How I lost weight and learned to love Thanksgiving again
In our house, there are no pictures of my wife and me that are more than a few years old.
When I was a medical resident, nearly two decades ago, I didn’t take very good care of myself. I was a pediatrician, and I counseled patients and parents all the time about how to eat right and get enough exercise. But I couldn’t seem to figure that out for myself. I gained a lot of weight, and so did my wife, Aimee.
After our second child was born, Aimee decided she needed to make a change. She told me she was going to try Weight Watchers. Since it seemed silly for us to prepare two meals at a time, I decided to join her.
It worked. Weight Watchers then was mostly focused on fat reduction, calorie counting and increased fiber. We both lost weight. I didn’t lose all that I wanted to, but it was certainly an improvement. Unfortunately, it was hard to keep sticking to the program. There were too many days I was hungry. I became too obsessed with “low fat,” as fat seemed to be how “points” were calculated. (Today, Weight Watchers points focus on calories, sugar, fat and protein.)
Years later, when I decided to try to lose weight again, I focused on exercise. I made it through the torments of P90X, P90X3 and Insanity. Each workout regimen had its own diet plan, with a list of foods to avoid. I stuck to none of them for more than four or five months. They were too hard, and after initial success, my weight loss stalled.
Most recently, I tried to go “low-carb.” I became convinced, by reading books and studies, that carbohydrates were the true danger, not fats. I eliminated sugar from my diet almost completely. Once again, my weight dropped, but it eventually stopped falling.
My experience is not abnormal. Studies of diets show that many of them succeed at first. But results slow, and often reverse over time. No one diet substantially outperforms another. The evidence does not favor any one greatly over any other.
That has not slowed experts from declaring otherwise. Doctors, weight-loss gurus, personal trainers and bloggers all push radically different opinions about what we should be eating, and why. We should eat the way cave men did. We should avoid gluten completely. We should eat only organic. No dairy. No fats. No
These conflicting opinions about nutrition have one thing in common: the belief that some foods will kill you — or, at least, that those foods are why you’re not at the weight you’d like to be.