How Not to Diet

Every month seems to bring us a trendy new diet or weight-loss fad, and they always sell because they always fail. The diet industry rakes in up to $50 billion a year, and the business model is based on repeat customers. Racked with the guilt and self-hatred of failure, people often line right back up to be fooled again.

We should eat real food that grows out of the ground, natural foods that come from fields, not factories, and from gardens, not garbage.

The battle of the bulge is a battle against biology, so obesity is not some moral failing. I can’t stress enough that becoming overweight is a normal, natural response to the abnormal, unnatural ubiquity of calorie-dense, sugary, and fatty foods. So, my goal with How Not to Diet was to give you every possible tweak and technique I could find to build the optimal weight-control solution from the ground up, whether you’re morbidly obese, just overweight like the average American, or at your ideal weight and wanting to keep it that way.

In How Not to Diet, I cover everything from cultivating a healthy microbiome in your gut to manipulating your metabolism through chronobiology, matching meal timing to your circadian rhythms. I discuss ketogenic diets, low-carb versus low-fat, meal frequency, eating rate, sleep enhancement, and more. I also dive deep into the hows and whys—and why-nots—of myriad intermittent fasting regimes.

A calorie isn't just a calorie

Isn’t a calorie just a calorie, though? In that case, why does it matter what we eat? The notion that a calorie from one source is just as fattening as a calorie from any other source is a trope broadcast by the food industry as a way to absolve itself of culpability. Coca-Cola even put out an ad emphasizing this “one simple commonsense fact.” As the chair of Harvard’s nutrition department put it, this “central argument” from industry is that the “overconsumption of calories from carrots would be no different from overconsumption of calories from soda.”

The notion that a calorie from one source is just as fattening as a calorie from any other source is a trope broadcast by the food industry as a way to absolve itself of culpability.

While it’s true that in a tightly controlled laboratory setting, 240 calories of carrots—ten carrots—would have the same effect on calorie balance as the 240 calories in a bottle of Coke, this comparison falls on its face out in the real world. You could chug down those liquid calories in less than a minute, but eating 240 calories of carrots could take you more than two and a half hours of constant chewing. (It’s been timed.) Not only would your jaw get sore...

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