Jason and his crash diet, revisiting

I had written some time ago about a friend of mine who recently turned 50 that is quite overweight. I would say he is a good 50 lbs overweight which isn't an insurmountable amount of weight and I know this because I was 50 lbs overweight at one point and I came back from it. The difference between the method that Jason and I took to attempt to achieve this are very different and of course have very different results. Jason started out just fine but he was looking for shortcuts and doesn't do any exercise of any sort. He also smokes so this means that cardio exercise is even more difficult for him.

src

I appreciated the fact that Jason realized that he needed to intervene in his life and lose some weight because it is true that the older you get, the more difficult it becomes to take off the pounds. We all have our own excuses for why we can't diet or exercise but none of them are good excuses and it all just kind of boils down to laziness. Jason is lazy, he admits that he is lazy.

Jason had heard about people losing weight fast with intermittent fasting so he figured he would give that a try. he would only eat for 4 hours a day and while I might be fudging the numbers a bit here for him that time was 4-8pm. The rest of the day he could have only coffee and water. According the program that he was on there were no dietary restrictions during those 4 hours, which to me just seems insane. During this time Jason would scarf down the worst food you can imagine and chase it back with beers and Coca-cola and a number of other things that honestly, you should only consume sparingly if you do at all.

I am a big believer in caloric deficits meaning that the ONLY way you are going to lose weight is if you are burning more calories than you are taking in. Your body is a really intelligent machine but it doesn't know what time of day it is. Therefore if you don't eat at all for 20 of the 24 hours in a day but you consume 12,000 calories during the 4 hours that you are "allowed" to eat that you are not going to lose weight. This is where I was slightly wrong. Jason DID lose some weight because of this program. Over the course of a month I would say he lost around 10-15 pounds. The problem was that it is very difficult to maintain a fasting schedule if you are going to be a normal functioning person. It just isn't natural to only eat during 4 hours of the day and this was a really big problem with Jason and I presume other people who have tried this as well.

The days that he would cheat became more and more frequent until eventually he just gave up. I think this is probably because it is very difficult to simply not eat when you are hungry and I think it must be absolutely terrible to wake up hungry at say 9am and know that if you are going to stick to your diet you have to wait an additional 7 hours of listening to your stomach gurgle before you can eat anything at all.

I don't remember exactly how long Jason stuck with this program, I think it was around 2 weeks of absolute dedication, followed by 2 weeks of increasing levels of cheating, then maybe a 5th week of cheating more than not and then by week 6 he had completely abandoned the program altogether.

Unfortunately for Jason he never introduced even slight exercise into his program nor did he try to wean himself off of things that honestly, most people need to almost eliminate from their diet altogether like processed sugar and other complex carbohydrates. The entire time he was "dieting" he never changed what he ate, he just changed the time of day that he would eat it.

Since I really don't think that the time of day that you eat is meaningful at all I have always said that slow, gradual, and permanent changes to someone's diet is the only true way to make a permanent change to your weight. Bad habits die hard and diets like intermittent fasting are going to be extremely difficult for anyone to follow in the long-term. I'm sure there are some success stories out there about how people have succeeded using intermittent fasting but I can all but guarantee that they also eliminated certain bad foods and drinks from their repertoire as well.

I saw Jason the other day when I was out and about and I didn't comment on it because I am sure he is really ashamed about this failure. He did however tell me that he actually weighs more now than he did before he even started the fasting program. I once again told him that if he wants help that I will offer it to him but I didn't press the issue.

For me, I think fasting is a bad idea because it is untenable for most people. It just isn't normal to not eat outside of a particular time frame. If you can cut down on snacking and replace a lot of the junk that we eat with whole real foods then most people are going to achieve success without doing much else. Most trainers will agree (and they would be correct) that weight loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise. However, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't exercise. We don't need to be running marathons or doing triathlons every week but simply going for a walk for half an hour a day will do a world of good for most people.

I feel bad for Jason and others like him, but ultimately people have to admit that these fad diets and these bizarre exercise programs are just passing fads. There have been SO MANY of them just in my lifetime and there is a reason why nobody talks about the ones that were popular in the 80's , 90's and 2000's anymore.

You need to make gradual changes to your lifestyle and these changes need to be reasonable and accomplishable. Going from eating 3 meals a day with some snacking in between to having a very specific time of day where you eat whatever you want but never any other time, is in my opinion completely unreasonable and not something that almost anyone is going to stick with.

There are no shortcuts folks, you have to put in the effort to make lasting change.

_{my qualifications for what I say are not academic. I was an athlete in my 20's and then let myself go in my 30's. I am now in my 40's and I am the strongest I have ever been in my life.}