Don't Diet

Later I will review the The Perfect Health Diet. While I found the book incoherent, I did find one point of agreement similar to my agreement with the video I posted last week. This is from location 6598 in my Kindle edition:

Some diet gurus advocate different diets for weight loss and maintenance. This is unnecessary. Since it is possible to lose weight eating the same calories as a normal person, it's not necessary to eat a diet different than a normal person's to lose weight.  

While the book critiques diet gurus who suggest diets, do you want to make a guess what the book does a few pages later? That is right, the authors offer a diet! This book will receive the full "Positive Dennis" critique very soon. 

But the authors were right in the first place: "dieting" is a mistake. The first reason is that while one is dieting,  they do not learn permanent techniques for healthy eating. The dieter learns temporary techniques that do not necessarily apply to the normal eating habits they will eventually adopt. It is like being an ivory tower intellectual where the theory does not fit reality. One needs to adopt permanent lifestyle changes, not temporary ones. A dieter is worse off if they yo-yo back and forth in weight. I am not talking about natural weight cycling based on the seasons, although we modern humans tend to do this backwards and gain weight in the winter and lose it in the summer. What the dieter is doing is messing up their metabolism, maybe semi-permanently. 

5 lbs. of Fat and MuscleAnother reason that dieting is dangerous is that those of us who are fat have been eating a lot of crap. This crap is stored in the fat. As we lose weight this crap is dumped into the blood stream. There is a real danger that one will overwhelm the toxic removal system of the body by forcing it to rapidly deal with lots of chemicals. Slow is better. 

There is also the danger of confusing your body. If you lose weight rapidly the body may think that a crisis has occurred and that the body is starving. Thus the body reduces the metabolism in order to preserve life. This makes weight loss more difficult. 

Should one ignore what one weighs? My surprising answer is yes. Instead concentrate on eating a proper diet at a level of calories that would supply the body you should have based on your height and size. I think most of us know what we should weigh. We may not like the answer, but we know. If you want some guidance, click here and look. 

For me the answer was no more than 185. How many calories do I need for that level of weight? Oddly enough there is great disagreement. WebMD thinks it is 2000-2200 for a sedentary male. The American Cancer Society says 2600. Fitness Magazine suggests 2063, which was about what I originally figured when I started my healthy eating program.

So what I did was eat 2000 calories a day. All these figures were for a sedentary person. I was that then, but now I am not, although I am at best lightly active at this time. This means that I am under eating slightly, but only slightly. 

So am I asking you to keep track of what you eat? Yes, I am. As Peter Drucker, business consultant, once said, whatever you measure is what you concentrate on. If you do not measure your calories, you will have no idea what you are eating. There will be surprises. I still remember my shock in discovering the calories in an Ultimate Cheeseburger. I have not had one since. 

How does one count calories? With modern technology the answer is that it is surprisingly easy. We will talk about that the next time I write about health. 

What is 2000 calories? Here is a visual aid.