A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.
Let me re-state one of the main ideas from Kristi’s initial post:
We’ve done the Atkins diet in the past, generally with great success, but we always seem to fall off the wagon at some point and return to our unhealthy way of eating with lots of sugar, flour, etc. That’s what addicts do.
Following a certain diet plan, especially an extreme one, is almost always seen as a binary choice: you either follow it or not, you’re either on or off the wagon. (See my earlier post, “Stay Off that Bandwagon!”) This type of thinking leads to exactly the situation described above: short-term “success” (meaning weight loss) but ultimate “failure” (the pounds come back on, rendering that loss meaningless and indeed leaving you worse off than before). Because you’re following someone else’s diet plan instead of learning to make healthy and restrained choices for yourself, building in some flexibility and mindful exceptions, you are doomed to fail. The exception would be that tiny percentage who find a certain diet guru and stick to his/her ideas without exception over long periods of time. Gretchen Rubin fits that mold, as she read the Gary Taubes book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It a number of years ago, experienced what she calls a “lightning bolt,” and has adhered to a rigidly low-carb diet ever since. She’s a very rare bird, however, belonging to the personality type known as an “Upholder,” someone who finds it easy to meet her own and others’ expectations. For the rest of us mere mortals, that type of once-and-done behavioral change is pretty much impossible.
Here’s another telling statement from Kristi’s post:
But the ketogenic diet is not the Atkins diet. While it’s built on the same foundational principle that processed carbs (sugar, flour, etc.) are the enemy, and that healthy fats provide a much more efficient and clean fuel for your body than sugar, the ketogenic diet seems to stress more balance.
Here we can see yet another binary choice, this one the logical fallacy of the “false choice,” in which we’re presented with only two choices, the implication being that these are the only two available to us. The false choice here is having the body burn healthy fats vs. having it burn sugar. Well, of course it’s not good for the body to run on sugar. That fact does not mean that the alternative is having it run solely on fat! How about some balance here? As in the left-by-the-wayside “balanced diet”? Oh, wait: “the ketogenic diet seems to stress more balance.” Is that actually true?
Interestingly enough, no. I’m no fan of Atkins (or indeed any diet that has someone’s name on it, or has someone making money by marketing it), but one thing that it does have is a series of stepdowns so that you end up on a maintenance plan that’s not as extreme as the initial phase. With the keto diet, at least in the literature I’ve read so far, there’s no such easing up. You’re basically supposed to just stick with an extreme and unnatural way of eating . . . for life, I guess. So when you inevitably just get sick of the whole thing you have no fallback plan.
How has our blogger done on this diet so far? In her initial post on Sept. 7, 2018, Kristi tells us that she’s lost 29 pounds since June 25, a rate of 2.64 pounds per week. As of November 28 she’s lost 40 pounds, a rate of a little over 1.75 pounds per week, 40 pounds in five months. (I couldn’t find a further update.) That’s actually not too bad in terms of loss rate. The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t lose any more than two pounds a week, so although her initial loss was faster than that (caused mainly by water weight loss, as I’ve mentioned before), the overall rate comes in okay.
Let me end with a couple of thoughts:
1) A loss of 40 pounds is nothing to be sneezed at, as it speaks to a high level of determination and discipline. So yay for that. But
2) The real test comes after a year or so. I’ll quote here from an article in Health magazine by a woman with actual nutrition credentials (she has a Masters in Public Health and is a registered dietician):
I’ve had clients eat this way, lose weight quickly, and feel fantastic—at first. But all of my clients who follow a ketogenic plan eventually break down and eat potatoes, fruit, or dessert (or drink several glasses of wine).
Tomorrow I’ll close out this particular series by taking a look at one of the suggestions Kristi makes:
Find one keto expert you like and trust, and stick with him or her.
Who’s the expert she recommends, what are his credentials, and why is “sticking with” any expert on a topic such as this a bad idea?