“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
– Thoreau

I’ve been reading some of the weight-loss message boards recently in search of some new fad diets to put through their paces. The message boards can be such a depressing mix of hope and frustration that I can’t spend too much time on them. If I could offer one piece of advice for the people on these boards it would be to simplify their diets.

I’ve used this analogy before. You have to imagine losing weight like it was a cross country trip from NY to California. You get in your car and go west via the most direct route on the map. That’s the simplest way to get there. Now, someone might tell you that the most direct route isn’t necessarily the fastest route, so if we go online we could do a little research and find out which route would be the absolute fastest and end up getting to California in an hour or two less time. Someone else might suggest that if we smoothed out the hood of your car it would create less wind-resistance and we could go faster and get better miles-per-gallon, saving another 2 hours on our trip. A third person might mention how your red car might draw the attention of the cops a bit too much, so if we painted it a forest green we could travel at a faster speed without being pulled over, saving even more time. These are all fine ideas theoretically but they’re not doing a goddamn thing to actually get you to California. In fact, they’re just making getting to California so frustrating you’re not even interested anymore. And if you had just bought into the idea of pointing your car in the right direction, turning the engine on and driving, you would have been there already.

People are spending too much time trying to optimize their diets. Simplify. Go down to 1200 calories, try to walk a few miles a day. Ignore trends and ignore fads. That may seem to be the exact opposite of what I’m doing here, but if I’ve realized anything while doing these diets it’s that it does come down to calories in/calories out. Ignore fluctuations on the scale. If you can’t do that, weigh yourself just once every two weeks. If you’ve been vigilant about sticking to 1200 calories and getting in a little exercise and you aren’t down a little weight every 2 weeks then you have something wrong with you and you need to see a doctor. Suppress the urge to “start over” with something new every couple of weeks.

I’m down almost 50 pounds now and about half of that weight was lost when I wasn’t following any of these fad diets but rather in the in-between time when I was just following the plan I mentioned above.