Six Weeks In: Variety

So the diet rolls along, a bit more difficult now, as I knew it would be: the weariness of restriction is cumulative. But still entirely doable. Dropping a pound a week. 

Variety. "Eat a variety of foods," say the USDA guidelines earnestly, and everyone says the same; and yet there's no science to back that up. And research shows plainly that variety leads to overeating, for rats as well as for human beings.

What the advice is trying to prevent, of course, is deficiencies in vitamins and minerals. Now that I am eating so much the same thing every day, for the first time I have to take account of that: though a diet as full of eggs and meat and fresh fruit and vegetables as this is very unlikely to be missing anything. Still I'm going to do some reading.

I tend to eat the same thing every day anyway. A waitress at Tom's used to make fun of me for it, in a rather aggressive way, as though the fact that I ate the same thing every morning affronted her. I never quite understood why that might be, but I just went on with it. Why would I eat anything but what I liked most?

So rather than correct these defects in myself -- habitually eating breakfast out and always eating the same thing -- I thought I'd harness them. So far, so good.

The really nice thing about this regimen is that I actually know. There's no guesswork to it. I don't depend on calorie measurements or food processors' labeling. I simply eat the same stuff every day, and if it doesn't amount to a deficit of a pound a week, I chop another piece out. I chopped out half the hash browns a couple weeks ago, and half the toast last week. The rest of the hash browns are about to go, I think.

In previous diets the uncertainty, the guesswork, interacted very badly with the hunger hormones. I don't much trust myself to measure and estimate properly when a large part of my brain is intent on subverting me. I'm less apt to fool myself than many people -- than most people, I flatter myself -- but I don't trust myself to be able to outwatch my lizard-brain when it thinks I should be eating. And once uncertainty was introduced -- did I really measure that properly? Did I really note that down? Was that frozen dinner label really accurate? -- it gnawed away at my resolve. Was there really a point in depriving myself if I had already screwed up? 

No. Other people do the measuring. I just do the eating. 

If you follow the study of obesity, you'll know that most of it has relied on self-reported consumption, and that we've discovered recently that people are spectacularly bad at self-reporting consumption -- to the point that some researchers have suggested simply throwing out all the research that depends on it. That's how bad we are. I have no reason to think I'm uniquely gifted at self-reporting, or immune to self-deception. So I'm outsourcing as much of it as I can.