Erase The Word « Diet » From Your Vocabulary

One of the hardest things needed to stay in shape past 30 or 35 is keeping control over your food intake. As your metabolism becomes less efficient with age, extra calories tend to translate even faster  into extra pound and body fat.

This basic truth has given rise to one of the largest industries in the US and the western world: the “diet” industry. This 60-billion dollar a year sector (one of out 3 woman and one out of four men are on a diet at any given time) rests on a shockingly incorrect assumption:
Dieting can make you thinner in the long run. The scientific truth demonstrates quite the opposite.

This misconception is based on a basic misunderstanding of the very word “diet”. In common parlance the word “dieting” means changing one’s eating habits temporarily in order to achieve weight loss and/or other health benefits.  If you look up the word “diet” in a dictionary, you will find something to the effect of “A regulated selection of foods, as for medical reasons or cosmetic weight loss” The point is that there is no notion of limitation in time in the very definition of the word “diet”.

Unconsciously or not, most people think that losing weight rapidly will magically induce a stabilization of their weight at a lower level than before starting the diet after they “quit” it.
Not only is this assumption false but a lot of people actually experience a permanent weight gain (from their baseline weight) after “quitting” a diet.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_dieting

Therefore I will try never to use the word “diet” on this blog. I will instead speak of “food discipline”. The reason for that is the only way to reach your fitness/health goals in midlife is to permanently change your eating habits. I mean by that: forever. No amount of exercise without food discipline will do the trick. I repeat: no amount of exercise will be efficient without food discipline.


Going on a diet is tantamount to quitting smoking for a couple of months only while expecting permanent health benefits from it: this is simply absurd.


Now for those of you questioning the necessity of permanently changing your eating habits, i.e. practicing food discipline from now on and forever, please refer to my first post “I’d rather confront you with unpleasant facts (e.g. no, there is no “quick fix” for this) and lose readers in the process than paint too rosy a picture”.


For those of you who are still bearing with me after this first (brutal) brush with reality, chances are you are posed to benefit from this blog, because you are honest enough to recognize a scientific truth.

Having said that, being the eternal optimist I strongly believe that a day will certainly come when science will provide us with a simple pill that will make it possible to unabashedly gorge on food without gaining any weight. But until this happens, the only option for keeping or becoming fit for us midlifers is food discipline.