Fad diets seem to have become a race to the bottom on who can propose the most preposterous diet possible. The more diets I see like these, the more I feel like they start out essentially taking...
Fad diets seem to have become a race to the bottom on who can propose the most preposterous diet possible. The more diets I see like these, the more I feel like they start out essentially taking one step away from Inedia and thinking that's enough.
Yeah most of the dieting info I see getting passed around is based around rules and moralizing, and you can see that as well in how people talk about it - there's the same defensiveness and...
Exemplary
Yeah most of the dieting info I see getting passed around is based around rules and moralizing, and you can see that as well in how people talk about it - there's the same defensiveness and evangelism around nutrition that you see in religion a lot of the time.
None of that stuff worked for me. My actual problems were a combination of habits and values whose outcomes ran counter to my own intention to stay at a healthy weight. I was doing the opposite of what I needed to do - I was eating unsatisfying food often instead of eating satisfying food infrequently. And I valued that experience. Eating five thousand calories of chips and sweets and other heavily processed and artificially flavored food was what I wanted to do. I had never been taught what "satisfying" actually meant when it comes to food, for me, and so I was going for large volumes of food that only filled me up when I overate, and didn't fill me up for long. And that turned into habit.
I had to rethink things and redefine myself a bit to cut that out. And introspection is simply not an easy answer like "only ever eat meat" is. But I learned that I was actually craving a type of experience that the unhealthy food I was eating didn't provide unless I binged: satiation. And I figured out that I could produce satiation by eating more whole foods, proper meals cooked to my taste, choosing "rich" or "filling" foods.
Before if I wanted a sandwich I would make three cold balogna-and-mustard sandwiches on wonderbread, and I'd either feel sick or else end up wanting some chips and candy a couple hours later. But if, on the other hand, I took one of those dollar loaves of italian bread and a variety of italian meats and some decent cheese and made a toasted Italian sub with Italian dressing, I could eat a six- or eight-inch sub like that and be good all day. The sub has things that the cold balogna sandwich doesn't - complex and powerful flavors, texture, and applied effort. It was basically that simple. Make the food feel like real food and I'll feel like I ate.
There were a couple other behavioral changes I needed to make. One was to limit my eating to a six hour time frame each day, and I helped that along by taking a quality Hoodia Gordonii supplement for a couple months to suppress my appetite (despite what you'll read online the stuff worked great for me and I don't care if it was placebo or not) until the change in eating schedule was habitual. I also had to chew my food much more slowly and thoroughly, and I helped that along by sticking to foods with a firm, crunchy texture and avoiding foods that fall apart in your mouth (like Twinkies or ice cream) until that was also habitual.
I'm at the point now where I don't really have to think about this stuff anymore. My values and habits are different now and I actually prefer to eat this way because I understand the why and how of it on a personal level. And that means I eat whatever I want, because what I want is good, reasonable quantities of food.
Fasting is the only diet I've seen that seems to actually work consistently, but I reckon there's some bias going on as the people who have to discipline to fast are probably the ones who have...
Fasting is the only diet I've seen that seems to actually work consistently, but I reckon there's some bias going on as the people who have to discipline to fast are probably the ones who have overcome whatever was causing them to overeat in the first place.
Studies have shown that most diets, including fasting, work in pretty equal measure. The determinant factor in their success often not being their actual composition, but rather the fact that they...
Studies have shown that most diets, including fasting, work in pretty equal measure. The determinant factor in their success often not being their actual composition, but rather the fact that they encourage people to change habits and become more conscious of their food intake. As @alessa pointed out in their excellent comment above: a change in habits is still the most effective diet we know of.
So like you reckoned: the fact that fasting seems to work has less to do with some inherent quality of the diet itself, and more with the sort of discipline it takes to do.
Of everything in this article, this is the sentence that horrified me the most. Like, you're just going to trust some random person on the internet with your diet for a few days? A person who...
As far as rules for the diet go, I opted to follow a more lenient version of the diet that I found on this blog
Of everything in this article, this is the sentence that horrified me the most. Like, you're just going to trust some random person on the internet with your diet for a few days? A person who writes articles titled "Health Dangers of Eating Fruit"?
Yes, yes that's exactly what people do all the time. It's horrible and dangerous but it keeps happening. People will believe fake science on Facebook telling them gluten are 'poison' and nobody...
you're just going to trust some random person on the internet
Yes, yes that's exactly what people do all the time. It's horrible and dangerous but it keeps happening. People will believe fake science on Facebook telling them gluten are 'poison' and nobody should ever eat any gluten ever. It's perhaps the most pernicious issue of our time.
Fad diets seem to have become a race to the bottom on who can propose the most preposterous diet possible. The more diets I see like these, the more I feel like they start out essentially taking one step away from Inedia and thinking that's enough.
Yeah most of the dieting info I see getting passed around is based around rules and moralizing, and you can see that as well in how people talk about it - there's the same defensiveness and evangelism around nutrition that you see in religion a lot of the time.
None of that stuff worked for me. My actual problems were a combination of habits and values whose outcomes ran counter to my own intention to stay at a healthy weight. I was doing the opposite of what I needed to do - I was eating unsatisfying food often instead of eating satisfying food infrequently. And I valued that experience. Eating five thousand calories of chips and sweets and other heavily processed and artificially flavored food was what I wanted to do. I had never been taught what "satisfying" actually meant when it comes to food, for me, and so I was going for large volumes of food that only filled me up when I overate, and didn't fill me up for long. And that turned into habit.
I had to rethink things and redefine myself a bit to cut that out. And introspection is simply not an easy answer like "only ever eat meat" is. But I learned that I was actually craving a type of experience that the unhealthy food I was eating didn't provide unless I binged: satiation. And I figured out that I could produce satiation by eating more whole foods, proper meals cooked to my taste, choosing "rich" or "filling" foods.
Before if I wanted a sandwich I would make three cold balogna-and-mustard sandwiches on wonderbread, and I'd either feel sick or else end up wanting some chips and candy a couple hours later. But if, on the other hand, I took one of those dollar loaves of italian bread and a variety of italian meats and some decent cheese and made a toasted Italian sub with Italian dressing, I could eat a six- or eight-inch sub like that and be good all day. The sub has things that the cold balogna sandwich doesn't - complex and powerful flavors, texture, and applied effort. It was basically that simple. Make the food feel like real food and I'll feel like I ate.
There were a couple other behavioral changes I needed to make. One was to limit my eating to a six hour time frame each day, and I helped that along by taking a quality Hoodia Gordonii supplement for a couple months to suppress my appetite (despite what you'll read online the stuff worked great for me and I don't care if it was placebo or not) until the change in eating schedule was habitual. I also had to chew my food much more slowly and thoroughly, and I helped that along by sticking to foods with a firm, crunchy texture and avoiding foods that fall apart in your mouth (like Twinkies or ice cream) until that was also habitual.
I'm at the point now where I don't really have to think about this stuff anymore. My values and habits are different now and I actually prefer to eat this way because I understand the why and how of it on a personal level. And that means I eat whatever I want, because what I want is good, reasonable quantities of food.
Fasting is the only diet I've seen that seems to actually work consistently, but I reckon there's some bias going on as the people who have to discipline to fast are probably the ones who have overcome whatever was causing them to overeat in the first place.
Studies have shown that most diets, including fasting, work in pretty equal measure. The determinant factor in their success often not being their actual composition, but rather the fact that they encourage people to change habits and become more conscious of their food intake. As @alessa pointed out in their excellent comment above: a change in habits is still the most effective diet we know of.
So like you reckoned: the fact that fasting seems to work has less to do with some inherent quality of the diet itself, and more with the sort of discipline it takes to do.
Of everything in this article, this is the sentence that horrified me the most. Like, you're just going to trust some random person on the internet with your diet for a few days? A person who writes articles titled "Health Dangers of Eating Fruit"?
Yes, yes that's exactly what people do all the time. It's horrible and dangerous but it keeps happening. People will believe fake science on Facebook telling them gluten are 'poison' and nobody should ever eat any gluten ever. It's perhaps the most pernicious issue of our time.