Making dieting more difficult than it needs to be.

Updated 5.19.2015
This rant was inspired by this Washington Post interview in which Traci Mann, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota. Mann studies people while they eat, and has decided after monitoring successful dieters that to be successful you have to live as though you are starving. This is NOT true.

This kind of thing is precisely why people stay fat. Because why even try to correct your diet (way of eating) if it’s hopeless. Mann a set point person. She calls it the “ideal” weight which basically is the weight the body defends, and will try and get you back to if you go over it. I’m sorry. I don’t think ANYONE’s “ideal” weight is at a morbidly obese level. And plenty of those people claim that they simply can’t lose weight.

The real problem is the fad diets that people use to lose the weight, whether we're talking Atkins, "Paleo" or whatever. Typically people try and lose weight quickly and that requires significant restriction and significant willpower. Once they attain their goal weight (or break under the stress of the restriction) and go back to eating as they had been— or even eating a normal amount of food— they pack the weight back on. Or they alternate restricting and binge eating— possible the most efficient way ever discovered to become obese.

Long term most people won’t continue to follow fad diets, which is why Mann (and the HAES) crowd insist that diets don't work. Fad diets maximize the neurological, hormonal and biological effects caused by calorie restriction. But you don’t have to “diet”. You do need to eat the amount of food (and only that amount) that a healthy human of the size you want to be would eat (as calculated, for example, at the NIH site, though there are other calculators). And that calorie total will NOT be a starvation level. It will be more than you'll eat on any fad diet, but it will also be LESS than you ate to become obese, and that's really where the hang up is. Because people do not like to admit that they became obese because they ATE TOO MUCH. All sorts of emotional and moral baggage gets assigned to that simple fact. And the plain fact is that though it won't be a starvation level ration, your body will register that you are now eating less, because you've trained it to expect more. I found the adjustment didn't take long, because I was eating enough to fuel my body, just not enough to increase its size.

Slow and steady NEATly done

Slow and permanent weight loss is entirely possible, but it will take a lot longer to achieve. I've noted a number of times how I did it, and I'm not neurotic about the amount of food that I eat. I'm aware, in that I have a general idea of what the correct portion size is for a human of my size and age. But I don't count calories and I don't journal my exercise expenditures. I do eat the correct portion (NOT a starvation amount), I do move regularly, and of course, I do maximize my NEAT— which is NOT simply fidgeting. NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis and it's the energy expended by your body to do everything other than deliberate exercise.

Yes, exercising IS important to weight loss

It is currently popular in the "low carb high fat" (LCHF) diet world to pronounce that exercise is unnecessary to lose weight, and of course, this is true. Even Yoni Freedhoff is in on the act, taking 40 minutes to say that eating less is necessary to lose weight, not just moving more. At last he acknowledges that the laws of thermodynamics exist and do apply. But he repeats the fallacy that NEAT is simply fidgeting and slams companies who tout exercise as a helpful to weight loss. Freedhoff thinks exercise is great and a part of a healthy lifestyle, but not part of weight loss. I think that's wrong.

However, if you want permanent weight loss that does NOT require you to eat less than a never fat person of the same weight, then exercise (and I'd add increased NEAT) makes that possible. Studies have shown that the metabolic effects of calorie restriction are mitigated by exercise. It really is eat less and move more. For the record, my "honeymoon" period as Mann would call it, is long over and I'm still at the lower weight. More to the point, my body seems to be defending the lower weight.

Not that long ago I wrote about my attempt to lower my set point further. That hasn't happened yet, but as soon as I corrected my portions, my body easily returned to the weight it was before the holidays. This newly defended weight point is roughly 30 lbs or 20% of my weight before I began my weight loss journey. I am still slowly losing weight as well, though I am still not "dieting" in the starvation sense. I average between 1800-2000 calories (I'm not counting so that's an estimate) a day, which is an abundance of food if you stay away from the chip bag.

I know she's trying to sell a book, but she's really doing a lot of damage.

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