The Two Secrets of my Success

The secrets of my diet success? Well, there's two, and they're interrelated.

The first is, I AM NOT DOING MY OWN MEASURING. I don't trust myself. Now, I am an exemplary measurer. For a long time in fact I was a professional measurer. I'm comfortable with measurement. I understand that a big apple, which looks half again as big as a small apple, may well have four times the volume. It easy when estimating by volume, to be off by 400%, even when you're not biased. But I still don't trust myself. 

Estimating by weight? Better. (Are you really going to weigh every thing you eat, every time? I'm not.)

No hungry person who's measuring the food they are about to eat is unbiased. It's simple as that. Add several 400% errors together, or even 50% errors, all leaning one direction, and the fact of the matter is that you don't know within a factor of 2 or 3, how much you're eating. You don't have a clue. Your numbers will be garbage. And research on self-reporting confirms this. You think you're an exception? You're not. So the answer is simple: don't measure your own food. Have someone else do it.

Calories in / calories out is a reliable principle. (No, not because of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, which applies only to closed systems and has no plausible application to the open system -- of staggering complexity -- which is the human gut and fat-storage system. It's reliable simply because it has been rigorously and repeatedly tested.) It works great if the calories are measured accurately. It's pretty useless if they're not.

If we really wanted to measure calories, we'd be in a fix, really. It's just too hard. But we don't actually care about the absolute numbers. We just want a deficit. Fewer calories going in than are coming out, by roughly 500 per day. We'll figure out if we're getting that deficit by measuring something else -- our body weight.

So I don't have a clue, no idea at all, how many calories are in my breakfast, and I don't need to. I don't know whether the guys in the kitchen actually put two eggs or four into my omelet. I don't know how much sour cream is in the little plastic cup the server brings. I don't know how big the two slices of toast she brings me are: all I know is that I only eat one of them. 

Do all these things vary? Of course they do. But I'm not in control of the variation. So they vary randomly. All the errors don't fall one way.

So now we come to the other secret of my success: MY PROCESS IS SELF-CORRECTING. I weigh myself carefully every morning -- actually I weigh myself three times and average the results, every morning. Then Wednesday morning I take the average the last seven days' weights. Now I have a number that I actually have some confidence in. 

I compare it to the previous week's number. If it's not a pound lower, I drop something out of the breakfast. Permanently, for good. A couple weeks in I dropped half the hash browns. A few weeks after that I drop the rest of them. Then I dropped half the toast. How many calories was I dropping each time? I have no idea, I'll never know, and I don't care.

(Actually it's a little more complicated than that. I only chop something out if I'm not a pound down *and* if I'm "over the blue line." But it would work either way.)

So I don't have to guess about anything, or know any absolute calorie values. If my calorie expenditure drops because my metabolism shifts, or because I'm twenty pounds lighter, or if my calorie intake increases when the guys in the kitchen start buttering my toast more heavily, the scale will know about it within a week, and the diet will change accordingly. I don't have to guess, or think, or worry, or compensate. It's all taken care of. It's out of my hands.

And so when I eat -- I just eat. I love my food: I don't know if I've ever enjoyed eating so much, as I have in the past three months. And I know my diet will work, because it fixes itself if it doesn't. I'm home free.