I don’t like to dwell on it, but I have failed on a lot of diets. Now, I am focused on the future. But here is just a bit of background:
I weighed 325 pounds in January, 2019. I have been overweight for the last 20 years. I have weighed more than 300 pounds for the last 10 years. Many diets have not worked for me. But there is hope – I have lost 40 pounds so far by developing a new way of thinking. What I have discovered is that if you change your mind, your body will follow. I am already thinking like someone who can control their weight. You can, too.
1. Dieting starts with a decision
It’s not the decision you are probably thinking. Are you thinking it will be “I decide to lose the weight”? It isn’t that simple, or everyone would be thin. If you have the mindset that you can will yourself thin, you’re wrong. I wouldn’t like to meet the person who could will 120 pounds away. The decision is also not “I choose to be responsible for my weight.” Definitely not! Now you’re in a moral contest with your diet ideal, and you will lose, and start to really be disgusted with yourself. Dieting through self-loathing! Good luck with that.
No, the decision you need to make is, are you willing to let go. Obviously, you are willing to let go of the extra weight, especially if it is 120 pounds! No, you have to decide if you can let go of your stubborn pride, some strongly-held values, your mindset, and your comfortable old life.
- My pride made me overweight, I wouldn’t admit the need to change.
- My hierarchy of values made me overweight. For example, I wasn’t willing to throw away or waste food. Being thin wasn’t in the same league.
- My mindset made me overweight. I ate to feel full. So I would eat to feel full at every meal. Result: constant calorie overload.
- My old life made me overweight and kept me overweight. I usually ate without paying attention, and ate until I felt completely full. I would read or watch TV while eating. What did it matter? I only needed to eat until I was stuffed. At every meal. That was my source of eating satisfaction: being full. All that had to go.
2. Successful dieting starts with a realization
No, the key realization isn’t “I could be thin”! My realization was a bit deeper than that, and had moral and mental components. The moral part was figuring out that being thin or overweight isn’t a moral condition. I will explain that in a moment. The mental realization came from observation. I am a scientist by training and profession, so observation is a very important tool. By observing the behavior of people who were thin and stayed thin, I realized that thin people mostly monitor their weight throughout their lives. They also control their food intake throughout their lives.
Morally, I was in a nonproductive mindset before I figured out this diet. I saw losing weight as a matter of willpower and moral fiber. Thin people were full of willpower and were filled with strong moral fiber. Overweight people lacked willpower and would quit before reaching the goal. According to this moral mindset, I just needed some willpower to transform myself. I would use my willpower, and somehow my food intake would just balance out due to my superior moral condition. I would lose weight and keep it off, through strength of moral fiber.
Terrible, isn’t it? You can see how that mindset will set you up for failure. With that thinking, you will be overweight, AND feel bad about yourself. Willpower just doesn’t work that way, and being thin does not imply superior moral fiber or moral being. Take the moral scolding out of your thinking. It just reinforces failures and makes you hate and resent your own being. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Set yourself up for success instead.
The setup for success comes from the other half of my realization. To start a long term lifestyle change that will result in the loss of 120 pounds, you must accept that it’s a lifetime change, to monitoring your weight and regulating your food intake. Ask a thin friend or family member. They monitor their weight all the time! Maybe they judge their weight by the fit of their clothes, or belt, or using a scale, but they do it. They also monitor their intake of food, no matter what they call it.
My grandfather never counted a calorie, but lived to 101 years and never weighed more than 135 pounds in his life. What willpower! Actually, he just had the same things for almost every meal of his long life. His dinner was invariably a small hamburger patty, a baked potato, and string beans. Not of lot of them, either. Lunch was a ham sandwich: 2 slices of ham, one of cheese. Breakfast was cold cereal. He did have dessert every night, but it was never more than a bite or two of brownie or cake. He exercised every day and monitored his weight every day. He also didn’t spend a lot of time wondering what he was going to have for lunch or dinner. He had a system that worked for 101 years. Ask yourself: where was the willpower in that system? The only moral decision is that being thin is more important to you than other things.
3. Successful dieting needs a plan
I am not saying you should plan like my grandfather did. I personally transformed myself into someone who is looking forward to each meal and is hungry at mealtimes. After the first 100 years I think I would get a little bored of his regime. I can only think that for him, being thin and staying thin was more important than almost anything else. Seen in that light, eating the same amounts of the same things every day is a very simple and reliable way to make sure your food intake is under complete control. No calorie counting, no carb counting, no cholesterol or LDL worries. Just eat the green beans, potato, and beef patty. He could look on, amazed, as his acquaintances and coworkers agonized over their waistlines and talked about steaks, rich desserts, and holiday food.
For you to lose weight successfully and keep it off, you need a plan. The plan will let you live out the consequences of your moral and mental transformation.
Create a plan to do two things:
- Monitor your weight
- Control your food intake
3A. Monitor your Weight
I weigh myself every Saturday morning. I blog about it, as a matter of fact, under the category Saturday Weigh-in. I am in the middle of an incredible personal quest to lose more weight than most people on Earth weigh. I am not at all interested in this diet petering out, and once I have achieved this remarkable weight loss, I have even less interest in gaining any of it back again. So weigh yourself systematically.
Some people, like my grandfather did, weigh themselves every day. But once a week is a minimum. I like the anticipation of a weekly weighing. I was also worried that if I had a bad day and overate, I would get all discouraged. This point is so important I have taught it to my kids: weigh yourself every week. We make a family activity out of it, but it is an important tool for their lives too.
3B. Control your food intake.
There are different levels of control. You could decide that being thin is so important to you that you will only eat pre-portioned frozen dinners or pre-packaged weight loss meals every day for the rest of your life. There’s also what I will call the Grandfather Method.
Speaking personally, none of that works. I tried may variations of the idea over the last 20 years of unsuccessful dieting. I tried having weight loss shakes for meals, and I also tried eating only low carb foods with a limit of 30 grams of carbs per day. Neither was satisfactory. I had to find a different way, and I was willing to do some work and put in some time to achieve control.
My own solution is calorie counting and recording the totals in a spreadsheet. I’ll go into more detail elsewhere, but I am careful to count calories before I eat, and then record them immediately after I eat. No matter what else is going on, if my hair is on fire (metaphorically), I will record what I eat before doing other things. So I recommend a serious commitment to controlling food intake. I spend an hour a day doing this and I am happy to do it because being thin is high up on my list of values.
I don’t use any dieting apps or websites for this. I figure out the calories, eat the portion, then right after the meal, record everything in a Google spreadsheet. I use the internet-based spreadsheet because I can access it anywhere I have internet, like work, restaurants, and on vacation. If I waited until the end of the day or the end of the week, I wouldn’t remember what I had or how much or when. I might leave things out by accident or on purpose. And I tell the absolute truth in the spreadsheet. If I overeat, I put all the food in there and the calorie count. (In the section on self knowledge just below, I will talk about the temptation to punish yourself for overeating or having a bad diet day or week.)
Through trial and error, I picked a number of calories I am allowed to eat every day. Exercise is a tricky subject I talk about in another place, but when I exercise, I increase the number of calories in my daily limit. I also keep track of my average weekly calorie intake and compare that to what I would have to eat to maintain my weight.
Have a plan to monitor your weight and regulate your food intake. It has to be a plan you can follow forever.
4. A successful lifetime diet plan relies on self-knowledge.
If you’ve spent any time on a diet, you know that there is part of you that doesn’t enjoy it. It doesn’t play along with what you say or follow your plans. When your diet fails, you blame yourself, or that part of yourself for your supposed lack of willpower. Well, imagine that part of you is important, even crucial, to your dieting success. If you are mean to yourself and treat yourself badly, and think of yourself as a weak-willed slob, that’s not a plan for success. It’s more self-loathing.
You have to really listen to yourself, figure out what you need and want, how to work with that, and then reward yourself for doing well. Never, never punish yourself for overeating. Try to learn instead.
By punish, I mean: have you overeaten and then withheld breakfast or lunch the next day to make up for it? That’s punishing yourself. Skipping dessert, or withholding some food you really like? Usually in retaliation for overeating before? That’s a punishment. It makes it really hard to get your subconscious desires lined up behind your diet. By carefully paying attention, I have found I can figure out why I overeat and keep ahead of it. For example: if I get really, really hungry, I will overeat. I will also eat in a big hurry and want to feel full. That’s destructive. But when it has happened, I don’t punish myself anymore. At the next meal, I eat normally.
Try to learn: I mean you can learn about yourself by figuring out when you will overeat. When it is really cold outside and I feel cold, I will overeat. When I don’t go to bed on time and don’t get enough sleep, I also overeat. If I am significantly late for a meal and get too hungry, I will overeat. And if I have any food insecurity, I will overeat.
Food insecurity means I have to have food available that I really want to eat and am looking forward to. When I am hungry and head to the kitchen at meal time, it is really demoralizing to have to only find food I don’t really want. Remember before when I said my values include not wasting food or throwing it away? That had to change. I learned I have to reward myself at every meal for eating less food. The reward is I get to eat foods I really crave. I am willing to accept that trade at all levels of my being.
I also decided to build in some significant rewards. As I lose each 10 pounds, I pick something I really want to eat as the reward. I might flip through the recipes at America’s Test Kitchen (I am a subscriber). My reward for losing 30 pounds was making a cake. A gingerbread cake. With ermine frosting. It was really good, even on the installment plan. Rewarding myself builds confidence and self-trust: I say I will reward myself, and I do.
That’s the really nice part about this project. I have learned to really value working with myself, figuring myself out, and learning to trust myself. It is very rewarding and satisfying. Losing weight is almost beside the point, given the beauty of my new self-relationship. I’m not a weak willed failure, but a person capable of making the changes needed to improve my appearance and lifestyle.
Compared to all this, my old lifestyle seems really pointless. Why would I go back to it and gain weight? I have learned to get much more out of myself. Aim high!
-The Doctor
(To read all the posts in the Start a Diet series, click here.)