually fruits, but you should avoid them on Diet Days. Vegetables contain STARCH, which is easily converted to SUGAR. Remember that the ONLY thing you eat on Diet Days other than the Diet wafers is RAW FRUIT. Period. If you were eating anything else, that may be the reason your One Day Diet plan did not work for you. If you were eating the most sweet-tasting fruits like grapes and pineapple, or high-fructose dried fruits like raisins or dates, try to avoid them now and eat high-fiber and less sweet fruits like apples and peaches instead. You'll get more of a "full" feeling with far less calories. If you were eating a LOT of fruit, try to eat less fruit and drink more water.

And make sure you eat your 2 Diet wafers EVERY hour so you don't feel hungry and want more fruit - or get tempted to "cheat". Don't try to do the One Day Diet without eating ALL the wafers each day - 2 per hour for the first 10 hours after waking, and a few more if you happen to feel hungry at night.

(4) Here is the MAIN reason why some people fail to lose weight on the One Day Diet - and this applies to ANY diet plan...
If you have LOWERED your body's metabolic rate, then you will find it very difficult to lose any weight at all - and you might gain weight even if you are eating "normally" or eating less calories than usual. If your body's basal metabolism (the rate at which your body uses energy to survive and function properly while at rest) had been lowered BEFORE you started the One Day Diet, then you would likely NOT lose weight on this Diet - or on ANY kind of diet program.

If you did not pay attention to the repeated warnings about getting as many calories on EVERY Food Day as you were getting BEFORE you started the Diet plan, then you may have lowered your metabolic rate when your body sensed a reduction in calories for three or more days in a row. You must NOT "diet" on your Food Days - and that means don't skip meals, don't cut calories, don't do any other kinds of diet plans, and don't get LESS calories than your body was used to getting before you started the Diet plan. If you WERE doing any of these things, then you may have caused your body to lower its metabolic rate, and then you won't be able to lose weight. It's not the Diet plan that is the problem, it's the lowering of your metabolism that is the problem.

If you ignored the warnings and tried to do two or more Diet Days in a row, then you likely reduced the number of calories your body was getting for three or more days in a row, which would result in your body sensing a "food shortage" and lowering its metabolic rate to conserve energy and help you survive. Once your metabolism is lowered, it will be very difficult to lose weight by dieting. You will need to start a regular exercise program, and perhaps start eating the special vegetable oil discussed in the previous section.

We guarantee that the One Day Diet works if you follow the instructions for using it. But we cannot guarantee that you will follow the instructions to use it properly. If you are not satisfied with the results, Affinity will still refund your money, but it would seem a little unfair to claim the guarantee if your Diet plan failed simply because you didn't make the effort to follow the guidelines that make it work for everyone else.

(5) If you have an under-active thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), then you have probably gained weight in the past and are always having difficulty in losing weight, no matter what you do. The One Day Diet cannot help you if your body is resisting any attempt at losing weight - either because of low thyroid activity or because of a reduction in your metabolic rate. (Consider using the Extra-Virgin Coconut Oil discussed above to help increase your thryroid activity. You are advised to consult your personal physician before starting any diet program or special diet.)

(6) If you are on an active exercise program or body-building program at the same time you are using the One Day Diet, then you may be adding muscle cells at the same time as you are reducing the amount of fat stored in your fat cells. Since muscle weighs nearly THREE TIMES as much as the same volume of fat, then you might actually be losing fat but not seeing a reduction in overall body weight - because adding muscle increases weight and this might be over-compensating for the loss of weight caused by a reduction in stored fat. You might even be gaining some weight while actually losing some fat. Because the muscle weighs nearly three times as much as the fat, you are more likely to be gaining pounds than losing pounds.

Adding muscle while losing fat is a GOOD thing - but it may not show up as a net loss of weight, as measured by your bathroom scale. You may think your Diet plan is failing, yet if you are gaining muscle at the same time you are losing fat, then your One Day Diet plan IS doing its job of reducing the amount of fat stored in your body. You just don't SEE that you are losing fat when you get on the scale - but you CAN see that you are losing fat when your waist line is losing inches, even if you don't see any loss of weight measured by your scale. It's really the INCHES that matter, not the POUNDS. You don't diet to lose pounds, but to lose FAT.

(7) If you were eating TOO MUCH food on your Food Days, or were eating too much food that contains sugar, then you may have been consuming more calories than your body needed, and the excess calories would have been stored as fat, and you may have been gaining more weight on the Food Days than you were losing on the Diet Days. You are supposed to "eat normally" on your Food Days - but that does not mean you can "pig out" or eat a lot of fattening foods, or eat a lot more food than you were eating before you started the Diet. You can eat nearly any food you like, and you are supposed to get AS MANY calories as your body was used to getting before you started dieting - but you are not supposed to get much MORE calories than you were used to getting. Not less, and not more - but as close to the SAME amount of calories as you can estimate. In other words, eat the same foods you were eating before, and in the same quantity.

You can still have a few "treats" to reward yourself for doing another Diet Day, but you should not be indulging in TOO MUCH food or too much of the sugary or fatty foods which cause you to gain weight. If you have been over-eating on your Food Days, then even if you were actually losing weight on the Diet Days, you may have gained it back on your Food Days and your net weight loss would be small - and then you would think your One Day Diet plan was not working for you. There is no way around it... to lose weight you have to consume less calories than your body needs each day. You lose weight fast on a Diet Day by consuming only 180 calories from the Diet wafers and a little more from the raw fruit. Then on the following Food Day you should be consuming your "usual" number of calories to maintain your weight, but not too many "extra" calories which would cause you to gain weight.

So what CAN you do if any of the above things has resulted in your One Day Diet plan failing to cause a reduction in weight?
Well, you can STOP doing the things mentioned above which are sabotaging your weight loss program. Follow the guidelines or "rules" for the One Day Diet plan EXACTLY, and see if you do start losing weight over the next few Diet Days. If you are on an exercise or body-building program, stop doing your work-outs for a few days while doing the Diet, and see if your scale starts to show a net loss of weight.

If you were gaining weight on your Food Days, cut down on the total amount of food you eat, and try to cut down on the SUGAR you get in your food. There is sugar or glucose added to almost every kind of processed food, so try to eat more "natural" foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, and eat less processed foods and sugar-laden bottled condiments like BBQ sauce, tomato catsup, salad dressings, and especially mayonnaise. Try to avoid potato chips, corn chips, snack foods, fried foods, and bacon. And go easy on the candies, cookies, and ice cream!

Try to exercise more often, even if it's only going out for a brisk walk for 10 or 20 minutes. If you can exercise or go walking on your Diet Days, you will burn off more fat - because your moving muscles will require more glucose, and the only way to get it is to burn more fat because on Diet Days you don't have enough carbohydrates in your body to convert to glucose to supply the extra demand. If you only have time to walk or exercise every second day, try to schedule it for your Diet Days instead of your Food Days (when you will have lots of carbohydrates in you).

If you HAVE been doing the Diet plan exactly according to the guidelines, and have not "cheated" at all, and have not been eating TOO much raw fruit on your Diet Days, and have not been eating TOO much food on your Food Days, then if you have still not lost any weight you may have a thryroid problem and should consult your personal physician to see if that is the problem. Or you may have already lowered your metabolic rate while trying another diet plan BEFORE you started the One Day Diet plan - or by trying to "starve" yourself, or by "fasting" for more than three days in a row. Even skipping breakfast may have caused your body to lower its metabolic rate because it was not getting enough calories per day. Skipping breakfast will usually cause you to gain weight, even though you think it is a good way to reduce calories.

Remember, when you get LESS calories than your body needs, and this occurs for more than three days in a row, your body interpets it as a "food shortage" or "starvation" and it will lower your metabolic rate and try to store as much fat as possible! Then you CAN'T lose weight even when you are on a diet program. Continually skipping meals can create this situation. And skipping breakfast after going all night without any food at all can cause cravings which tempt you to eat some sugary or fatty snack food later in the morning. If you have no time for breakfast, grab a piece of fruit and eat it on the way to work.

Avoid the donuts and sugary snack foods, for eating refined sugar just makes you crave some MORE sugar half an hour later. And note that using two teaspoons of white or brown sugar in your coffee adds 30 calories PER CUP. Adding two of those little containers of table cream adds another 60 calories PER CUP. So if you are drinking "double double" coffee and drinking four cups per day, you are consuming 360 EXTRA calories per day just from drinking that coffee. That's twice as much as you get from the 20 Diet wafers in a whole Diet Day! Switch to an artificial sweetener (or use the natural herb Stevia) and switch from cream to low-fat milk, and you could cut out a lot of calories per day. Eating 360 extra calories per day for 10 days will add one pound of fat. You may have been gaining weight just from the sugar and cream in your coffee! You can lose weight by being aware of this and choosing to use a sugar and cream substitute, or learning to drink your coffee black.

The only way to raise your metabolic rate is to exercise regularly, and it may take a while for it to go up again to the point where you can lose weight again. There is one other method that might work for you, though I certainly cannot guarantee it... you might try eating 2 or 3 tablespoons of extra-virgin coconut oil per day, because this has been claimed to cause an increase in metabolic rate, and even an increase in thyroid activity. Affinity sells an ultra high-quality extra-virgin coconut oil, but I would suggest you look for a good quality coconut oil in your local health stores so you can get it fast and try using it before your 30-day guarantee period runs out. I tried this myself (with the Affinity coconut oil) when I hit a "plateau" after easily losing about 30 pounds with the One Day Diet, and I think it is what helped me get through that barrier and lose another ten pounds.

Use the search engines to do some research on the Internet concerning "virgin coconut oil" and you may find a page I have seen where a doctor recommends taking three tablespoons of coconut oil per day to raise your metabolic rate. (It sounds crazy to be eating a saturated fat like coconut oil to lose weight, but this is a very unique kind of "medium density lipid" or "MDL" that has properties unlike any other fat or oil. It is even fed to infants in hospitals, and contains a beneficial substance (lauric acid) which is also found in human breast milk. All other oils are "high density lipids" or "HDL". Coconut oil is the only fat that is not usually stored as fat in the body, but is metabolized like a carbohydrate. It is the only fat or oil that does NOT go rancid when exposed to air, and that does NOT convert to cancer-causing trans-fats when it is heated to high cooking temperatures. And it is the only vegetable oil which is naturally a solid at room temperature - the other vegetable oils like canola or corn or soybean oil must be "hydrogenated" to make them solid enough to use as margarine, which has the effect of turning a naturally unsaturated oil into a man-made "saturated" fat. You can use coconut oil as a healthier substitute for butter and lard and margarine in your cooking and baking, and use it instead of the HDL oils for high temperature cooking or frying. You can even use it as an all-natural skin softener or sun tan lotion!)

If you are having trouble losing weight on the One Day Diet plan, I would respectfully request that you call me personally at the number below so that I can try to help you try to make it work before you give up on it completely. There might be some little thing you overlooked, or some little thing you are doing wrong, and I may be able to help you figure out what it is. This diet worked great for me, and I know that it is working for the vast majority of my customers, because only a few percent of them are claiming a refund under the guarantee - and many have called me and told me how much weight they have lost with the One Day Diet. Some have told me they lost so much weight in a short time that even I find it hard to believe. One lady told me she had been eating ice cream and French fries on every Food Day. I thought she was going to say the Diet didn't work, but then she mentioned that she had still lost 7 pounds in 2 weeks!

If you have decided to claim your "30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee" you will first need to contact us at 905-891-7436 MONDAY to SATURDAY from 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time (GMT-8) to get an authorization number for returning the product for a refund. This number is also where you should call FIRST about any shipping or billing problems.

Please call me if the matter is not resolved to your satisfaction, and I will follow up for you as your personal Distributor. (I am also Affinity's biggest distributor of the One Day Diet.)

So feel free to phone me at my home number, any day from 11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time (same as New York or Miami). Just don't call me before 11 AM, or you may get a sleepy guy you just woke up after a late night working on the Internet! Here's my home phone number: 905-891-7436. If you are worried about long distance fees, just ask me to call you back at my expense - as long as you are in the USA or Canada.

Now I do know that the One Day Diet really works, because I lost 20 pounds in 20 days while using it for the first time in April 2003 when I was a new customer, before I became an active distributor of Affinity natural health products. But YOU won't really know that until after you try it yourself, so we want you to be able to try this great weight loss product "risk free". Let us take the risk for you, by offering you a money-back guarantee.

Although the overall "failure rate" for all diet plans started by people in the USA is about 88%, which makes it pretty risky for the seller of a weight loss product to offer a satisfaction guarantee, Affinity Lifestyles is so confident in the "success rate" of the Affinity One Day Diet plan that we have included it with all the other Affinity products which are sold with a 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee.

All we ask of you is that you be serious about losing weight and sincerely make an effort to follow the Affinity One Day Diet plan guidelines. (Actually, it turned out to be not much of a risk to guarantee this Diet plan, because only a few percent of my thousands of One Day Diet customers have requested a refund - and some of those had unforeseen reasons to stop dieting, such as discovering that they were pregnant or discovering that they had a medical condition and should not be dieting now. I think that my customers do well with the One Day Diet because I believe in providing them up-front with all the information they need to make an intelligent decision when choosing this diet program, and providing enough detailed instructions to ensure that they can do the diet plan the right way and get the weight loss results they really want. Now you know why the pages on my web site are so long!)

ALL the natural health products marketed by Affinity Lifestyles Inc. through its Independent Distributors come with a "30-Day Money-Back Guarantee" which starts on the date the product is delivered by UPS or the US Postal Service. If the opened bottle is received AFTER the 30-day guarantee period, there will be no refund.

In all cases, you will need to phone to obtain an authorization number before returning a product for a refund. Call Michael at 905-891-7436 during business hours MONDAY to SATURDAY from 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time (GMT-8) or 11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time (GMT-5).

I wish we could be more generous with the refund policy, but please understand that the Company is already going to lose the entire cost of the product you ordered and used (they can't resell it), plus the cost of shipping it to you, plus any other costs in handling your order and your refund. There is a limit to how much they can afford to risk losing when they guarantee YOUR success in losing weight. You only stand to lose the relatively small cost of mailing or shipping the product back to Affinity within 30 days (and you may have already saved that much on the cost of your "regular food" if you actually tried the Diet plan for more than a few Diet days).

The mailing address for returning Affinity products is listed at the end of this section. Please save the invoice which comes in your package, and save the package itself so you can use it to ship the product if necessary.

One bottle of 140 Diet wafers will last for 14 days, so do not delay if you decide to ask for a refund under the satisfaction guarantee, and allow for the time it will take to ship the bottle back to Affinity through the post office or a courier like UPS. With products like Sea Energy and PowerMax and Affinity Water and Lose And Snooze and Extra-Virgin Coconut Oil which may "leak" during shipment after the original seal has been broken, please send back just the "empty bottle" without any liquid remaining in it, and screw the top on tight. With these liquid or "leaky" products you are welcome to use the remaining product or let a friend try it, if you wish to transfer it to another container so you can ship back the empty bottle.

In order to control fraudulent claims (it happens), we must insist that the original bottle is actually returned and received before a refund can be processed. The guarantee covers the original purchase price of the product being returned, but not the cost of shipping it back to Affinity Lifestyles in Las Vegas, NV, USA. (Affinity already paid the cost of packaging, processing a credit card payment, and delivering any products which were shipped to locations in the lower 48 states of the USA.)

If you decide to return an Affinity product because you were not satisfied with the results you experienced, or for any other reason, please use the original packaging if possible and either include a copy of the original invoice, or if you have lost it, then include a written note with your full name, billing address, phone number, and email address (if possible) so that the Affinity staff can search for your original order - and so that your returned product will be credited to the appropriate account (yours). We would appreciate a short note explaining the reason you were not satisfied, to help us serve our customers better and improve our products.

You MUST write the Return Authorization Number on the OUTSIDE of the package, or delivery may be refused. Be sure to ship ONLY by a method which provides you with "proof of delivery" - such as Registered Mail - and hold onto the paperwork, just in case.

If you need to cancel your order, please call us immediately at 905-891-7436 MONDAY to SATURDAY from 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time (GMT-8). But if the product has already been shipped (within 2 business days from your Order date), then your best option is to "refuse delivery" when the UPS delivery person or mailman arrives at your door and asks for a signature (signatures are not always required, so watch for the delivery and try to get the delivery person to mark the shipment as "refused delivery" instead of just leaving it at your doorstep). And tell all the residents of your household NOT to sign for the package from Affinity in Las Vegas, NV. Then the post office or courier service will return the package to Affinity and bill them for the return shipment. Then, seeing that the delivery was refused and the product was returned, Affinity will process a credit to your credit card or issue a refund check to you after they get the product back. To follow up on your refund, you can call the number above. If you accept delivery of the product, or it is left at your door, then you will have to pay the cost of returning it yourself.

PLEASE NOTE:  Make sure that you actually ordered the product from us!

There are a few other companies selling One Day Diet wafers made by the same manufacturer, so be sure you actually ordered your product through Affinity or one of its Independent Distributors before you try to send the product back to Affinity. Obviously, if you did not buy it from us, we cannot refund the money we never received from you, and we cannot look up your information in our database if it was never entered there. (Some other independent Affinity distributors collect payment and ship the products from their own warehouse, so if you ordered from another Affinity distributor (not from me), then please contact that distributor directly to claim your refund, instead of sending your product to Affinity headquarters. In other words, send it back to the place it was shipped from. If you send it to the wrong place, you can't expect to get a refund, and you may not get your package back.)

WARNING: I frequently receive phone calls from people who heard a "One Day Diet" commercial on their local radio station in the USA and ordered through a 1-800 toll-fee phone number. Affinity Lifestyles is running national 30-minute radio infomercials in the USA and along the Canadian border, but some shorter commercials may be from another company entirely - not Affinity and not an Affinity distributor like me. So please do NOT return THEIR product to Affinity if you did not actually order it from Affinity. Check first! There is an image of a bottle of Affinity One Day Diet wafers on this page, in the left margin below. It will say "Affinity" and "The Original One Day Diet" on the blue and yellow label, and the "Improved Formula" bottle contains 140 Diet wafers. The phone number of Affinity Lifestyles' head office in Las Vegas, NV is printed on the bottom of the label. If you purchased your product(s) from this web site, be sure to mention that your Distributor is "Michael Star Co." if you call that number.

The easiet way to tell if you did NOT order from me or from Affinity is that we DO NOT sell a product called "Sun Crystals" which some other companies and distributors are bundling with the One Day Diet wafers. (Affinity will not sell the Sun Crystals product because it contains Aspartame - a "not-natural" ingredient which may have some alleged health risks - and it may contain a stimulant which makes some people "edgy". The One Day Diet works just fine without taking any "Sun Crystals".)

Also note that a few companies which ARE independent distributors of Affinity products might have independently chosen to obtain and sell Sun Crystals or other products along with the Affinity One Day Diet. (Those companies will be shipping the Affinity products themselves, so the products should be returned directly to them, not to Affinity Lifestyles.)

For those of you who may have ordered from the other company which advertises a different One Day Diet product on national radio, and did not save the invoice or package and have now forgotten the phone number, I am sorry I cannot help you because I don't know their name or how to reach them either. You will probably have to keep listening to the same radio station where you heard their commercial until you hear their phone number again.

There is also another company advertising One Day Diet on the major search engine sites (and bundling it with "Sun Crystals" and thus charging a higher price), but their web site does not say who they are or where they are located, and their "Contact" page shows no names or phone numbers or physical address, only an on-line form you fill out which does not show the email address. You will have to fill out their web site's Contact form to find out how to return their product to them, if you lost the original invoice or threw out the packaging. You can probably find them by doing a search on Yahoo.com for "one day diet" and looking at the "paid sponsor ads" near the top of the page where Yahoo displays ads from companies who pay to be listed there. (Personally, I prefer not to deal with any company which hides its identity and does not show a mailing address and phone number on its web site. I would wonder what they are hiding, and why they don't want anyone to know who they are. If I have a problem, how will I be able to contact them for help?)

The most economical way to ship the returned product(s) from the U.S.A. is to go to your local post office and send the package by standard Parcel Post. Delivery may take several days, so if you are close to the 30-day point since your Order Date, you may want to ship it by "express" delivery. We use UPS "3 to 5 business day" ground shipment in the mainland USA, but note that this method can take up to 5 days (and 2 more if over a weekend, because they do not deliver on Saturday or Sunday) if you live far from Nevada.

If in doubt about how to best ship your returned product(s), call us at 905-891-7436 during business hours on Monday through Saturday: 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time (same time zone as Los Angeles, CA), or 11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time (same time as New York, NY), and tell the customer care rep you wish to return a product.

Please call the above number to obtain an authorization number BEFORE you send back the product.
Then follow the instructions for sending back the product, as given by the customer care person.
Write down the number you called and the name of the person you spoke to, just in case you need to follow up later on.

Please ship all Affinity product(s) to:

Affinity Lifestyles Inc.
Dept. Q
3035 Patrick Street, Suite #15
Las Vegas, Nevada,
U.S.A.  89120

Don't forget to write the Return Authorization Number on the OUTSIDE of the package, and include a photocopy of the invoice or a note with your full name and contact information! If you send a package with no information about who sent it, then Affinity cannot issue a refund to you because they won't know who you are!

If you paid for your order by credit card, a credit will be issued on the same credit card within a reasonable time after the returned product is actually received at Affinity headquarters in Las Vegas, NV. If you paid by a U.S. dollar money order or bank draft, your refund will be mailed to you in the form of a company check. So please allow a reasonable time for the product to arrive at Affinity and your refund to be processed and mailed to you before expecting your refund check to arrive.

Thank you for trying the One Day Diet and/or our other Affinity natural health products! I hope we can be of service to you again whenever one of our other products may help you.

You can use the link below to order any of the Affinity natural health products on-line. If you are reading this from a page printed on paper, the hyper link will not work by clicking on it, so use the full URL which is printed just below the link. Just copy it or type it into the address window of your web browser (such as InternetExplorer) while connected to the Internet.

This on-line Order Form is installed on a "secure server" which encrypts all the data you type in with a 128-bit security code to prevent any unauthorized parties from reading your credit card information. You can check that the little "padlock" icon on your browser appears "closed" instead of open, which indicates you are then connected to a secure server. (It is actually safer to order by credit card using a secure server on the Internet than to hand over your credit card to a restaurant waiter or a gas station attendant.) You may see a reference to "Diethunter.com" on the Order Form, since I am presently using the secure server of my business partner to handle my customers' on-line orders. (Don't worry, I am still your Distributor and will be available for personal service. My contact information is at the end of this section. - Michael)

You may pay with any major credit card, or may mail a US dollar money order. Please have your credit card at hand when you place your order. (If you wish to pay in advance with a U.S. dollar money order, you will need to place your order by phone.)

Click here to ORDER on-line

OR copy and paste this URL into your web browser program's address window:

https://astrologyzine.com/health/order.shtml
(Note the "s" in "https:" indicates that you will be linking into a Secure Server which protects any data you enter there)

I am presently using the secure on-line Order Form at my "AstrologyZine.com" web site, which is serviced by our own Customer Care Representative in California. When you use the URL above, you may see "AstrologyZine.com" mentioned on the form and in any emailed receipts. Orders placed there will be shipped by Affinity from Las Vegas, NV, USA.

Note that your credit card is NOT charged in real time when you first submit your Order Form at AstrologyZine.com, so you will not receive an instant confirmation of the amount charged to your card. The data you entered will be manually checked before your credit card payment is processed, and you will be contacted by our customer care staff if there is any missing information or errors on the Order Form. Please be sure to include a working email address and phone number so you can be reached if necessary. Because AOL.com and other ISPs now use overly aggressive email filtering, there is a chance your email from us may be deleted without your knowledge or consent. I suggest you use a free email address at yahoo.com because they do not filter and delete your emails as aggressively.

A confirmation of your Order showing details and total fees will be emailed AFTER it is manually processed (but only if you provided a working email address).
If your order is shipped to any of the lower 48 states of the USA there will be no shipping charges and there will be no state sales tax charged unless shipped to an address in Nevada, USA.

After your Order has been shipped by UPS another email will be sent to you from UPS.com which shows your shipping date and a tracking number and the expected delivery date. If you have NOT provided a working email address you will NOT see these confirmation letters. (Note that some orders for some "lighter" products which are below a certain shipping weight will not be sent by UPS, but by the United States Postal Service which does not provide a tracking service and does not email any delivery notices to you. ALL packages to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, Mexico and overseas will be shipped by U.S. Parcel Post, not UPS.)

You can call our Customer Care representative about shipping and tracking and accounting as it concerns your Order. Please say your distributor is "michael" or Michael Star.
Contact Alice H. using this email address: customercare@diethunter.com or contact Michael Star at: michael@star-company.com

For detailed information about the One Day Diet or other Affinity products call Michael Star at:
905-891-7436 (11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time, GMT-5, or 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time)

To get a UPS tracking number or help with shipping or accounting matters, call Alice H. at:
905-891-7470 (8 AM to 8 PM PACIFIC Time or 12 AM to 9 PM Eastern Time)

To order by telephone from OUTSIDE the USA or Canada, call the above numbers.

Please say you were referred by Member I.D. "michael" or "Michael Star Co."

If you have any problem with ordering on-line or by phone, please call me personally at
905-891-7436 from 11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time (GMT-5), any day of the week.
I will be glad to help or answer questions about the products. I use the One Day Diet, Lose And Snooze, Sea Energy PowerMax, Alli-C, Performance Specialist, and Digestion Specialist myself. - Michael

My email address is: michael@star-company.com.

Thank you for ordering our Affinity 100% natural health product(s)!

The phone number to call is listed at the end of this section.

If your Order was shipped to an address located in the lower 48 states of the USA, it was shipped by UPS ground shipment (or sometimes it will be shipped by USPS Priority Post, if the total weight is low), which can take "3 to 5 business days" to arrive. Since Affinity guarantees to ship within 2 business days from the time you place your Order, it can take up to a total of "7 business days" for your shipment to arrive. If the time period extends over a weekend, add 2 more calendar days. UPS does not usually deliver on Saturday or Sunday, and Affinity is closed on weekends. (If you ordered UPS "express shipment" at extra cost, expected delivery times will have been quoted to you when you placed your Order.)

Delivery time to Canada is typically 7 to 10 days, depending on how long the package takes to be cleared by Canada Customs. Delivery time to Europe and Asia and Australia by U.S. Parcel Post standard shipping is typically 4 to 5 weeks, depending on how long your country's customs office takes to clear the shipment.

So if your package shipped by UPS to a mainland USA address has not arrived at your door within 7 to 9 calendar days, there may be a problem with the delivery, and you should contact your local UPS office and ask them to "track" your shipment. To do this, you will need a UPS "tracking number" which you can obtain by calling the Affinity shipping department (tell the operator you need a tracking number). Then call UPS and tell them your tracking number, and they should be able to find exactly where your package is or what happened to it. UPS also has an on-line tracking service which you can use when you have your tracking number. Their URL is ups.com on the Internet.

When delivery is to be made to an office, an apartment building, or certain other types of locations where the householder may not be the one who accepts delivery, the shipment must be "signed for" by the person receiving it at that address as a security measure. If you later claim to have not received your shipment, the UPS office can tell you the name of the person who received it for you and signed for it. Please have your Order shipped only to an address where you know it will be received by a trusted person, and not exposed to theft if it gets left at the door because no one was home.

If the UPS delivery person finds no one there to sign for the shipment, he or she will leave a notice for you to call the UPS local office to arrange a second attempt at delivery. If that notice is taken away or somehow lost, you may not be aware that UPS has already tried to deliver your shipment. If there is no response from you to that notice, after a certain period of time UPS may ship the package back to Affinity.

Be aware that sometimes a delivery notice may have been stolen or blown away in the wind, or otherwise lost, and so you may not have seen it.

With a parcel that must be signed for, if your local UPS office is working efficiently, they will either make a second delivery the next business day, or try to phone you to arrange a second attempt at delivery when you are home - so make sure you have included the correct phone number with your Order.

If you expect to be away from home when the shipment arrives, try to arrange for a neighbor or someone to check your mail and look for the UPS notice, so that they can call UPS and arrange to accept the shipment themselves on your behalf if you will not be home soon to do this yourself. Or arrange to ship your product(s) to a trusted third party who WILL be there to receive the delivery. If no one accepts delivery on the second attempt, your shipment may be sent back. Or you may be asked to pay a fee for UPS to make an extra trip to deliver it to you. Or you may have to make a trip to pick it up yourself at the local UPS office.

But in most cases, the delivery of your package will not require a signature. So please be careful to have your product(s) shipped to an address where they will be safe if the delivery person leaves them at your door, or have them shipped where a trusted person is likely to be there to receive the package during business hours. The delivery person will often try to leave the package at the back door if no one is there to answer the main door - assuming that access to the back is possible. He or she might put it inside an open garage door, or in a partly concealed place at your front door, or someplace where passers-by will not notice it and be tempted to steal it while you are not there. So if you have not received your shipment within the expected time, check these places to see if it was actually delivered while you were out and left in some safer place than on your front doorstep.

If your shipment was sent to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, or any overseas country in the world, it will have been sent by U.S. Parcel Post (or express post if you requested and paid the extra fees). Delivery times will vary because of the distances involved, customs inspections at your country's border, and the efficiency of your local postal service. For shipments to Canada, expect delivery to take at least 10 days, and expect to pay the 7% federal tax (GST) on the value of the product(s) in Canadian dollars, plus a small "customs brokerage" fee, to your postman when he delivers your package. When there are taxes to be collected by your postman, the package must be signed for, and usually a delivery notice will be left if there was no one home to receive it and pay the fees. They do not take personal checks, but they will usually be able to process a credit card payment.

For shipments to Canada and other countries, please take the same precautions to avoid theft as mentioned in the section above regarding delivery by UPS to the mainland USA. Try to use a shipping address where a trusted person will be there during business hours to receive your package.

Please don't hesitate to call the number below if you think your shipment may have been lost or misdirected, but do allow a reasonable time for the order processing and shipping, such as the 7 to 9 calendar days mentioned above for mainland USA destinations. The farther you live from Las Vegas, Nevada, the longer the delivery time will be, so if you live on the East Coast of the USA, expect it to take up to 9 days.

Please wait those 7 to 9 days before you call because you are concerned that there may be a delivery problem. We sometimes have people call us about a "lost shipment" and then call us back the same day to say it just arrived a few hours later - or that they found it in the garage two days after it had been delivered.

Regarding shipment tracking or any delivery issues, please phone Alice H. at
905-891-7470 during business hours on Monday through Saturday:
9 AM to 5 PM PACIFIC Time (same time zone as Los Angeles, CA),
OR 12 PM to 8 PM Eastern Time (same as New York, NY).

If you happen to have any difficulties in contacting Alice H. or Affinity Lifestyles, please contact your personal Affinity Distributor, Michael Star, at:
Phone: 905-891-7436 (11 AM to 11 PM Eastern Time, GMT-5)
Email: michael@star-company.com

Before you ship a product back to Affinity, please make sure that you actually ordered that product from Affinity. You may have ordered from another source, because the manufacturer of One Day Diet wafers supplies them to a few different companies under different labels and in bottles of different sizes. If you ship a product to a company or distributor you did not originally order it from, you really cannot expect them to refund money you never paid to them. Click here to read the FAQ about the Money-back Guarantee for more information about checking that your product(s) came from Affinity or not.

If you wish to return a product under the Affinity 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee, please use the original packaging if possible and ship the bottle with any unused product (but not any liquid product) to this special address below, using the U.S. Post Office parcel post service, or a courier service like UPS. The cost of shipping a product back for a refund is your own responsibility, and Affinity will not accept any return shipments that require payment on delivery. For small and light shipments, you may find the U.S. Post Office is the most economical, since courier services usually have set a minumum fee of several dollars, no matter what the shipping weight is.

When returning opened bottles of any liquid product that may leak during shipment, such as Sea Energy, PowerMax, or Affinity Real Water, or one that might melt and leak, such as Extra-Virgin Coconut Oil, please send only the "empty bottle" and replace the cap tightly. But if the bottle was never opened and the seal has NOT been broken, please send back the entire bottle and contents so that the unused product may be re-sold. (If you need to empty the bottle of any remaining liquid product, then you can just dispose of the product, or use the remaining product yourself, or give it to a friend to try for themselves. But we would prefer that you use as much of the product yourself as possible, to give it a fair chance of working for you. And feel free to contact your personal Affinity Distributor to get any advice or help in using the product effectively. We are here to help you!)

Affinity Lifestyles Inc.
Dept. Q
3035 Patrick Street, Suite #15
Las Vegas, Nevada,
U.S.A.  89120

Don't forget to include a photocopy of the invoice, or a note with your full name and contact information!
If you send a package with no information about who sent it, Affinity cannot issue a refund to you because they won't know who you are. Please allow a reasonable time for your package to arrive and the refund to be processed.

For advice or help on returning a product, or help with shipment tracking or any delivery issues, or to follow up on a returned product and the proper credit to your credit card account or the issuing of a refund check, please phone Alice H., our Customer Care rep:
905-891-7470 during these hours on Monday through Sunday:
9 AM to 5 PM PACIFIC Time (same time zone as Los Angeles, CA),
OR 12 PM to 8 PM Eastern Time (same as New York, NY).

Please tell Alice that your Affinity Distributor is Member I.D. "michael" - or "Michael Star Co.".