Wynonna’s 55 Pound Weight Loss Magic

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