The Setpoint Diet: Interview with Jonathan Bailor

My guest today is Jonathan Bailor, author of a new book called The Setpoint Diet and the founder and CEO of Sane Solution. Before starting his own company,  Jonathan served as a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, where he helped create health and fitness-focused products like NikeKinect Training and Xbox Fitness.

Here are a few of the topics we delve into in our conversation (just click on the audio player to listen):

• What we gain (and lose!) when we focus on the quality of our food choices.
• How can we change the weight our body "wants" to weigh?
• How big a factor do external factors play in changing one's Setpoint?
• How to choose foods that keep hunger at bay
• The limits of appetite control
• How to avoid overeating healthy foods
• Where food and eating fits in to a balanced life
• How to love yourself slim.

About 5 years ago, Jonathan wrote a book called The Calorie Myth, in which he argued that it’s the quality of calories that determines our weight, more so than the quantity. In The Setpoint Diet, Jonathan adds new insights into how to convert those principles into action in the real world, based on his experience with thousands of participants.

This concept of a body weight setpoint is an interesting one. It contends that the body has a certain weight that it wants to be. And if we lose weight, the body fights to return to its setpoint weight.  In The Setpoint Diet, Bailor says we can change that setpoint—that weight that our body wants to weigh—by changing our diet.

But as we discuss in our interview, that setpoint may be at least partially determined by our environment—the way our homes and workplaces and schedules are set up and the degree to which they encourage us to overeat or be sedentary.  We can lose a bunch of weight on a short term diet. But if we don’t change, in a permanent way, the way our homes and workplaces and schedules are set up, that environment is going to exert a lot of pressure on us to revert to previous habits (and...

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