How to start a diet Archives - Doctor of Things

How to start a diet 120 pounds overweight, Part 3

Post author:The Doctor
Post published:May 5, 2019
Post category:Start a diet

Review

In Part I of this series on how to start a diet when 120 pounds overweight, I described the philosophy for a new system of successful weight control based on self knowledge, negotiation, and fulfillment.

Make the decision (to sacrifice your old self)
Accept the realization (thin people monitor and control their weight)
Create a plan (monitor your weight, and control your food intake.)
Learn about yourself (negotiate to find what you really want, keep yourself satisfied)

In Part II of this series on how to start a diet when 120 pounds overweight, I explained how to transform yourself and be reborn as a new person with weight control as a top-level value.

Don’t go on a diet – sacrifice your old self instead
Change your mind and your body will follow (the other way around doesn’t work)
Avoid the willpower trap – your new life must be worth living (not maintained by force)
The new you – what do you value, and how does that make you different than before?

In Part III of this series on how to start a diet when 120 pounds overweight, we will focus on paying attention – learning how to pay attention to what your body is telling you, and negotiating with yourself to find the way forward. You must align the different levels of your being so that being in control of your weight makes your life rewarding and meaningful. More than the old life did!

Paying Attention

If you have read this far, you have already decided to let go of your old self and embrace a new self. The new you is committed to a lifestyle where you truly value being in control of your body’s weight. That value outranks most of your other aims in life. You will sacrifice your old future in favor of the new future. You will become a person capable of losing weight successfully and keeping it off.

The new you accepts that the price of lifetime weight control is a lifetime of paying attention.* All thin people monitor their weight; all thin people control how much they eat, one way or another. You are no different. You are proud of your new life and take pride in controlling your food intake and weight. You are working body and mind together to increase the fulfillment you get from life. The struggle to stay in control of yourself gives meaning to your existence. Success here will make you powerful. You can apply what you learn to other parts of your life.

*Don’t fall into the willpower trap. You’re not meant to be on a diet for the rest of your life, using willpower to keep eating things you don’t want. The effort is to keep paying attention to your body and mind and keep them working together. Don’t slack off.

A new hierarchy of values

Here is what a new hierarchy of value might look like, and how it will play out in your life:

Your new value is to be in control of your body’s weight. It outranks most everything else.
Your new aim is to monitor your weight every week and control your food intake.
Your new goal is to be hungry in time for every meal**.
Your new lifestyle should increase your sense of fulfillment and overall satisfaction with life.

**Note that this goal does not include being hungry between meals. Nobody wants to live like that.

When you have made these changes, you will start to feel that your old goals for food and eating were not truly fulfilling, but shallow, and left you feeling unhappy. Fulfilling the old goals came with a mix of immediate cheap satisfaction but also shame (to be enjoyed later). It’s amazing for me to look back and imagine the way I used to think and be. Figuring out this lifestyle change has made me much more satisfied with my life and happy with myself. I can trust and love myself again, after many diet and weight failures over the years. I recognize that I had become unhappy with myself and a bit depressed about my future. Now, that has turned around.

Track your food intake daily (and your weight)

Now, pay attention. What follows all flows from the decision to let go of all your old baggage and construct a new set of values and goals for yourself. For your new self, controlling your weight is one of your highest values that you live by. You make all your decisions through that lens. It’s a lifelong hobby and you have decided it is so important that you will not let anything get in the way. No excuses. It’s not willpower, it’s just who you are now.

There are two MUSTs to be in control of your weight: (1) monitor your weight and (2) regulate your food intake. After all, if you don’t know what you had for lunch and breakfast, you will have a hard time figuring out how much food you can have for dinner. If you don’t know, how can you control it?

Other people address the problem of controlling intake by restricting what foods they can eat. Keto diet is a very trendy example (on the keto plan, you only eat meat and fat and certain vegetables, very little sugar), but there are others. Atkins. South Beach. Weight Watchers. But it’s all just regulation of food intake in various disguises. On those kinds of diets, I found I needed portion control on top of restricting the kinds of foods I was allowed to eat. I found the restrictions unfulfilling. I wasn’t proud of telling people I was on South Beach or Keto, either. I wanted a life more fulfilling than that, and found it.

Set a day and time to weigh yourself, and maintain a written record of the results (at least once per week). To regulate your food intake, keep records of every food you ate and how many calories you ate. This is known as a food journal. There are workable alternatives: my grandfather solved the problem of monitoring intake by eating the identical amounts of the same things for practically every meal. He didn’t record anything, but he did weigh himself every day. He never exceeded 135 pounds and lived to be 101 years old. That solution didn’t work for me. It sure worked for him.

A journal also has a space for your weekly weighing, exercise (if you do that), calculations, and comments – kind of notes to yourself on how you were feeling and how things worked out for you. The comments are valuable. Treat your insights about yourself like gold.

Find out what rewards and satisfies you

If you try, you can force yourself to believe that you like eating rice cakes and wilted greens. It’s probably not true, though. That’s your WILL talking. You WILL get on a diet and lose weight! You WILL eat what I say! That kind of will. It has its uses. But when you are living a lifestyle of controlling your food intake and your weight, you can’t force yourself to do it by willpower, not for long. You may have experienced this already. Your body and mind will rebel against the tyrannical will, and you will break your diet and then you will hate yourself. That’s the different parts of you not acting together. And hating yourself is no way to get your body’s cooperation. You need all of the parts of your mind and body working together to do this. Try it – it is very rewarding.

Once you have an accurate record of your eating habits for several weeks, you can start finding out things about yourself. What are you eating and why? When are you eating? What foods were you really looking forward to? What wasn’t satisfying? When did you need to snack? Did you binge? If so, when and why? That is all very valuable information about yourself.

Looking back through my food journal entries for breakfasts, I quickly zeroed in on various forms of bacon, sausage, eggs, and steel cut oats as my favorites. I did eat other things too, but these were the most satisfying to me and kept me happy until lunchtime. (There were variations, like breakfast sandwiches, BLT sandwich wraps, egg fritattas and tortillas, on top of plain bacon and omelets.) I am most interested in controlling my weight and being satisfied. On that score, I am happy to report that I always look forward to breakfast, even under calorie limitations. Bacon is only 70 calories per slice, and eggs are 80 calories each. Breakfast of three eggs and three slices of bacon is totally ok and 450 calories. You will lose weight on three of those meals a day and enjoy the total satisfaction of eating them. Maybe you will like different foods. But remember the idea is that you look forward to your meals and they must satisfy you until it is time for the next one.

Hunger can be your friend

Eating to be full – that comfortable and enjoyable sensation – is a low-quality goal that I embraced for many years.

What is a higher quality goal? My higher food goals are to make sure I will be hungry for and excited about my next meal; and to pay attention to every bite I am eating and enjoy it. That means I have a reason to stop eating when I reach the end of the portion I have decided on. Amazingly, if you are paying attention and listen to what your body is telling you, you don’t actually get much taste enjoyment out of a second portion of even your favorite food, if the first portion was at all sufficient. The only enjoyment from eating more and more comes from feeling full, and possibly the sense of completion that comes from finishing the entire dish. That’s not a high goal! Your body is trying to tell you, if only you would pay attention, how it wants to be fed. You can use that.

Hunger is the best pickle. -Benjamin Franklin.

What was Franklin saying? Do you see it? He is saying that your food tastes best and is most satisfying and fulfilling when you are hungry for it. If you regularly overeat to feel comfortable and full, there are two consequences: you will not be truly hungry for the next meal, and it won’t taste nearly as good.

On the other hand, it is not a higher goal to starve yourself, either. That is very demoralizing and self-defeating. You should eat sufficient and measured amounts of foods you are really looking forward to. If you get a chance, read Mark Twain’s story “At the Appetite-Cure”. Twain knew that hunger was the best pickle! In the story, after Twain finally lets go of some bad thinking and embraces hunger, he is rewarded with steak, potatoes, bread, and coffee, rather than tripe and old boots! And he enjoys them and appreciates them more than he ever has.

The higher goal has the two necessary parts: you must be looking forward to what you will be eating with great anticipation – for that reason, you must be hungry for it. It makes it taste so much better and it is worth sacrificing and waiting for. You are sacrificing the feeling (your old goal) of feeling full! Once you have taken the first bite, the temptation to rush through and get another portion will be there. Therefore you must temper your instinct and instead eat slowly, enjoying every bite with the knowledge that you will not want any more – it just won’t ever taste as good as when you were hungry. It will be a waste. Put the rest away to enjoy it later. If you make sacrifices (get hungry) and they are constantly wasted (on food you don’t really want), you will not make sacrifices anymore. This is part of the negotiation you will have to have with yourself. How do you reward yourself for stopping with one portion? The reward is that you know the next meal will be worth the sacrifice, too. You may have to have trust-building exercises with yourself!

Notice that the goal is not “I want to be thin.” That is not enough and it is never enough. If wanting to be thin made people thin, we wouldn’t be struggling to get there. We are working to transform your values and how you see food. We are increasing your enjoyment, not decreasing it, and refining your tastes and goals. You are giving up something (the low quality goal), but you are gaining back much more. As a side effect of your mental revolution, you will become thin over time. Isn’t that a nice way for dieting to work?

This is why diet food is such a bad idea, in my opinion. Who would look forward to it? Is it worth sacrificing for? Will you really enjoy it? No! That’s completely self-defeating. All foods can be part of my diet, as long as I am hungry for them and maintain my enjoyment as a means of portion control.

Plan out your food and have it ready

Make sure the foods you want are in the house and ready to eat. That means planning ahead. I like bratwursts by Johnsonville, so I cook them ahead of time with onions and keep them in the fridge. I can have them ready for lunch in minutes. Wednesdays I go to a Greek restaurant and have a gyros sandwich of 600 calories. The point is: have a plan and keep the food you want close to hand. Once you are hungry, you will want food NOW. You won’t have time to go to the store or order something. I know I will get hungry for lunch at 11.30. I plan the day around the times I will be hungry. Obsessive? A bit. But my weight is coming under control. That’s a trade-off I can accept.

You have to have snacks ready, too. Sometimes you will get hungry between meals (or get delayed, lose track of time, and so on) and will need to satisfy yourself immediately. I am really bad about snacking. I forget to take snacks with me, and if I do remember, I put off eating them. It’s an area I will have to work on more. That’s a downside of embracing hunger as the goal – it’s really hard to ignore once it happens. Having sacrificed satisfaction through being full, you need to keep yourself satisfied using the high quality approach, so pay attention to your hunger all the time. Obsessive? A bit. But my weight is coming under control. That’s a trade-off I can accept.

Find the right people to support you

Surround yourself with supportive people. This may or may not include your parents, spouse, or your best friends. Pay attention to who supports you during your efforts. You have a goal: find a higher purpose and meaning in your life and then live out the consequences through your lifestyle choices. Some people you think are friends, might be unsupportive, even destructive, if you announce you are improving yourself. Maybe it makes them jealous or they feel ashamed of their own shortcomings, who knows? You can’t change your lifestyle successfully with those people in your life. They might find ways to sabotage you and take a perverse pleasure in keeping you low, in your failures, bad days, and other shortcomings.

This negativity can take various forms. The person might just act uninterested, which is a signal for you to stop talking about your transformation and successes and find someone else to talk to. A more negative approach might be to start putting you down or saying negative things, or dismissing your accomplishments. Even well-meaning people can say things that you don’t find helpful. My mother sometimes said things I found irritating – but she is trying to be supportive. I have asked her to say different things instead, which she is willing to do.

If you have unsupportive, jealous, negative, or plain toxic people in your life, try talking to them about the weather instead. Avoid the subject of your diet success and new lifestyle and don’t bring that up to them. Find people who will encourage you and be happy for you that you are accomplishing your goals. Keep your vision high. Find meaning in pursuing your goal through your choices and new values.

Don’t let anyone hold you back, not even family. Get some people who are happy for you and want you to succeed. They are around if you look, and they are worth the finding.

-The Doctor

How to start a diet 120 pounds overweight, Part 2

Post author:The Doctor
Post published:April 13, 2019
Post category:Start a diet

In the first post of this series, I talked about the general thinking and philosophy you need for successful lifestyle change:

Make the decision (to sacrifice your old self)
Accept the realization (thin people monitor and control their weight)
Create a plan (monitor your weight, and control your food intake.)
Learn about yourself (negotiate to find what you really want, keep yourself satisfied)

Those points were about committing yourself to a change of heart, a change of values, and ultimately a change of lifestyle. I want to talk some more about the sacrifice you are making and the new self you are creating.

1. Don’t go on a diet

How do people do on a diet? Sing along with me, you know the tune. (1) lose some weight by forcing yourself to make some drastic and unpleasant change, then (2) fall back into your old habits (your old life), suddenly or gradually, then (3) gain back that weight and maybe some more, and (4) repeat. For your own sake, please don’t go on a diet. Instead, change who you are. Let me explain.

I’ve checked out the weight loss forums and food diary pages, and read some weight loss books. The advice can be good. But it needs a framework. Why are you doing this? What does it mean for how you live your life? What are you sacrificing (forever)? Who will you be, when you have reimagined yourself? People are full of enthusiasm to give dieting a try. Motivation is not the issue! But they run into a few problems that make the whole thing self-defeating. The first problem is the dieting idea itself.

Diets set you up for failure because they are built around the idea that you do not need to permanently change your lifestyle or take control of yourself. They give you excuses that salve your self-image instead of inspiring in you the desire and ability to change forever. Once you accept the truth that thin people absolutely do monitor and control their weight throughout their lives, you are mentally halfway to getting there yourself. Think about it: if thin people must monitor and control their weight during their whole lives to stay thin, then so must everyone else, including you and me. (If you want to be thinner, anyway.) If you diet, then go back to your old life, your old weight will come right back.

On diets, you are following a temporary plan. Whether you are on the grapefruit diet, or low carb, South Beach, keto, Atkins, or paleo, or whatever, that diet has a built-in, self-defeating excuse and a dodge of your responsibility to yourself and others. (The people in your life who depend on you, need you to be at your best.) If what’s making you heavy is too many carbs, or processed foods, or the lack of grapefruit, well, it’s not your fault, is it? It’s those darned carbs, or the corporations, or some other demon. Remember: if thin people must monitor and control their weight during their whole lives to stay thin, then so must you and I.

Do you really want be someone who is on the diet cycle for the rest of your life? Don’t diet. Make a change to your thinking and create a new you who can lose weight and keep it off forever.

2. Instead, change your mind. Your body will follow.

Your old self was a person who couldn’t lose weight, and who is gaining weight. You need to be a new person, who can lose weight and keep it off. That means you must sacrifice the old you. It has to go. Does that sound hard? Well, it is. Very hard. You’ve built the old you over many years. It’s comfortable and secure. To leave the old you is like being a hermit crab leaving the old shell. It’s scary and makes you feel unprotected. Luckily, you have some help in making this difficult change. You know that successful people sacrifice. You will read here some ideas on to build a new and better lifestyle for yourself. Sacrifice your old thinking, goals, aims, and lifestyle that make you overweight. Find new ones that result in a new you. I will explain.

Maybe, like me, your old goal in eating was to feel completely full. Maybe you find that very comforting – being completely full. And maybe you have hurt yourself, failing on diet after diet until you can’t trust yourself any more. You might start to dislike yourself, or get depressed about your failures. Maybe you have punished yourself for straying off a diet. Maybe you eat quickly, to get to that full feeling faster. Maybe you eat while watching TV or using your phone or reading. The old life is not that wonderful when I describe it, is it? You must let go of all that. It will be hard. Even letting go of hurt is hard. But it is necessary and there are compensations. I know an adult who ruined his own life just to upset his parents. That’s someone who can’t give up their hurt and needs revenge. Let it go.

You need to create a new self. You need a plan to become a new person with a new set of values. THAT is the lifestyle change. You will become a new person who values being thin and is willing to put in a lot of time and effort to make it happen. It is a transformation! You turn yourself from a person who is overweight into one who can succeed at losing weight. You’re not doing it for anyone else or despite anyone else. You let the old parts of you burn away and your life is renewed.

You are building a new identity. What does the new you value above all else? What is your new aim regarding your eating? What does a person in control of their weight value? What is your new goal when you consider eating food? It all flows from the top. Change what you value in your life. If you value having your weight under control, then you need a new aim or purpose in living your life. Your goals in eating must be different, too.

3. Avoid the willpower trap

A couple of months after I started dieting, my mother sympathetically asked me if I was feeling deprived over the things I was cutting out. It was hilarious, there was no way to answer her. We were operating on different planes. She was thinking in terms of what I was cutting out of my food choices to lose weight. She was expecting me to be living on willpower and broccoli, constantly hungry and craving. And I had done that before and failed at it before. But this time, I was eating better (quality) and enjoying my food more than I ever had since I was in college and decently thin!

I could only answer her by showing her how I was reframing everything. Mom, I’m just not thinking about it that way. I’m not giving up any foods, deprivation is not part of my experience. Willpower is not being used in the way you think it is. For breakfast, I had 3 slices of bacon and 3 eggs with cheese. For lunch, I had a Reuben wrap sandwich. For dinner, I had a carnitas burrito. I ate 1730 calories that day and I was hungry for every meal and I enjoyed every bite. Oh, and I was losing weight too. The willpower was all used for paying attention to what I was doing. Deciding which foods would be worth waiting for. Figuring out how much of them would be enough to enjoy, but not so much that I wouldn’t be hungry for my next meal. Paying attention while I was eating, so that I would eat carefully and remember to enjoy satisfying my hunger with that first bite and every bite. I was making a sacrifice, and then ensuring that the sacrifice would be worth it. What was I sacrificing? My old self. My old goal. My old comfort (which came from eating until I was completely full).

Don’t use willpower to force yourself to do things you don’t want and can’t live with. You can’t force yourself to do them forever, and then you will go back to your old life. Plus, when your willpower fails, you will feel terrible about yourself. You need to feel your body and mind are working together. Fulfillment comes from that partnership.

4. The new you

Imagine you were helping someone else on a diet and they are letting you down, time after time. How can you trust someone like that? How can you work with them to accomplish the goal? Think of your body as another person you must work with. You need your body and mind to be working together in your new life. You must love yourself, work with yourself, and reward yourself for a job well done. You also must figure out (in consultation with yourself, strange as that may sound) a lifestyle that will make you successful at losing weight, and one that you could enjoy being on for many years. That’s right – if your new lifestyle is enjoyable, losing weight will be enjoyable too. Losing weight will almost seem beside the point.

The new you will have to be discovered. I can tell you about the new me. Unlike my grandfather, who very effectively controlled his food intake by eating a monotonous diet, I am very interested in the different foods I can eat and I want to keep eating them. A lifestyle of eating only broccoli wouldn’t work for me, though I like broccoli (with enough butter and cheese). The new me still values eating as a sensual experience.

What changed? I moved “in control of my food intake” and “I want to be thin” near the top of my moral hierarchy. They are up there now, higher than my desire to be frugal, higher than my desire to save money, higher than my desire to buy a house or a new car. I haven’t saved any money by eating less food, because what I am eating isn’t as cheap, but is more satisfying. You know, my new values are higher in my mind than “I want to eat together with my family”? If they don’t make it home in time for dinner, I eat without them. That sounds terrible, but I am in a serious calorie deficit. By dinner time, I can get seriously grumpy if kept hungry for too long. They wouldn’t like me when I’m grumpy. It’s better if I eat. When they come home, I can serve them, sit with them, and talk to them about their day. Do you see how that works? Being in control of my food intake and being thin are now more important to me than they were before. I sacrificed that old me, and I sacrificed my old values and I will sacrifice eating with my family, if that gets in my way. (There are limits – we’re not the Donner party.)

My aim now is to be in control of my food intake and to be thin. There are many physical and social benefits to being thin and I won’t go into them here; they are well known and I accept most of them. But my new aim is a great moral good that I have brought into my life; I will be responsible for my body and how it looks and I will be proud of it. I am focused on my aim and I will cut off anything that gets in the way (unless it conflicts with a higher value; there are some things even rats won’t do!). Other things, like spending time with my family, are still important. But I fit them in if I can. If it’s work on my food journal, or play with the kids, I complete my journal. It’s that important to me now. I don’t compromise in my new aim. I intend to be like this for the rest of my life, too. It may sound a bit selfish, but my family will benefit from me being a stronger, fitter, and more disciplined person who is living responsibly.

My goal now, when eating, is to be hungry. Using the power of my mind, I have turned hunger from a bad thing into a good thing. Let me explain. Before I changed, I wanted to feel absolutely full after every meal. That was my old goal. Consequence: overweight. My new goal is to have every meal be as enjoyable as possible, while still under control. That goal means that I must be hungry when mealtime comes. Food tastes best when you are hungry. The food has to be worth getting hungry for and has to be truly satisfying my cravings. It has to be just enough to satisfy me and keep me happy until the next meal. I have found this arrangement works for me, if the food is worth it. This brings me to rewards.

Reward yourself for doing a good job. Your body will love you for it. Make promises to yourself and keep them. Build your trust in yourself and your abilities. Each 10 pounds I lose gets rewarded. I reward myself with special foods. Do you see how the new me has a system that reinforces itself? The special food is the ultimate in “worth waiting for”. I will prepare by getting hungry; I will take my time and enjoy it; I will eat just enough so I will be hungry for the next meal. I admit that if the reward is an Indian buffet lunch, the next meal might be breakfast. But I will be hungry for it.

What if I have a bad day or fall back into my old thinking? What if I get too hungry, overeat, ruin my plan? Well, I don’t punish myself, ever. I try to learn why I did that. What was different about today? Did I get cold, did I have some emotional stressor, was I tired? Was I not planning my meals out? I learned that I need to have the foods I am craving in the house and ready. When I get hungry, it gets very urgent, and I really resent eating things I don’t really want. My old habit was to cook lots of extra food and eat the leftovers as lunch. Quantity was the goal. Now I want quality, and if all there is to eat is leftovers I don’t really want, I get resentful. Maybe rebellious. I am not satisfied, after the sacrifice I made! So I rebel.

So don’t punish yourself. Try to learn. Tomorrow is a new day. Losing weight is a matter of average calorie intake, week by week and month by month. Leave your anger and disappointment at yourself behind. It’s better to learn to listen and prevent future binging. I pay a lot of attention to what foods I keep around, now. Resentment is destructive.

Create a new life, one that you can be proud of, and enjoy. Who wouldn’t want that?

-The Doctor

How to start a diet 120 pounds overweight

Post author:The Doctor
Post published:April 7, 2019
Post category:Start a diet

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.)

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