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Now, for the First Time Ever! My Weight Loss Secrets … Revealed!
For the first time in years, losing weight will not be one of my New Year’s resolutions. After several years piling on the padding, which only accelerated when I started working from home, I’ve lost 38 lbs. in the past 98 days. Gee, Jon — what’s your secret? Read on, for all will be revealed in Five Simple Steps.
Google “weight loss” and you’ll get 232 million hits. Everybody is searching for the silver bullet that will replace their pony-keg belly with six-pack abs. And it seems like half the people who are happy with their size are hawking some miracle diet, high-tech fitness equipment, or psychological trick that will restore anyone to their teenage figure. (All for 18 easy payments of $119.99!)
As most adults have learned, there is no magic formula. But now that I’ve achieved a moderate level of scrawn, and with Peter’s prompting, I wanted to share my counter-intuitive observations about shedding pounds.
1. Every diet works.
South Beach, Jenny Craig, Atkins, Paleo, Medifast, Zone, Modified Zone, Nutrisystem, Jared’s Subway Spectacular — each one of these mainstream diets works like a charm. As will any diet or exercise program that takes in less calories than it expends.
After failing at a couple of the above plans, I decided that they didn’t work. But now I know that it wasn’t the diets that failed — it was me. If I would have stuck with their program(s), the pounds would have fallen off.
So read about a few different options and choose the one you think will fit best with your lifestyle. Then choose a second option.
2. Every backup diet works too. Say you’re driving to an important meeting and a bad accident blocks your usual route. Do you just go home? No, you use a different route to get to there. If weight loss is an important goal, you’ll act accordingly. Since failure is always dispiriting, pick your detour diet ahead of time. Creating this fallback actually helps you stick to your original plan by changing your choices. No longer are you choosing between a protein shake and a DQ Double Mint Oreo Blizzard with Xtreme Spr!nklz. Instead you’re choosing an Isagenix bar or a Paleo meal.
3. No one has ever cheated on a diet. You can’t cheat a diet, but you can cheat yourself. If you sneak in a greasy cheesesteak, the diet plan is going to be fine. You are the only one who will suffer since you’re further from your goal. And although we all fall short sometimes, don’t pretend you’re getting away with something.
4. Develop a healthy negative attitude.
When going through various diets’ promotional literature, I read a lot of happy talk about the various plans. “The food is delicious!” “I was never hungry!” “It’s so easy!”
Lies all. I don’t care which diet you choose. The food often sucks. You’re desperately hungry, at least early on. And it’s harder than hell to stick to the plan when your friends and family are scarfing down donuts for breakfast and pizza for brunch.
Obviously, I maintained a positive attitude about achieving my ultimate goal, but I didn’t lie to myself about what a breeze the diet would be. I decided that my food would be a drag for a few months, but the result was worth it. And every time I sort-of enjoyed a lightly seasoned plate of lean meat, organic wild rice, and veggies, it was a pleasant surprise.
5. And finally, the secret to losing weight (and keeping it off): You’ll lose weight when you want health more than you want that pile of donuts. It’s just that simple — and that difficult. I was overweight for several years and had several failed attempts at lasting weight loss. But it wasn’t the fault of the diet, my metabolism, genes, body type, or anything else. There was no rare medical condition that was keeping the pounds on. I just didn’t want to lose weight as much as I wanted another plate of buffalo wings.
I could list 20 more tips and tricks that helped me along with way, and I’ll probably add a few in the comments. But ultimately I had to make the choice for myself. And once I made that decision, I had little choice but to lose weight.
So, I chose the plan best suited to me and selected a backup plan. I wrote 17 reasons why I wanted to be healthy and read them often when my willpower flagged. I planned my meals days in advance and tracked everything on a fitness app. I gave away my XL clothing like Cortez burned his ships.
And I’ll keep the weight off as long as I opt for health over heartburn.
Published in Culture
You’re doing great, Jon. I’ve kept a fairly decent weight level for years, but I have had to work hard at it. And in my 60’s, it’s even harder. For me, trying to eat healthy most of the time, working out for an hour 3X per week and fast walking for two miles 5X per week(35 min.) helps. I just get super annoyed when people (1) assume I don’t have to worry about my weight or (2)assume I love to exercise–NOT! Actually I love the walking, but I would have chocolate cake every day and skip exercise if I could. I treat it like brushing my teeth or putting on clothes everyday before I go out–I don’t ask myself if I feel like doing it–I just do it!
Bragger, bragger, bragger . . .
First off, Kudos to Jon on his success.
I want to second Tuck’s endorsement of Dr. Maffetone. His approach is simple: eliminate junk food–defined as refined carbohydrates–from your life.
Bread, pasta, most cereals, chips, candy–all of the goodies–are hyperglycemic by nature. You eat ’em, blood glucose spikes, followed by insulin. The insulin facilitates fat creation while inhibiting fat burning, lowers your blood glucose, and gives you that hungover hungry feeling that is usually cured by another shot of sugar.
The degree of what Maffetone calls carbohydrate intolerance varies with age and by individual.
I adopted the Maffetone method last August and feel much better as a result.
The picture you used caused me to go across the street and buy a calzone.
Thanks Jon. :)
I did the same thing for decades. However, insulin resistance increases with age. I never had a weight problem, but since taking Maffetone’s two-week test I feel much better. I just don’t need all of the carbs.
Jon, what made you pick this Isagenix product?
Since I’m a sucker for this stuff, and since my wife went on Medifast a while ago, I took a look at some of the ingredients (they’ve got the ingredients for all the products if you care to look).
It appears to be a simple protein meal-replacement shake, they use primarily fructose as a sweetener, because it doesn’t affect blood glucose and therefore fat gain the way glucose does. But it makes you feel like you’re cheating, ’cause it’s sweet. As I explained to my wife, it’s a low-carb diet for carb addicts, basically.
So it’s very similar to Medifast, and a number of other such products. High-protein diets suppress appetite, and can therefore aid in weight loss—they’re known as “protein-sparing, modified fasting” diets.
Medifast’s been around for years, in fact. One of the doctors I respect most used Medifast to treat his patients in the ’80s:
Continued…
IMHO, the diet trap is about food portions. I’d rather give up Doritos for life than limit myself to a handful. (Similar to the theory that alcoholics can never stop at just one drink.)
I eat as much as I want but skip the fixins’. No salad dressing (a tbsp of olive oil is fine), no frying or sautéing but plenty of grilling and broiling. I eat a lot of protein (mostly chicken and fish) which is also helpful in filling you up. No rice, corn, or white potatoes but all the yams I can eat and plenty of steamed vegetables with fresh lemon juice and some seasoning.
I began this dietary discipline over 15 years ago and a funny thing happened; I grew to enjoy the taste of food in its plain ole natural state!
…Continued:
Basically, it’s a high-fat, high-protein, lower carb diet. But the fat is your own body fat. That’s why PSMF diets are so effective for weight loss.
The problem arrives when you stop the plan, and go on a high-carb, lower-fat, normal protein diet. The one that caused you to gain weight in the first place, as Dr. Eades alludes above.
These can be very effective, but the “normal” diet you go on for maintenance is critical.
Isagenix, while it’s using a tried-and-true approach, is basically a scam, unfortunately. Many of the claims they make are just nonsense for the gullible, which I assume doesn’t include the author of the OP.
So I’m curious what caused you to pick it.
Good for you! I’ve been following Phil’s plan for a number of years now, and it’s terrific. I’ve also been lucky enough to meet him a few times, and while—in his own words—he’s a bit “odd”, he’s a genius when it comes to diet and training. Decades ahead of the scientific research, which is only now confirming what he’s been saying.
Of course he’s got the success of his athletes as a nice demonstration.
Bingo. I also started noticing natural sugars in natural food. I never realized how sweet simple things like steamed carrots or a good cup of black coffee could be. And the flavor is better than the caked-on sugar of mass-marketed desserts.
I have an old friend who weighed more than I did, but ended up thinner and healthier than me. He did Isagenix, and when I read the material, the skeptic in me yelled, “scam!” But I saw that it worked and he kept most of it off.
Then a second old friend did the same program with the same results. He incorporated vigorous exercise and now competes in Ironman events all over the country. Isagenix is multilevel marketing, which as a marketing professional myself, raised 100 red flags. But, again, it worked and I couldn’t argue with that.
Reading through the material again, I saw lots of elaborate claims about cleansing toxins and what-not. But frankly, I ignored all that. I saw that it reduced calories, but nothing as extreme as Medifast or liquid diets. It allowed me to eat healthy grains and a rather large meal for dinner. Their morning shake provided the same number of calories as I usually have for breakfast, but these were good calories, not garbage. And my Ironman pal gave me a handy workout regimen I could easily complete even with the reduction in food intake.
The initial investment seemed somewhat steep, but since I dropped multiple trips to restaurants and coffeehouses, my food budget stayed roughly the same over the three-month period.
Best of all, Isagenix fit best with my lifestyle and food preferences. Paleo has done wonders for so many, but it too had requirements that seemed arbitrary and didn’t mesh as well with my daily routine.
Yup, makes sense. Marketing BS aside, they’re doing a pretty standard approach.
LOL. There’s no such thing, except in small quantities!
Yeah, technically I don’t follow paleo myself, since I eat a lot of dairy. But for simplicity’s sake that’s how I describe it. It is getting a lot easier now than it was 6 years ago, as there are now “paleo” products that you can buy, versus cooking all your own meals and claiming mythical food allergies when you eat out! :)
In this case you really should look into Maffetone for your maintenance plan. The two athletes who still hold the record for most wins at Ironman Hawaii, the most prestigious event in the sport, were both following his plan.
One of my wife’s relatives had this simple advice for weight control:
It works for me! (beer is a vegetable, right?)
Maffetone is a frequent guest on the quirky but informative Endurance Planet podcast. I find the production a sprawling affair best suited to a long weekend run, but there are gems in there from time-to-time.
Yeah. Most of that stuff is just too sweet when I do indulge now. And the aftertaste lingers very uncomfortably.
Guinness is a whole meal.
Not sure if this will work for everyone but I’ve been doing it for several years with great success. The key is you have to be content with losing very small bits of weight over a long period of time. I call it balding.
Yes, I’ve been listening for years. It’s pretty much become the Maffetone show of late, now that it seems Phil’s decided to come out of retirement.
Are you familiar with the excerpt about Maffetone from Noakes’ Lore of Running?
If you look at the commonalities of most of those popular diets, it ends up being whole foods, lean protein, fruits and veges, cook for yourself, have an indulgence every now and again. Move around. Lift some weights. I pretty much stick to that.
I also plan all my meals for the day. I put in a waiting period for any impulses. If I really want that doughnut in an hour, I can have it then and enjoy it fully as long as I work around it later in the day. I am not saying “no”, I am saying “later”. Usually the craving goes away.
My mantras are “boredom isn’t hunger” and “hunger isn’t an emergency”.
I track my calories with MyFitnessPal and log my exercise with my Fitbit Charge HR. Lately I have had good accountability with DietBet.com. (You put in the bet price around $30, if you lose 4% in 4 weeks, you get your money back and more, depending on how many in the game succeed.)
Just to shoehorn my interests into Jon’s great post, your decision process perfectly illustrates what we know about how cancer patients make decisions about where to be treated (and maybe most health decisions?) Stories from a trusted friend, family member or neighbor trump science every time.
Go JON!
Also, avoid anyone who proclaims to have The Answer and that everyone else has it wrong.
There are many roads to success with weight loss.
Another key to my success is to build good habits over time. Everytime I have tried to do some diet/exercise overhaul like on January 1, I have failed. What has worked for me is small positive changes stacked up on each other so the habits get solidified before adding another one.
Don’t forget, don’t take advice on a healthy diet from doctors, as their record of success—in general—is abysmal. :)
I sure didn’t learn any of what I know in medical school. The nutrition and exercise education was paltry and mostly leaned on dogma and echoing what the societies say. Heart patient? American Heart Association diet. Diabetic? ADA diet. American College of Sports Medicine for exercise recommendations. Use the Food Pyramid. etc. The thinking was done for you by someone else.
Losing weight = Easy
Getting motivated to do something to lose weight = Hard
Yep, that’s my understanding.
There’s no scientifically-valid reason to stick to lean meat, that’s what got me going, btw. The truth is quite the reverse.
There is “The Answer”, and it also happens to be the Conservative answer. Eat the foods we evolved to eat. Bacteria can eat oil, that doesn’t mean humans can. Don’t eat the foods that are well-known to cause ill-health in a large majority of the people that eat them. That still leaves one with a world of options.
Ignoring that simple, Conservative principle is what’s gotten us to a nation that’s 70% overweight and 30% suffering from fatty-liver disease—not to go into the rest of the chronic degenerative diseases we suffer from.
Sadly the medical profession has led us down that road.
If you’re not familiar with the intellectual journey of Dr. Ron Krauss, it makes for interesting reading. The best account of it I’ve read with him is in the book The Big Fat Surprise.
This is an important point.
The Paleo diet sounds interesting. Fruits are preferable to grains? That sounds counter-intuitive to me, but I think maybe I’ll try it.
Whole fruits. Skip the orange juice, eat an orange. That cuts the amount of sugar you consume dramatically.
Grains are the least healthy foods available to us, and refined grain products like flour and seed oils (corn oil) are even worse.
This should be marketed as the “Conan the Librarian” diet.