If you ask people about weight loss attempts, you get a lot of similar answers. Most people try a diet – a particular way of eating that is believed to help you lose weight – and it works, almost any diet.
And then, of course, it is not.
What happens? Life, generally. I asked my folks on Twitter to send me their stories, and heard some of the many ways life derails the diet: illness, pregnancy, bicycle accident, new baby, new job, menopause, bad work situation, even breakdown of the church. But sometimes it’s just that you’re really tired of not eating bread. Or track every meal. Or eat things that are different from what your friends are eating.
The common thread of the stories I’ve heard – not just this time, but over 20 years on this beat – is also what study after study has confirmed. People can lose weight until they can’t. They are on a particular diet, and as long as they stick to it they are successful, but they usually can’t stick to it forever. “Recovery happens when we decide to come back to our comfort zone,” one tweeter told me.
Weight loss is, for most people, a switch between dieting and non-dieting. Diet = weight loss, no diet = weight gain. So why on God’s Green Earth do we spend all of our time discussing the difference between this diet and this diet, when people lose weight with each of them? The obvious problem you are looking in the face is the difference between dieting and non-dieting.
Diets have rules. Eat this, not that. Eat now, not then. Eat that much, not that much. Eat it with that, but not with the other thing.
The rules isolate you from the obesogenic food environment that comes here, said to be normal. Instead of stepping out into the world of tasty, convenient food with a fuzzy idea of moderation, you come out with a plan. And it works.
What if normal had rules? What if, instead of “moderation,” you had specific strategies for navigating normally?
In 2017, researchers recruited 42 volunteers and put them on a “low-calorie powder diet” (appetizing!) For eight weeks. Participants lost an average of 12 percent of their body weight.
It sounds like a setup for the same old story: They would all regain weight, and then some, over the next couple of years. And some of them won; 20 regressed over the year, they were tracked, but not quite back to their original weight. 13 others maintained their weight loss, give or take. But nine continued to lose.
What did they do that the waste pickers didn’t? In this study, unlike most, the researchers conducted detailed interviews and included quotes from participants. The results are striking. Weight losers set rules.
“From Monday to Thursday, I eat 1,200 kcal [calories]and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I eat what I want but always reasonable.
“I can buy the chocolate today, but I won’t eat it until Saturday.”
“Candy is a treat for me, and on weekends, I reward myself not to eat it the rest of the week.
“I have a maximum limit of 2.5 [hours] between my meals.
“Each main meal should not contain more than 500 calories.”
“Resisting an urge is like trying not to breathe[e]. At some point you have to surrender.
“If I’m tired, if I have had a hard day at work, or if I have controlled my food for a while, I feel like I deserve it, so I eat chips and chocolate – sometimes several days in a row.
We’ve all been there! It’s tough, struggling with the call for food. And diets fail because the rules are hard to follow. So the key question is, how can you find the rules that you are most likely to stick to?
Diets are useful for the very obvious reason that they generally help you lose weight. So use them for what they’re good for without expecting them to be a permanent fix. Rather, they are clues to a permanent solution.
When it comes to our weight, we have been victims of learned helplessness. Experts have told us that losing weight is in the hands of the experts. We need a list of rules made by someone else, often someone with a complicated physiological explanation of why eating your own way is better than eating all the other ways. Enough already! Think of all these diets from all of these experts as an assortment of rules and strategies. Go down the line, mix and match.
In my own home, my own husband started a weight loss effort with a month of alcohol-free veganism. He knew he wasn’t going to eat this way for the rest of his life, but he thought he was consuming too much butter, meat, and wine. He found that going without them for awhile restored his appetite for these things to a lower level. To preserve it, he switched to olive oil on his toast, black coffee, and smaller portions of meat. Eighteen months later, he lost 40 pounds and it stays there. (He does build a wine cellar, though; some rules just won’t.)
- Put off breakfast for as long as it suits you (I wait for the first feeling of hunger).
- Eat no more than 800 calories per day; the rest at dinner.
- Never eat after dinner; the kitchen is closed.
- Other than a little chocolate, desserts only on special occasions.
- Be alert at home and more relaxed at parties or dining out. (You remember?)
- Keep junk food and any food that I find particularly tempting (yes, cashews) out of the house.
- Always have fruits and vegetables on hand for snacks.
- Weigh every day.
When the rules work, weight loss works. When they don’t, they don’t. A friend on Twitter told me that a simple rule worked for him: don’t eat in the car.
Try a diet knowing that there is nothing magic about it. They all work by limiting your intake to the point where you burn more calories than you consume. (While it’s possible that diets can affect the way your body burns calories, those differences are minimal; next month, I’ll write about keto and its claims, so hold your fire.) But who will be. in the best position to find a combination of rules that work for you – you or an “expert” who has never met you?
Now that I’ve disseminated the experts, I’ll bring one into this conversation. Stanford University professor of medicine Christopher Gardner has done some of the most influential diet trials in the field, and he’s too frustrated with arguments about the differences between diets.
“They agree more than they disagree,” he told me of Zoom. “Limit added sugars and refined grains, and eat more non-starchy vegetables.” Of course, people don’t agree on what’s next – do you eat legumes? Do you eat meat? – but “if you do those two things you get 90% of the benefits.”
“You are biohacking,” he says. “Try not to snack, try intermittent fasting, try including some chocolate, try to sleep better.” Vegetarianism has worked for him, but he doesn’t expect it to work for all of us.
And then there’s one thing that’s often overlooked: “You have to have joy and fun in food,” Gardner said. If you like what you eat, you have a much better chance of doing it forever. “It will be different from person to person and there will never be a randomized trial.”
There is absolutely nothing about weight loss that is true for everyone. To some, too many rules can seem like the path to messy eating, and it’s not the right path. Others find a specific diet that works for them for the long term, and that’s great. And some decide to try to eat healthy, exercise, and stop worrying about their weight, and that’s okay too.
There are even people who succeed in moderation. My hat is to both of you.
