How to lose weight: A five-second lesson for a life-changing system
Be prepared to have your mind blown
This, from NBC, is a truly jaw-dropping headline:
Wow, really? You mean a weird, modish, unpleasant way of eating food didn’t help its adherents lose weight? You mean to tell me that eating “fewer, smaller meals” can help keep the pounds off? What, you’re saying that if you eat fewer times throughout the day, and less food every time you eat, you won’t gain as much weight? This is, to put it mildly, groundbreaking stuff. Wipe the chalkboard clean, boys, we’re starting from scratch.
Of course it’s not really. This is an easy layup. “Intermittent fasting” is not, at scale, a practical weight-loss solution; it’s just another thing, another odd sort of modality of eating that many people have convinced themselves is a necessary component of healthy living. It’s been a valuable component of religious asceticism for millennia but I don’t think the Desert Fathers ever touted it as a weight-loss program. I am not sure how it was originally sold to the modern public. Johns Hopkins points out that “our bodies have evolved to be able to go without food for many hours, or even several days or longer,” a remnant of “prehistoric times.” My goodness, we’ve gone all the way back to the Lower Paleolithic now. The Mayo Clinic notes there are several variations to the diet, including “alternate-day fasting,” “5:2 fasting” and “daily time-restricted fasting.” How can anyone not look at this stuff and not be just totally turned off by it?
The U.S. has a very, very strange culture of food, more or less unique to us and unknown in pretty much every other part of the world except maybe the urban parts of the United Kingdom. We obsess over food in the strangest and most neurotic of ways; we’ve developed and promulgated too many eating and dieting systems to count, all of them based on the premise that someone has finally figured out the long-hidden secret of weight loss. But there’s no secret. Losing weight for probably around 99% of people is exceptionally simple. This is it, the long-awaited revelation: Eat less food. That’s it. If you eat less food you will gain less weight; eventually you will lose weight. It is very nearly simplicity itself, the simplest of causes driving the most predictable of effects. Nobody in the history of our species has ever developed a better weight-loss system than this. It works!
Of course, technically there are many ways you can approach “eat less food,” and I suppose “intermittent fasting” is one of them. The problem of course, is that it’s just so unpleasant—there’s a weird set of rules, you risk the awkward situations where you have to refuse dinner with a friend because it’s “outside your window,” you have to adopt this identity as being part of a branded subculture. It’s really quite awful. Nobody wants to live like that, truly.
The best way to eat well, live well and keep the weight off at at the same time is itself also very simple: Eat three reasonably sized, high-quality meals, three times a day—when you wake up, in the middle of the day, and in the evening—and don’t snack in between them. Boom, done. There’s no system, there’s no brand, there’s no name for it, no subreddit, no guy hawking a book on an infomercial; it’s the way people do it billions of times a day, all over the world, and it is a great way to live. Cook good meals using good ingredients, eat at three intuitive and predictable times of the day, don’t overload your plate. Do this and you will be happier and healthier than any ridiculous diet program could ever guarantee. Nothing intermittent about it!