Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet
I tried for 3 years to lose weight before I happened on an effective approach. Body composition change (I hate the term &#x27;losing weight&#x27;) is one of the hardest things one could ever try to do, right up there with kicking an addiction.<p>Misinformation was the first big hurdle. I would happen on a promising approach, and then when immediate results were not forthcoming, I&#x27;d start questioning my assumptions. In the process of questioning those assumptions, I lost all faith in so-called &#x27;expert&#x27; opinions and realized that I was completely on my own.<p>Instead of looking for someone to give me a plan &#x2F; approach &#x2F; strategy, I researched on Wikipedia exactly how metabolism works. How does food turn into fat? What causes that fat to break down?<p>It was here that I had the realization that <i>what</i> you eat can never have more of an effect on your metabolism than <i>how much</i> you eat. Calories in and out is the rule, everything else is secondary.<p>I also realized from the research that there are different goals involved in improving health &#x2F; fitness. I also developed a disdain for the term &quot;healthy&quot;. It&#x27;s entirely too poorly-defined to be a useful term. It&#x27;s basically a shield against the possibility of failure. You can&#x27;t fail in your goals if you don&#x27;t have any goals, and &quot;eating healthy&quot; is not a definable goal.<p>I decided to frame my goals instead in terms of aesthetics. If my looks are improving, then I am making progress. If not, then I need to go back to the drawing board.<p>So I started to look a little more carefully at the aesthetic angle. What looks good on people? Muscles look good. So does lack of excess body fat. But with an aesthetics first approach, I realized that losing fat is way way more important than gaining muscle. I used to deadlift 325 and I still looked fat.<p>So I needed a diet. But just like &quot;healthy&quot; and &quot;losing weight&quot;, &quot;diet&quot; is too poorly-defined to be really useful, hiding a lot of complexity. People don&#x27;t want to have to do their own research and actually understand the problem domain, so they reach for an intuitive solution rather than apply their analytical mind. I&#x27;ve looked at and applied several diet approaches over the years, but realized after I started throwing out &#x27;experts&#x27; that there&#x27;s something more fundamental about dieting that I was missing.<p>Are you taking a short-term approach or a long-term one? Which one is better? The more I reasoned it out, the more I realized that you need both the short and the long to really be successful. Most people only go one way. They&#x27;ll pick a long-term approach and won&#x27;t test it, or they&#x27;ll pick a short term approach that works for awhile, but long-term they just go right back. You need a plan for losing it, and a plan for keeping it off.<p>The calories-in-calories-out realization made things a lot easier. What really made it dead simple was when I started researching diets throughout history. A lot of people use the &quot;healthy&quot; heuristic to throw out perfectly good dieting strategies, and especially egregiously, to subconsciously toss out calories-in-calories out. If you don&#x27;t get CICO right, you will not lose fat. When I read that Roman legionnaires mostly ate vegetables and grains, all thoughts of controlling &#x27;what&#x27; I ate left my mind and I focused only on &#x27;how much&#x27;.<p>Finally that leaves habits. Intermittent fasting held the most appeal to me, that seemed like the most sustainable approach considering my lifestyle and and history. But how to deal with hunger? Being committed to the goal, having a simple-enough approach made it really easy to adjust to once-a-day eating. I simply looked at all the barriers to eating once a day and devised practical solutions for each of these in turn, giving myself permission to make mistakes and also to relax, this is a lifestyle change and I&#x27;m going to be doing this <i>for the rest of my life</i>.<p>So I&#x27;d structure everything in terms of tweaking knobs. I would get hungry and so I&#x27;d eat a small something, resolving myself to snack less in the future. so long as the amount of snack foods is decreasing over time then I&#x27;m on track. Eventually I mastered hunger and was able to mostly stop snacking. People would bring in food and it would make me really hungry, so I&#x27;d eat earlier to pre-empt it. Eventually the smell of food started holding less power over me, and I&#x27;d pick a later meal time, as that afforded me greater social flexibility.<p>Long term was all about monitoring and awareness. Once I was happy with how I looked, I&#x27;d stay strict on most of my &#x27;knobs&#x27; and just start tweaking one at a time back up to give me more pleasure. I&#x27;d watch myself closely to see how I felt and looked. I found remarkably easy, and I&#x27;ve been able to dial back monitoring and transfer more control over my eating back to my subconscious. I realized that if you&#x27;re not happy with how you look, you should not listen to your body, but if you are, then you should, as the body is a selfish two-year old who is terrified of losing anything and will do anything to you to maintain the status quo.<p>Reading this article, I can tell that it means well, but is going to be just as ineffective as all the other &#x27;expert&#x27; advice. It doesn&#x27;t focus on the right level and instead perpetuates poorly-defined, &#x27;intuitive&#x27; concepts that do nothing but obscure true effectiveness.