What makes yellow onions so bad? (I have virtually no onion knowledge, since I try to avoid all of them.)

I have absolutely no idea. I think, in reality, they are probably a smidge sweeter than red onions, but not actually truly evil. But I did not lose the promised weight on that diet, in spite of following it quite rigorously, aside from a couple instances of forgetting about the onion restrictions when eating out.

I'm very dubious that accidentally eating yellow onions would make a diet fail. I realize everyone's metabolism and reaction to different foods is going to vary, but -- onions???

That reminds me of a post I read (maybe on Shapely Prose) about a woman on WW who, when she had her weekly weigh-in, either lost no weight or possibly gained a little. The WW leader went over the woman's food diary with her, and upon seeing that the woman stuck to the plan diligently, EXCEPT for sucking on cough drops because she was sick, declared that it was the cough drops that made her not lose/gain weight that week.

Seriously. Cough drops. How freaking many would an adult human need to consume to affect weight? About a billion.

I think that losing weight is very difficult for a lot of people, and calling out things like "you ate the wrong color onion" or "well, you sucked on cough drops" as reasons for diet failure is really ridiculous. Plus it makes the person trying to lose weight feel like shit, like they just didn't try hard enough -- if they REALLY wanted to lose weight, they would know that cough drops are forbidden.

Seriously?

It's not the cough drops, and it's not the onions. Losing weight is just plain difficult.

It took me a couple years to realize the reason he thought it was so ok is that he was assuming I had cheated quite a bit, but hey, if the fat chick stuck to the diet enough to lose anything, that's ok.

Oh... that makes me seriously rageful. What a douchenozzle.

That's pretty annoying, WindSparrow. The idea that overweight people can stick to a diet or sensible food/exercise plan and still not lose weight shouldn't be that foreign to medical personnel. If it was easy to lose unwanted pounds, almost everyone would do it.

There's a blog for people who are heavier than the current standard, and how that can negatively affect their medical treatment here.

The reason most diets work is that when you are on a diet, you are paying more attention to what you eat, which leads to eating less. The specific rules of the actual diet in question are almost entirely irrelevant.

(Which is to say, you could go on an "all cough drops and yellow onions diet" and lose weight just as easily as a "no cough drops or yellow onions diet." The point is that people on diets think more about their food than people not on diets.)

[eta: Though, just in my personal opinion, I do not recommend anyone go on the all-cough-drops-and-yellow-onions diet. Leaving aside all nutritional concerns, I shudder to imagine what that would do to one's breathe.]

Like the part where he says that if your skin turns yellow from eating too many carrots and sweet potatoes, that's actually a good thing, and it's the people with non-yellow skin who are unhealthy. Um, no thanks.

That reminds me of an article I read a while back about a bunch of (seemingly cultish) people who were eating as little as possible (like consuming 600 calories a day) in the hopes that it would permit them to live to the age of 150 or something. One of the very visible side effects of "succeeding" on this plan was the orange skin thing.

As I don't care to live till 150 and as I love food and drink and the pleasures it brings me and as I am tired of wasting time berating myself for not having a different body, and as I know that something will kill me sometime, I like to stay away from the diets. At least since my last one.

That reminds me of an article I read a while back about a bunch of (seemingly cultish) people who were eating as little as possible (like consuming 600 calories a day) in the hopes that it would permit them to live to the age of 150 or something. One of the very visible side effects of "succeeding" on this plan was the orange skin thing.

In their defense, caloric restriction has been proven to double or triple lifespans in lab rats. (And in defense of common sense, human beings are not lab rats! You need more food than that!)

In their defense, caloric restriction has been proven to double or triple lifespans in lab rats.

Heh, xpost, kinda. Yes, I believe that research was the basis of the diet examined in the article I mentioned above. I wish I could remember where I saw it.

Blech. My breakfast burned. I was able to scrape out enough not-burned parts to have a decent breakfast, though. And I hope the dishwasher can deal with the burned mess in the pan.

In their defense, caloric restriction has been proven to double or triple lifespans in lab rats. (And in defense of common sense, human beings are not lab rats! You need more food than that!)

See, our lifespan is already double what you'd expect in the wild (so to speak), courtesy of modern medicine and improved sanitation. And we still get to eat stuff. Suck on that, rats!

nods

eats another white chocolate-covered longan.

concludes that milk chocolate-covered bananas still have the edge over the other frozen fruit chocolates

is glad not to be a rat, dieting or otherwise