Diets I Have Tried
So ever since about three years ago when my weight started creeping up, I have tried a number of diets. Today, I’m going to discuss those diets and my feelings about them. I should say that I think all of these worked to some extent or another, and so the real question is how the diet makes you feel, how it affects the rest of my day-to-day life, and how easy it is to maintain.
There is a notion in academic of main drivers and moderating and mediating variables. Main drivers are the variables that are strongly linked to an effect. They are in some sense causal drivers. Moderating variables can determine when the main driver works, and mediating variables help to account for why the main driver works. My overall feeling, and a bunch of research bears this out, is that calorie restriction is the main driver, but there are moderating and mediating variables that effect how calorie restriction works.
So here are the diets I tried:
- Calorie Restriction — Calorie restriction is the most suggested weight loss routine. It basically says calories in should be less than calories out. The normal adult human needs about 2000 calories / day to maintain their bodyweight, so if you eat less than that you should lose weight. The biggest problem with this diet is that its hard to track. How do I know how many calories are in the salmon-tuna poke bowl I just ate? There are tools such as LoseIt to help you out, but if you eat in a lot of varied circumstances it is still hard to figure out what to choose. And if you don’t record on certain days that can basically mean that you are not tracking at all, so it takes a lot of dedication.
- Intermittent Fasting — The basic idea behind intermittent fasting is that rather than trying to track your calories every day. You eat an absolute minimum number of calories on a few days, and then basically eat what you want on other days (though if you really want it to work you should still do calorie tracking. I tried the 5–2 version of this diet for awhile, meaning fast two days, and eat five days in a week. And it worked well, and I find it easier to stick to than a regular calorie restriction since you basically cut out almost all calories on two days, which is easier than trying to guess the calories you are eating all the time.
- Whole30 — The Whole30 is based around the idea that you cut out six things from your diet completely: sugar, sugar substitutes, grains (rice, wheat, corn, etc.), alcohol, dairy, and legumes. I’ve done this for a solid month and it works pretty well, but it seems hard to stick to permanently because it is so restrictive.
- Slow Carb — This is Tim Ferris’ diet, and it is similar to the Whole30: No fruit, no white foods (bread, potatoes, rice), no sugar, no beer, but you can cheat one day a week and beans are okay, and try to eat the same meals again and again. This diet is a little easier to stick to with the the built-in cheat day, but it is still fairly restrictive.
For a diet to work well, it should be easy to follow, and easy to enforce. So Intermittent Fasting is easier than calorie restriction because it is easier to enforce. My experience has been that Whole30 and Slow Carb are difficult at times because they forbid too much. I want a diet in the end that I can stick to for the rest of my life. Finally, I should say that I just don’t like eating higher fat content foods as both the Whole30 and Slow Carb diet do. I much prefer my breads and cheeses to fatty steaks. So my goal is to find a diet I can stick to forever, that doesn’t replace carbs with fat, and that is easy to enforce.
