A New Way of Looking at Diets — One That Might Actually Work

Pete Ross
Pete Ross
Sep 3, 2018 · 14 min read

Where do we even begin when it comes to a topic as contentious as diets? Look at the statistics that are usually quoted, and they’re dire — most people that go on diets may lose weight, but they put it all back on. Some will even add weight on top of that. We see lists from nutritionists and dietitians on the best and worst diets, some even become movements like paleo or religions like veganism. Then you have the fact that many nutritional establishments don’t provide recommendations in line with the current research. It’s a nightmare for any person to navigate.

I have a hypothesis though, and that is that the problem isn’t individual diets (although in some cases, it certainly can be), it’s the fact that most people have no idea how to implement them. They decide one day that they want to do the zone diet, or paleo, or keto. They read the book, and the next day go out shopping and have a red hot crack at it. 2 weeks in everything falls apart because they didn’t realise how much they’d want a food that is now forbidden, or they get stressed at work, or life just happens and they find they can’t stick with it. Or, worst of all, they just decide that it’s all too difficult and throw in the towel.

With this in mind I propose a new way of implementing a diet: treat it as a project that must be managed. That’s what a diet is. When a building is constructed, they don’t just let all the builders come in and do the work, they hire a project manager who runs the entire show. That’s because there are a lot of different employees doing a range of tasks, materials that need to be delivered to the right places, site access that needs to be managed and so on. The average project manager needs to plan for a whole raft of contingencies that might delay or derail the project, and cause it to go over time and over budget.

Let’s take a look at your typical diet implementation and think about all the contingencies that threaten to derail it:

  • Being busy at work
  • Social engagements where you’re tempted to eat foods you shouldn’t
  • Kids
  • Your energy levels
  • Your ability in general to stick to things
  • That time of the month
  • Cravings
  • Your (in)ability to cook and make the food taste good
  • How easy it is for you to actually eat meals (perhaps you don’t work a desk job, you’re out and about)
  • The price of what you’re eating
  • Attitudes and differing levels of support by friends and family
  • How the people you live with might react and be affected by it

This isn’t even an exhaustive list, and it’s already getting pretty long. Any one of these could completely derail a diet. For instance, if your immediate family doesn’t want to eat what you are and thinks your diet is stupid, your chances of success plummet on that one factor alone. Add in a couple of bad days at the office and the temptation of chocolate, and you’ll drop the diet you believed in so much like a bad habit.

Related: Morning Routines Are Bullshit

So in order to implement a diet that is actually going to work, I’m going to teach you how to manage it like a project. WIth proper planning, you’ll work out whether it’s actually a viable diet for you, you’ll come up with a phased approach to implementing it that accounts for the most likely contingencies you’re going to face and you’ll have a framework to make adjustments as necessary so you can maintain it. You’ll go in knowing that this may not be the diet for you and you’ll have to change and try something else, but that’s ok — because you’ve given it the absolute best shot you could. So let’s get started…

Phase 1: Planning

This is where it all starts, and what most people spend no time on. This is what you should spend the most time on. Planning properly means that if the diet isn’t right for you, you realise it before you even try it and save yourself a whole lot of money, time, and heartache from failing yet again. That’s a good way to start, yes? It also means that you’re going to execute the diet in the most efficient, effective way possible, giving yourself the greatest chance of success.

The first part of planning is to map out everything that the diet requires. All the foods you can and can’t eat, what times you’re supposed to eat, how you’re supposed to cook and so on. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to start asking the hard questions:

  • Does this diet suit my current lifestyle? If not, how far off is it? This is a really important point, because a diet that is radically opposed to the lifestyle you lead is not going to end well. If you’re a low discipline person, for example, you need to be honest about it and know that the diet requiring you to prep all meals in advance is going to be difficult at best for you.
  • Have I ever eaten like this before, and do I know what to expect? If you’re a carb fiend and you decide you want to do keto, this is an important question to answer. Did you know that you can expect to feel like crap for the first few weeks? Might want to check into that…
  • Why am I doing this? If you don’t have a really compelling reason, you’re going to flake out.
  • Does the thought of eating the food prescribed make me depressed just looking at it?
  • Does this diet — regardless of the results it promises, look right for me?

It’s important to remember at this point that the good diet you can actually follow will always yield better results than the perfect diet that you can’t stick to. A lot of people get caught up in the fact that they can’t follow a diet to the absolute letter, and blow it because if they can’t, what’s the point? So my advice when going through the above is to temper your excitement of how great this diet is that you’ve just found, or the fact that it helped some celebrity lose ten kilos. If you feel like you can mostly stick to it and it fits in with your lifestyle, that’s big a win and a good reason to give it a try. On the flip side, don’t try to follow Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet where she licks 10 almonds for dinner. Don’t try and follow any celebrity’s diet, because while it may seem great, they have an army of support people that you don’t. You can make just about anything succeed when you have that kind of time, support and money.

Don’t let Instagram fool you — changing how you eat isn’t all perfectly arranged fruit bowls. It takes thought and planning.

So you’ve gone through those questions and decided that yes, you want to give it a crack. The next part of planning is contingencies. A good project manager doesn’t build timelines around everything going well, they plan around all of the things they expect to go bad. You need to do the same thing. You need to consider things like:

  • If you get cravings to eat at a particular time of day, how are you going to prevent yourself eating junk?
  • If you need to do meal prep on a Sunday, how is that going to fit in with your social life? Maybe you need to skip social engagements for a month so you can get that into a routine.
  • If work or indeed life gets busy, how are you going to stay on track, when takeaway food is so much easier?
  • What are you going to do when social engagements come up?
  • Are you a good enough cook to make this work? And if not, what are you going to do about it?
  • Do you even like cooking? There are plenty of people who don’t…

No one knows you better than you, so this is the time to be honest because you know where your weaknesses lie, and you’re the person best placed to plan around them. Even in planning around contingencies, you also need to account for the fact that you might make mistakes anyway. In setting your timeline, allow yourself a few weeks more than you think you’ll need, so if you screw up, you can get back on the horse rather than beating yourself up over it.

While we’re on the topic of screwing up, let’s talk about the binge. When on a diet, a lot of people will crack and eat something they shouldn’t, which then turns into a couple of things and before you know it, they’ve thrown down a tub of ice cream or a family meal at McDonalds. THey then decide that they’ve screwed everything up so there’s no point anymore. Then they make the excuse that they’re “all or nothing”. If this has ever happened to you, you need to plan for this eventuality as well. Plan for how you’re going to keep such food out of reach so it’s not easily available. Plan for how you’re going to quell the craving (more on that below).

You also need to have it in your head that if you eat one bad thing, that going on a binge is just you allowing yourself to lose control. You might have a severe craving, but you’re not drunk or on drugs — you can still make good decisions. If you do succumb to a binge, your next goal is to just get back on the horse and keep going. Don’t beat yourself up over making mistakes — this is a marathon, not a sprint, and one mishap that takes a few days or even weeks to remedy is not a big deal.

For this reason, planning needs to take into account time for pressure releases. A pressure cooker has a small opening that allows enough steam to escape during cooking so that the whole thing doesn’t explode, and that’s exactly what you need to program into your diet. Dieting is not easy, and if you’re being restrictive because you need to lose a lot of weight, the longer you go on the greater your chances of screwing up. So while an entire cheat day might not be suitable, maybe you have a single cheat meal built in at certain intervals, so you can indulge yourself just enough to keep going.

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but by planning properly and not rushing your transition, you’re setting yourself up for life.

You’re also going to need to plan for the fact that even with everything set in place, that things aren’t going to go to plan. Maybe the diet leaves you feeling like crap for a couple of weeks (keto, or anything very low carb), maybe you don’t react well to certain foods, maybe after a few months of eating something, you just can’t stomach it anymore. Maybe (eventually) you’ll plateau, and have to figure out how to get your metabolism moving again. There are any number of things that can happen, and you need to plan for the fact that you’ll be making adjustments along the way. Again, never assume the best case scenario.

Finally, plan your timeline around a “worst case, average case, best case” scenario. Most people overestimate their abilities, and hate themselves when they don’t measure up. So work out what a bad week on the diet might look like for you — how many times you might stray, and the magnitude each time that happens. Then be honest and consider how your best week looks, which assumes that everything in your life is going great and you’re at your absolute best with regards to willpower and discipline. Now, shoot for somewhere in the middle of that, and always assume you’re going to do a little bit worse than a little bit better. Remember, this diet needs to work around busy times in your job, tiredness, break ups, fights with friends or family, basically any number of stressors that cause you to want to feel good through food.

Phase 2: Transition

A construction project wouldn’t just start with people working, you’ve got to get everything in place first. Building materials, machinery, procedures, personnel and so on. Likewise just going all in on a new diet from day one is a no no — you want to get everything in place first so there are no screw ups early on. The transition phase could be anywhere from a month to 3 months, maybe even 6 — this is another phase that you don’t want to rush, because the longer you spend and more the more thorough you are, the better your long term prospects are going to be.

So let’s say your current diet is a train wreck, and you’re just trying to get to the point where you’re eating 3 relatively healthy meals per day. You usually skip breakfast, you buy a dodgy lunch from a local fast food joint, and dinner is better but very lacking in vegetables. Using this approach, you’re not going to go all in and try to cook 3 meals a day, because it’s too much change too quickly. most people would be doomed to fail. The transition phase would begin by simply making sure you had enough vegetables with dinner. That’s all for at least a couple of weeks, longer if necessary. Once you’re used to that and it feels like a habit, then you start buying a healthier lunch each day for a few weeks or however long it takes you to get used to it. You save breakfast until last, because that’s the hardest for you. Because you don’t feel like eating, and you wake up just early enough to get out the door on time. So maybe you start with the minimum thing you can stomach, that takes the minimum time to prepare, and then you work towards your ideal from there.

Using this approach could very well take 6 months before you’re fully on diet and eating properly every day. But this way, it’s sustainable. It’s sustainable because you’ve chipped away at it and made small changes that you’ve adapted to your lifestyle, so they don’t feel like impositions and you don’t feel deprived.

The transition phase doesn’t just have to be about what you’re putting into your diet either, it could be about what you’re taking out. You might start even smaller — you might want to cut out Coke, but you’ve been drinking it for so long that it’s an ingrained habit that’s difficult to break. So maybe you start your transition by drinking one less can per week, and each week continue to reduce that number by one more can. Keep that going until you’re down to the level that’s acceptable before you try to cut something else down. It might seem like a slow start, but the thing about slow starts is that the momentum you build gets greater and greater. Before you know it, you look back in wonder at how far you’ve come.

Finally, actions in the transition phase might not have anything to do with what you consume or don’t consume. It could be something like doing a proper grocery shop every week on a Sunday for a number of weeks, so you don’t have to worry about not having the food you’re after. If you’re not used to it, that’s a big enough change on its own.

The main point of the transition phase is to implement one thing at a time. We’re building habits here, and changing one thing at a time gives several benefits:

  • You don’t have the stress of trying to do everything at once
  • You don’t feel deprived
  • You have one small goal to conquer at a time
  • You can measure what’s happening

That last one is really important. When you’re making one change at a time, you can measure the effects. If you make a change to eating a healthier lunch each day and you feel better in the afternoon, you know where that result came from. If you start eating a certain food with each meal and you find yourself feeling bloated or cramped, you can now take that food out and see if it was the culprit. If you go all in and change everything, you have no idea what the cause is of how you’re feeling, because you’ve changed too many variables at once.

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but by planning properly and not rushing your transition, you’re setting yourself up for life. You’ve got the benefit of being healthier, but also the benefit of learning how to plan and implement something effectively, which you can use in other parts of your life. Taking your time means that even if you move off of a particular diet, you now have the experience to find something more suitable and succeed at it.

Phase 3: Maintenance

This is where the rubber hits the road. You’ve taken as long as you’ve needed to transition into your diet, and now you’re fully committed and living it every day. Rather than letting go of the reins and assuming everything is going to be fine, you need to be the project manager who keeps an eagle eye on what’s happening. During the first few months of the maintenance phase, you should do as a project manager does and review the state of play once a week, no exceptions. Think about what is going well, what isn’t, how you’re feeling day to day, and whether the trend of your diet is going the way you want it to go. If you see things going the wrong way, make the smallest adjustments you can and continue to monitor.

There’s really not much more to it than that. You’ve done all the hard work already by taking your time in planning out your diet and transitioning appropriately. That’s where the difficulty lies, and by now you should be able to continue indefinitely, only making adjustments as needed. The most important part of maintenance is monitoring. I’ve competed in sports where I had to stay in a weight class for over 15 years, which meant that I was on the scales on a weekly basis, just ensuring that everything was staying on track. If my weight started to creep up, I’d look at what I was doing differently and adjust as I needed to. Health professionals will tell you to stay away from scales because they make you feel bad and cause you to be obsessive. I believe that to be well intentioned, but flawed advice. That’s because when you stay away from the scales, it’s easy to slowly pack on weight without realising until it’s too late, at which point you have to put serious measures in place to get back to where you were. When you monitor on a weekly basis, your weight doesn’t have a chance to get away from you.

Phase 4: Transition out

This step isn’t strictly necessary and depends on what you’re doing. If you’re trying to change your lifestyle and just eat healthier, this isn’t required because you’ll just be testing and adjusting as necessary. If, on the other hand, you’re experimenting with something a bit more extreme such as the keto diet or you’ve gone on a very restrictive diet to lose a lot of weight, you’re going to need to transition out of that rather than just changing your diet in an instant. This also applies if you’re on weight watchers or any other diet program where you have a support group and programming to help you lose weight. If you just decide to stop it with no plan, the statistics show overwhelmingly that you’ll put it all back on.

You really need to consider the magnitude of what you’re doing when you decide to go off one of these diets. You’re not just changing what you eat, you’re losing whatever the framework is that that diet provided. If you’re coming off Weight Watchers, you’re losing a support group and a way to measure what you eat. How are you going to replace that? If you’re coming off keto or paleo, you’re not just changing your diet, you’re likely losing a community as well. These factors are far more important to us than we realise, and we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that we’ll be just fine without them.

It doesn’t take a physicist to realise that just dropping a diet cold turkey will mean that you’ll put all your weight back on. If you’ve been on shakes for 8 weeks (which is an awful idea, by the way), guess what’s going to happen once you go back to eating real food without any plan or restraint? If there’s one thing you take from reading this, it’s that failing to plan is planning to fail. Take the time to do it right, factor in everything you can, and give your diet the best shot you can.

Related: When It’s All Over: Insights and Lessons from 15 Years of Competition

Related: Miss America Scraps the Swimsuit Segment — Is it Progress, or Denial of Choice?

Pete Ross

Written by

Pete Ross

Author of Building the Elite Athlete www.eliteathletecoaching.com

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