Losing weight quickly and easily — without hunger, without exercise

With his meal plan, Michael Prgomet lost 25 kilos in 2.5 months in the summer of 2016. He’s a naturopath and has over 35 years of experience in practice. I’m Dustin Müller, and with his permission, I’m presenting here how he went about it.

Here, I’ll first share what helped Michael during his 2.5 months. After that come my own experiences and the variations that worked well for me.

The two simple rules

If you only want to remember the most important things about the method, you can get by with two rules.

Rule 1: gluten-free and rice-free, with two to three exceptions a week

This is the main focus of the method: avoiding gluten and rice as much as possible. This mainly concerns two things:

Flour products (bread, bread rolls, pasta, pizza dough, cookies, pastries, muesli with wheat): They usually contain a lot of gluten, meaning sticky protein. Gluten “gums up” the body and slows down many metabolic processes.
Rice: Michael avoided it just like wheat, rye, and barley, because rice is a grain too. Rice doesn’t contain gluten, but it does contain a lot of concentrated starch. And that’s very sticky too, as anyone who has ever forgotten cooked rice in the pot knows.

Michael uses an analogy to explain why this starch is a problem: If you leave a pot of cooked pasta at 37 degrees Celsius, which is body temperature, bacteria go to work on the starch within just a few hours, and the pasta turns sour. The same thing happens with rice and all flour products, and also with potatoes, especially starchy varieties. It’s similar in the gut: Bacteria ferment the starch, and in Michael’s experience, the breakdown products this creates put a strain on the body and slow down weight loss. That’s why Michael only rarely ate this kind of carbohydrate.

Two to three meals a week can still be completely normal, for example with pizza, döner, pasta, rice, or bread rolls. The important thing is to spread them out over different days. Pizza three times in one day would be too much for the gut at once. This way, the gut has time to recover in between. Michael did exactly that and still lost 25 kilos.

Rule 2: Sinning is allowed, just not at cruise-ship levels

Just so we’re clear: This doesn’t mean a wedding feast where you stuff yourself to the brim until you keel over. Or a cruise ship where you eat to the max and think: “The pepper will take care of it.”

What doesn’t work: five bars of chocolate a day plus cheese fondue with bacon on the side. That won’t work even with pepper.

But: A bar of chocolate, a glass of cola, a bag of chips, or a few spoonfuls of ice cream in the evening are completely okay. Michael allowed himself exceptions like these too.

And this is really important: You don’t have to go hungry. Throughout the day, you can eat until you’re full. But by full, Michael doesn’t mean stuffed, as in so full that you can barely move because your stomach feels tight. He only ever ate until the empty feeling in his stomach was gone. Then maybe there was still the feeling that it tasted good, but no real desire left to keep eating.

Why calories still matter in the end

Even though the method boosts the metabolism, in the end the body has to use more energy than it takes in, and that’s over the week as a whole. But you don’t have to count calories for that. Michael never did either.

For you, that means:

If you want to lose weight as quickly as possible, you keep your fast food, chips, chocolate, and cola intake lower.
If you build in a few more sins, you’ll still lose weight, just more slowly. The prerequisite is that Rule 1 holds and that pepper, curry, and nutrients are consistently part of it.
If you go totally overboard, you won’t lose weight but can even gain weight despite the method.

How Michael put the plan into practice

Here’s what Michael’s everyday life with the method looked like in concrete terms:

Michael’s reality (2.5 months, 25 kg)

Two to three meals a week completely normal, like before: pizza, döner, pasta, rice, or bread rolls, spread out over different days
Around 1.5 liters of cola a week, eight to ten large bottles in total
Now and then, candy, chips, or chocolate, but usually just a handful or two from the bag of chips or a piece of chocolate. He didn’t have cravings, just a desire for the taste.
The rest of the week: consistently gluten-free and rice-free, with pepper, curry, and nutrients

Michael never went in for strict self-flagellation along the way. And still the kilos came tumbling off.

Michael’s typical daily routine

This was Michael’s personal standard routine. Important to note: You can certainly eat more or use other foods. An extra meal isn’t a problem either, as long as you generally stick to the two rules.

In the morning

Fresh fruit, vegetables, and cheese
Depending on appetite, meat or a small vegetable skillet as well
A glass of water with vitamins and nutrients of the kind used in high-performance sports: B vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K), water-soluble omega-3 fatty acids, and Q10

In the morning, Michael usually only ate a few spoonfuls, until he no longer felt hungry.

At lunch and in the evening

For both meals, Michael had his tried-and-true vegetable skillet.

The main ingredients of the vegetable skillet:

Corn, mushrooms, onions
Fried in high-quality coconut oil
Depending on what you’re in the mood for, other vegetables too, for example zucchini, peas, carrots, tomatoes, or green beans
Plus meat or tofu

Spices and add-ins with a targeted effect:

1 teaspoon of ground black pepper per vegetable skillet, so one at lunch and one in the evening. The pepper increases the burning of fats and carbohydrates in the body.
1 teaspoon of curry powder, also per vegetable skillet. The curry powder reduces inflammatory reactions when acids and harmful substances are released from the fat cells as you lose weight.
Enough fresh cream or sour cream. This provides filling fats and mellows the heat of the pepper and curry so the stomach doesn’t get irritated.

Important note on the pepper: If you have a sensitive stomach, reflux, or gastritis, are pregnant, or take prescription medication, please check with your doctor or naturopath first. That’s because the piperine from the pepper can increase the absorption of some active ingredients.

Between meals

At least 2 apples a day
Plus other fresh fruit
At least 2 liters of still water daily, on top of other drinks
When hungry: two to three tablespoons from the vegetable skillet or a glass of water with fat-soluble vitamins, omega-3, and Q10

What’s meant here is real hunger, meaning an empty, growling stomach, not the urge for something sweet or savory.

All the nutrients at a glance

For Michael, this targeted supply of nutrients was crucial for taking the strain off his body while continuing to lose weight naturally.

In the morning, in a glass of water: B vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins, water-soluble omega-3 fatty acids, and Q10

At lunch, in addition: two to three scoops of highly bioavailable B vitamins

After lunch and after dinner: 2 scoops of alkaline minerals each time

→ Which nutrients exactly, and why: Helpful Nutrients

What Michael did about typical diet symptoms

For Michael, losing weight easily means avoiding the typical symptoms of a diet. To avoid symptoms like over-acidification, weakness, irritability, inflammation, sleep disturbances, or concentration problems, he took the minerals after lunch and dinner and the B vitamins at lunch.

→ If accompanying symptoms do occur: Avoiding negative symptoms when losing weight

Why Michael didn’t experience a yo-yo effect

Behind it is a simple rule of Michael’s: You leave out flour products and gluten as much as possible only during the diet. After that, you can eat normally again, and from then on you only eat two to three meals a week according to this plan, so that there’s no yo-yo effect.

For Michael, it worked. Before the diet, in March 2016, he weighed 95 kilos. In October 2016, it was 70 kilos, and in October 2017, 2018, and 2019, it was 65 kilos each time. He maintains his weight easily, without the yo-yo effect.

My own experience with Michael’s method

I used Michael’s method myself and lost about nine kilos in around three weeks, without doing any extra exercise or consciously moving more. My journey with it isn’t over yet.

Here’s how I put the plan into practice for myself:

Variations instead of just the vegetable skillet: zucchini noodles with cheese sauce as a substitute for pasta, tofu, quinoa, amaranth, chickpeas, now and then a pizza made with almond flour, or a copycat döner made with quark and eggs
Potatoes occasionally, just regular ones from the supermarket, for example with spinach. Michael didn’t actually recommend them, but my body handles them considerably better than rice or pasta.
And sometimes a piece of chocolate, a handful or two from the bag of chips, a few pieces of candy, or a glass of cola
And sometimes an ice cream in the evening
Overall: consistent about Rule 1, relaxed about Rule 2

Usually I had a small vegetable skillet in the morning, zucchini noodles in the afternoon, for example, and only a little in the evening, like a salad with a few nuts. For the minerals, I took 3 scoops after lunch and again after dinner instead of 2 like Michael, because I’m a bit heavier and taller than he is.

From Michael’s experience and mine: As long as Rule 1 holds and pepper, curry, and nutrients are part of it, occasional sins won’t suddenly make you gain weight, nor will they make you stall. With them, you only determine the speed.

Dustin Müller

Warmth in the body as a signal

For Michael and me, losing weight with occasional fast food, döner, or cola worked well mainly when we were really warm, meaning when the pepper’s warmth effect had really ramped up and we could clearly feel the warmth in our hands, our feet, and our whole body.

For Michael, it was exactly this warmth that was the main reason he lost so much weight in a short time despite all these exceptions. He describes it as being not like a fever, but like an inner engine. For him, it was the direct signal: The metabolism is active, really active.

Important to note: The warmth usually isn’t there constantly from day one, even if you do everything right. The body first has to switch over, and how long that takes varies. For some people it happens after a week, for others after three weeks, and sometimes only after a month. So if the warmth hasn’t really set in for you yet, it’s worth cutting back on the sins for now and giving the method time to ramp up.

→ More on the warmth effect: Warmth in the Body: why it makes the body burn more calories

Try it yourself: What works for you?

Every body reacts differently. What worked well for Michael and me doesn’t have to work exactly the same way for you.

What you can do:

Weigh yourself once a week, ideally on the same day of the week, at the same time, and on an empty stomach if possible
Watch how your body reacts, to the method overall and to individual sins
Test what works for you. Maybe you can eat a bar of chocolate every day and still lose weight, maybe for you it only works every three days. And the glass of sparkling wine with your buddies or the extra bag of popcorn during an exciting movie? Try it out. The scale will show you what’s possible for you.

This isn’t a rigid requirement, but self-observation. You control the speed: If you build in more sins, you’ll lose weight more slowly. If you want to lose weight faster, you tighten the screws.