Season three starts this Friday. Come back then for the new site.

Here are some final numbers in regards to the fad-diet diet I did on Revival of the Faddist and the no-diet diet I did on The Dead Weight.

I did fad diets on and off for about 200 days and lost 54 pounds.

I did “no” diet for about 250 days and lost 50 pounds.

So, what’s next?

What’s next is “Season 3.”

I like the ideas of blogs with ends. Most blogs just go on and on. I like the idea of a blog being a self-contained unit. I kind of think of them as seasons of a TV show. This blog, The Faddist, was season 1. The Dead Weight was season 2. In May I will be starting season 3 with a new site which will be the final site in my weight loss trilogy. I feel I’ve worked on two sites devoted to both ends of the dieting spectrum and now it’s time to take what I learned and use it to finally complete my weight loss project. This will probably take another 9 months to a year, I’m guessing.

I will be posting an update here once things are ready but in May everything will transition to the as-yet-unnamed new site.

In the meantime, if you enjoy this site and you haven’t read The Dead Weight, I’ve picked out some of my favorite posts or posts that I got the most feedback on.

The Essential Dead Weight

1. The Basics – Unsurprisingly, this was a post covering the basics of how I would attempt to lose weight.

2. 7-Word Diet – This was my attempt to create a philosophy of sensible eating in as few words as possible. This post ended up getting picked up by Zen Habits, one of the biggest productivity blogs in existence. It ended up giving me about 100 times the normal traffic I get on my site. Something I might have noticed if I ever checked my hit-counter which I didn’t do until about two weeks after it was linked to. Regardless, I still think this post is a great idea.

3. Breaking News – Here I go on an unprovoked rant against the undoubtedly sweet woman who runs Hungry Girl for her posting of common sense as if it were news and hideous recipes as if they were food.

4. I’m In the Mood for Love – I attempt to quantify how many calories you burn masturbating.

5. Dear Oprah – A heartfelt letter to Oprah Winfrey after she came out to say that she had packed the pounds back on.

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, Oh, I get it, you fell off the wagon and gained all the weight back and then decided to give up on fad diets and try something else entirely. I know that’s what it seems like and if I were you I might think the same thing. But the truth is that gaining the weight back was a conscious choice on my part. I wanted to try again. I had lost a bunch of weight with fad diets, I wanted to know if I could do it with the opposite of fad diets. But what is the opposite of a fad diet?

We’ll get to that. But first, let’s talk about gaining the weight back. This was amazingly easy for me to do. Within a couple days I had gained back 15 pounds. Now, no human can really gain that much weight back unless they are shotgunning hollandaise sauce, but I managed to. I suppose some of the weight that is lost on fad diets is slightly artificial. Your body can shed a lot of water just by limiting salt and maybe carbohydrates (at least that’s been my experience). It’s why people go on the biggest loser and lose 30 pounds the first week and 8 the second. Their body didn’t adjust that quickly it’s just a matter of not having the excess water weight to piss out the second week.  So I initially gained some of the weight back very quickly, then after the first couple weeks I made it my goal to gain a couple pounds a week. I made a big deal of it and I would weigh myself in once a week and if I didn’t gain at least 2 pounds I’d act real upset. And on the rare week when I’d gained 3 or 4 pounds I’d clasp my hands over my head in victory. This little playlet went on in my bathroom for nobody’s benefit but my own for about 6 months  and I found myself at a little over 300 pounds. And then over the next month I gained another 10 pounds as I tried to discern what the opposite of a fad diet was.

I know the obvious answer is just to “eat healthy.” But I don’t think that’s the correct answer. The truth is that most fad diets, barring the extremely stupid like the “Master Cleanse” and things like that, are somewhat healthy. Even things like the “ice-cream diet” aren’t as crazy as they sound. You think it’s ice-cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but it turns out to be a day full of lean protein and complex carbohydrates followed by 1/4 cup of ice-cream after dinner. I never liked those types of fad-diets (which is why when I went on a candy diet I went on an ALL candy diet), to me they were like a woman holding a sign above her head that says “FREE SEX,” and then when you approach her and say, “Yes, I’d like some of that free sex, please,” she says, “Okay, just take me out to dinner, entertain me, charm me, woo me for six months, meet my parents, propose to me, get married to me, and then we’ll have all sorts of FREE SEX!!!!”

I’m not someone who draws a distinction between, say, the Special K Diet and Atkins, as far as I’m concerned they’re both equally brilliant or bullshit depending on your perspective. What makes a fad diet a fad diet is you being told what to eat and/or when to eat it. It’s not the type of food that makes it a fad diet. It’s the regimentation and the need to subjugate your own desires for the sake of what “the diet” says. It may be an effective way to lose weight, but I don’t know that it’s the most fulfilling way to do so.

And the biggest problem is this: there’s no future in it. The reason the overwhelming majority of the people who go on fad diets (or any diets for that matter) gain the weight back is that they’ve had no experience eating the foods they love in amounts that keep them at the weight they want to be at. It’s like lifting weights in a swimming pool. It’s great to be able to lift a 300 pound barbell in a swimming pool, but that doesn’t mean you can do it on dry land, and if your goal is to be strong on dry land, maybe you should start working out there even if it’s harder to lift there. Am I getting lost in my own analogy? I just mean that it can be easy to lose weight if you limit yourself to only one type of food, or follow a very strict diet. But what’s the plan after that? Never to eat pizza again? Never to stop by McDonald’s? If we’re striving for mastery here, don’t we need to get in there and dance with our demons a little? You don’t beat the school bully by hiding from him, you do it by smashing his head against the basketball pole when he starts shit with you.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. These are ideas I’ve come to in the past year. But in May of last year I didn’t really know what I was going to do — how I was going to do the opposite of a fad diet. And it hit me that the opposite of a fad diet was no diet at all. And so in June of last year I started The Dead Weight. It’s a blog devoted to trying to lose weight just be being conscious of the fact that I was trying to lose weight. Nothing was off limits, nothing was forbidden, and nothing was mandated. My diet mainly consisted of waking up in the morning and reminding myself that my goal was to lose weight, and that’s about it, although I came up with a few more mental tricks along the way.

The story starts here and continues for the next 6 or 7 months.

If you don’t want to read it all, I’ll tell you how it ends. I lost almost as much weight in that time as I did doing fad diets.

But the story doesn’t end there.

It continues this April (and no, I haven’t gained it all back again).

More on that soon.

Okay, if you’ve read this blog, then you know the first part of the story. On April 1st, 2007 I weighed 299 pounds and decided it would be a good idea to lose some weight. Most people come to this decision long before they’re 100 pounds overweight, but I like to cogitate on things longer than most people (and apparently masticate on things longer than most people too).

The thing was, losing weight itself wasn’t a super-attractive endeavor for me. I had a lot going on in my life and losing weight for the sake of vanity, or even health wasn’t all that interesting to me. I wanted to do something that would be fun in and of itself and that hadn’t really been tried before. So, as you know, I decided to try and lose weight on a fad-diet-diet. If one fad diet was good, a dozen must be great. And it worked! Over the course of 200 days I lost over 50 pounds. But as time wore on I wanted to try different things. And there was a seed of what was to come in this post here.

You see, I was wrestling with an idea. An idea so startlingly stupid it made the fad-diet-diet not sound so dumb. The process of losing weight had always been primarily about self-experimentation for me. Not about looking good, or feeling good, or sticking it to my ex-girlfriend, or fitting into plane seats, or being there for my daughter’s wedding. Or whatever the reasons are most people have. I’m not even married and don’t have a daughter, so I am sure as hell not going to let some non-existent, bride-to-be daughter dictate if I’m going to some peach cobbler or not . But self experimentation, on the other hand, is something that I find exciting. I enjoy things like learning to hold my breath for three minutes or messing with my sleep cycle or seeing if I can stand in one place for 24 straight hours. I don’t know what it is I like about that, but I always have.

And it was in October of 2007 that the self-experimentation reflex really started twitching for me in regards to the fad-diet-diet. I had proven, I thought, that one could lose weight on this type of diet. But I was missing something that every good experiment needs: a control. A control is used in  scientific experiments as a standard of comparison. When 20/20 wants to see how much fecal matter collects on a toothbrush in an average bathroom, they keep a control toothbrush in the kitchen so they have something to compare it against.

And for weeks and weeks this idea of a “control” in the weigh loss experiment was really gnawing at me and it became something I felt I needed to do. It was a compulsion, really. And gradually more and more of my mind began to think it was a good thing to do. It’s like breaking up with someone or quitting a job or moving to a new city where you think you’ll find opportunities in a field you love. It starts as just a germ of an idea but it grows and grows to the point where you just have to do it. And it’s not a matter of doing it because you know it’s going to work, you need to do it because if you don’t you’ll always think, “I wonder what would have happened if I had [fill in the blank].”

This is just the way life works. If you move to LA to find work as an actor and you don’t have any success, well, that’s a lot easier to deal with looking back on your life than if you had never moved to LA and given it a shot in the first place.

So I was convinced I had to try a “control” for the weight-loss experiment.

But in order to do that I would have to do something that was foolish at best and dangerous at worst.

I would have to gain the weight back.

(Coming Soon — Connecting the Dots – Part II : The Control)

That’s a heartbeat.

I’m not dead.

This site is only somewhat dead.

And the whole experiment isn’t as dead as you thought it was.

Updates coming later this week.

This blog is officially on hiatus for the time being while I work on some other projects. I will come back to it eventually when I have the time. If this is your first time here, feel free to check out the archives to see what this is all about and I will see you in a few months.

Hugs and kisses,

Andy