Dieting 101

 

You want to lose weight?  It’s really very simple.  Just go to the bookstore or library and pick a fad diet.  Then stick to it for the rest of your life.  The fact that we have fad diets that soon go out of favour should be no cause for concern.

Try The F-Plan, the high fibre solution to shedding excess pounds.  You’ll eat more bran and beans than you ever thought possible.  Basically, you’ll shit yourself skinny.  And add more methane to the atmosphere than a herd of cows.

Odd, actually, how so much of the diet lingo plays on our resembling a cow.  You wouldn’t think that it would work in a diet book writer’s favour to liken us to our ruminant kin, but a lot of diets recommend “grazing” in place of “eating.”  Rather than sitting down to a filling meal, we should graze small amounts of food all day.  If thinking about yourself as a cow is up your alley, try any diet that promotes grazing.  (Draw the line, though, at the whole regurgitate and rechew the food.  Unless you’re a model.  Then, by all means, barf up your lunch to keep stick thin, since this is really the only way to achieve your birth weight of 8lbs 6oz, but keep quiet about it lest you give the girls and women who look at you eating disorders, because, really, when we look at you we are not supposed to think “vomit.”)

But why stop with cows?  Why not go further back the chain of kinship to our hunter-gatherer ancestors?  The Fast Diet has a simple premise: our ancestors lived by feast and famine, and so should we.  We are not grazers, after all, and we need to experience real hunger.  Famine.  Progress has brought us indoor plumbing and the internet, but the famine of our ancestors is the way forward.  The pangs of hunger are a good sign that you are losing weight.  Therefore, on just two days a week, you will not eat.  Well, you can have dinner.  As long as it’s only 600 calories.  The whole family has to be fast on the fast diet: the adults will fast, and the kids had better learn to run fast from the really nasty Neanderthal creature that seems to have take over their mother’s body on the days she does not eat.  She may or may not return to normal on the days she’s actually allowed food.

Let’s try a different cave-dwelling ancestor: The Paleo Diet.  (AKA The South Beach Diet.  AKA The Atkin’s Diet.)  Our ancestors ate a plant- and protein-rich diet, and so should we.  The fact that their life expectancy was 30 should not deter you at all.  Live fast, die young.

Actually, while on the topic of ancestors, don’t forget the arguments in Wheat Belly.  Our forebears did not eat the strains of wheat we currently grow and that are currently the root of all evil.  Eliminate gluten.

Back to the cows for a minute.  We are the only mammals that drink milk past infancy, so you should probably also eliminate dairy.

A cleanse!  A cleanse will cover all these bases.  For just four short weeks, eliminate: solid food for breakfast and lunch, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, dairy, wheat AND the will to live.  If that does not help you lose weight, I don’t know what will.