Thus end two plateau weeks on the diet—virtually nothing lost, nothing gained. Probable cause: too much restaurant-hopping and the reintroduction of wine. Or: the old metabolism-adjustment trick, as my body cottons on and turns the pilot light down to compensate for the threat of starvation. In any case it’s not depressing to make almost no progress over the course of 14 days, but I hear it can break the will over, say, 40.
I was talking to fellow editors about the high failure rate of diets. If diets were regulated medical treatments, diet doctors would be in jail for quackery. Failure stats abound on the Web: 60%, 75%, 90%, even 95%. In fact, the 95% figure is among the most commonly cited, though it dates back to the 1950s and came from a study of just 100 people. We all know in our guts that many diets are shilled like snake oil for good reason.
But the traditional definition of failure is also flawed: It says that if dieters put back on some or all of their lost weight (or even extra) over time, then failure has occurred. But of course all diets—being temporary measures to cause calorie intake to fall below calorie burn—have to end; otherwise you’d eventually diet yourself to death. (Has a fitness regime failed if, after you stop, your body becomes less fit?) The question is, What new habits do you put in place when you stop dieting? At that point you have to transition to a new calorie balance, a sort of eating homeostasis.
Many diets take a stab at suggesting how to do this (make healthy food choices, blah blah blah), but basically it’s beyond their jurisdiction; most religions don’t tell people how to behave once they’re in heaven, either.
My own plan for dealing with the rest of my life is to try to achieve that homeostasis, but I’ll probably fail often; and so I plan to have a five-pound trigger point that will set off a resumption of dieting. Sounds dreary. Though not as dreary as facing the upward-inching of the scale after this much struggle. Right now, though, I’ve got to get my fat ass off this plateau.
Competition Numbers:
Start date: 1/1/08
Height: 5′9½”
Start weight: 199 lbs
Latest weigh in: 2/11/08
Latest weight: 191 lbs
Weight lost: 8 lbs
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