"But Fred," you say, totally gobsmacked by this news (and if you are not, please step away, smack your gob, and return when it is truly smacked). "How can this be?" you say. "The starting price is nothing? The secret is amazing? And aren't you kinda... fat?"
Well, the answer to your questions are: Yes, yes, and I prefer to other nomenclature. Some might say "fat," while I might say "husky." Some might say "morbidly obese," while I might say "cheerfully obese." Attitude counts for so much.
I do a lot of book editing, as many of you know, and I've done my share of diet books. Many do not call themselves diet books -- these days they promote "health" and "well-being" but if they didn't have at least a tacit promise to show you how to discard the lard they would never get printed. So let's call them diet books and be done with it.
I happen to believe they all work. Yes, every single one of them. And that is part of the secret.
I've known plenty of people, men and women, who have gone on diets at various ages and lost a pile of weight. All sorts of diets, too: meal replacements, paleo, Atkins, vegan plans, Weight Watchers, calorie counting, sugar-busting, the pizza diet, the cabbage soup diet, you name it. They worked just as advertised. (Please note that in this essay I am not referring to people with serious medical issues like diabetes and cardiac disease who lost weight when they had the fear of actual death put into them, or those who had inadvertent weight loss from cancer or its treatment -- although most of them put weight back on.)
All these folks had to go buy new pants. Everyone looked great. And then they all ballooned back up, usually worse than before. Most of the time this happened very quickly, sometimes in response to a life event, because we can't completely change our thinking and our body fights us hard to regain that weight. I never saw a fat person become a skinny person and stay that way.
EXCEPT....
Here comes the secret!
The secret is to evangelize the weight loss. The people who remain successful are those who do not just lose weight and keep it to themselves; they try to spread the word and get other people excited about it. In other words, they have a sense of mission and purpose and meaning connected to the weight loss that keeps them focused on continuing the accomplishment. And for many people this means they must become pains in the butt.
Vegans who lose weight from cutting the cheese (heh) and other fatty animal-based foods out of their diets are famous for being annoying to those who consume meat-based products.
As an ethical choice, they are compelled not to be quiet, I guess, anymore than a pro-life Catholic cannot remain silent about the issue of abortion (which comes up a lot less frequently than "What's for lunch?"). So they have a sense of mission built in. Weight Watchers has groups where people who work for the program hold meetings in which they help others and the others can help one another. Overeaters Anonymous uses a modified version of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the last step being "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive overeaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs." All 12-step groups caution members that to keep the gift of freedom from addiction they have to give that gift away. AA will tell you that you can't expect to stay sober in a vacuum, and they have plenty of stories of what happens to those who try.
I think we need to take this sense of mission into account when we look at successful dieting. Unfortunately I don't think this secret is good news for any of us. Why? Three reasons:
1) Most of us who wish to lose weight would really like to not make a big deal of it. We'd just like to do it and feel better and look better and not annoy other people. We hate being lectured and we don't want to become lecturers. So the idea that we have to hector our loved ones at Thanksgiving repels us as much as pumpkin pie attracts us.
2) The favorite way to evangelize weight loss, especially for Coachella types, is to write books and annoy everybody (especially the lardo who has to copyedit their books). They have to fight their way onto The Doctors so they can smile at and belittle fat people on TV. They say they want to help others, but they really want to be rich and famous. The secret is that deep down they're afraid of blubbering up again, and they know that being rich and famous for a weight loss plan will keep them honest. So yeah, they kind of really do want to help people, and that's the secret. But there's only room for so many diet books and diet plans out there; even if they get published the odds are a bazillion to one that they'll make it big. The vast majority of people who follow the diet plan will fail -- why should they evangelize someone else's plan? -- and go on to something else; the TV appearances will stop and the book will go out of print. Can they stay thin in obscurity? All us other losers can't, apparently.
Which brings us to:
3) Even if you know the secret it is no guarantee to continued healthy weight.
So my secret isn't much of a secret. I think that looking this over, Overeaters Anonymous is probably the best way to lose weight and keep it off (OA also deals with other food problems like anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia -- it saves lives). The problem with that is the person who can't lose weight would have to admit to being "powerless over food," and that is not the kind of thing someone who just wants to drop 30 for her high school reunion is prepared to do. Hell, most people who drive cars into trees, get fired for drunkenness, give their bartenders more money than their mortgage company, and have more outstanding warrants than actual friends can't admit they've become powerless over alcohol.
So there's my secret, and it's no help. Come back tomorrow when I explain why health food pushers are awful.
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