Dieting Doesn’t Work — Here’s What To Do Instead

If you can’t do it forever, it’s not a good option

The massive problem with dieting can be exposed by the use of 2 simple 4-letter words:

“Then What?”

You’re planning on going on a diet, but what comes next? What’s the plan for after your diet?

It’s the “Then What?” that gets people. Sure, people can swallow pretty much anything for 12 weeks. Salads for lunch, working out 6 days per week — bring it on! They’ll be fine as long as there is an end in sight.

The elephant in the room is about what will follow the allotted time frame.

The problem with dieting is that most diets focus on short-term efforts that are completely unsustainable across time. Many dieters end up repeating the excruciating cycle of losing weight only to put it back on (and then some). It is thought that up to about 80% of dieters who lose a substantial amount of weight fail to keep the weight off for 12 months. (1)

There is an excellent quote from Dr. Layne Norton (a Nutrition Ph.D. and thought leader in the fitness industry) that illustrates this:

When it comes to designing a sustainable approach to nutrition, there is no one-size-fits-all. What works for me may not work for you. There is one thing, however, that is abundantly clear for all of us:

When thinking about dieting, we need to think long-term.

I do not believe that most of the common diets one can read about are sustainable approaches for most people. I want to suggest a few simple practices that can hopefully guide people towards coming up with a sustainable approach to eating that can work for them.

Know Your Numbers

This is the part where I talk about calories, and you immediately close this story and instead read something about how intuitive eating is the best way to lose weight. If your goal is to simply feel better about the way you are, then that might be a good option.

However, if you’re genuinely interested in creating lasting change and maintaining a body that you love, then the reality is that you cannot neglect to think about calories.

It is energy balance (the balance of calories in vs calories out) that determines body fat storage. This does not mean that you have to be religious about putting every single thing that you eat into an app and meticulously controlling your calories.

What you can’t afford, however, is to be significantly wrong about how many calories you’re consuming on average and how many calories you require given your lifestyle.

There are 2 problems that people encounter that are not helpful to long term fat loss:

• Underestimating caloric consumption

• Overestimating physical activity

It seems to be the case that people are exceptionally bad at estimating calories in larger meals (when there are more calories at stake).

This 2006 study (2) found that overweight participants underestimated the caloric content of large meals by between 22 and 38%. We simply cannot afford to be off by that margin.

Taking your food scale to dinner with friends or family BBQs is not a sustainable technique, but you also cannot hope to have a long-term strategy that helps you to be lean if you are severely off in your estimation of how much you’re eating.

To have a chance at a sustainable, long-term approach to nutrition without dieting, you’ll need to be able to approximate 2 things:

• The calories you require per day to maintain your current weight

• The caloric content of the things that you eat

Total Daily Energy Expenditure

You’re Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the total amount of energy you burn throughout your day. It is measured in calories and represents the caloric content you can eat per day to maintain your weight. There are 4 components of TDEE:

Basal Metabolic Rate: This is the energy you spend by simply being alive and breathing.

Exercise Activity: Fairly self-explanatory — this is the energy you spend by doing intentional exercise.

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): Most people underestimate the amount of energy they burn by just going through the demands of daily life. Elite athletes are the only ones who burn more from Exercise Activity than NEAT — for most of us, it is all the other activities that require movement that end up being more influential to our TDEE

Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF): You actually burn calories digesting the food you’ve eaten. This is referred to as the Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF).

Your TDEE will depend on how much exercise you do and your lifestyle. Lifestyle is a crucial factor — a construction worker and a software developer will have drastically different numbers due to their NEAT.

The easiest way to get an idea of your TDEE is to use an online tool like this one here. It will only take you a couple of minutes. Don’t get married to the number you get, it’s just an estimate. But it’s much better than being completely in the dark.

Caloric Content of Food

The biggest hurdle for folks is portion sizes. The problem is not that people misunderstand that ice cream and pizza are not helpful for staying lean, it’s that they tend to think that they are consuming much smaller portions than they are.

You look at a tub of ice cream and think “150 calories for 125ml — that's not too bad!”. You’d be correct — that’s not too bad, and eating a serving of ice cream is something that you can absolutely make a daily habit. You probably won’t put 125ml in your bowl though — it’ll be closer to 300–400ml.

It’s the same thing for the “tablespoon” of peanut butter — it doesn’t matter that you used a tablespoon to scoop it out of the jar. A tablespoon is 15 grams, and the 50-gram hunk of peanut butter you just scooped out is over 3 times the calories that you see listed on the label.

What I’m getting at here is that you need to acquire the ability to accurately ballpark your serving sizes and equate them to calories. No, you don’t have to religiously weigh out and track everything, but if you have never done this, I suggest that you buy a food scale and weigh out food for 2 weeks.

Doing this for even a small period of time will make you much better at being able to ballpark your calories so that you don’t fall into that group that underestimates their intake by 38%.

Use the Fool Proof Method (Fiber, Protein, Micronutrients)

Eating well is far simpler than many fad diets would have you believe.

You don’t have to do Paleo. You don’t have to do Keto. You don’t have to skip breakfast, avoid carbs, or go on some stupid diet full of bone-broth and butter coffee.

For most people, the healthiest diet will be one where they are getting plenty of Fiber, Protein, and Micronutrients. There are some outliers who would challenge me on fiber and micronutrients (such as adherents to the carnivore diet), but I’m not going to get into that. Eating nothing but red meat definitely works for some, but it doesn’t apply to the majority.

Fiber

Fiber is technically a carbohydrate, except that it doesn’t get broken down in the same way. It takes longer for your system to digest foods high in fiber, and this leads to these foods being more satiating. Fiber is thought to be beneficial for gut bacteria and is helpful for regular bowel movements.

Women are recommended to shoot for between 20–25 grams of fiber per day, and for men, it’s between 30–38 grams. You’ll find fiber in whole grains, starchy vegetables, and fruit.

Protein

Most fad diets obsess over fat or carbs, but protein is the macronutrient that you should really be paying attention to. Some people thrive on a high-fat, low-carb diet. Some people thrive on a high-carb, low-fat diet. But protein is non-negotiable — everyone needs protein.

Protein molecules are made up of amino acids, which can be thought of as the building blocks of the body. They repair tissue damage and build up muscle. Protein also has a couple of bonus advantages:

• It is the most satiating of macronutrients

• It has the highest Thermic Effect of Feeding

Protein has a significantly higher TEF than carbs or fat:

Carbs have a TEF of 5–10%, fat 0–3%, and for protein, it’s a whopping 20–30%. This means that 20–30% of the energy of the protein you’ve consumed is used to digest that protein.

Protein supports the growth and maintenance of lean mass, it is highly satiating, and it has a significantly higher TEF than carbs or fat. For these reasons, a successful long-term nutrition strategy should involve plenty of protein.

The recommended amount of protein for sedentary adults is 0.8g per kilogram of body weight, but that is on the low side. People who lift weights shoot for 1g per pound of body weight, and this is a better goal to have for long-term nutrition success (even if you don’t lift weights).

Micronutrients

Protein, Carbs, and Fats are the macronutrients, and micronutrients refer to the nutrients that we require in much smaller amounts (such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sodium).

I am not going into all of them here, but the simplest way to ensure a healthy dose of micronutrients is to “eat the rainbow.” Color in vegetables indicates a rich variety of nutrients, so make room for yams, carrots, leafy greens, red cabbage, red onion, beets, and all the other delicious and nutritious veggies out there.

Eat some starchy vegetables and whole grains for Fiber.

Eat plenty of protein.

Eat the rainbow.

That’s the foolproof method. For most people, that is what a healthy diet looks like. No fad is required.

Don’t Overeat

Feasting is a tradition in every human culture. It is a cathartic experience to feast with friends and family, and I’m not suggesting that you abandon this. If you overeat regularly though, you will gain weight. This is the first law of thermodynamics. It doesn’t matter whether the food you are overeating is “healthy” or not — you will still gain weight. There are a few easy practices to help mitigate overeating:

Control your environment

If you have lots of snack foods that are easily accessible to you, you will consume them. Willpower is not going to help you. You need to ensure that your environment is set up to support your nutrition goals. Don’t keep high-calorie snacks in the house (or right by your desk at work) that you know you have difficulty controlling.

In contrast, it is helpful to supply your environment with better snack options. By “better” I mean more nutrition and fewer calories. Fruit is an excellent snack idea — swap out the chocolates and sugary snacks for strawberries, blueberries, and oranges.

Don’t Be Hungry

A core principle of intuitive eating is to only eat when hungry. For myself, this is the worst advice I could follow. Hungry Colin is a savage — an absolute beast. Hungry Colin makes terrible decisions. Hungry Colin has eaten half a jar of peanut butter while preparing dinner.

If I am to stick to a nutrition strategy that works for me, I need to keep hungry Colin chained up for the majority of the time and only let him out on special occasions.

To achieve this, I eat regularly. I don’t exceed 4 hours between meals. I am ready to eat at my meal times, but I’m not ravenous. This helps me avoid the extreme hunger that leads me to make decisions that are not helpful for my goals.

Eat Mindfully

I try to eat with purpose and with respect for the fact that I am supplying my body with energy.

You don’t have to eat simply because someone brought donuts to the office, or there is a cake and it is someone's birthday.

You don’t have to eat the chips just because they’re laid out on the coffee table at a gathering.

Eat with intention and with awareness, and try to catch yourself engaging in mindless eating or turning to food to soothe a negative emotion.

See Food as Helpful, Not Healthy

A donut is not unhealthy because it is “junk food.” A kale salad with chicken breast is not healthy because “salads are healthy.”

An overly simplistic narrative about healthy and unhealthy food can lead to “food morality”, and this can be a major problem. Food morality is the underlying cause for the “F*ck it moment” — the moment where you say “F*ck it, I had one cookie so now I may as well have the whole box.”

The underlying logic that facilitates this behavior is that “a cookie is a bad food.” Since you’ve eaten bad food and have sinned, you now may as well take advantage of this opportunity to sin even more. Of course, tomorrow is a new day and you’ll be good then…

I like to think of food as helpful and unhelpful. This mitigates the moral association and allows me to look at food from a more scientific perspective, as being a combination of energy and nutrients that have nothing to do with morality.

A donut is unhelpful for me most of the time because it represents a significant portion of my calorie allotment (considering my TDEE) and provides me with very little valuable nutrition– no fiber, no protein, virtually no micronutrients. But it’s not evil, and it doesn’t even have to be “unhealthy.”

If I am able to fit this donut into my calories while getting the protein, fiber, and nutrition I need, there is actually no evidence to suggest that this donut is unhealthy. It would be hard to do this every day, but it can absolutely be done every once in a while.

This is essentially what is called “Flexible Dieting.” It doesn’t work for everyone, so you’ll have to pay attention to whether this can be a sustainable technique for you. For some folks, even though they may understand that a cookie isn’t inherently evil, it is easier to avoid them completely than to try to eat just one or two. This is completely fine, and I myself fall into this camp. But it’s important to understand that the cookie isn’t bad, and you are not bad for eating it.

See food as a combination of energy (calories) and nutrients. Some packages of energy and nutrients will be supportive of your goals, and some will be less so.

Get Creative In The Kitchen

A common trait among those who have made long-lasting body transformations is that they learned how to get creative in the kitchen.

There is a whole world out there of low-calorie, high-protein recipes. Food scientists take to their lab (or kitchen) to figure out ingenious methods for using sugar-free apple sauce, 0% fat Greek Yogurt, and egg whites to create delicious baked goods that have half the calories of the original version (and lots of protein!!)

These recipes are in cookbooks, on YouTube, on Instagram, and all over the internet on food blogs.

A couple of my favorites are The Flexible Dieting Lifestyle and Skinny Taste.

Food has to be fun. If you try a diet that takes the fun out of food, that diet is doomed to fail.

The trick is to get creative in the kitchen so that you can have fun making delicious recipes that are relatively low in calories.

My diet does not consist of “chicken, broccoli, and rice.” My diet consists of protein french toast, protein pancakes, protein-filled flatbreads, and delicious stir-fries.

I strongly encourage you to go down the delectable rabbit hole of low-calorie/high-protein cooking and baking.

This is not a short-term project. The way you eat is a forever project. If you’ve struggled with dieting, reflect on what aspects of the diet were too hard and where you think it went wrong.

Dieting in the traditional sense does not work. What will work is to take a long-term approach built out of habits that you can sustain across time.

This is your Forever Diet.

Everyones “forever diet” will look a little different. But I believe a good place to start is to consider the following.

• Have a good idea of your TDEE and become decent at estimating the caloric content of food

• Focus on getting plenty of Fiber, Protein, and Micronutrients (through veggies)

• Make an effort to not over-eat (switch to low-calorie snacks, don’t eat out of boredom or obligation, don’t let yourself get too hungry)

• Stop seeing food as moral (and thinking that you’ve been bad for eating a cookie)

• Get creative in the kitchen and invest in learning how to make delicious low-calorie meals and treats

Good luck with your fitness and food goals! And remember — if you ever catch yourself committing to something you don’t think you can sustain in the long run, you should probably reevaluate your decision.

1. Unexpected clues emerge about why diets fail (Nature) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0632-y

2. Meal size, not body size explains errors in estimating the calorie content of meals https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16954358/