The Perfect Diet

Excerpted from
Calorie Queens; Living Thin in a Fat World
By Jackie Scott, Diane Scott Kellum, Brett A. Scott, M.D.

Since you purchased this book, there's a good chance you're overweight or obese and looking for help. The government keeps lots of statistics on health and nutrition, and the most recently published results have focused tremendous attention on the nation's epidemic of obesity. According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, the percentage of the population that is overweight or obese keeps increasing, from 47 percent to 56 percent to 65 percent. In today's society, "normal weight" is no longer the norm.

In June 2000, Diane and I fit nicely into the national statistics, but we didn't fit nicely into anything else. Diane needed to lose more than 200 pounds. I needed to lose at least 100 pounds.

If I lost 100 pounds, I could move out of the Land of the Morbidly Obese into the slim, trim Neighborhood of the Merely Overweight. The loss of 100 pounds would put me at a weight of 147 pounds. This had been one of my weight plateaus (before I moved on to weight mountains). It was what I weighed at age twenty-two, when I joined Weight Watchers the first time It was what I weighed each of the two times I became pregnant. It was the lowest weight I achieved after each pregnancy.

It was also a weight I hadn't seen in about fifteen years, but losing 100 pounds sounded nice. In fact, it sounded great. But I wanted more than just weight loss for myself. I was a morbidly obese mother with a daughter whose weight was completely out of control, and I blamed myself for her weight problems. In addition to my own excess body weight, I was also carrying around a staggeringly heavy load of maternal guilt.

Despite her weight and my concerns, Diane had always been an extrovert with many friends, and she describes her former self as "a remarkably well-adjusted person who just happened to have been really fat" She was a good student and active in extra curricular activities, but her college experience hadn't included any personal relationships I lived with the fear that my daughter would never many or have children of her own, because I had failed her

While I worried about Diane's personal future, her father worried about her health She had her gallbladder removed at age twenty, and Brett was very concerned about the serious health risks associated with her extreme obesity. And he was worried about my health as well. What could he do to help us? In the summer of 2000, he gave us a remarkable gift; he gave us the gift of time

We were a family in transition, Brett had changed jobs, and he and I were moving from Michigan to Kentucky. Diane was graduating from college, and Brett wanted her to move with us rather than look for a job. He offered to support the two of us for an entire year so we could try to lose weight. He asked us not only to lose weight, but also to "figure out what was wrong with our lives and fix it." His goal for us was not simply weight loss, but weight loss we could maintain. His goal for us was happier, healthier, longer lives. His gift to us was the opportunity to achieve together what neither of us had been able to accomplish alone.

On June 12, 2000, Diane and I made a commitment to each other and to Brett to try one more time to lose weight. Who could have guessed how much our lives were going to change?

Diet Failures

What made this time different? After spending decades playing the lose-it, find-it, find-some-more game of unsuccessful weight loss, what did we do to finally get it right? First, we spent hours thinking and reading and talking about losing weight; it was our only responsibility. Losing weight was our job, and we were determined not to disappoint our benevolent employer.

Diane and I both have backgrounds in engineering, and engineers are trained to solve problems. We approached weight loss as a problem to be solved, and utilized the scientific methods we had learned in school. We started by analyzing our previous weight loss failures to determine if our past mistakes could provide a framework for future success.

If, for instance, we could identify when and why our previous diets failed, would we be able to recognize useful patterns that would help us avoid the same mistakes this time around? Suddenly, a lifetime of frustration was magically transformed into useful research.

When did our diets fail?

Sometimes the diets failed us at the beginning They allowed so little food, or placed such extreme restrictions on the food permitted, that we couldn't stay on the diet long enough to lose any significant amount of w eight. Even when we managed to lose weight by following one of these diets, we never kept the weight off longterm. Sometimes we gained it back quickly. Sometimes we gained it back slowly. But we always gained it back. Instead of the diet failing at the beginning, it failed at the end.

Why did our diets fail?

The diets that failed us in the beginning failed due to our minds 'responses to our dieting choices. We were bombarded by promises of fast and easy weight loss, so we started each new diet with the same unrealistic expectations. At the beginning of the diet, when weight loss was rapid (due primarily to the loss of water), we did well. As soon as weight loss slowed, due to our bodies' natural physical reactions, we became discouraged and quit. We hadn't mentally prepared ourselves to make any permanent and sustainable changes in our diet.

After we determined that our previous diets had failed due to our normal psychological and physical reactions to dieting, we began to itemize the requirements of the perfect diet. The diet that wouldn't fail us at the beginning, the diet that wouldn't fail us at the end. The diet we could stay on a really long time. The diet that would keep the weight off.

Searching for the Perfect Diet

Now that we knew exactly what we were looking for, we began searching diligently for that perfect diet. I started at the library and at the new and used bookstores. There's a never-ending supply of diet books, so Brett and I read new ones and old ones, million-copy sellers and one-print wonders I highlighted and took notes, and I asked Brett question after question.

What did we discover? There are lots of books, but the same information and misinformation keeps getting repackaged, recycled, relabeled, and resold. Many of the supposedly new ideas are just minor variations on old themes. And some of these old ideas were conceived when our knowledge and understanding of physiology and nutrition was tremendously limited.

Nontraditional diet books present ideas that differ from the traditional medical community's opinions on health and nutrition, and explain the conflict by indicating that they are privy to information the rest of the medical community is lacking. These books frequently contain elaborate explanations for their personal diet theory, but underneath a lot of pseudoscientific explanations designed to impress and intimidate readers, the basic rules of thermodynamics have not been changed.

Diets work when your caloric intake is less than your caloric expenditure. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume This basic fact is frequently disguised by elaborate rules for what to cat, and when to eat it, and what to eat it with. But if you cut through the camouflage, you end up with a reduced-calorie diet masquerading as something more impressive. And frequently it's a diet that is not nutritionally balanced due to the restrictions placed on the consumption of certain food groups

Traditional diets place no restrictions on types of foods, they simply reduce daily caloric intake in order to achieve weight loss. Since many nutrition experts believe it is very difficult to consume adequate nutrients at these caloric levels, these diets are often referred to as semi-starvation diets. Most of us have had personal experience with the accuracy of this description. It is very difficult to eat the calorie allotment of the typical reduced-calorie diet without feeling physically hungry, bodily fatigued, and mentally deprived.

When I finished analyzing our personal diet failures and studying the research about traditional and nontraditional diets, what did I conclude? If your goal is to lose weight, it doesn't matter which diet you follow

A study of subjects following a number of popular diets determined that their daily caloric intake consistently fell in the range of 1400-1450 calories per day. Since the typical American diet contains 2200 calories, following any of these diets produced weight loss.