What is the secret of the Rush Limbaugh Diet? Forget Oprah - Rush Limbaugh is now American’s diet obsession, having lost a ton of weight and looking great to many.

And how about sounding great? Well that’s a different issue.

You may not agree with Rush’s political views, but you will agree with his approach to weight loss - sensible and without a stimulus package. How did he do it? Limbaugh just months ago was larger. Now he’s looking great.

What’s the secret? Skipping Obama’s high calorie beer summit might be the first step!

Rush explained in June the following:

RUSH: I’m getting so many e-mails — because people see my weight loss on the Dittocam — and I’m getting so many e-mails, “Why can’t you tell us what –” Folks, it’s not that I won’t tell you, it’s just I can’t. It’s too complicated. I mean putting the menu together is a jigsaw puzzle every day. It would take me 45 minutes every day to tell you what the diet plan is and answer all your questions about why it works.

He’s basically limiting calories without calorie counting. And he’s relying on fish. He gets a sense of how much to eat and how much to avoid on a daily basis:

All I can tell you is is that it’s about 1500 calories a day, but you don’t count ‘em. I don’t know the caloric intake of one thing I’m eating. All I know is that it adds up to about 1500 calories. It’s a factor, but it is the way the proteins, the complex carbs and the fats and even some fruit get put together during the course of the day. For example, you cannot have two proteins at one meal. So I cannot have one night Surf and Turf. I can have five and a half ounces of fillet, seven ounces of chicken or fish, but I can’t combine it. I can’t have three ounces of beef and four ounces of fish. I don’t know why. I just follow it and it works. I’ve never lost weight faster than this diet. But it’s not that I don’t want to tell you; it’s just I can’t.

And Rush understands the comparison to Oprah, but he’s not going there. He’s not turning his business into Jenny Craig despite how many fans ask him for recipes:

“Well, why don’t you put the menu up?” Because I’d have to put the recipes up and it’s not the business I’m in. I’m not trying to deny anybody this. If you want to lose weight, trust me, I’ve done every diet there is, and they all work. They all work. I’ll tell you what. (interruption) I’m not going to go on Oprah to talk on it. Don’t make me laugh. You disturbed my train of thought in there, Dawn. I was going to say something about this, trying to recapture my train of thought here. I’ll tell you the first three days of this diet, first three or four days are Atkins. You just pound as much protein and fat as you can.

“If you have a steak, dip it in melted butter, have lobster scampi, scallops scampi, shrimp scampi, no vegetables. No fruit. First week I lost ten pounds. That’s the first three or four days of the diet is Atkins. After that, it goes to this 1500-calorie regimen. If I didn’t have help doing this, I couldn’t do it myself. It’s a jigsaw puzzle putting it together every day, to do it right. I started March 9th. This is June 1st. So June the 9th is going to be roughly 90 days, right? Three months and I’m at 58 pounds this morning. I was at 55, it’s leveled off now to about three and four pounds a week, three to four.

Finally, Rush does the obvious, he eats real food, cooked food, not store bought or packaged.

I do not think about food, this is real food, not boxed food. Real food. The recipes are the key. I look forward to it. I don’t feel deprived. I can see eating this way the rest of my life in fact and be satisfied. Now, I’m not going out. I could but the problem with that is you can never trust the chef at a restaurant. You can tell ‘em, “Please do not put any oil of any kind on the chicken breast.” But restaurants are in the business of their food tasting good and they do that with fat. Fat is what makes food taste good. And even if you know the place you’re still running a risk that they’re telling you they won’t do it — I want seven ounces of salmon, not seven-and-a-half, not eight, I gotta trust that when it comes out of there it’s seven ounces, you don’t want to go in there with a scale and weigh it, besides it’s precook weight that you have to measure. So I wish you could tell you, folks, but it would be a full-fledged business. “You could put the recipes on the web.” No. I’m not going to turn RushLimbaugh.com into recipe central. If I wanted to do all this I could do it myself right here.

And how about the Obama Beer Summit? Out of the question - no alcohol!

“You cannot drink, no adult beverages. Well, probably now if I wanted to have a glass of wine once or twice a week I could do it without throwing the diet off. But when you’re starting you can’t. It’s not the calories. Alcohol gets metabolized as pure sugar and that requires insulin, and insulin is the biggest enemy of weight loss because insulin is what’s necessary to store fat. So any diet worth its salt you’re going to be eating very little sugar so that you trigger as little insulin as possible because that shuts down the weight loss process, that’s why alcohol is banned. And now the only alcohol diet that works is if you don’t eat anything then you can drink all you want. But the minute you eat something you’re dead. I don’t know too many people who can just drink all day long and be functional. But that’s the only alcohol diet I’ve ever seen that works. I could name you a couple of people that do that, but I would get sued for revealing trade secrets of famous people. So I’m not going to do that.”