Wynonna’s 55 Pound Weight Loss Magic
Photo credit: Michael Lavine, Brian Smith
According to this week’s People Magazine, country music singer Wynonna Judd, 46, dropped 55 lbs. and five dress sizes using “brain state conditioning.” The magic behind this dramatic weight loss was reported to be 10 to 14, 90-minute sessions at the Brain State Technologies center in Scottsdale, Arizona at $195 per session.
We have written about many celebrity diet and exercise regimens before and we had never heard of “brain state conditioning” before so we decided to look into it using the Resounding Health Baloney Detection Kit and came up with more questions than answers about Brain State Technologies and its founder and CEO, Lee Gerdes.
Mr. Gerdes is described in the People article as a “computer scientist” although we couldn’t find any evidence of formal education and training in this field. According to various web sites, Gerdes’ background and education includes an undergraduate degree in math and physics from Doane College in Crete, Nebraska and a Masters Degree in Divinity from Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. He is the author of a book on new age mental and spiritual healing entitled Limitless You. He has no publications among the 20 million biomedical research articles at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, although he’s mentioned in the July 14, 2009 issue of Oprah online. The mention here quotes Mr. Gerdes about how $1,200 to $4,000 of “balancing your brain” sessions can lead to “effects that can last a lifetime.”
We’ve ordered a copy of Mr. Gerdes’ book and will continue to try and find out exactly what “brain state conditioning” is and how it might relate to weight loss and behavior modification. We’ll report back later. For now, we’ll leave you with one of the principles of Skepticism 101: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence [to support them]. So far, we haven’t found any.
E! News Now video: Wynonna Judd’s Whacky Diet
You have no answers because as far as we know, you haven’t asked any questions of us directly. If your goal is to receive accurate information, it’s always a good idea to go directly to the source. It was not the intent of People magazine to provide a full scientific explanation for the process. We would welcome your call at any time. Dianne P. at Brain State Technologies 480-588-6840.
Dear Dianne, thank you for your comment. Most people with medical or scientific training are taught to consult the peer-reviewed biomedical literature to evaluate claims. This is routinely done using the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s online bibliography of about 20 million articles published in thousands of medical and science journals over the past 50 years. We did such a literature search and found nothing under Mr. Gerdes’s authorship. Perhaps the technology and it’s application to weight management has been validated by clinical research trials that have been published by other authors and/or in journals not indexed by the National Library of Medicine. If so, please email us PDFs of any peer-reviewed articles you would like us to review. We will review them promptly and, if we have any questions, contact the authors of these publications for further information.
Mr. Gerdes has made public statements to journalists explaining that he doesn’t want to give away his presently unpatentable information technology process by writing about it for peer reviewed journals. Until our legal community catches up with information technologies like this, I can hardly say I blame him. Who would want to give away a potentially multi-million dollar idea to competitors just to buy credibility that a little patience will bring with time? Wait and see.