And now for something completely different...

Three times in my life I’ve managed to lose a significant amount of weight through dieting - each time it’s been a different diet but the rate of loss with all three has been about 1 lb a week.

Unfortunately once I’ve lost the weight I’ve always been faced with the same two problems:

1. I haven’t been able to stop myself putting the weight on again.
2. I haven’t been able to keep to the same diet a second time.

I’ve been reading quite a lot recently about the benefits of fasting, which are far from just confined to weight loss apparently. I won’t go into what they are as, if you are interested, you can easily research them on the internet.

I decided to embark on a fairly intensive diet in which I ate normally on alternate days followed by a day in which I ate no more than 600 calories.

This worked very well to start off with. I didn’t find it difficult to keep to and I lost about 6 lbs fairly quickly. Then I found that I was no longer losing weight. I seemed to put on as much weight on the non-fasting days as I lost on the fasting days. This wasn’t due to bingeing on the non-fast days. I wasn’t tempted to binge in the slightest.

So I decided to up the stakes and go for a full 24 hours on and 24 hours off alternate day fast. This is supposed to be very beneficial but is also supposed to be very difficult to keep to. But it struck me that there was a very simple way of making this much easier. All one had to do was to make the change-over between the days at 12 noon instead of 12 midnight. This would mean that I would be getting the benefits of a full 24-hours without food, but still getting at least one meal every day.

So the days look like this:

Day 1 Breakfast

Day 2 Lunch and Supper

Day 3 Breakfast

Day 4 Lunch and Supper

Day 5 Breakfast

and so on.

The result of doing this has been fantastic. I’ve continued to lose weight (at about 2 lbs per week). I’ve only felt pleasantly hungry - otherwise I’ve felt great, with a lot more energy. I’ve not been tempted to binge, and I actually prefer being on the diet to not being on it.

One problem with diets like this is social events. I don’t live in isolation. There are plenty of occasions when I want to celebrate or I’ve been invited out, or there’s a celebration on a special day. How do I handle these?

1. I never deviate from the basic 24-on/24-off rhythm. That means that I know in advance which days are going to be “on” and which “off”. So as far as possible I plan my social calendar so that eating out takes place on “off diet” days. However that’s not going to work for everthing, so:
2. I have perfected the art of sitting at a dining table and watching other people eat. I think about it in the same light as watching a cooking programme on TV. In other words I think of it as an enjoyable experience, and not as a battle against temptation. And it really works! This is OK for family members and others who are used to my strange ways, but like 1. above is not going to work for every situation - so:
3. If all else fails, the diet is sufficiently robust to survive occasionally adding an extra meal in. You would still ony be eating 2 meals that day. But it’s really important to make these exceptions as rare as possible.

I’ll report on further progress (or lack of it!) in due course. I’m hoping that this is going to be something that solves the two problems I had with my three earlier diets.

Dieting Update

It’s been a while since I posted on the subject of my diet. However I am pleased to say that it is still going well and this morning I weighed in at 17 lbs less than my starting weight at the beginning of the year.

The diet has been going much more smoothly than it did last year, when it collapsed largely as a result of holidays. I think this improvement is due to two lessons that I have learned:

1. Cheating. There is always a tendency to cheat on any diet. With my diet the result is the introduction of more rules than necessary - which of course leads to more cheating! The solution I have found is to have a rule that if I cheat during a day I am not allowed to weight myself the next day. I have to add one more rule anyway. This rule is surprisingly effective, because it stops me from cheating when I think I can get away with it.
2. Holidays. Holidays and diets don’t mix! There is nothing worse than trying to keep to a diet while holidaying in some gastronomic paradise. In my case last year it was Italy and Canada. The trouble was that I didn’t have any rule about what to do on holiday with the result that the diet collapsed and I never succeeded in picking it up again. Anyway my rule is now that I make no attempt to keep to the diet on holiday (defined as anything more than three days away from home). When I get home, I weigh myself the following morning and start the diet again from scratch.
   

One thing I have noticed again as a result of the diet is that I need much less food than before. This is due to the slowing of my metabolism. Most diet critics get very upset about this, but for the life of me I can’t follow their logic on this point. Surely having a slow metabolism is the equivalent of having a car that does 50 miles to the gallon rather than one that does 30 miles to the gallon. All other things being equal why would one want a car with higher fuel consumption? In the same way, in these days when we are all worried about rising food prices and shortages, why would one want to need to eat more food? It doesn’t make sense!

(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)

Related: 

Other posts about dieting

Diet Progress Report

My diet is still going strong, and I am right on target having lost 12 lbs in the 12 weeks since the beginning of the year.

One problem that I am coming across is an increasing tendency to cheat. The trouble is that after one has cheated once it becomes easier to cheat the next time. Cheating of course is self-defeating in this diet as all that happens is that the rules get tighter and tighter.

So I am going to be really strict with myself from now on: NO CHEATING! 

(Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.)

Related: 

Other posts about dieting

Update on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 19:30 by Mark Forster

See my May 22 Update for how I overcame the cheating problem.

Dieting Update

I wrote this at the beginning of the year, but didn’t dare publish it until now. I’ve successfully lost half a stone (7 lbs for those of you who don’t speak British English) since I wrote it, so feel that I’ve made enough progress to go public!

Full details of the diet I have been following are given in my article Can I Improve on the “No S” Diet.

Looking back over the figures, I started this year 6 lbs heavier than I was at the beginning of last year!

So it sounds as if the diet wasn’t a great success.

But wait, it’s a bit more complicated than that. A couple of weeks before Christmas I was several pounds lighter than a year before. So what made the difference? A year ago I was on the diet over Christmas, and this year I wasn’t.

In fact what put paid to the diet last year wasn’t any fault in the diet itself. It was holidays!

A week in Sicily and a month in Canada were disastrous.

In fact there is a problem with the diet whenever I can’t weigh myself. So the obvious solution is to travel with my scales. My scales aren’t that heavy or bulky so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Next time I travel it will be with my scales!

Anyway I started the diet again with effect January 1st. Wish me luck!

Dieting and Health

An article Advocacy for Whom? on Sandy Szwarc’s blog Junkfood Science has given me furiously to think. An excerpt:

… the strongest evidence for more than half a century is that voluntary weight loss, regardless of the method, is associated with increased rates of premature deaths, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancers — by as much as several hundred percent, as the National Institutes of Health found in 1992 and the medical literature continues to support. The other problems that have been documented include the physiological effects of restrictive eating, dieting and weight loss, such as eating disorders, diminished mental acuity and work productivity, loss of concentration, nutritional shortages, reduced bone mass, cardiac arrhythmias, long-term exacerbation of high blood pressure and long-term weight gain.

The medically-documented consequences of inadequate calories, protein and deficiencies in nutrients, especially being seen among older people, include delayed wound healing, increased risks of infection, damaged heart and intestinal functions, longer hospital stays and higher rates of complications and higher mortality rates, depression, apathy, functional decline, loss of muscle strength, falls and increased fractures.

No one dies of fat, but they do from weight stigma. And they do die from bariatric surgeries, which bring objectively documented risks of dying far and above those even associated with the most “morbid obesity.”

The whole article is well worth reading.

A Rest from the Diet

I have decided to consolidate my diet as I’m finding that to lose weight I have to use too many rules. So what I am going to do for the rest of this month is keep the target weight at my present weight and allow my body to adjust to this weight. Hopefully by the time the month is up, I will need far less rules.

Dieting: Re-zeroing

My set of electronic bathroom scales has died. It kept giving error messages and the weighings became increasingly inconsistent, so I decided to buy a new set. Now I am the proud possessor of a WeightWatchers 8962U LCD Precision Electronic Scale. It’s much more legible than my old set and also gives the weights to the nearest quarter pound.

Using a new weighing machine means that it’s best to re-zero, so I’m starting again from this morning’s weight (1.25 lbs above yesterday’s weight on the old machine) with zero rules. I’ve also decided that it’s a good opportunity to go back to the previous method of a steady loss of one pound a week, rather than the Ratchet Effect which I’ve been using recently. What I’ve realised is that the Ratchet Effect doesn’t just ratchet the weight down - it also ratchets the number of rules up. I should of course have realised at the start that it would have this effect, but mathematics was never my strong point!

Since I’m now moving in quarter pound intervals instead of half pound intervals, I need to change the target weight four times a week. Since I’ve started on a Thursday, I will plot the quarter-pound drops on Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

I’m going to keep the new rule I introduced of “Single Course only” on the list of rules as it seems to work well.

(Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.)

Diet Progress

I couldn’t believe my eyes this morning when I weighed in and found that I was 2 lbs below my target weight for the day. That means that since I introduced the Ratchet Effect on March 10th I have lost 6 lbs. That’s nearly 2 lbs per week. Although I am eating much less than I used to in my pre-diet days, I have not been feeling particularly hungry. That seems to me to mean that my body is adjusting quite well to my weight loss.

Dieting: The New Rule Starts Well

The new rule I introduced yesterday “Single Course Only” showed its worth yesterday as this morning my target weight had dropped by 1.5 lbs. I’m now only 1.5 lbs behind where I would have been if I had not taken a week’s break at the beginning of the month.

There’s another reason for celebration: today I have lost overall 1 stone* since starting the diet at the beginning of December. That represents a steady loss of just under 1 lb per week.

* That’s 14 lbs or 6.4 kilos for those of you who don’t speak the Queen’s English!

Dieting - a new rule

I’ve decided that in my list of rules, there is too fast a progression to starting skipping meals. After all the idea is that skipping meals should be an occasional exception, not the norm.

So I have decided to try out a new rule which comes between “No Sweets” and “Skip 1 Meal”. The new rule is:

Single Course only

This means that you are only allowed one course at a meal. And no, you’re not allowed to pile your plate to the ceiling, because the “Small Portions” rule will be in effect at the same time!

I’ve been thinking of introducing this rule for some time, but it was only today that I was in a position to try it out. So far, so good!

[See here for the other rules]

Dieting: The ratchet starts to take effect

In my post about dieting just over a week ago I described how I was going to introduce a new idea called the “Rachet Effect”. So how have I got on with it?

The answer is that my target weight has gone down 1.5 lbs since last week - half a pound more than it would have under the previous system of an unvarying rate of decrease. But (and it’s a big but) this all happened towards the end of the week.  Here’s how it panned out :

Sunday: over target weight, 1 rule

Monday: over target, 2 rules 

Tuesday: over target, 3 rules

Wednesday: over target, 4 rules

Thursday: on target, 4 rules

Friday: target drops by 0.5 lbs, 3 rules

Saturday: over the new target, 4 rules

Sunday: target drops by 1 lb, 3 rules

So I seem to have reached a stage where having three or four rules is producing a weight loss. These rules are No Second Helpings, No Snacking, Nothing Sweet and finally (on alternate days) Small Portions.

Remember this is just how it has worked out over the last week - it may not stay that way. In fact the diet as it is now constituted should continue to respond to how my metabolism is working at the time.

Dieting: The Ratchet Effect Update

The first two days of the new system have been a bit inauspicious. So far I have gained 1.5 lbs and have two rules in effect. But not to worry - what I expect will happen is that I will stabilise at a number of rules which will keep my weight slowly declining. I hope that it will be not too high up the scale!

Dieting: Introducing the Ratchet Effect

Now that I’ve started back on my diet I must confess that I am getting rather bored with it. Specifically it’s the rate of loss of 1 lb per week that’s boring me. It’s too unvarying. It also isn’t sensitive to what is going on in my body at any specific time. So for instance when I first started the diet back at the beginning of December 1lb per week was too slow. I was losing weight faster than that with hardly any effort and had to hold myself back. But a couple of months later it was too fast. To keep up I had to cut back on eating to a greater extent than I was prepared to put up with.

So I’m going to experiment with a different way of adjusting the daily target weight. To do this I am not going to have a pre-determined rate of loss, but instead will let my body arrive at it’s own rate of loss. I will employ the “ratchet effect” - movement is only allowed in one direction.

The method of dieting remains exactly the same, except that my aim each day is to stay at the current target weight. However whenever I go below the target weight, that weight becomes the new target weight.

Let’s see how that would work out. If I weight myself in at 200 lbs to commence with, 200 lbs becomes my target weight and my aim each day is to maintain myself at that target weight. Every day that my actual weight is above 200 lbs I add a rule. If my weight is exactly 200 lbs I keep the rules that I have (if any). Everything so far is exactly the same as before.

Here’s the difference. If my weight one day falls to 198 lbs, then I can take one rule off and the new target weight becomes 198 lbs. So each day the target weight can remain the same or decrease. What it can never do is increase.

I won’t really know how this will work out until I have tried it for a while. It seems to me that it will be more interesting than a regular decrease in target weight. Interest is one of the main motivating factors in keeping to a diet. Of course it is theoretically possible that I might remain at the same target weight for evermore, but I don’t think that is very likely. It may well result in a much slower rate of weight loss - but that’s better than giving up the diet because one’s body can’t keep up.

(Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.)

Eating for a Long Life

There’s an interesting snippet in James LeFanu’s “Doctor’s Diary” in the Daily Telegraph today in which he says:

There should be much to learn from our most senior citizens about the sort of healthy diet that might promote longevity

He then gives some examples of this healthy diet.

Florrie Baldwin, current oldest Briton, aged 110: a fried-egg bap for breakfast every day.

Ada Mason, previous oldest Britain, aged 111: bread and dripping with lots of salt.

Charlotte Hughes, oldest-ever Briton, aged 115: cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs (and brandy).

Back to the Diet!

My week of resting from my diet is now over, so this morning I weighed myself to see what the damage has been from a week of eating what I like when I like. Considering that I’d taken full advantage of having no rules in place, I was glad to find that I’d only put on one pound. This means that my new target weight for the day is three pounds more than it would have been if I hadn’t taken the break.This isn’t too bad at all, as it could easily have been a lot worse.

In case you can’t work out how I arrived at the figure of three pounds, I’d better spell it out. It is made up as follows:

I was one pound over the day’s target when I stopped

The target weight would have dropped one pound over the week if I had stayed on the diet.

I have put on one pound.

Total three pounds. Since my aim is to lose one pound a week, in time terms I have slipped three weeks.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this adjustment will now make the diet easier to keep to. My wife did the same a few weeks back (with exactly the same result of three pounds/weeks), and she has had no problem since.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

A Rest from the Diet

The diet has been getting more and more difficult over the last week. I had to miss a meal on both Thursday and Friday and in spite of this I had to miss another meal on Saturday. When on Sunday I found that I was still one pound above my target weight I decided enough was enough.

In similar circumstances I knew exactly what advice I would give to someone else, because I had given it to my wife a few weeks ago. “Take a week off from the diet. Weigh yourself again in a week’s time and start again from that weight.” My wife did exactly that and the diet has been going fine for her since then.

So in spite of the fact that it involves putting back the date on which I am scheduled to attain my “perfect” weight, I am going to do the same. I will forget about the diet and start again next Monday. I can’t complain really - I have lost 11 lbs in total - and reaching a plateau like this is a feature of almost every diet. All I’m doing is allowing my body to consolidate the gains so far and then I will be getting going again.

When I come to write the diet up finally, I will probably amend the rules to include a resting period like this in place of the final “no eating” rule.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Dieting Update

I wrote earlier this month that my diet had been getting more difficult. Now for the first time I’ve had to spend two days only eating one meal a day. I am exactly on my target weight, but it’s taking less food to keep me there.

However something entirely unexpected has occurred, and that is that I don’t feel hungry. None of the symptoms I associate with missing meals have manifested themselves - I don’t feel light-headed, I feel perfectly fit and strong, and I have no hunger pains.

It strikes me that there is a lot of difference between skipping meals when one has been eating indiscrimately, and skipping meals when one has been training oneself (as I have) to eat less over a period of some two and a half months. In particular, the last time I had anything sugary to eat was on 31 January, well over two weeks ago. That probably means that my blood sugar is far more stable than it would have been previously.

As I say, this is an entirely unexpected effect, but it does seem that the people who said that missing meals would slow my metabolism are correct. The only thing is that I now realise that this is a good thing. I can now maintain an even weight on much less food than before. That’s rather like finding a way to reduce a car’s petrol consumption without effecting its performance.

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

How Hard Has My Diet Been? One Month On

In a previous entry when I had been doing my new diet for just over a month (January 5th) I summed up how hard it had been. Now that I’ve been doing it for just over another month I thought it would be good to analyse how hard it had been again for comparison purpose. As of today, I have lost 10 lbs and have four rules in place: No Seconds; No Snacking; No Sweets and Small Portions.

I’m still finding it easy to keep to, in spite of the fact that I’m getting to the stage where in most diets one tends to plateau. As you’ll see below there is some evidence of that happening, but not so much as to pose problems.

So in the 34 days since the previous report:

• On 4 days I have had no rules in place at all; so I have been able to eat exactly what I like, when I like, in what quantities I like.
• On 30 days I haven’t been allowed second helpings.
• On 23 days I also haven’t been allowed to eat more than 3 meals a day.
• On 14 days I also haven’t been allowed to eat anything sweet.
• On 7 days I’ve also had to eat small portions
• On 1 day I also had to skip a meal.

If you compare these figures with the ones given for the first month, you will see that the diet has increased in difficulty - not so much though that it has been hard work to keep to. As in the first month, I’ve only had to skip one meal.

The good news is that I’ve now lost enough weight for it to be noticeable, both to myself and others. Still a long way to go though!

Nothing to Report

Nothing to report on my diet.

That's quite unusual, isn't it? Aren't diet reports supposed to be full of moans about hunger, confessions about bingeing, and alternating despair and elation about the latest weigh-in?

No, sorry. None of that. I seem to have got used to the amount of food necessary to keep more or less to the target weight. Occasionally I have to use a rule or two, but basically it's just steady progress downwards and I eat what I feel like.

Very boring -  I need some drama to keep the readers coming!

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.

Diet Report

Since the British unit of dieting is the stone (14 lbs), it is important to celebrate the significant markers on the way. So today, since I have been on the diet for 7 weeks, I have officially lost half a stone (7 lbs). In fact I was a pound under target this morning, so I have actually lost 8 lbs. This means that I can remove one of the two rules currently in force. So today all my diet consists of is that I am not allowed second helpings. Easy peasy!

Full details of the diet I am following can be found here.