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

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.

One time I made a deal with myself: I could eat anything I wanted so long as I was willing to write it down. I did that, down to the last teaspoon of sugar-free Coffee Mate, for a month. You know, it did not prevent me from having a cookie if I wanted one, but it sure prevented me from eating 20 cookies at a time. At the end of the month, I showed it to my doctor, who looked at and said, "If that's all you are eating, you should be losing weight."

Ta da!

The thing that sucks is, she said it in a sympathetic tone of voice. I thought she was going to order tests to figure out why I didn't lose any weight. And then she left the office, my appointment clearly over.

I was very puzzled and disappointed. And again, it took me a couple years to realize that she was assuming I couldn't tell the truth or accurately measure a portion to save my soul. The unspoken part of her sentence was, "Since you did not lose any weight, that cannot have been what you were eating."

I don't know how to get the doctors past the, "Since you did not lose any weight, that cannot have been what you were eating," territory, and on into the, "So let's find why you didn't lose any weight, even though that is all you were eating."

I doubt that I could ever stick to a diet that required that I never eat a specific item. Of course, eating less and moving more isn't helping either. Apparently my ideal diet was when I was in high school walking around with a heavy back pack all day and living entirely on pizza, mountain dew, and Chinese food.

I doubt that I could ever stick to a diet that required that I never eat a specific item.

This is me. When I was at my heaviest, I tried Atkins, since Lewis had read the book and was all ga-ga about it and wanted to try it. And hey, I'm a huge carnivore, I figure it would be great.

I felt like SHIT. And I realized that as much as I adore meat, I love the whole experience-- the bun with the burger, the roux-based sauce to put over a chicken or steak dish, the potatoes in a good beef stew or clam chowder, the rice dish to go alongside picadillo. So I quit while Lewis not only kept going, he was enjoying it and having so much success, he was going whole hog. I couldn't bread chicken cutlets in even the lightest coating of flour, no, no... I had to go find whatever it was that Dr. Atkins recommended, which burned and left my kitchen smelling so bad that I declared war. I told Lewis he could damn well cook for himself and I went on my own diet which was a severe portion control, but I didn't deny myself anything.

Sucked, though, that I couldn't even share a bite of ice-cream with my husband. (He was that hardcore, even after the initial period had long-since passed.) At the time, if I had run into Dr. Atkins, I would have cheerfully punched him in the nose.