I believe that this is not a one-size-fits-all world, and that every diet doesn't work for everyone, but every diet works for someone.

That said, I'll admit that I have my own personal biases and prejudices. I've written about them here and there in various articles here on DietHobby, and you can find them in the Archives section. 

Personally, I'm strongly opposed to the concept of Intuive Eating as a means to lose weight or maintain weight-loss. I've read many books about it. I've attended seminars on it.I've experimented with it. I've spent a great deal of time observing others who try it out.

My conclusion is that ... for anyone who has a long-term problem with obesity ...Intiutive Eating as a weight-loss or maintenance of weight-loss diet is simply "wishful thinking", and it almost never works.

I am a great believer in using a computer software program to daily track one's food intake ... forever. I've written a very great deal about that, and although my own personal favorite is DietPower, any such software program that you can learn and use will work well. 

I've experimented quite a lot with various low-carb diets, and with alternate day eating, and I frequently incorporate elements of those plans into my own eating plans. 

One Diet that I am quite taken with, is the No S Diet.  While I do not follow it myself, I have incorporated many of its concepts. It is a simple plan, and its theme of moderation is a sound one.  Although it is ineffective for many, as a stand-alone-diet, It can be a behavior base for many other diets, and with a few modifications can become an excellent plan for almost everyone. 

The book, The No S Diet is simple, well-written, and quite excellent. I've read it many times, and have purchased copies for friends. You can find an extensive review of it here.

Here is a recent testimonial from a long-time user of the No "S" diet.  

I'm nervous and excited about finally writing this because I love No S so much and want to sing it to the high heavens, and not after just the honeymoon phase of success. At age 58 and two years, this marriage is going to last! 

I can’t be a source of hope for anyone who is trying to get into the low end of his/her BMI range, but there are others who can. However, No S HAS SAVED MY EATING LIFE AND MY SANITY AROUND FOOD. In 2 years, I’ve gone from 185 to 161 (13% of my weight) and am still losing. Not the huge drops some have, but I had some setbacks, and yet I’m stronger now than ever, unlike most people who follow traditional diets; they are usually heavier 2 years later. Plus, I look good in my clothes and I feel confident and peppy. I wasn’t even sure I would lose weight on No S, but I knew I had to do something about my insane compulsion to overeat, mostly sweets, and mostly in private. If you want freedom from the tyranny of food as much as or even (as I did) more than weight loss, I ecstatically recommend it! 

(BTW, the National Weight Loss Registry reports that it takes 2-5 years of compliance for the likelihood of relapse of overeating to drop to 25%, and this is only in the 3-15% who actually do lose weight in the first place. And those people do not usually get thin, just thinner. Sobering news, and more reason not to choose radical plans, in my opinion. Consistent moderation forever!) 

• I no longer worry about the pull of fattening or processed foods/ carbs/sugar. I can have small amounts without going overboard-- or none. 

• I don’t fear restaurants or social eating situations where lots of food is available. 

• I don’t feel deprived or in food prison. 

• I’m completely happy with the program. I’m not afraid that there’s a better, faster way to get lean and mean that will last. 

• I love my three meals a day and love getting hungry. I overeat some on the weekends, but less and less, and I enjoy all that I do eat. 

• I stuck it out even when I was bingeing on weekends much longer than many and it has paid off. Don't fear the weekends! 

• Thank you, thank you, thank you, Reinhard and all the long-term No S-ers here. 

The challenge for anyone with disordered eating is to find the right balance of ordered eating to counteract it. As I see it, the major problem is too many random decisions to eat a lot of calorie-dense food, especially in the face of promises to self not to eat. No S has been the best of both worlds for this recovering disordered secret “emotional” binge eater, even though it was not designed for it: a program that promotes flexible food choices with ordered limited access to food, and free eating on weekends to promote more independent judgment. Jackpot! I found that it didn’t matter what the reason was for my wanting to eat during the week. I just didn’t do it between meals. So freeing. And two years of mostly compliant weekdays tamed my weekends enviably. 

History for those who need to hear if it matches their problems: I started eating sweets secretly when I was about 10 years old and was told at 12 to lose 10 pounds (I weighed 120 at 5’4”). I did not and weighed 145 after high school when I went on my first real diet for a gymnastics class (even though I was in my normal BMI range). I managed over 40 years to stick to diets and lose weight for probably about 3 years total in that time. The rest of the time, I agonized over eating and my body, never able to stick to my attempts to cut eating sweets, especially at night. My disordered eating got progressively worse so that my weight rose from mostly in the 140-150’s before my 40's to eventually to over 200 for a short time.

I first joined No S in October of 2008 (age 55), probably weighing 180, had brief success, but fell off after Thanksgiving and didn’t return in earnest until Dec. 26, 2009 at 185. I WAS DESPERATE AND KNEW THAT MY DISORDERED EATING WOULD ONLY GET WORSE AND BE WITH ME MY LAST YEARS ON THIS PLANET IF I DIDN'T DO SOMETHING. I knew that eating 5-6 meals a day as I had been for 7 years was not stopping it. I knew that though intuitive eating had helped me get rid of a lot of food prejudices against supposedly fattening foods, I hadn’t been able to use it to lose weight. I knew that though I had actually learned a lot about what combinations of whole foods I enjoyed and actually satisfied me on traditional diets, I wouldn’t follow one, nor track calories forever. And I believed that at least for me, there was no food I couldn't learn to eat in moderation. No S was and remains my best bet, and I am so grateful I found it! I may alter what I eat at meals or how much on weekends but I will never go back to snacking, tracking, or sweets every day. This is it! 

May we all find peace with food soon.

_________________

Ht. 5'6" 

SW 12/26/09 185 lbs.

10/11/11 166 lbs.

1/08/2012 161 

Sun Jan 08, 2012 9:33 am    
Post subject: controlling disordered/emotional eating

NOTE:  Originally posted on 1/10/12, Reposted for New Viewers

Good food,
Bad food,
and
Subversive
Food Combining.

By Michelle
May 9, 2016 @  fatnutritionist.com 

The idea that there are universally “good” foods and “bad” foods is an old one, ancient even. There are traces of it in Leviticus, though the way the concept was used then is perhaps different from how we use it now.

Given what we know about clinical nutrition, that sometimes a startling mix of foods can be used to help people in certain disease states — more ice cream and gravy for someone undergoing cancer treatment, less protein and fewer vegetables for someone with kidney disease — and since dividing your risk among a wide variety of different foods can help hedge your health bets, the idea that there are universally good or bad foods doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny.

I take it more as evidence of black-or-white thinking — a hallmark of diet culture — which is almost always false.

The words themselves, good and bad, imply a moral dynamic to food that I just don’t think belongs there. Sure, food can be literally bad if it’s spoiled or contaminated with botulism. But even if you eat this kind of bad food and get sick from it, we don’t generally assume that you now have become a bad and contaminated person.

We just think you’re sick, send soup, and wait for you to get better.

Getting food poisoning doesn’t stain your character or reputation, even if you are literally contaminated by a bacteria that a food has transmitted to you. There’s an implicit understanding that the body is self-cleansing and will get the pollution, the infection, out of its system over time. And though you might be averse to eating a food that made you sick in the future, due to stomach-churning associations, you probably won’t assume it is a universally bad food eaten only by bad people.

We do, however, make this assumption about moral contamination, that (morally) bad foods
(which are coincidentally usually high-calorie, presumably “fattening” foods) are eaten
by bad, gluttonous, ignorant, irresponsible, and usually low-class (and coincidentally fat) people.

And we try to avoid those foods, we claim, out of concern for our health.
But, in practice, it appears to be much more about avoiding that moral stain.

Even if there are foods that, in isolation, don’t produce ideal health outcomes for most people, does the idea that these foods are uniquely bad while other foods are uniquely good actually help us to be well-fed?

I’ve asked dozens of people this question, “Does believing in ‘bad food’ help you to eat better?” It’s an honest question. After looking at the ceiling for a second, then looking down and letting out a bitter little laugh, they always tell me no.

No, thinking of the foods they want to avoid as morally bad does not help them to eat a more nourishing diet in the long run. It doesn’t even help them to avoid those foods, most of the time. For a lot of us, it only succeeds in producing guilt for eating a perfectly human mix of foods.

If a belief in good foods and bad foods helped people, on balance, to eat better, I could grudgingly get behind the idea, though being a fat hedonist, I would always advocate for pleasure. But it fails even in its stated objective, to say nothing of the side-effects that come with it.

I do believe there are foods that are generally more nutritious than others (in certain ways, keeping in mind that macronutrients and the calories that represent them are still technically nutrients, after all), and which usually leave a person generally feeling better, and generally in better health, than others. But there’s also something to be said for eating and including foods that are designed primarily for pleasure, not for the cessation of physical hunger or the promotion of long-term health.

Learning to break down the categories of “good” food and “bad” food is a little tricky, but it can be done.

One of my favorite techniques for doing this, aside from giving yourself explicit permission and acknowledging that all food is food, is to do what I called “subversive food combining.” This means, simply, putting together foods that you would usually classify as good and bad, and that you would usually keep apart (that “healthy” meal of fish, rice, and vegetables you eat when you’re being “good,” vs. the pint of ice cream you eat when you’re being “bad”) by including them in the same meal, or even on the same plate.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but it gives me a cheap thrill. Some combinations I’ve tried:

•     Potato chips and salad
•     Sauteed kale and pizza
  
•     Peanut m&ms and an apple
  
•     Boxed macaroni and cheese with pork tenderloin and greens
  
•     Carrots with bean and cheese burritos
  
•     Cookies and almond
  

Telling yourself that there are no good foods and bad foods is one thing. It is necessary, but not sufficient to produce an actual change in how you view food. Backing it up with action is crucial.

Try it. Break a few rules. Crush the false dichotomy.

So, if thinking of foods as either good or bad doesn’t actually help people to eat better, what does? In my experience, it’s eating observantly, but non-judgmentally, and taking note of your pleasure both during and after eating. Noticing how food both tastes during eating, and how it makes you feel, physically, after.

Over a series of hundreds of personal experiments, you can start to shape your eating in a way that makes the most sense to you, that leaves you both happy and feeling healthy, and that improves measurable indices of health, like cholesterol or blood sugar. But in order to conduct these experiments, .......

You have to give yourself permission to eat anything.

You have to acknowledge that food is neither universally good or bad, real or not-real, pure or polluted.

And you have to believe that it cannot, by association, make you good or bad either.

 One should read the book “The No S Diet” by Reinhard Engels  even if only to access his wisdom, common sense, and Habit concepts. 

Reinhard Engels is a software engineer who created the diet for himself and lost 40 pounds.

His diet has just three rules and one exception: No Snacks, No Sweets, No Seconds, Except (sometimes) on days that start with "S" (Saturday, Sunday and Special Days).

The No S Diet is incredibly simple. It has just three rules.
These three rules   focus attention on the three primary areas that affect a person’s diet.

No Seconds…means you have to use portion control. 
                All of the food in your meal must fit on one normal sized plate (the one-plate rule).
No Snacks..…means you have to eat at mealtimes only..no food in-between meals.
No Sweets......means you have to avoid foods that have sugar as the principal ingredient.

All of these rules apply on all normal (N) days.

 None of these rules apply on (S) days, i.e. weekends, holidays, and special occasions..
However, you are advised to normally stay with your normal-N day- habit and only SOMETIMES use your allowable exceptions. Just because it is an "S" day, doesn't mean sweets or snacks or seconds are REQUIRED. It just means there's no RULE against them. It isn't permission to binge. Following N day principles on S days is appropriate behavior.

Reinhard's No S is: ..."except SOMETIMES on S days".
Reinhard’s basic warning is: "Don't be an IDIOT".
Putting all of your food on one plate in front of you at the same time is meant to help you see how much you are actually eating, and keep you from deceiving yourself about that issue. Both the "No Snacks" rule and the "One Plate" rule are meant to keep one from DECEIVING oneself about how much one is actually eating. Reinhard hopes that the REALITY of seeing the food all together will jolt one into choosing to eat less. However, this depends on one's subjective beliefs about the size of "normal" food portions. 

The one-plate rule (no seconds) can be helpful information for a "normal" person, who is struggling in the "overweight" category if they understand how little food-intake they actually need, and have simply allowed their weight sneak up on them.
But it isn't very helpful for a person well into obesity, who thinks of large portions of high-calorie food as a normal amount.

No S is a simple, straightforward diet that is non-restrictive in nature. There are very few rules that must be followed. It allows people to occasionally eat foods that are normally restricted. It will fit into any lifestyle, and can be used together with other diet plans. It also is very affordable.

The No S diet relies strongly upon the concept of Habit, and the plan is based on getting people to cultivate habits that are sustainable for life…Habits which are intended to result in weight loss, or at least, result in the maintenance of one’s current weight.

There isn’t any fixed step-by-step plan, which could be an advantage to some, and a disadvantage to others. No S diet does initially demand huge amounts of self-control when it is used by people who have lifestyle habits that normally involve large amounts of between-meal eating, or large amounts of food at meals. You might suffer from hunger pains until your body adjusts to the No S way of eating.
You are the one who decides whether to make healthy food choices while eating within those rules. The No ‘S’ diet plan asks people to stick to a healthy diet plan. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less! The only food problem one needs to address, is the snacking, portions, and sweets part of their diet.

Initially, these rules tend to commonly result in weekend binge eating. This binge eating lessens over time for some people, but for other people weekend binge eating becomes habitual.

The primary problem with the basic No S Plan (known as “vanilla” No S) is that it won’t necessarily result in weight-loss. As Reinhard says,

"The No S Diet is not designed to get you "trim trim;"
it's designed to help you eat moderately (and see what happens)."

People differ in their energy requirements. The energy requirements for large, active males are far different than for small, sedentary females. This distinction is not addressed in the No S diet, and under the basic No S rules, it is easy for small, sedentary females to eat more than their body requires which, over time, can actually result in weight-gain.

The No S diet is based on the principle of Moderation. For people who don’t want to count calories, carbs, or keep track of points or food-exchanges and want something simple, then the No ‘S’ diet can be a good plan. It is simple, but not necessarily easy. The primary problem is whether you can actually follow the restrictions underlined in the diet.

I am very interested in the No S diet’s Habit concepts, and have watched many others on the No S diet for several years. My personal observation is that "vanilla" No S tends to activate the "binge/fast" cycle for many people, and my observation over the past couple of years, has been that, time alone,does not seem to stop "IDIOT" behavior for obese people who tend to binge. It seems clear to me that these people need additional eating restrictions on "S" day eating.

Reinhard makes some good suggestions on some additions and modifications that might help resolve this problem for some people.My personal version of No S greatly differs from Reinhard's basic plan.
My opinion is that the brilliance of The No S Diet is not in the specific rules of the diet,
but instead in the philosophy of cultivating eating habits that are sustainable for life. 

NOTE:  Originally posted on 3/30/11, Reposted for New Viewers