I grew up hearing, "If you don't have anything good to say, then say nothing."

Nevertheless...
today I spent quite a long time surfing the internet looking for weight-loss and maintenance articles
to inspire myself, but came up empty-handed. I found a great many articles,
but I wasn't inspired by them.
I suspect that this result has something to do with my own frame of mind…
...which currently is well inside the border of pessimestic.
Days like that happen for all of us … including me.

                                        
A member of a forum I frequent left me the following message:

You have a great website there.
It's very interesting to read the perspective of one of the exceptions,
who has lost a large amount of weight and kept it off.
I love your honesty about how little you have to eat to avoid regaining.
But I also find it quite scary!
I find it very difficult to imagine myself eating like you
(in terms of calorie intake and portion size) for the rest of my life.
It worries me that the amount I should eat to maintain
is actually less than the amount I'm currently eating to lose weight.
No wonder maintenance is difficult for people who have been very big!

It IS scarey how little I need to eat to maintain in the normal weight range.
Those weight charts that connect calorie needs to bodyweight
are inaccurate for a great many people...including me.

One thing that people often don't get .... is that THE REALLY SCAREY THING
is how little my body needs in order to maintain my weight ANYWHERE...
even in the morbid obesity weight range....

I didn't get to eat everything I wanted to eat whenever I wanted to eat it,
and still not gain, even at 220 or even 250 lbs.
As a short, older, sedentary woman I was only averaging around 1600 - 1800 calories a day
during that couple of years when I gained from the 160s up into the 190s.
AND my weight was still slowly climbing.

Evidence indicates that is very difficult for me to maintain at any weight.
I can choose to work to maintain in the "normal" range,
OR
I can choose to work to maintain well inside the "obesity" range.

Since I have to work hard anyway, to maintain anywhere,
If it is at all possible,
I'd rather do what it takes to weigh in the normal range.

                                                      
One of the things I choose to do here at DietHobby is give an occasional review of a diet and/or diet book which I’ve read and have found unusual or interesting enough to personally experiment with (although usually only after I make personal and individual modifications to the basic plan). This is one such review.  

 Snack Yourself Slim (2008) was written by Richard Warburg, a lawyer, assisted by Tessa Lorant who is a published author and knitting expert. This diet book is based on the rather unique premise of having tiny snacks every hour instead of meals.

Warburg shares a personal eating plan that he developed and used successfully. He asserts that it is a known fact that the body craves satiety through smaller, more frequent meals. His lifestyle approach is to eat a very small amount of something every hour that you are awake.

Here is his diet plan. Every hour that you are awake you eat approximately 80 to 100 calories of any food. If you arise at 7 a.m. and are awake until 10 p.m. for those 15 hours you would consume about 1200 to 1500 calories. Warburg says that such a plan is destined for success since the body’s caloric needs can be determined through scientific charts which show a person’s daily caloric needs, based upon gender, height, weight, and exertion level.

As an example, the charts say that a six-foot, 40-year-old man, weighing approximately 200 pounds with a moderate physical activity level (five exercise sessions a week), would need about 2800 calories a day to maintain his current weight. Since 3500 calories equals one pound of fat, reducing daily intake to a 2000 calories would equate to nearly a pound of fat being reduced every four days.

Snack Yourself Slim encourages such a hypothetical man to eliminate another 500 calories from that amount for even quicker weight loss.

Based on the conventional wisdom of calories-in calories-out, it would appear that this could be a successful means of weight loss. Warburg cites his own success with the plan, as well as the success of a few of his friends who have used it. The main drawback of the plan, appears to be that it would require giving up eating all normal size meals. For most occupations and lifestyles, this could be rather difficult to accomplish.

Warburg claims no medical expertise, and his knowledge about body functions appears to be based on his own armchair reading about various dieting methods. Current conventional wisdom is calories-in-calories-out, and he seems to understand that basic concept, however he makes the statement that all calories are NOT created equal because “you can have as many as you like in protein form – the body simply excretes those you don’t need”. This inaccurate statement indicates that Warburg is unfamiliar with the concept of gluconeogensis which is the process whereby the body turns extra protein into glucose, which then … if unused… gets stored as fat. Based on this rather egregious error, I would advise a reader not to heavily rely on Warburg’s sketchy interpretation of how insulin and his diet work together.

I have previously reviewed the book “The No S Diet” (2008), which is a 3 meal zero snacking plan. I am very fond of the Habit concepts of the author, Reinhard Engles, and in March 2008, I began experimenting with the No S diet. I was unsuccessful at establishing a 3 meal, 0 snacking habit, probably due to the fact that my entire 60+ year lifetime involves a strong established habit involving small meals with snacking at random throughout the day. However, I am still strongly attracted to the diet and to Reinhard’s habit concepts, and I enjoy and recommend his No S forum which frequently contains the comments of some interesting, intelligent, and courteous people.

With that personal background, I ran across “Snack Yourself Slim”, in mid-2009; I purchased and read the book, intrigued by the idea of All snacks, 0 meals which is actually a reverse pattern of The No S Diet, and a diet concept I’d never tried.

My only experimentation with this diet was for about 10 days in early May, 2009, just a few days after returning from a long vacation in Boston. During that 10 days, I ate …what for me were maintenance calories … divided into approximately 11 to13 snack eating sessions. My average weight went down approximately 1 lb during that 2 week period, but this appeared to be merely due to normal flucuation. I found that I missed meals, plus I was strongly motivated to quickly drop a few lbs of vacation weight, so I quit that all-snacking-zero-meal-plan to experiment with other diet plans.

I have no strong feelings about the personal effectiveness of the diet, either way. Recently I’ve became interested in doing a second experiment with it, and I now have a plan to do that. If I follow through with such a plan, and I have results that I find interesting, I will share those in some later article.

Diets and dieting is often an emotionally charged topic. Everyone has an opinion, and most people are interested in sharing theirs.  Even "experts" have different perspectives and many of them are quite evangelistic about their own beliefs on the subject.

There is now a rather popular viewpoint fostered by some Therapists and Nutritional experts who say that "Diets don't work";  that "Diet head is a bad thing"; and that "Dieting is one of the primary causes of eating disorders".  

Do Diets Work?

My own position is that If a person eats food, and that person is alive, that person is on a diet that works. The frequency of eating, the amount eaten, and the micronutrients of the food eaten are all just factors of various diets. For more about those factors, read my articles: 

The Essence of Diets Part One, and

The Essence of Diets Part Two.

What is "Diet head" and is it a bad thing?     

The basic essence of the term, diet head simply involves thinking about what and how one is eating.  I, personally, see this as a very positive thing, and have chosen to make Dieting one of my Hobbies. For more about that perspective read my article:

"Diet head" is a vague and negative term coined by "experts" who hate the concept of restricting eating.  When I Googled it, I couldn't find it in any dictionary, even the current "slang" ones.

 
Does Dieting cause eating disorders?

That's an enormous question, because first one would have to agree with current definitions of exactly what an  "eating disorder" is, and I don't.  Next, since everyone is on a diet (because everyone alive eats food sometimes), unless everyone has an eating disorder Dieting couldn't cause it. 

That subject of "eating disorders" and what causes them, is far too broad for me to cover here, and I will be addressing it in future articles. 

So, starting with the Basic premise of Diet, opinions are divided from that point on.  Each of us moves and breathes and thinks and behaves independently.  I see the subject of How and What one eats, as one of the most personal issues in life. 

In this DietHobby website, I talk about that issue and I share about how it relates to me personally. One primary belief that I share here, is that It's not a one-size-fits-all world; that there is no one "right" way for everyone, and that finding a way of eating that is "right" for one is part of one's individual life journey which can be both valuable and entertaining. 

                                                       
A fresh start?

Recently I've been thinking about the concept of a "fresh start" as it relates to dieting, weight-loss, and maintenance of weight-loss.

My own belief is that every diet works for someone, and every possible type of eating is actually a diet… including all of the intuitive eating, "non-diets" etc. Just SAYING it isn't a diet, doesn't change it's nature. As far as I'm concerned, despite all of the factors like total amount eaten, timing of eating, or micronutrients eaten, if it's food, and if it goes into one's body, it's some type of diet.

Most people begin each new weight-loss diet, "healthy" diet, or new food plan, with some emotional energy, hope, and enthusiasm. Over time, Reality intrudes, and that energy grows dim, and sometimes fades away. At that point, many of these people "take a break" from their diet, or food plan, and return to their former eating habits. This break can be for a short time or a long time, but almost all of them will eventually decide to again alter their ongoing way of eating, telling themselves they are getting "a fresh start".

My personal choice, at present, is to change maintenance food plans frequently…but without allowing any "free" space for overeating, between plans. For the past 8 years I've recorded all of my food every day into a computer software program, no matter what food, how much food, or when that food was eaten. This has been my bottom line consistency factor.

My take is that there needs to be a balance between consistency, patience, endurance, and effort and keeping our daily experiences from getting "stale". "Stale" is the opposite of "fresh", and means tasteless or unpalatable from age; tedious from familiarity, or impaired in vigor or effectiveness.

Although we all share common factors as human beings, each of us is an individual, with genetic, cultural, and behavioral history differences. Weight-loss is hard for almost every overweight or obese person, and maintenance is even harder yet.

The science behind why we weigh what we weigh is hugely complicated. The number of physiological factors governing our ability to maintain, lose or gain weight is staggering. Leptin, leptin resistence, ghrelin, insulin, insulin resistence, and a whole host of other chemicals and chemical reactions in our bodies come into play.

Here's an interesting article I recently read in Big Fat Facts, written by a long-time weight-loss maintainer that talks about the tremendous problems involved in success with losing and maintaining weight.

The Truth About Long-Term Diet Success

An oft-quoted but rarely cited statistic is that diets fail 95 percent of the time. That figure dates back to a 1959 study of 100 people. The study was conducted by Dr. Albert Stunkard, now a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, and Mavis McLaren-Hume. It concluded that "(m)ost obese persons will not stay in treatment, most will not lose weight, and of those who do lose weight, most will regain it." It was a brazen statement at the time, when doctors and other experts thought that treating obesity was as simple as handing a patient a "plan," and it was likely accurate. It may still be accurate, though we do not know.

Two 1992 reports from the National Institutes of Health have been quoted as corroborating this 95 percent failure rate. The executive statement of one report asserts: "Data show that many individuals regain one-third to two-thirds of intentionally lost weight within 1 year and regain the rest of the weight within 5 years." While this report stops short of stating a figure, it has been used in support of the 95 percent assertion because it references several studies with different but dismal results, some even worse than 5 percent success:

Kramer and colleagues (1989) found that less than 3 percent of subjects were at or below posttreatment weight on all followup visits.  Other researchers have documented similar findings (Graham et al., 1983; Stalanos et al., 1984). With respect to obesity treatment in adolescents, Rees (1990) reported that 85 to 95 percent of patients regain at least as much weight as they lost and Stalonas and colleagues (1984) found evidence that patients regain even more weight than the initial weight lost.

This NIH report also references the analysis of David Garner and Susan Wooley, a 51-page review of diet research and diet failure, that has also been used to support the 95 percent claim and concludes there is no "scientific justification for the continued use of dietary treatments of obesity. . . . Most participants regain the weight lost. The inevitability of this result is often obscured by the use of follow-up periods insufficient to capture the later phases of weight regain."

Many have marginalized the 95 percent figure, but few scientists have challenged it directly with original research or analysis, and that is likely because few are so motivated. The wise people who tell us that "diets don't work" have no interest in finding a different figure. This one proves their point sufficiently. The researchers funded by the pharmaceutical industries want a low benchmark to beat when they finally find the "wonder pill" that will reverse obesity in, say, 12 percent of the population as opposed to 5 percent. They'll tout it as "more than twice as effective as conventional dieting." The people who run the commercial diet programs are not interested in learning that the real rate of success might be 8% or 10%, which might mirror their own success rates compared to that 5% figure.

 The researchers at the National Weight Control Registry (a project dedicated to documenting diet success stories) have recently challenged the 5 percent figure, but they have done so by redefining "success" modestly  as "intentionally losing 10 percent of initial body weight and maintaining that loss for at least a year." They assert (though they stop short of saying they have proven) that under this new definition, the "success" rate is probably closer to 20 percent.

We must conclude that we don't know the long-term success and failure rates of diets, but what we do know is depressing. Do we really embrace the idea that just one year of maintaining 10% weight loss is success? (We would want to ask a "successful" dieter who has regained all her weight plus ten pounds, and who started that humiliating process on day 366 or shortly thereafter.) Moreover, regardless of how diet "success" is defined, even the most cynical researchers, who support weight-loss dieting for health or social purposes, agree that diets fail at least 80 or 90 percent of the time.

This fuzzy problem has implications for both scientists and everyday citizens. For scientists there is an implied challenge to define "success" using fair language that average citizens would embrace if they were to achieve it, and then test that definition and give us a real number to work with. For everyday citizens, even lacking a solid number, the knowledge that diets do "fail," by even the weakest definition, 80 percent of the time or more begs a question: would we board an airplane that had only a 20 percent chance of landing safely?