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.