Full disclosure: I was once a foodie. I loved trying new and unusual foods; I looked forward to meals out at fancy restaurants and holes-in-the-wall; I looked for recipes that challenged my burgeoning cooking skills – all while maintaining my love for grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft Singles (because it’s just best that way).

I grew up in a small town without a lot of culinary diversity (although I did first try Tibetan food there thanks to my friend’s enthusiastic siblings screaming “Try the momos! Try the momos!” at me from their booth at our town’s ethnic food festival), so when I moved to the huge Canadian city of Toronto at age 24, one of the first things I set out to do was taste everything.

A friend and I took the ethnic food listings from the local free paper and decided to conquer every cuisine listed. We started with a Moroccan restaurant (“A” for Africa – we were going alphabetically, at least at first). We ate earthy, spiced couscous and tender meat encased in a phyllo pastry crust. I’d never had anything like it. From there we tried food from Bolivia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Peru, Portugal (and we abandoned alphabetical order). We brought friends with us and it was fun.

It wasn’t just ethnic cuisine I tackled; I also tried ostrich steak, boar, lamb, bison and sushi (“Raw fish?? EW!” and then found it immediately and completely addicting. Except for sea urchin. Still ew.) and more fusion combos than you can shake a ladle at. I found out what really amazing pizza tastes like. I was once on a date with a guy who didn’t know what avocado and sun-dried tomatoes were or what they were doing on his plate and I decided then and there it would probably be our last date. I was already in a committed and exciting relationship with food.

At home, I learned to cook fancy(ish) meals using exotic ingredients I could find in the various markets of Toronto: Chinatown, Kensington Market, St. Lawrence Market, Little India. My inner foodie flourished.

I was not dieting very restrictively at this time, despite having lost 30 pounds a few years earlier (perhaps I had just reached the lowest end of my natural weight range, as Traci Mann advocates but I’ll never know) although I do think that my lazy, halfhearted dieting left me hungry enough to crave very rich foods often and fueling my foodieness. It wasn’t until I began severely restricting my calories in the name of bodily perfection that my foodie self came into conflict with my dieting self.

To be thin, I simply could not afford the calories of a truly delicious meal – ever. I couldn’t even afford the calories of a very basic, average meal. By this time I was living in San Francisco, another great food town, but instead of enjoying it, I ate a half PBJ sandwich and fat free canned soup every day for lunch (I would have preferred the French cafe down the street) and hoovered bags of microwave popcorn to keep my stomach from growling. When I did eat out, I would starve myself all week and then binge till I was sick, followed up with a terrible guilt hangover. I don’t remember any of those meals fondly. Ironically, during this time I started telling people how much I lurved food, how obsessed I was by it. That obsession and preoccupation was even why I became a dietitian.

As you know, I eventually quit dieting because it was ruining my life. For a while, I ate everything again. I was in school and funds were limited but I still had fun not constantly worrying about what I was eating. I have since developed acid reflux which has recently limited my experimentation and even enjoyment of food. I know this is partly stress-related and I fully expect some improvement with upcoming life changes. But I’ve also likely inherited my mother’s delicate middle-aged stomach and will probably always have to be cautious around some foods (avoiding too much garlic, too much heat, too much fat or fried).

And part of me thinks I will never be quite that excited about food again because 1. I’ve tasted a LOT of foods, and the novelty of experimentation has worn off over the years and 2. I’m never starving enough to get into a food frenzy. Eating is generally pleasurable for me but I’ve got other things to do, and that’s a bit of a relief.

I still pine a bit for my former inner foodie, though. At the very least, I want to reclaim the joy I once had in cooking. I want to make bagels in my kitchen again because my bagels rock and it’s really fun. While writing this post, I slaved over an amazing pot of chicken posole. This weekend was jambalaya which I haven’t made in years. At the very least, I’m thrilled to be able to eat these foods without any diet anxiety. What I lost through dieting, I will reclaim through liberation.

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I want to stage a coup. I want to take back the term “lifestyle changes” from the diet industry.

In my last post, I talked about the crazy things people will do in the name of losing weight. Pro-weight-loss people, allow me to speak for you because I know exactly what you’re going to say: “Obviously diets don’t work; everyone knows losing weight is really about making permanent lifestyle changes.” I have heard this refrain myself from well-meaning-but-not-yet-in-the-know colleagues many times.

The reality is something quite different. When we (non-diet advocates and just, you know, all the research) say that nothing has been shown to produce long-term (greater than 5 years) weight loss for most people, we are talking about everything: calorie restriction, exercise, and yes, even so-called lifestyle changes. (And if you can find proof otherwise, please send it my way)

I am not against lifestyle changes, not in the least. There are many things we can do to improve our health: we can eat more fruits and vegetables; we can move our bodies more; we can try to lessen our stress; we can quit smoking or just never start; and we can avoid excessive alcohol consumption. Doing all of those things will most likely help to make you a healthier person. I’m all about getting as healthy as we can.

But when the term “lifestyle changes” is meant to inspire weight loss…sorry, but that’s when it becomes just another diet. Most easy-to-make lifestyle changes don’t result in significant, long-term weight loss. They just don’t. That’s why most people who want to lose weight turn to more extreme, unsustainable measures – calorie restriction (aka dieting) or food-group elimination (think Atkins or Paleo). While these methods of eating do tend to produce immediate weight loss, the results are short-lived and nearly everyone gains the weight back and sometimes even more within 3 to 5 years.

I’m not saying lifestyle changes won’t produce weight loss – maybe sometimes they will. But when weight loss becomes the focus of the behavior change, and then the weight is regained (as tends to happen through natural, biological processes geared to maintain weight homeostasis), how likely are people to keep up those changes that they made? Maybe if outcomes goals of lifestyle changes were things like feeling better or improved metabolic measures, instead of unrealistic expectations of permanent weight loss, then people would be more willing to try them, or keep them up once started. As long as they masquerade as a diet, I predict resistance and disappointment for all.

So suck it, weight loss industry: your profiteering stops here.

Bonus! Book Review: Secrets of the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again

One of the most comprehensive, fact-laden books I’ve read on the subject of the failure of weight loss lately is Secrets of the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again by Traci Mann, PhD. Mann runs the Health and Eating Lab at the University of Minnesota and is no stranger to the science of weight loss. The first section of the book is chock-full of references to the literature on the failure of intentional weight loss efforts (aka dieting). She writes engagingly on why diets don’t work and how the failure to maintain weight loss has nothing to do with willpower. I can’t recommend this book enough if you are still skeptical about the need to abandon dieting as a health intervention. The second part of the book delves into why diets are not only useless, but bad for you. This, of course, is my favorite part! Again, every statement is backed up by sound research.

The third section of the book is titled “How to Reach Your Leanest Livable Weight (No Willpower Required)” and is essentially a list of small changes you can make to help you eat healthfully and live at the lowest end of your weight range (although no advice on how to know what that personal range is). I tried to read this part with as little bias as I could muster, but as a recovered dieter, I will never be completely bias-free when it comes to talk about eating and I had mixed feelings about this section. However, as much as I love and promote intuitive eating, I also realize that there is no one definite way to eat for everyone. Tips include making healthier foods more readily accessible and creating obstacles to temptations (like taking the route to work that doesn’t pass your favorite bakery). Some of these tips I love, like not eating healthy food because it’s healthy but because you have other compelling reasons that are important to you (might I suggest taste?), and changing how you think about tempting foods. Others, I was not so keen on, like pre-committing to a penalty for indulging (because I don’t believe punishment and eating are good bedfellows).

Some of these tips felt a little prescriptive to me but may be useful for those who have never dieted and want more regimented ways to eat better. As long as the “tips” don’t become strict rules and aren’t tied to weight loss results, I think they could amount to good advice for some. Dieters in recovery may find some of the tips too rigid or similar to the diet rules they used to follow, as I did with some of them. And what works in the eating lab to get people to eat better (when they do not even realize their eating is being studied) may work differently when we are applying them more consciously to ourselves. However, I appreciated the final tip the most, “Savor (nearly) everything,” because I think it underscores the basic message of the book – don’t eat for weight loss, eat well, and enjoy life. As long as the little “lifestyle changes” recommended here don’t become “diet rules,” the book remains an important part of the non-diet canon. So yes, I’m recommending the book for its ardent, fact-based support of abandoning intentional weight loss. Happy reading!

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(Potential trigger warning to recovering dieters/ED folks: I discuss ridiculous diet advice in this post)

Many people who have, perhaps, never dieted to try to lose weight often think it’s merely a matter of “eat a little less, exercise a little more” and then the magic happens. I’m here to tell you that when it comes to weight loss efforts, nothing could be further from the truth. If simple lifestyle changes like eating more veggies, eating fewer fried foods, and moving some more produced viable weight loss results, no one would be fat, because making those changes is relatively easy. They can make us healthier but they generally don’t work to make us a whole lot thinner. Thus, dieting behavior ensues.

Some of the weight loss tips I was given during my time at Weight Watchers (the weight loss company most people consider “the sensible one”) are downright laughable when I think about them now. Although contemplating doing them again actually makes me want to cry, not laugh.

Here’s some of the diet advice I’ve encountered over the years:

1. Eat your salad undressed, with dressing on the side, and then dip the tines of your fork ever so gingerly into the dressing before spearing a bite of salad. Honestly, even in my most diety of diet days, this seemed utterly ridiculous, both for the effort it took and results it produced. I happen to think the best thing (or at least the thing that makes it edible) about a salad is the dressing, so plunging into a naked salad with but a microdrop of dressing on the fork seems downright obscene. The whole time I dieted (most of my adult life) I avoided salads for this very reason – too much dressing would make me gain weight, too little would render it inedible. Healthy, right? When I order salads now and the server asks me if I want the salad dressed or dressing on the side, it’s such a comfort to be able to have my salad made as the chef intended it – fully dressed.
2. Don’t use butter or oil on your vegetables; instead try a squeeze of lemon…on literally every vegetable you eat. Hey, guess what vegetables always dressed in lemon juice taste like? LEMON! I mostly skipped this one too by mostly just skipping vegetable sides altogether. If there was a vegetable incorporated into my entree, such as a stir-fry (and therefore coated in some sort of sauce or seasoning), I’d eat it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t touch a plain, steamed vegetable with a ten foot fork. There are a million awesome ways to cook veggies to make them more delicious to pickier palates: roasting, baking, sautéing, and yes, even steamed, but with a dollop of butter or drizzle of olive oil to really make them sing. Dietitian fun fact: many vegetables contain fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) which means having them with some fat makes the vitamins a whole lot more bioavailable to us. I like lemon as a seasoning – occasionally. But not to mask the flavor of my unfatted vegetables (yes I did just make that word up). By the way, if you have a hard time eating vegetables and squeezing lemon on them is the only way you can tolerate them, then I applaud you for your efforts, and it’s the way you want it. It’s when it’s not the way you want it that it becomes a problem.
3. Eat “Zero Points” (aka fat free, low carb, low protein) soup to fill up before a meal. Anyone ever make a whole batch of this soup, recipe courtesy of Weight Watchers (basically vegetables boiled in broth), have one bowl, and then watch it go moldy in the fridge because while you didn’t have the heart to throw it out after all that effort, you also didn’t have the fortitude to force one more spoonful of this gruel down your throat? Yeah, I didn’t think it was just me. Notice no one eats this kind of soup while not on a diet? Know why? Because it tastes awful! I make amazing soups now. They often involve olive or canola oils (both rich in monounsaturated fats), butter, avocado (also rich in MUFA), cheese, meat and yes, vegetables. They are delicious, and while certainly not “zero points,” they are also not soul-crushing.
4. Go to a restaurant, order a meal, and immediately have the server put half of it in a doggie bag. Okay, seriously? If ever there was a place I wanted to escape the grip of my dieting, it was at a restaurant. How sad I’d have been to see half of my lovely meal for which I’d “saved up” my calories all week then go directly into a doggie bag before I’d even had a single bite. And unless that bag was hermetically sealed, I know I’d be dipping into it before I even left the restaurant. I was so hungry back then that I wouldn’t leave one single scrap on the plate and usually over-stuffed myself, but by Thor’s hammer, I was not going to sacrifice my dinner to the Styrofoam container before its time. I don’t always finish my plate these days, either at home or eating out, and am happy to have leftovers, but that is always based on my fullness level, and it’s my choice, not someone else’s mandate, which really makes all the difference.
5. The all-time weirdest: use spaghetti squash instead of actual spaghetti in any dish that calls for pasta. Two words: NOT PASTA. I did this once. The resulting fibrous strings coated with tomato sauce went right into the trash after one bite. I have a special hatred for one type of food pretending to be another in the name of calorie reduction. My friend had a similar experience with Shirataki noodles, which I have avoided rigorously ever since hearing her tale.

These weren’t ever a part of my diet, but I’ve gleaned them after a lifetime of listening to diet talk:

6. Go Low-Carb. Ah, perhaps my biggest diet pet peeve. Even if it did work to produce long-term weight loss (and there is no evidence to show that it does), I’ve met tons of low-carbers who have lost weight and then gained it all back because they simply could not live with so few carbohydrates in their diet for very long. I’ve never heard anyone get excited about giving up carbs, though I’ve personally witnessed a few low-carbers get a little over-excited at the presentation of cupcakes at a birthday celebration and the contemplation of having a massive cheat moment. I am sorry for these folks because while man (and woman) certainly can’t live by bread alone, living without carbohydrates really sucks. I know many people who have tried some version of this diet, but very few people who have stuck with it long term. And in conversation, their alternating obsessions with not-eating-carbs and dying-to-eat-carbs is tiresome. If you’re going to do this, do us all a favor and stop talking about it.
7. Eat a breakfast and lunch of [Special K, meal replacement shakes, fake food item] and then have a “sensible” dinner. I sure as hell do not want to eat anything twice a day, never mind the bland items on offer in these classic diets. I really enjoy the (perhaps unintentional) inference that while your dinner may be sensible, your breakfast and lunch sure weren’t. Is the concept here to bore you into thinness by making you sick of eating? I don’t think it would work for me; I’d be so off-the-rails with real-food cravings by dinnertime there would be a major diet fail daily. Sorry diet food companies, you’re not going to fool me into buying more of your product by making me eat it twice a day.

As one of the most ardent, “successful” dieters I knew, even I could not participate in a lot of this weirdness, opting instead to avoid healthy foods altogether to reduce calories (which is stupid in its own right). Most diet rules make eating completely unenjoyable, yet we are biologically geared to enjoy food. It makes no sense to deny our most basic instinct, but we do it every day when we diet. No wonder every diet ends up failing the dieter.

What are the most ridiculous diet tips you’ve heard or tried? Feel free to leave them in the comments section!

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There are a lot of misconceptions about Health at Every Size®, even among people who know that dieting is futile. I want to talk about them here and why they are just plain wrong.

Misconception #1: HAES® is just an excuse to overeat all the time.

Why it’s wrong: You might have missed it, but “health” happens to be the first word in Health at Every Size®. Is constantly overeating healthy? I think most of us can agree it is not. The opposite of restrictive eating is not overeating, it is freedom to eat, which is a very different thing than overeating. In fact, many studies on restrictive eating show a strong association with overeating, which means that you are more likely to frequently binge-eat while on a diet than you are not dieting. HAES® emphasizes getting in tune with internal signals of hunger and fullness to help guide eating, and contrary to popular dieting belief, most people will not eat themselves to death if the reigns come off. So HAES® is not an invitation to overeat to discomfort more, it’s actually enabling us to do it less.

Misconception #2: HAES® is “letting yourself go” and not worrying about health.

Why it’s wrong: Once again, notice the word health in HAES®? The only thing you let go of with HAES® is trying to manipulate your body size – which is largely dictated by genes, not to mention a whole host of other things – into something that might not be natural, or even possible, for you. You can still work on eating well, increasing the amount of exercise you get and managing your stress – all things that will help improve your health – which is challenging enough without having to worry about shrinking yourself to someone else’s idea of a “healthy” size.

Misconception #3: HAES® doesn’t work because fat is just unhealthy.

Why it’s wrong: This is just plain untrue and the evidence supports that. Numerous studies show good health doesn’t require thinness, only good health habits. Specifically the work of Matheson et al, Bacon and Aphramor, and Mann and Tomiyama have shown that healthy habits such as eating more fruits and vegetables and getting regular exercise, not smoking and avoiding excessive alcohol consumption have all improved health and that weight loss does not necessarily improve all parameters of health. Meanwhile, there are exactly zero studies to show that long-term (>5 years) significant weight loss is possible for more than a tiny fraction of people. So we don’t need to keep throwing the same worthless intervention (weight loss) at people to make them healthy; we just need to enable people to engage in healthy habits (if they choose, since health is not an obligation) to help them be healthier. Duh.

If you continue to feel skeptical about HAES® and still think weight loss is the one true way, ask yourself this: who makes money from HAES®? Is there a $72 billion industry that is fueled by self-acceptance and the adoption of healthy habits? No. You likely can achieve these things on your own and improve your health without spending an extra dime. The diet industry doesn’t care if we become healthier, it only cares that it can sell the dream of weight-loss over and over again, often to repeat customers. That is one of the best rationales for Health at Every Size®.

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“Allow me to suggest a revolutionary action: Let’s try to be okay with our bodies. I am not saying you have to love your body. I can’t help but notice that this goal is frequently pushed on women, but never men, and if men don’t need to love their bodies, it seems to me that women can get by without it, too…Perhaps loving your body is something to strive for, but all we really need to do is respect our bodies, appreciate them, and be generally okay with them.” –Traci Mann, PhD, author “Secrets from the Eating Lab”

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again. I love so many parts of this book, like all the scientific evidence for the failure of weight loss diets. I’ll talk more about the book in a future post, but for now…see above quote.

Why did I love this quote so much? Because I found it to be profoundly freeing.

Part of the talk around giving up dieting revolves a lot around learning to love your body. As someone who dieted for most of her adult life, I didn’t even know what this would look like in practice. I tried a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, telling myself that I loved my body and that I wasn’t going to torture it anymore. In reality, I no longer wanted to punish myself with deprivation and food obsession not for the sake of my body, but for my peace of mind.

But I espoused body-love because it seemed like a good idea. Even on this blog I talk about learning to love one’s own body, and loving my own body. What I probably come closer to, though, is this idea of being okay with my body.

I was raised, as most of us were, in a world where fat bodies were not seen as attractive. We still live in that world. One of the first things I did, after I stopped dieting, was to find ways that I could see large bodies as attractive, or at least not unattractive. I’ve never been one to focus too much on the outsides of other people…I reserved that obsession for myself. But I bought the party line that fat was not attractive, because that’s how I had been treated and that’s what everyone said. So I spent time on fat fashion blogs and I started looking at fat people around me with a neutral eye and I realized that there is nothing inherently unattractive about fat bodies. With just a little bit of practice I soon was able to see every body without bias. While it was easy to see others’ fat bodies as completely acceptable and even lovable, I still struggled with my own evolving body.

As my body continued to change dramatically after quitting dieting, I was unable to look at it in photos for a long time. With GI problems that cause severe abdominal bloating after even a small meal, I sometimes even avoid mirrors. While I don’t particularly have any animosity toward my body, loving it just seemed…a tall order. And a lot of work.

All of that doesn’t mean I’m not 100 percent okay with my body. I’m not embarrassed about my body with others – I’m not shy about being in a bathing suit or wearing body-con clothing. I have enormous gratitude for my bod and what it allows me to do. When I have those momentary “ehhh” photo moments, I remind myself that I’ve been under the unrelenting influence of completely unrealistic expectations for how women should look for all of my life. I also remind myself that I want to be more than about how I look. How I look is really the very least of me. And in the end, I really did become okay with my body.

I don’t require others to love my body, so I’m not sure that I need to either so long as I respect it and have some gratitude for it. What I want most of all is for my body to occupy zero space in my brain for most or all of the day – for it to lose the importance it has held in the past. My body is not my life’s work. What I do, how I am, is. Being okay with my body is frankly enough for me for now.

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Two news stories this week inspired this post. The first one is about fitness instructor Cassey Ho, who created this video after receiving a barrage of body-shaming comments on social media.

In the video, she has the opportunity to change all the parts of her body that have been shamed in the comments. She creates thinner thighs, a smaller waist, a bigger butt and boobs, a more sculpted face and she even changes her eye color. At first she looks in the mirror pleased with these changes, but in a few seconds, her expression changes to dissatisfaction. The video ends with the message, “What would you change?” Cassey said that she created it to help combat body shaming.

The other news story was about supplement company Protein World and their new ads for their “weight loss collection” products crap featuring the words “Are You Beach Body Ready?” and a picture of a typically unachievable-by-most-people body of a woman in a bikini (there is a counterpart ad with a similarly unrealistic-for-most male body). Thankfully some people who saw these ads responded with acts of civil disobedience, vandalizing them with their own messages such as “Your body is not a commodity,” “Each Body’s Ready,” and my personal favorite, “Fuck off.” These women are saying something, and it’s that they don’t want Protein World telling them that they must look like the woman in the ad in order to feel allowed to go to the beach. Responding to the criticism, Protein World tweeted:

Subtext: why make your insecurities our problem when you should be making them our profit!

Fat people are body shamed for not looking like the cultural ideal; then someone like Cassey Ho, who is the cultural ideal, is body shamed for not looking enough like the cultural ideal?? What the hell. I’m not saying one body type should be shamed while the other shouldn’t; I’m saying these body-police will never be happy any which way.

Lena Dunham showing her “less-than-perfect” but perfectly average naked body on television is treated as an act of heresy, the message loud-and-clear: “Your body is wrong, please don’t show it to us anymore.” I spend a lot of time watching HBO, and there is plenty of nudity, and I don’t recall anyone else ever getting questioned about why they are spending time naked on TV.

I don’t know about you, but I’m about fed up on being told how I need to look in order to be socially acceptable, on the beach or in a dress. It started young for me, when my mother implied I probably shouldn’t wear sleeveless tops because my arms were too big or dresses with elasticized waists lest I end up looking like a potato sack tied in the middle with a string (she didn’t say it to be mean – she really thought she was being helpful!). And now we have internet trolls and the weight loss industry to constantly remind us how “wrong” our bodies are. We have Dr. Oz shaming us into buying unproven weight loss products he endorses. We have the media reinforcing the stereotypical ideal by rarely showing bodies of diverse sizes (not to mention colors) in TV and movies.

What happens when we start to use all these external yardsticks of beauty instead of making up our own minds about ourselves? We stop living a life that is authentically our own. We go on diets that don’t work at best and hurt us at worst. We lose interest in all the things that make us interesting, exchanging them for a full-time focus on making ourselves “right” according to everyone else.

I’m not buying it anymore. I’m not using someone else’s idea of beauty to determine how I feel about myself. I’m expanding my beauty palate every day by looking at diverse bodies and seeing what is right about them (answer: everything!). I’ve become so successful at this that now when I hear body criticisms of any sort, it’s like hearing something spoken in Greek (note: I do not speak Greek).

So thanks internet trolls, Protein World, the rest of the diet industry, the conventional fashion industry and Hollywood, but I don’t need your advice on my body anymore. I’ll take it from here. I’ve got my own yardstick.

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I was in one of my favorite restaurants the other day, a cafeteria-style salad-and-sandwiches place, and while waiting to pick up my order at the other end of the line, I gazed fondly at the display of luscious-looking desserts (many of them gluten-free or vegan or pasture-raised-and-massaged or…hey, it’s LA). That’s when I noticed a little sticker on the sneeze guard that said “Our desserts are made with all-natural ingredients that your grandmother would recognize.”

Ehhh, I don’t know…it just rankled.

I understand the rational for the whole back-to-basics all-natural-organic cooking movement. It was an inevitable response to the many years following World War II where food became more and more processed, convenient and full of ingredients that many of us couldn’t pronounce (some of which are preservatives which make our food safer). For a long time, I was a huge proponent of this movement. I loved organic, natural, local…whatever sounded the least processed was what was going in my grocery cart. It’s a completely privileged way to be able to live and I knew I was lucky. But the downside of thinking this way about food was an intense feeling of guilt whenever I bought plain ol’ conventional broccoli from my local big-chain supermarket.

Guilt: a hallmark of so many modern ways of eating.

It isn’t just the organic and/or local movements that seem peppered with this emotion. It’s everything we must feel guilty about these days: calories, fat, carbs, too much sugar, not enough fiber, not natural enough. I was enjoying dessert after a very nice dinner with a crowd of people recently when I heard at the end of the table, “Is the red velvet cake worth the calories?” A former long-time dieter, I heard the twinge of guilt immediately: How bad will I feel if I gain two ounces after eating this cake? (And by the way, it should never be a question. Red velvet cake – hell, any cake – is always worth the calories if it’s what you want).

Trader Joe’s has a line of Reduced-Guilt diet foods (great blog post about that here), the implication being that we naturally feel guilty when we eat the non-Reduced-Guilt foods. Since when did guilt become the bedfellow of eating? Food is not morality. Food is just food. Like it? Eat it. Then shut up about it.

Back to that little sticker that annoyed me so. I don’t remember my Grandmother ever baking so much as a Pillsbury Cookie. She worked in a factory for a living and spent much of her time dieting, then cared for my Grandfather after he fell profoundly ill. Should our sweet little grannies also feel guilty if they didn’t spend their time in the kitchen whipping up all-natural baked goods and wholesome meals? What if your grandmother ate carrot-and-dirt soup in the old country and hated it and prefers processed convenience foods? Maybe that wasn’t the intention of the sentiment on the sticker, but that was the message I was getting. Not using all natural ingredients? Buying a pre-made frozen chocolate cake instead of baking it from scratch? Oh the shame. Maybe it would have been enough for them to just say “We use all natural ingredients, yum” without the misguided assumption about our grandmas.

I am not trying to malign natural or organic or local or healthy eating. I think those are all wonderful choices to have available. I am saying that guilt should have no part in any of it because it begins to limit the availability of those options. If someone chooses to strictly eat a certain way, let it not be born out of a sense of doing something wrong.

Feeling guilty about eating blunts the enjoyment that we get from food. It messes with a healthy relationship to food. From my own experience, feeling guilty (over the perception of “too many” calories) often led me to eat either more than I wanted or less, and not even enjoy it. Let’s get over our guilt hangover and leave it where it really belongs: with the $60 billion diet industry. Because guilt should have no place in eating.

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Traci Mann, PhD and professor at the University of Minnesota (and co-author of several of the papers listed on my Scientific Lit page), was featured recently in this LA Times article talking about why we should give up dieting. I’m pretty excited, as you can imagine, anytime a like-minded professional gets some serious traction in the media!

Professor Mann doesn’t mince words right out of the gate:

“You can stop dieting and still be healthy,” Mann said in an interview about her new book, “Secrets From the Eating Lab,” an overview of dieting, willpower and health. And if you’ve lost weight on a diet only to regain it, she said, “it’s really not your fault” but more likely the result of your biology, stress and the allure of “forbidden fruit.”

Preach sister! The article went on to say:

If you want to stay thinner than your body’s natural range allows, Mann said, “you’re going to be dealing with that five or six times every day — meal times, snack times, when you should be exercising. It’s going to have to become a huge main focus of your life. That just seems crazy to me.” (emphasis mine)

Crazy doesn’t even begin to cover it. This was the life I led for a chunk of time, and it left little time for other, happier pursuits. Like blog writing!

Professor Mann advocates for something she calls the “leanest livable weight,” which she describes as “a weight you can maintain while having a normal life. If it’s a weight you cannot maintain, that is not your leanest livable weight.” I don’t love the use of the word “lean” because I think it implies a certain image of thinness, something that many of us will never come close to achieving. But I understand what she is saying and frankly it’s coated in enough honey that even skeptics might find it palatable. And I’m all for making the non-diet message as accessible to as many people as possible.

As I thought more about this concept of leanest livable weight, it struck me that I was there: my life is livable, normal (well, normal for me) and enjoyable, and my weight is now stable. My leanest livable weight means I get to enjoy two slices of pizza for lunch and some frozen yogurt after to celebrate a friend’s birthday. That’s livable.

Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again will apparently include some tips to help improve eating habits. One example was to eat a vegetable before (not with) a meal to cause you to eat less of the meal. So, while I think eating vegetables is great, I’m not necessarily for “tricking” my body into anything. If I eat less than I need, I’ll know it in an hour. If you like your vegetable with your main entrée, eat it that way and just focus on how your stomach feels as you eat. That said, starting your meal out with a salad isn’t the weirdest or most unpleasant thing a person can do. I’m crossing my fingers that her eating tips aren’t restrictive in nature and are just easy things to do to encourage better eating.

I can’t say whether I recommend this book or not because I haven’t read it yet, but it looks promising, and I’ll get behind almost anything that shows the diet industry for what it is: pure profit on a shoddy failure of a product. I just purchased it online so I’ll let you know in a few weeks if it’s worth a look from a non-diet perspective.

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If I had a nickel for every time someone talking about weight loss said to me “It’s just calories in/calories out, right? Just eat less and move more!” I’d be able to retire on a beach in Hawaii with a big fat Mai Tai always at my fingertips. Alas, no one has paid me anything to listen this sort of horse manure so now it’s my turn to disabuse everyone of this ridiculous notion.

In case you have been spared this silly platitude, I’ll give a little background. It all starts with the idea that 1 pound of fat = 3500 kilocalories (or what we know as just “calories”). This estimate was derived by researcher Max Wishnofsky, MD, in 1958, for who knows what reason. The derivation of the math is pretty straightforward (skip this if math puts you in a coma):

1. 1 pound = 454 grams (fact!)
2. 1 gram of fat is estimated to equal 9 calories
3. Human adipose tissue is estimated to contain around 87% lipids.

So then… 454 g adipose tissue x 87% x 9 calories = 3,555 calories/pound of fat (rounded up from 3,554.82)

Then it was rounded down to 3,500 calories because, hey, it’s just easier to remember so why the hell not? The idea is that if you reduce your caloric intake by 3,500 calories a week, then you will lose a pound of fat a week. There’s a ton of rounding and estimating going on here, and yet people cling to this calculation like it came down written in stone from Mount Sinai as the 11^th Commandment.

But let’s pretend for one moment that this calculation works. So you reduce your caloric intake weekly by 3,500 calories a week (500 calories a day) and that takes care of the Calories In part. Now you just need to rev up your Calories Out half of the equation in the form of ramping up your exercise. If you’re managing the 500-calories-a- day-less deal and exercising too, then you can definitely lose even more than 1 pound a week, right?

Oh…except we forgot something. There’s another part of the equation… it actually looks like this:

Calories IN: Food

Calories OUT: Exercise AND Metabolism.

Oopsy, we forgot that tiny little factor – our metabolism (specifically something we call Resting Metabolic Rate, or RMR, the calories you burn while at rest, which accounts for 60-70% of our total energy expenditure). And it turns out that our metabolism is not something of which we are completely in control. This is borne out in science time and again; in fact, I recently had the pleasure of supervising the research project of a dietetic intern whose research consistently showed that RMR decreased with intentional weight loss. You can check out this particular research here and here and here and here and here and here. Sometimes the RMR remained low throughout the entire study, occasionally it eventually returned to normal, but in most of these studies the weight lost also began to return within the study period.

What happens when you start to eat less? Your body doesn’t know you’re just trying to lose weight for the sake of vanity or a misguided belief that it will make you healthier. No – after a few pounds are lost, your body eventually senses that you are in a place of food insecurity, and so to save your life it slooooows down its engine, the metabolism. Now you are eating less but also burning less in the way of your RMR – this is essentially your body’s way of maintaining homeostasis – stable internal conditions. Because that’s what the body wants more than anything – to remain at homeostasis. You might think you can compensate for this decrease in metabolism by exercising more – except that your metabolism will continue to compensate in the downward direction still as it continues to perceive this energy imbalance. This alone does not explain why most weight loss attempts end in lost weight being regained, but it’s a good start (I can think of some other reasons: unpalatable, unsustainable diets and hunger. Lots of hunger.).

Many health professionals have given up on this equation because they know it just doesn’t work all that well. Some researchers are working on new mathematical equations that will better predict how much a person should eat to lose weight and maintain the loss. Because – and this is dripping in sarcasm – we should definitely be eating according to a mathematical equation.

For me it all goes back to the idea of homeostasis. Our bodies want to remain in happy equilibrium, and they have amazing mechanisms to help us do so. Two of these mechanisms are a sense of hunger and a sense of fullness, which is why it is so important for us to use those internal mechanisms to guide our eating. Yep, back to the ol’ Intuitive Eating we go!

I think we’ve done a lot of damage with dieting over the years by ignoring those internal cues and trying to eat-by-the-numbers. Let’s forget this bad science and start paying attention to what our bodies tell us.

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