Here’s My Formula for a Weight-Loss Diet

As I diet these days, I think about all the times women have told me that for long stretches of their adult lives—in some cases for all their adult lives—they haven’t been able to eat without feeling some anxiety about food. I troll the community pages on SparkPeople.com and find posts like this.

I’m sickened & disgusted w/ myself. (Just being honest.) It’s the nighttime eating, really. Well that, and the lack of cardio. Thank goodness for SP [SparkPeople] so I can be accountable and not just hide in my fat jeans.

This from someone who had already lost 65 pounds.

Let’s posit the obvious cultural point, that something is screwy if eating induces such despair. Also the nutritional point, that national habits and the food supply are in thrall to fat and sugar, making poor food choices all too easy. And we’ll ignore the health point, that obesity shortens lives. The tragedy has to do with lost pleasure.

I was 10 when my family moved to a small city in Indonesia and I had to abandon the seven things I would agree to eat (spaghetti with no sauce, for example) and stare into the horror of coconut-curry beef, gado-gado (salad with peanut sauce), and giant shrimp crackers.

But I had an almost instant conversion experience. Within months I was eating frog’s legs; I was a one-boy biblical curse upon the frogs of that island. I learned that if the world was full of delicious things, it was a good idea to avoid eating anything that wasn’t delicious. I spent 37 years more or less doing that, and I could pack all the anxiety I felt along the way into Anna Wintour’s clutch bag.

No virtue here, just luck. No one really cares if you become a middle-age guy who’s 10, then 15, then 20 pounds overweight. And frankly, you don’t care that much yourself if by other measures—blood pressure, lung capacity, cholesterol, ability to bicycle 100 miles—you’re fine. Then the bad numbers start rising and you feel something in your bones. You realize that the chickens are coming home to roost—the ones you ate roasted to a crisp, with rosemary potatoes and a bottle of pinot noir. You reach a point where, practically speaking, finding a way to eat less seems like a better bet than not doing so, if only so you can enjoy eating longer.

I’m just saying it’s a lucky thing to not be burdened by a relationship with food that involves being sickened and disgusted. But when a relationship’s that bad, you need to get out of it or change it, right? Therapy, not dieting, is surely the weight-loss ticket. (Google “change your relationship to food” to scan the volumes written about this.)

Meanwhile, when people ask me what my diet is, I say—pace Mr. Pollan—“food, mostly delicious, less of it.”

Competition Numbers:
Start date: 1/1/08
Height: 5′9½"
Start weight: 199 lbs
Latest weigh in: 1/24/08
Latest weight: 193.5 lbs
Weight lost: 5.5 lbs