That question was asked in the comments of a prior blog entry.

I’m sure a lot of readers have received similar questions or advice:

1. Why don’t you just eat less.

2. Eat less and move more.  That’s the secret to weight loss.

3. Eat fewer calories than you burn and you will lose weight.

4. It’s all about the portion size.  Just eat smaller portions.

Aargh!

If it was as simple as eating less, then there wouldn’t be over 162 million weight loss sites on the Internet you moron!

Don’t you think we thought of that?  Don’t you think it was probably the very first thing we tried… AND FAILED AT?

Do you think all fat people are just stupid idiots that simply don’t understand that they should eat less?

This site would simply have no readers if it was as simple as eating less to lose weight.  Nearly all overweight people have tried that method and failed.

In fact, the USDA recommends that method to all Americans.  What has been the result?  Americans have INCREASED weight every single year since the USDA issued that advice.

Why don’t I just eat less?

Because it doesn’t work you moron!  That’s why.

Here’s what happens when you just eat less to lose weight.  You go along just fine for three or four days.  You feel better.  You lose a lot of weight.  Sometimes you lose 2-3 pounds per day.

Then the cravings start.  Your body is going into starvation mode.  Since you are eating less than you used to eat, your body is starting to panic.  It thinks you might be starving so it starts doing a ton of things to “save you” from starvation. 

It starts sending you cravings for more foods… especially simple carbohydrates because those are easiest to store as fat for the upcoming famine.  You crave chocolate cake and cookies and coke and all kinds of sweets.

You hold those cravings back at first.  You have been encouraged by the 2-3 pounds of weight loss every day and you want to keep going.  It will be worth the pain of those cravings. 

If you can just keep losing 2-3 pounds per day, it will only be ____ until you are at your ideal weight.  You can hold on that long.  The cravings might pass anyway.  It’s a battle of will power now.

And then it happens.  You get on the scale and you’ve actually gained a pound since the day before.  Wow.  Is that discouraging or what?  You were suffering all day the day before with those cravings, but you didn’t give in to them.  What is your reward?  Nothing.  Notta.  You gained a pound.  You didn’t lose anything.

But you are a champ.  You realize there is water weight loss that is easy at the beginning of every diet.  You realize that scales aren’t all that accurate.  Maybe you really lost a pound, but the scale is just two pounds off in the wrong direction that morning.  You are still going to stick it out for another day.

That day the cravings are really strong.  You feel weak.  You don’t go for your walk that day.  You had been walking more because you felt great at the beginning of the diet.  Now you feal lousy.  You almost feel sick.  Your stomach actually hurts.  So does your head.  You feel tired and listless.  Still, you want to lose the weight so you stick with it for another day.

The next morning… you gained two more pounds.  How depressing.  That was a lot of suffering, but maybe it was because you didn’t walk that day.  Today, you decide to really buckle down.  You decide you are going to have a salad for dinner and nothing else all day.  You drink water all day and wait for that salad without dressing at the end of the day.  You force yourself to go for a walk even though you feel like a concentration camp victim with the flu.

The next day, you weight yourself fully expecting to have lost five pounds…. especially since you forced yourself to do aerobics before bed to be sure to burn all 200 calories from the salad you had for dinner.

You step on the scale and it says you gained 2 more pounds.  You cry.  You know you can’t take it anymore.  After crying all morning and not eating anything, you try to get up to do the day’s activities.   You can’t.  You are too sick.  You are also too depressed.  What went wrong?

You can’t handle it anymore.  You drive to McDonalds and order a Big Mac, a filet of fish sandwich, two orders of supersized fries, a 20 piece chicken mcnuggets, two milk shakes and you binge.  You stop by the grocery store on the way home and get some cookies, chips and ice cream for that afternoon.

Well… you tried really hard.  It just didn’t work.  You don’t understand what happened.  You wait several months before trying again.

Hopefully your next attempt isn’t after someone says…

“Why don’t you just eat less?”

Hopefully your next attempt isn’t a repeat of your first attempt.  Some people never do give up the notion that dieting means eating less.  They yo yo diet all through their life and suffer the health consequences from constantly asking themselves why they can’t just eat less.

The fact is that you can’t just eat less.  Your body won’t let you.  It thinks it is starving.  That plan will only work for a week or so.

In fact, other plans (where you eat different things) all seem to work better… but they also have their limits.  The body doesn’t necessarily go into starvation mode from lack of calories, but it does adjust to any other eating plan and it becomes less and less effective. 

Some plans can go months (most people can do low carbing for weeks for instance).  Then it becomes less effective and you start to crave whatever it is that isn’t allowed on that diet plan (by definition all diets restrict something).

There are some things that are really mildly effective for almost forever.  Eating actual food (vs. processed garbage) has a very long effectiveness calendar.  Restricting sugar and wheat products can be done for a very long time by many people.  Eating organic can be done by almost anyone for an entire lifetime (nobody really craves chemicals).  But all of those things have a very limited effect on weight loss.

I lost five pounds by going organic for a month.  Then it leveled off and there was no further weight loss from that effort.  Getting rid of processed food in my life worked for a couple of months with good weight loss before leveling off.

What I advocate (because it has worked for me and I have kept the weight off) is to switch eating plans regularly (weekly works best for me).  Eat different things and have major restrictions on something for an entire week.  Then switch diets and restrict something else, but allow yourself the restricted thing that week.

The only things I have decided that I can probably do for a lifetime are:

1. Eating organic whenever possible.

2. Avoiding sugar and grains as much as possible (but giving in to cravings and birthdays, etc when they come).

3. Avoiding processed foods whenever possible.  Actually buying meat, fish, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruits, etc. and preparing meals.

That isn’t enough to lose weight long term though.  And restricting calories is DEFINITELY not a plan that works long term (although you can plan to do that a week at a time… even fasting if you wish for a week).  Switching diet plans weekly does work long term.

In addition, it allows you to measure which diet plans work best for you.  You can average the weight loss over several times of trying a particular diet plan and see how it works for you.  Then you can slowly eliminate diet plans that don’t work for you and only switch between plans that do work for you.

An additional advantage is nutritional.  In any diet plan, you restrict something.  Maybe one week it is fruits (fruits actually are a problem for me).  But is it wise to restrict fruits for a lifetime?  Obviously not.  Fruits are full of nutrition and antioxidants, etc.  It would be foolhardy to restrict eating fruits for a lifetime.  Most people couldn’t do it anyway.  Their body would start sending cravings and you would eventually break down and give in to those cravings.

Another advantage is the elimination of guilt with this plan.  You approach your body as a third party and do experiments on it weekly.  If a weekly experiment fails, then it fails.  You didn’t fail.  The experiment showed you something that didn’t work.  That’s valuable information for the future.

Low calorie diets don’t work for most people.  Don’t blame yourself for that.  Instead, use that information and start other experiments to find out what does work.

Why don’t you just eat less?  Give me a break.  Been there.  Done that.  Got the t-shirt…  but unfortunately it doesn’t fit anymore because eating less made be fatter.

-James D. Brausch