Engineering a Good Diet

The best diet is the one you can follow forever

Losing weight is easy. Anyone can starve themselves and lose weight. However, the weight loss will stop, no matter how hard you try, on whatever diet. It’s not an indictment of your willpower. It is elementary math: if your weight loss continues perpetually, your weight will become zero.

Losing weight is the process of deliberately knocking yourself out of balance physiologically and, perhaps, psychologically. If the cost of a numerically “healthy” weight is being miserable all the time, it’s not so healthy. An unbalanced state of mind and body is not sustainable. You may get short-term results, but the real challenge starts when you must regain and maintain balance.

The Positive Eating Plan is not a diet. It’s a framework to help you live a happy and healthy life with your ideal weight. You are not eliminating unhealthy food from a bad diet. You are adding good food to build a wholesome consumption pattern.

It’s designed so that people, who care about health but don’t want to follow a strict diet day in and day out, can execute the plan without guilt or stress for the long term.

The Plan

The Positive Eating Plan is so named because it’s positive. It doesn’t tell you what you can not eat or limit how much you can eat. You have to banish that kind of negative, anxiety-inducing thoughts to achieve balance.

The plan requires you to eat enough food in a handful of categories. That’s right: you need to eat “more than,” not “less than.”

Don’t be alarmed by the word “category.” It’s really quite simple. This is the list:

And two more rules:

• Try to eat fresh and in season foods.
• Limit the total daily food intake. The limit is different for each individual. You are the best judge of how much is too much for you.

That’s it. No stressing over calories, no feeling guilty for having that pot de crème, and no skipping the salad dressing.

This plan has a few obvious characteristics. As Peter Drucker said, it’s the obvious that needs to be pointed out:

• It’s positive
• It tracks food, not nutrients.
• It tracks weight, not calories.
• The food cateogries are designed to help meal planning.

Let me elaborate.

It’s positive.

This plan does not have a negative list or “not-to-exceed” limits. It only requires you to eat enough good food. I know I am repeating myself. But some people don’t believe a diet is real unless they suffer.

It’s been proven beyond any doubt that people don’t like to follow highly restrictive diets. A recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that even when foods are cooked and delivered to study subjects, they don’t follow the diet plan.

It tracks food, not nutrients

Food is not the arithmetic sum of isolated chemicals. It’s commonly accepted that the calorie content for carbohydrates and protein is 4.5 kcal/g, and for fat, 9 kcal/g. However, this is based on the assumption that there are no interactions between foods in a mixture in the intestine. We know that dietary fiber affects fecal losses of nitrogen and fat. In other words, if you eat a high fiber content diet, you will digest less of the protein and fat in your food. Another example is that ice cream has a lower glycemic index than apples. The fat in the ice cream changes the way sugar gets into the bloodstream. A recent study showed that drinking a little vinegar before eating carbs may slow the rise of blood glucose levels.

In 1863, a pamphlet was published in England: Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. The main idea was that to lose weight, you have to cut out starch. In the 1950s, Ancel Keys published the 7-country study linking saturated fat to heart diseases. High protein keto diets are deemed safe because the Arctic people have been eating mostly meat for thousands of years. Turns out the Inuits can’t go into ketosis because they carry a gene mutation that prevents the production of ketones! We seem to have run out of edible macronutrients.

The situation with micronutrients isn’t any better. In the book “Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”, Michael Voss wrote that scientist at General Foods working on a synthetic orange juice had a big problem: when they added in all the vitamins and minerals to replicate the nutritional profile of real orange juice, it tasted bitter and metallic. The marketing people told the scientists that people primarily associated orange juice with Vitamin C, not all the other nutrients. Luckily, vitamin C was the one nutrient that didn’t have an awful taste. Vitamin C was also an acid, so it balanced the added sugar, too. Thus born Tang, one of the blockbuster products from the food industry.

There is an extra twist in the Tang story. NASA didn’t pick Tang because it was nutritious but because it didn’t add much bulk to digestion. NASA was concerned about toilet constraints in space.

How vitamin C became associated with good health was also an interesting story. In 1970 Linus Pauling, the only person who was awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes (Chemistry and Peace), published “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” urging the public to take 3,000 milligrams of Vitamin C every day (about 50 times the recommended daily allowance). From there, he spent the rest of his career promoting the health benefits of Vitamin C and viciously attacked anyone who doubted it. However, at least 15 studies have now shown that vitamin C doesn’t treat the common cold. The data also show that high doses of vitamins and supplements increase the risk of heart disease and cancer. The fascinating history was expertly told in the book “Do you believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine”.

There is still a lot scientists don’t know about nutrients. The nutritional fiasco known as margarine comes to mind. The literature is not only immense, but full of contradictions. To quote Artemus Ward: “The researches of so many eminent scientific men have thrown so much darkness upon the subject that if they continue their researches, we shall soon know nothing.” To be clear, I am not saying we should not trust science, but when the process of discovery is playing out, let’s do what human beings have done for millions of years: eat food.

It tracks weight, not calories.

There are two problems with tracking calories: It’s futile and impossible.

Low calorie intake does not guarantee a large calorie deficit. The human body likes to be in homeostasis, a fancy word that means the body tries to match energy expenditure to energy intake. If you eat more, you burn more calories. You eat less, and you burn fewer calories. In his book “Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy,” the associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University Herman Pontzer wrote: “The average American adult gains about half a pound per year, an error or around 1,750 kcal. That’s only about 5 kcal per day, or less than 0.2 percent of daily energy expenditure. In other words, without thinking much about it, we match our daily energy intake to within 0.9 percent of our daily expenditure.”

And that’s before we consider variation among individuals. Big bodies burn more calories overall. Small bodies burn more calories per unit weight. According to professor Pontzer’s research, even after accounting for body sizes, many in the population fall above or below the trend line — their expected daily expenditure — by 300 kcal per day or more.

Anyone who has tried to look up calorie numbers for food knows it’s impossible to keep the total error under 5 kcal over a day. Let’s take, for example, the simple food French Fries. How many calories are in French Fries? If you search for “French Fries” in the USDA FoodData Central, more than 1000 results appear. There are different entries for the French fries from Applebee, Denny’s, Mcdonald’s, homemade from fresh, homemade from frozen, target store, vending machine, Giant Eagle Inc… And you can’t just pick anyone. The McDonald’s French Fries have 15% more calories than the Burger King French Fries, which in turn have 40% more calories than “Potato, Fresh fries, from fresh, fried.” That’s a difference of about 100 kcal for a small serving.

Why is there so much variation? The data provide one hint: 36.6 percent of McDonald’s fries is water by weight. That number is 44% for Burger King’s fries. And 65.1% of homemade fresh fries is water. When we fry food, bubbles stream from the food. That is water leaving the food in the form of steam. As water dries out, oil moves in. How much water is replaced by fat depends on how long you leave the food in the frying oil and how old the frying oil is.

Oil and water don’t mix. When streams rush out of the food, it pushes oil away so that the hot oil spends little time in contact with the surface of the food. That’s why it seems harder to get the same golden crust when you fry food at home because your frying oil is too fresh, and the food does not get hot enough for the browning reactions. As oil stays at a high temperature, the fat molecules are broken down and rearranged over time. Some of the products of this process are surfactants, aka emulsifiers. One end of these chemicals likes water (hydrophilic), and the other end likes oil (hydrophobic). Oil that has been “broken in” conducts heat more rapidly into the food because surfactants help mix the steam with hot oil, bringing them in contact with the food. McDonald’s probably has a pretty good process to ensure all fries are fried for the same amount of time, but each tank of oil must fry many batches of fries, and the concentration of surfactants in the oil will change over time.

In two food tracking apps I tried recently, one gives 12 options for fries and the other 18. They have had to narrow down the options quite a bit to make it usable. Food Database is where calorie tracking apps go to die. The more exact the data, the worse the experience.

Fries have only three ingredients: potato, salt, and oil. Imagine trying to figure out the calorie content of the Champaignon De Bois in the French Laundry Cookbook. The book said: “We love the simple fun of this dish.” It’s a cute little appetizer, with three dozen ingredients! It is simple to eat and admire, but certainly not simple, nor fun, to try to look up and record the calorie value of this dish.

Champaignon De Bois, from the French Laundry Cookbook

What about the label on food packages and restaurant menus? They are regulated by FDA, and FDA allows up to 20% variation. That is pretty strict, considering all the possible deviations in preparing an item as simple as fries.

Compared to calories and nutrients, weight is the most straightforward metric to track, while still giving you all the benefits of food tracking. Your weight is the output of your life choices; the food you eat is one of the most important inputs. There are many advantages of tracking the input instead of, or in addition to, the output:

1. The input is something you can control. The output (body weight) is not directly under your control, as anyone who has ever tried losing weight is painfully aware. In “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon,” two former Amazon executives wrote about how Jeff Bezos focuses on the “controlled input metrics” instead of the Amazon stock price. You make sure the inputs are right, and the output will take care of itself. It’s too late to change the input when the output has already changed.
2. It liberates you from the depressing thought of “portion control.” This positive plan does not prescribe any upper limit. By design, the total weight of food is the reminder to watch how much you eat. It gives you a simple, objective, indisputable number to think about. As long as you follow a balanced diet, the total weight is the most meaningful data point.
3. You can get a rough idea of how full your stomach is. Most adults’ stomachs can hold about 1 liter of food. Since a large portion of most food is water, it’s reasonable to assume 1 kilogram of food will start stretching your stomach. You can not shrink your stomach without surgery, but if you are mindful of the space in it, you might just be able to train your stomach to send the “I am full” signal for less food.
4. For someone serious about weight control, it’s relatively easy to refrain from overeating at the dining table. It’s much harder to be mindful of everything you put in your mouth. But those small things add up. That little cube of butter you add to the pan to baste the steak weighs 8 grams, not 5 grams (another 21 kcal, if you must know). The three times you grab “just one” cookie when you pass the cookie jar? That’s 150 grams.
5. Forcing yourself to weigh everything you eat gives you just enough of a “speed bump.” It’s the ultimate slow food move.

Let’s take a step back and consider our original goal of weight control. How much does one calorie weigh? When you lose weight, where does it go? We hear a lot about the conservation of energy. How about the conservation of mass?

Carbohydrates and fat react with oxygen in our body to create energy (proteins are generally not involved in daily energy needs). The two main products of the chemical reactions are carbon dioxide and water. You breathe in O2, and you breathe out CO2. In every exchange, you are losing the weight of one carbon atom. In other words, unless you are breathing harder, you are not losing more weight. That’s why you can not expect to lose more than about 0.5 pounds a day. If you experience rapid weight loss, it’s mostly water unless you have diarrhea.

Now, the total weight of food includes a lot of water. Soup is an obvious problem. Seventy-seven percent of Chicken dark meat is water. 93% of spinach is water. All of that water will easily pass through your body. So tracking food weight will overstate the mass you ingest. Is that so bad?

By the way, the plan tracks weights, not volume. By adopting the metric system, it takes away two unnecessary sources of stress:

1. How tightly should I pack my spinach? Tracking food is hard enough. You shouldn’t have to worry about the ambiguity inherent in volumetric measurement. 100 grams of blueberries is 100 grams of blueberries, regardless of how high you allow the top to stick above the rim of the measuring cup.
2. Quick: how many tablespoons are in 1/3 cup? Answer: 5.3328. Math is so much easier in the metric system. The United States is one of the only two countries that have not adopted the metric system. The other is Liberia.

Even if you insist on tracking calories and/or nutrients, you still have to weigh the food before you continue to identify the food, describe the food, look up values in some database, and do the math. The math is the easiest of all that steps. Now that’s something you don’t hear every day!

If you want to control weight, control weight.

The food categories are designed to help meal planning.

They are not there to win any academic prize. They are designed to help when you are standing in front of an open fridge, or in the grasp of a pang of hunger, just wanting to eat something, anything.

When you plan a meal, the natural thought is to assemble protein, vegetables, and carbs. Those are the main categories in the plan. Beans( including tofu and plant-based meats ) are good sources of plant proteins. Now vegans can follow this plan, too.

Preparing for difficult situations is one of the keys to executing a difficult plan. The new category of nuts, cheese, and fruits are your healthy snack options. They are satisfying and convenient, and they fill you up with good stuff: unsaturated fat, protein, antioxidants, and vitamins.

Don’t put yourself in a position where your only salvation is Snickers.

It requires you to drink a lot of water

The benefit of staying sufficiently hydrated is well documented. I will just mention one of them here. The first step of digesting fat is hydrolysis. Hydrolysis comes from the Greek words hydro(water) and lysis (dissolution), meaning chemical decomposition by water. Digestion of fat requires water.

By the way, the first rule of calorie restriction is: never drink your calories. Sugar water of any kind (soda, macchiato, boba tea, …) is the purest mechanism to deliver excess calories to your system. Diet soda is not a good alternatives it messes with your body’s release of insulin, and there are credible evidence that some zero-calorie sweeteners maybe carcinogens.

Worst of all, diet soda sustatins your preference for sweet drinks. You can train yourself to enjoy non-sweet flavors, as evidenced by the people who prefer to drink black coffee.

So in the context of this plan, I will count as water any non-alcoholic drink that is not sweet. From a weight control perspective, unsweetened lemonade and sparkling water are fine, but they leave your mouth slightly acidic, which is not good for your teeth.

Perceptive readers might have detected a theme: this plan goes out of its way to eliminate as much friction as possible so that you can focus your energy on the big picture: eat healthy. The fundamental principle when I designed this plan was: I would not play games with myself. I will not create something I can not follow, so I don’t have to lie to myself later by pretending to follow something when I don’t.

This plan does not have enough food to feed a healthy adult, who typically needs between 2500 to 3000 kcal a day. If you only eat the minimum amount of each category, you will have consumed approximately 1600 Calories. This is by design so that the “whatever else you want” is not an empty promise. Go ahead and add that béarnaise sauce to your poached salmon. For your reference, table 2 has the details.

Table 2: Nutritional Information for the Plan, if you must know

Does it work?

There are two questions here: Is it worth following (what’s the idea)? Is it realistic to follow it (how to execute)? Execution without ideas is pointless. Ideas without execution are worthless. Many diets make overtly optimistic promises in response to the first question and only consider the second one an afterthought.

In nutrition, the surest way to distinguish a scientist from a pretender is how often they use the phrase “I don’t know.” When you come down to it, this plan is just a quantitative and operable version of “eat a little of everything.” Left to our own devices, we probably eat too little vegetables, drink too little water, and overeat sugar and fat. Passive index funds have become so popular because picking a suitable investment is too hard. Warren Buffet said diversification is the defense against ignorance. Well, many fundamental questions of nutritional epidemiology have not been answered. There is still a lot of unknown in the chemistry and biology of the human digestive system. Think of this plan as your S&P 500 index fund for food. And “do not overeat” is the equivalent of dollar cost averaging. I want to stress that this plan does not come from a place of cynicism. It’s based on the best and latest science I can find.

Speaking of execution, I believe the positive eating plan is the easiest plan to follow that can still deliver health benefits. Any easier, it will not do much good. A little harder, too many people will give up. By taking away as many prohibitions and demands as possible, it spares you from constantly having your resolve tested. Willpower is not a muscle you exercise to make stronger. It’s a resource that can be exhausted.

Since graduating from college, I had been steadily gaining weight. My weight went from 55kg (121 pounds ) to 80kg (176 pounds). Three years ago, I underwent a painful weight loss program (painful starving) and dropped my weight to 69kg (152 pounds). Within a few months my weight was rebounding, and I realized I needed a plan. This plan is the result of extensive research and honest self-evaluation. My weight has been stable within 1 kg around 71 kg for the last two years. More importantly, I have been able to stick to the plan.

Some tips for executing the plan

This plan is designed to be low-stress, but it‘s not entirely effortless. Here are some tips to help you succeed.

• Get a kitchen scale and measure. You will find it easy to get a good sense of how much different food weighs and how wrong your intuitions are. Being approximately right is much better than having precisely no idea.
• It’s not the end of the world if you don’t record everything you eat, but if you don’t, admit to yourself you don’t know how much you have eaten. Don’t trust your intuition or recollection. Research confirmed that “people (gaining weight) tend to substantially underestimate their food intake, by as much as 400 calories a day. You could put on more than two pounds every three weeks at that rate.”
• The hardest part of executing the plan is to drink 1500 grams of water. So make it a priority. It has to be just water. If you crave soda, you can put it in your “where else you want to eat” category. Don’t kid yourself that soda is water. As an added incentive: cold water has a negative calorie count. It takes energy to warm it up to body temperature.
• Four hundred grams of spinach is a lot of spinach. You may be unable to fit them all into a small salad spinner. The key is to realize that leafy greens are not the only vegetable. A tomato can easily weigh 100 grams. A 200-gram onion is not particularly big.
• The best way to keep to the plan is to cook your food. Here are some tips to help you start cooking.
• Get enough sleep. At least 7 hours each day. If your metabolism is out of wack due to a lack of sleep, your body will not be in a good place, no matter what and how you eat.
• Use these tricks to gently suppress your appetite: one, try to eat only in-season local food. There is a limited variety of food for any season if you limit the geographical boundary. Absent the constant stimuli of novelty, you will eat less without realizing it; two, avoid prepackaged processed food. Not because they are not healthy, but because they are meticulously designed, backed by scientific research and advanced data analysis, to make you want to eat more.

You will undoubtedly run into unforeseen questions about the plan in your unique circumstances. The only “right thing” to do in those situations is to do whatever it takes to minimize your stress. Feel free to interpret the plan in ways that make it easy for you. As long as you maintain a diversified diet and don’t overeat, it doesn’t matter what specific food you eat on any given day.

Frequently asked questions about the plan

These are some of the questions I have been asked about the plan:

Are fries vegetables?

They are according to USDA. They have plenty of fibers. One hundred grams of McDonald’s fries have more than twice as much fiber as 100 grams of baby spinach. The problem with fries is not that it’s not a vegetable, but that they have too much fat. Since the plan has no limit on fat intake, you can technically count fries against your vegetable product.

I would not hesitate to count potatoes as vegetables, however. Those potato farmers are intense. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture excluded potatoes from its list of subsidized food in low-income programs. Chris Voigt, the executive director of the Washington Potato Commission, went on a potato only diet for 60 days. He ended up losing 21 pounds even though he was consuming 2200 calories a day. And his cholesterol level fell 67 points! It shows there is still a lot we don’t know about the interaction between food and the body.

By the way, of the dozen or so news stories I found about Mr. Voigt’s protest, none mentioned if he succeeded in changing the USDA’s policy. It just didn’t seem important or interesting in the context.

Does the bread have to be whole grain? Brown rice or white rice?

It doesn’t matter at the amount we are talking about. The difference is negligible. If you are concerned about the intake of micronutrients, it’s better to eat a variety of foods. If you are concerned about carbs, they all have similar amounts of the stuff.

Do you recommend organic food?

If you can afford it. It does give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to buy organic food. But the best feature of organic food is that they are too expensive to overeat. There are many intelligent people in the food industry. If customers demand organic, they will deliver organic. Industrial “organic” probably is not what you think it is.

Organic foods are not free of toxins. They are just free of added toxins. How do you think plants have survived in the world all those years?

I scored that reservation at French Laundry. What do I do?

Go ahead and enjoy it! Yes, you will eat too much for one day, but if you have been keeping to the plan, your body has found its balance. Your weight may go up for a day or two but will return to the balance point soon.

Can I lose weight following the plan?

For a while, yes. If the “whatever else you want to eat” category is nothing. As mentioned above, there is not enough food to keep a healthy adult full all day. For me, this is just enough for breakfast, lunch, and a mid-morning snack.

How do you know you are eating so little that you are losing weight? If you experience overwhelming pangs of hunger while reading something that bears only a marginal connection to eating (like this one) at 10 o’clock at night.

Enjoyed this article? 🌟 Help spread the knowledge by forwarding it to a friend and don’t forget to follow me on Medium for upcoming posts. Your support is much appreciated — thank you!