Get Even More Visitors To Your Blog, Upgrade To A Business Listing >>

The Renee Berdar Only-Eat-Stuff-You-Don’t-Like Diet

(CC BY-SA 2.0) by liz west/Flickr

Depressing but True: Less Enjoyment Translates into Fewer Pounds

You probably don’t regularly read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which means you most likely missed the recent profile of Renee Berdar, a local resident with a classic feel-good weight-loss story. In 2013 she found she was pushing the scales past the 420-pound mark, was appalled, went on a concerted weight-reduction program that included shunning added sugar and starches and taking up regular walking, running and gym workouts — the well-known basics of weight loss — and in 18 months had lost a stunning 250 pounds, which she has kept off by sticking to her program.

Nothing really new in all that, of course, but Renee pursued her quest for thinness buy adhering to some interesting insights and principles that the Post-Dispatch article characterized as the “don’t eat anything you like” diet. It’s actually more complicated than that, but as a core dieting principle, it’s got a lot going for it.

Why Eating Just a Little of the Good Stuff Doesn’t Work

For starters, it finesses the problem with the “eat what you like but just less of it” diet, which is too often impossible to pull off, running counter to the tide of human nature as it does. Once we start eating something we particularly like, our taste buds and pleasure centers and simple momentum tend to take over.

We know we should stop eating at a certain point, or at least at a certain amount, but when it’s something we truly enjoy, a lot of us begin fudging. (Especially when that something involves fudge.)

Just one or two more bites, or spoonsful, or slices, or whatever, couldn’t do that much harm, right? That was why the just-eat-less rule didn’t work for Renee.

“If I liked what I was eating, I’d eat all of it. I’d just keep eating.” This was an especially unhealthy inclination when it came to such Food items as party size pizzas, half-gallons of ice cream and entire baked hams.

Eat More Good Stuff, Even if You Don’t Love it

Renee reasoned that it might be easier to limit one’s Food Intake if one stuck to foods that one didn’t particularly like. It turns out that was not quite true in her case. She is what we might call a loco-vore, or a person who is crazy about food in general. “I like to eat a lot whenever I eat,” she acknowledges, “so I eat stuff that I can eat a lot of.”

And that’s the real strength of the eat-what-you-dislike diet: most of the Food Items that overweight people generally aren’t keen on happen to be of the healthier and less-caloric variety, your veggies and whole grains and salads and the like. So that even people who eat too much of whatever they eat get the benefit of more nutrients and fewer calories consumed than if they ate too much of things they loved.

Renee, for example, would choose raw cauliflower as a snack, not just because she wasn’t particularly fond of the stuff, but more importantly because she knew she could easily chow down an entire head thereof, as she was known to do, with minimal dietary damage.

(A cautionary note: don’t try limiting yourself to foods that you really can’t stand. If you make your diet regimen seriously unsatisfying, the odds soar that you won’t stick with it. And even if you did, you might actually run the risk of eating too little food, of unhealthily undernourishing your body. If I went on and rigidly stayed on a diet that limited my food intake to grits, liver and Brussels sprouts, I would be dead of starvation within 30 days.)

With a Diet, It’s OK to Get Bored

Another ingenious ploy Renee used to her advantage was simple repetition. “I eat the same things, over and over.” The result, along with a degree of dietary boredom, was a freedom from the dieter’s Achilles’ heel, cravings. Removing such appetite-stimulating elements as novelty and surprise and experimentation from her eating pattern seemed to also remove the element of ravenous hunger pangs.

The acid test of any weight-loss program, however, is whether the loser of the weight remains faithful to it over the long haul. In Renee’s case, it’s three years and counting, and for that blessing she thanks her emphasis on continued motivation. In fact, she uses the very unpleasantness of her self-imposed dietary restrictions as part of her motivation to persist with them.

She starts each day reminding herself that, “I have to make a choice as to whether to continue on my journey of health. If I quit, I’d have to do it all again. I don’t want to start over.” Wanting to hang on to hard-fought gains and not waste the great effort it took to achieve them can be a potent incentive to persist.

Another motivator she has found useful is to do—and to focus on appreciating—the little things in life that she was not able to do or appreciate when obese. That can range from cross-country skiing and fitting into a scuba diving wet suit to just showing up at an airport or theater knowing that you needn’t worry about the size of the seats, or being able to climb stairs without wheezing, or not having the unhappy prospect of type 2 diabetes constantly hovering like a vulture in your consciousness.

The fact that Renee Birdar’s approach to weight reduction and maintenance has worked for her is no guarantee that it will work for you, of course, but if the approaches you’ve been using so far haven’t, it may be worth giving her “eat what you don’t like to eat” philosophy a shot.

By Robert S. Wieder, CalorieLab’s Senior Health Columnist since 2006. Author of several books, including 115 Reasons Why It’s Not Your Fault You’re Fat, Bob wrote for numerous national magazines after starting out as editor of the UC Berkeley humor magazine the California Pelican. He also put in a stint as a San Francisco-area stand-up comic.



This post first appeared on CalorieLab Calorie Counter News, please read the originial post: here

Share the post

The Renee Berdar Only-Eat-Stuff-You-Don’t-Like Diet

×

Subscribe to Calorielab Calorie Counter News

Get updates delivered right to your inbox!

Thank you for your subscription

×