“Whether it's low-carb diets, low-fat diets, GI diets, middle-ground diets, vegan diets, and even bat-shit crazy diets, there are long term success stories and recurrent failures with each and every one, where the common ground to success is a person actually liking their life enough to sustain their new patterns of reduced dietary intake, and where the common ground to failure is suffering or restriction beyond an individual's capacity to enjoy their life.

………..when it comes to clinical utility and weight management, the last thing the world needs is to believe that there's only one right way to go.”

I totally agree with the quote above by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff M.D. who blogs at “Weighty Matters, Musings of an Obesity Medicine Doc and Certifiably Cynical Realist”

A close review of my website will show that although I’m not per se a “low-carb” person. I am a fan of Gary Taubes, and am very interested in the obesity concepts that he puts forth, although, my own experience …as well as what I’m hearing from the experiences of others …. tells me that even in low-carb or zero-carb eating, the amount of one’s caloric intake is an extremely important consideration when dealing with the issue of obesity.

Today, September 12, 2012, Dr. Freedhoff posted an article that might appeal to some of you with similar interests. Here’s the link: “Gary Taubes Launches Non-Profit to Prove His Low Carb Hypothesis”.

I often read articles involving diverse perspectives on Obesity and Dieting. I consider the evidence and put it into my mental file on the issue. Sometimes I even change my mind. But, truthfully, I most enjoy the articles that agree with my own beliefs.

I’m well aware of the existence of a great deal of dietary research involving “bad” science.   Some of these are studies based on inaccurate, self-reported, dietary recall which don’t even attempt to account for the actual quality of the participant’s diets, but then make conclusions about different food and health issues, including the impact of artificial sweeteners on one’s health.

I think that an Ideal end goal would be to drink the smallest amount of “sweet” beverages regardless of how the beverages got their “sweet” in the first place. In an Ideal World, I’d replace all of my artificially flavored and artificially sweetened beverages, including tea and diet cokes, with clear and undiluted water.

However, it’s NOT an Ideal World.

 As my current choice is to frequently use Splenda, and to drink Diet Cokes or Coke Zero, I enjoyed the following article.

             Artificial sweeteners help keep it off.

Not exactly a surprising result, but likely one that will be poo-poo'd by all those who love to vilify artificial sweeteners.

Researchers in New Zealand studied folks who had successfully lost weight and their dietary consumption patterns. More specifically they looked at folks who had maintained a weight loss of greater than 10% of their weight for 11.5 years and they compared these folks' dietary strategies to folks of similar weights who had never been overweight.

What unshocking yet valuable results did they find?

They found that folks who lost the weight had to work harder at their dietary strategies to help keep that weight off than folks who never had weight to lose. Their strategies included consuming fewer calories from fat (though the importance of this one's debatable as the 90s were the low-fat decade and more recent data from the National Weight Control Registry suggest that low-calorie is of course more important than low-fat and can be accomplished many different ways), consuming more of sugar and fat modified foods (reduced fat, reduced sugar), consuming more water, less pop and three times more daily servings of artificially sweetened soft drinks.

Go figure - folks who are predisposed to weight gain can help themselves keep the weight off by employing dietary strategies to help themselves consume fewer calories.

Go ahead, drink your diet Coke.

Phelan, S., Lang, W., Jordan, D., & Wing, R. (2009). Use of artificial sweeteners and fat-modified foods in weight loss maintainers and always-normal weight individuals International Journal of Obesity DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2009.147

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff MD,
Sept 17, 2009
weightymatters.ca

A fellow Forum Member  wrote:
 

"My calorie count needs to stay at 1200 to lose
and it has been averaging 1500.
So for now the only thing I know to try is cutting back to 2 meals a day.
This may be an every other day thing...we'll see.

At any rate I am now 12 lbs. over the top BMI for normal weight range
and have gained 8 lbs. over the summer. This can't go on."
 

What is described here is a common occurrence for those of us with older bodies who have lost and are working to maintain weight-loss. People who track their food... even during "bad" times ... can actually SEE this happening. Actually SEEING it is rather unusual, because most people in this position "give-up" and don't track, begin eating more, and regain all of their lost weight.

I am working on this same issue right now. It is very difficult to continually eat a calorie average low enough
to maintain weight-loss. I find that ..for me.. doing EXTRA exercise burns very little calories. and makes me very hungry so I wind up eating more than I've burned.

  For the past 4 weeks, I've been running another experiment with an Alternate Day Eating type of plan. My plan is more of a zig-zag, calorie cycling plan rather than one of Intermittent Fasting because I'm still eating all throughout every day... only I'm having smaller portion, lower-calorie meals totaling about half the calories on alternate days.

Success for me would be to average losing 1/4 to 1/2 lb weekly,  and get back into the blue area of my Weight Maintenance Range, (and this year I raised my maintenance range to make it run 5 lbs higher).

Due to water-weight-swings etc. it is impossible to judge weight-loss success in such a plan except over quite a lengthy time period. My stabilized weight is running about 3 lbs less than it was 4 weeks ago, but most of that drop came in the first week, and it is too soon to see whether this plan will cause weight-loss. It is also too soon to tell whether or not such a plan will be sustainable for me.

                                            
I am certain that there is NO One-Right-Way to lose weight.
However there are plenty of wrong ways,
and what's right for one person is almost certainly wrong for another.

My body doesn’t provide me with the ability to eat intuitively. I put every bit of food that goes into my mouth into my computer food journal. I also use my food journal to help guide me in my decisions of what to eat. I see looking at the calories ..and other nutrients…when I eat as like looking at price tags when I shop. Just like price isn't the only consideration when shopping, neither are calories the only consideration when eating. Food is also in my life to celebrate and comfort, and therefore knowing the amount of calories doesn't always lead to low-calorie choices.

Brian Wansink is a brilliant researcher based out of Cornell whose life's work revolves around mindless eating. His recent research study determined that consuming crackers from 100 calorie packs vs. large bags, cut consumed calories by 25%.

I’ve noted that tracking in a computer food journal protects me against mindless eating by allowing for the use of calories in decision making. There are people who feel that you don't need to count calories to eat mindfully, and that there are other ways of journaling, and that one is better served by paying attention to how one’s body feels, and/or to one’s psychological state.

So who's right? Should one eat intuitively, or should one count calories? And looking at an even larger picture, should one do low-carb, slow-carb or low-fat? Should one include cheat days or no-cheat days? Should there be forbidden foods, or should everything be allowable? These questions could go on and on.

I’m a member of The National Weight Control Registry … which is the world's largest prospective study of people who have been successful with long-term weight management. It tracks how people have lost weight before they register within the program. The average registrant has lost about 65 pounds and kept it off for more than five years. The Registry’s records indicate that while there are some behaviours which are shared by a large majority of registrants, …such as eating breakfast and exercising, … there is an enormous variety in the way each of these registrants' manage their own weight.

As of today, Amazon.com has more than 71,000 titles with the word, "diet" in them. And truthfully, each of these diets probably all 'work' for someone. However, many of these diets will probably provide a temporary result only, because one needs to actually like the way one lives in order to keep living ..or weighing .. that way.

I agree with Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, MD when he says :

“It's about living the healthiest life that you can enjoy, not the healthiest life that you can tolerate, because if your life is simply tolerable, you're not likely to keep living that way. To take an extreme example, while becoming a teetotaling, vegan, shut-in, marathon runner might well help you to manage your weight, is that a life you'd be willing, or even able, to live with forever?”

One’s bodyweight involves many different variables. Some of these are within our control, and some are not. There are some things in our lives that we can change to help manage our weight, but there are also some things in our lives, which affect our weight, that we either won't be able, … or won't be willing,…to change.

We can use our scale numbers … weight, body mass index, body-fat percentage…. to see where we are in life, and to decide whether or not to Diet. But it can be a mistake to set detailed and arbitrary goals based on those specific numbers, because the ultimate goal that we actually need is to live the healthiest life that we can enjoy.

There is no point in trying to live a life that we can't sustain. The personal cost of reaching and maintaining some table's definition of “ideal” might be too high for some of us. We are rightfully proud and satisfied with our personal best in every other area of our lives, and our personal best is also good enough weight wise.

So if you want to lose-weight, or maintain weight-loss, which diet should you choose?
Whatever works for you. Whatever you can honestly see yourself doing for the rest of your life. If there were only One right way, we'd all be doing it.

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health (2011) by William Davis M.D.   Dr. William Davis, is a cardiologist who advocates eliminating wheat from the diet in order to lose weight and reverse health problems. Davis shares his conclusion that wheat is the single largest contributor to the obesity epidemic, and that the elimination of wheat is the key to dramatic weight loss and optimal health.

In Wheat Belly, Davis exposes the harmful effects of what is actually a product of genetic tinkering and agribusiness being sold to the American public as “wheat” and provides readers with suggestions of how to live a new, wheat-free lifestyle.

I purchased and read this book when it was first published, and did some experimentation with "wheat-free" eating last fall.  During the period when I was not eating wheat, ... while eating approximately the same calories...., my weight dropped into a 3 to 5 lb lower range, but within 2 weeks of returning wheat to my diet, .....while eating approximately the same calories...., my weight returned to it's previous level.  Therefore, the weight result of that personal experiment was about the same as my many experiments with low-carb and zero-carb, in that no actual fat loss occurred in my body as a result of my wheat elimination experiment.

Bread and other wheat products combined with sugar and fat are definitely some of the foods that I find the most difficult to resist eating, even when I'm not at all hungry, and I will probably be doing more experimentation with eliminating or reducing wheat sometime in the future.

Here is a recent article about this concept by CBS news.

Modern wheat a "perfect, chronic poison," doctor says
                     CBS News - September 3, 2012 

Modern wheat is a "perfect, chronic poison," according to Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who has published a book all about the world's most popular grain.

Davis said that the wheat we eat these days isn't the wheat your grandma had: "It's an 18-inch tall plant created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s," he said on "CBS This Morning." "This thing has many new features nobody told you about, such as there's a new protein in this thing called gliadin. It's not gluten. I'm not addressing people with gluten sensitivities and celiac disease. I'm talking about everybody else because everybody else is susceptible to the gliadin protein that is an opiate. This thing binds into the opiate receptors in your brain and in most people stimulates appetite, such that we consume 440 more calories per day, 365 days per year."

Asked if the farming industry could change back to the grain it formerly produced, Davis said it could, but it would not be economically feasible because it yields less per acre. However, Davis said a movement has begun with people turning away from wheat - and dropping substantial weight.

"If three people lost eight pounds, big deal," he said. "But we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people losing 30, 80, 150 pounds. Diabetics become no longer diabetic; people with arthritis having dramatic relief. People losing leg swelling, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and on and on every day."

To avoid these wheat-oriented products, Davis suggests eating "real food," such as avocados, olives, olive oil, meats, and vegetables. "(It's) the stuff that is least likely to have been changed by agribusiness," he said. "Certainly not grains. When I say grains, of course, over 90 percent of all grains we eat will be wheat, it's not barley... or flax. It's going to be wheat.

"It's really a wheat issue."

Some health resources, such as the Mayo Clinic, advocate a more balanced diet that does include wheat. But Davis said on "CTM" they're just offering a poor alternative.

"All that literature says is to replace something bad, white enriched products with something less bad, whole grains, and there's an apparent health benefit - 'Let's eat a whole bunch of less bad things.' So I take...unfiltered cigarettes and replace with Salem filtered cigarettes, you should smoke the Salems. That's the logic of nutrition, it's a deeply flawed logic. What if I take it to the next level, and we say, 'Let's eliminate all grains,' what happens then?

"That's when you see, not improvements in health, that's when you see transformations in health."

Watch Davis' full interview in the video below