Dead-On Weight Loss Advice From an Unusual Source

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/1D5aV)
The other day on some social networking site (Twitter, Facebook, I don't remember exactly) someone made a post.  It post was titled "The Public Humiliation Diet." I had to read it. How could you not?

So I clicked the link.Where does it take me?

Deadspin.com (not necessarily a site I would tell my mother to read)

I read on.

The article was by one of the sites editors, Drew Magary, who has lost 60lbs in the last 5 months. Here's brief excerpt that describes his story and rationale for his diet.

I've struggled with my weight for my entire life. I went to hospital fat camp in seventh grade. I have stretch marks all along my sides and gut (fire belly!). I spend the majority of my day thinking about food, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon, even now. I love eating and have a hard time controlling myself when presented with cakes and pies and bags of Doritos. Oh, Doritos. Oh God, how I adore you. You hear about alcoholics who can't stop drinking until they're blackout drunk. I'm that way with food. I can't stop eating until I'm blackout fat.

So I needed to set some ground rules for myself to lose weight, ground rules that I felt were reasonable to follow for the rest of my adult life.

Here are 2  key strategies that Drew used to lose 2.5 toddlers worth of weight from his midsection (with my comments).

4. I never ate after dinner. 6 p.m., to be precise, because I eat with my kids. That may not be realistic for you. But there are plenty of people out there who advocate not eating too much at night. For me, it used to be that dinner was the start of my nightly eating. There'd be dessert. Then the after-dessert dessert. Then a bowl of cereal. Then shots of ranch dressing...This rule...I really stuck to. The only times I ate dinner late were when I was out with friends or whatever and had no choice.

This is great. I've written before about not eating after a certain time at night, not because of some magical fat burning property but because of the exact reason that Drew illustrated above - post dinner snacking. Drew was able to identify that for him, a huge caloric load was being consumed after he ate dinner. A simple way to curb that was to allow no wiggle room and just make the 'rule' that he wasn't going to eat after dinner.

Oftentimes, identifying a particular bad habit and making a hard and fast 'life rule' to stop it is a great way to instantly change your behavior for the best.

10. I made sure everything I ate was AWESOME. If I'm only getting three legit meals a day, they better be good. So I made sure of that. Did you know two slices of bacon only have 70 calories? Combine that with a fried egg and you've got a breakfast of less than 200 calories, far less than a bowl of granola. So I went the bacon route. I also learned to braise short ribs,  make my own pulled pork, make Thai steak sauces, and all this other crazy stuff because I wanted to lose weight and still enjoy what I was eating. None of this grilled-chicken-breast-every-night crap that NFL players do. I still love food and I LIKE it that way. (Note: This is not an exact quote as I editted out the f-bombs)

Diet foods or the foods that you eat when on a diet do not often conjure up images that make your mouth water. For whatever reason many people feel that the only way to eat healthy is by consuming the same bland food day in and day out. It does not have to be that way. You just need to learn to eat less of certain things that you love (like Drew did with Bacon) and cook differently (also like Drew did with homemade BBQ sauce) so the food that you do eat fits in with your plan.

I personally love cheese. There is no way that I'm cutting cheese out of my diet, even if my calories are low because I'm dieting down. A year or so ago I was teaching a nutrition course and got into a conversation with the class about this exact topic. They were surprised that I didn't recommend you eat low fat cheese,instead just less full fat cheese. Let's be real here, low fat cheese is disgusting. Maybe (let me repeat...Maybe) I'll use a low fat shredded cheddar cheese in a recipe but as a general rule reduced fat cheeses taste like rubber.

Why would you want to eat that? Wouldn't you much rather eat 1/2 an oz of delicious full fat Vermont Cabot Cheddar Cheese than suffer through a full ounce of fat free Kraft Cheddar cheese?

Losing weight needs to involve a calorie deficit, which will require you to eat less calories. It does not require that you deprive yourself of food that tastes good.

Take a look at your diet. Are you suffering through any meals? How can you make them better?

Here is the link to the  original article (again, there is a bunch of 'colorful' language in the post so if that bothers you then I wouldn't recommend clicking the link).

Post a comment and let me know your favorite delicious diet food or recipe.