Permanent weightloss with unlimited eating and no exercise

Only one in three people who slim and reach their target weight remain at that weight, and to make matters worse, only one on five people who slim manage to reach their target weight.

That means that only about six percent of slimmers manage to reach their goals and remain slim.

So basically, statistics tells us that generally, dieting and exercise doesn't really work, otherwise people would be more successful in remaining slim.

Why is that?

I'm not going to list all the factors that obesity has been blamed on. You probably have read more weightloss articles than I have, because I don't have a weight problem.

I used to have one, though. I will spare you the boring details, but I ended up twenty kilo (over 40 lbs) overweight. Modest perhaps for a lot of heavy folks out there, but a big headache for yours truly, because whatever I tried to shed the pounds, they always came back with a vengeance, shattering my newly won self confidence. I tried lots of weightloss strategies and although all of them made me lose weight, none of them was a permanent solution.

Successful weightloss (losing weight and NEVER regaining any of it!) is as elusive as the Holy Grail.

Part of this is due to all the nonsense told about losing weight. If you're not some kind of nutrition scientist or athlete, how do you know what really works? There seem to be infinitely many approaches to take to dieting. Should you fast? If so, intermittent fasting, long-term fasting, or calorie restriction? Or no fasting, but instead eating many small portions? What about only one large portion a day? No fat or no carbs? There are as many diet ideas as there are fat people.

Here are my two cents, and I think they're worth their weight in gold:

First of all you have to acknowledge that weight gain is unnatural. The Indians in the tropical rainforest of Brazil, the Aboriginals in Australia and the Papua's in Papua New Guinea are all slim - even the oldest amongst them. Clearly, they are doing something right and we are doing something wrong.

"But I don't want/can't walk around all day", you may interject. I have good news for you: Weightloss and exercise are things that have very little to do with eachother. Exercise is not a significant factor in successful, long-term weightloss. I am not saying that there are no people who attribute their weighloss to a combination of diet and exercise, I'm saying that exercise is not, and should not be an important factor in weightloss. Yes, I am very aware of the studies that show that exercise helps with weightloss. No, I still do not think that exercise should be a factor.

The problem with exercise as a long-term weightloss strategy is that it's a stupid idea. So first you shove a donut into your piehole, and then you will have to walk for an hour to burn off the fat. Insane. Exersise is good for you, it does a million beneficial things to your body but it sucks as a weightloss idea!

Of course, you should never have eaten that donut in the first place.

Some people are so fat that exercise would be the only way to lose it relatively quickly. But often, that can cause injuries. When you're severely overweight, repeated long walks can cause serious damage. To make matters worse, quite a few people get hungry after exercise. Not all. For others, exercise suppresses appetite. However you turn it, exercise requires a tremendous investment of your time per ingested Calorie. It just doesn't make sense to stuff yourself and then spend half a day sweating it off again.

So forget about exercise. Take it out of the weightloss equation. You'll feel the urge to move when you're slim. Physical activity is more fun when you're slim, and it will help you to stay slim.

What is needed is a permanent change in diet. "Diet" means: "What you eat". Moles are mainly on a diet of worms. What should a human's diet be? Humans and moles have in common that they are made of cells, and that those cells form tissues, and those tissues form humans and moles. Their cells' designs are in their DNA, and that DNA has evolved over many millions of years.

What I am getting at is that we are not eating according to what our organism needs. There are a lot of misconceptions about that. The government isn't helping - they claim that humans need a diet mainly based on birdseed (grains) and that stuff used to turn calves into cows: Diary. Nutritionists, dieticians - they usually have no idea what they are talking about, but they are very sure of themselves.

The problem with fat people is not really that they eat "too much". Yes, they ingest too many calories but that is not directly their fault. They have no choice, really. That's because when you eat the wrong things, your body will keep screaming for more food, because it didn't get what it wanted, and/or because you're eating addictive stuff. Admit it - you're addicted to crap, aren't you? All fat people have their weaknesses in that regard. Either chips or pizza, chocolate or pasta.

Is there a way out? Can you ever get rid of the habit of stuffing yourself with garbage that doesn't supply your body with the nutrients it craves? Is there a diet that doesn't drive you nuts?
Those stupid "broccoli soup only" diets will only work when you have tremendous willpower, and if you had that, you likely wouldn't be fat now, because you'd already successfully have followed one of those diets for masochists.

The problem with our food today is that it's not what humans are supposed to eat. There wouldn't be enough food for even a tiny fraction of the world's population if we would be eating optimally. It's no alternative merely eating smaller portions of the same food you're eating now - the food that got you fat. When you eat crap, expect crappy results. What's needed is a paradigm shift - a lifelong change in diet based on the thorough understanding that some things are just not fit for human consumption. Regrettably, that's nearly everything you're eating now. There really is a way to drastically fix your eating habits and not succumb to temptation or hunger. Dieting is a lot about psychology. I've already written about that.

- You first need motivation.

When you're motivated, you need to make things easy for yourself:

- Exercise is not encouraged because it makes most people hungry and hungry people make bad dietary decisions, harming morale as well as the waistline.

- Small portions are not encouraged either. You should eat as much as you want, any time you feel like. It is forbidden to be hungry.

- It is not allowed to lose weight too fast, because your body then thinks it's in a crisis situation and it will remember its previous highest weight, and as soon as there is a lapse in your resolve, it will force you to eat everything back on again, and then some. A kilo a month is all you should aim for. More than that and you're in great peril of eventual failure, no matter how much you manage to lose.

- If you live alone, get rid of all "forbidden" foods. Banish them from your life forever, because your new diet is going to be a permanent lifestyle choice. If you don't live alone and the others don't want to take part in your new diet, get yourself a segregated part of the fridge where only "your food" is stacked. You are only allowed to take from that food, and noone else is allowed to touch any of it. That's an autistic way of handling the problem of "what can I eat".

Your new diet is very simple. You are allowed to eat everything, except that you have to avoid carbohydrates like the plague. So no sugar, bread, pasta, pizza, potatoes, rice, beans or potato chips. Everything else is OK, including food that contains a modest amount of carbohydrates, such as almonds (12% carbs). On this diet, you will first of all thrive, because it contains much more nutrients per day than your previous one. Secondly, it will not make you so hungry all the time. Concentrated carbs do that to a person. Thirdly, this diet can't possible make you fatter than you already are. It's a physiological impossibility. Fat doesn't make you fat, carbs do. Look it up. It's not how many "calories" you eat, because people are more complex than calorimeters. Fat satiates quickly, and when you avoid carbs then you just won't manage to over-eat on fats to the level of gaining weight on them. If you do manage that, then you are a hopeless, but exceedingly rare case. Initially, this way of eating will make you lose weight. It may even make you lose weight all the way to skinniness, and at that stage you may want to add some more carbs. Research backs up what I say. Carbs make people fat and should be greatly reduced from your diet if you are trying to lose weight. What the government and dietary advisory boards have been telling us is bad advice based on a flawed understanding on how the body works, and instead relying on "a calorie is a calorie", assuming our body is as simple as a calorimeter.

By now you'll be very skeptical. You've read it all before. You perhaps tried it and it failed. The crucial thing is that you have a list of "allowed" food and that that list is varied enough so that you can live on it indefinitely. If you can manage that, you've won the battle because as I said - no exercise and unlimited eating from your own stash. After a while, carbs will be slightly repulsive to you - and they should be. Bread was invented because the peasants could not afford meat, fish, salads, berries, nuts and vegetables. Rice is a way to avoid starvation for the Asian masses, and so was the potato for Europeans, not such a long time ago. But that kind of food is no food for a human being! In fact, it's not suitable food for any animal. I don't think any creature digs up potatoes and eats them. Birds or mice may eat grains or rice, but they won't make it their staple either.

What a person should eat in order to get slim and stay slim:

- Salads. A salad does not contain excessive amounts of ham, cheese, eggs, mayonnaise and other things that don't belong in a salad. You can have chicken, tuna and feta cheese in your salads but the bulk should always be a wide variety of greens. Tomato, peppers, lettuce, celery, cauliflower, carrot, avocado, cucumber, anything you can eat raw and is available, fresh in your store. Use olive oil, vinegar and vit. C powder to make a dressing. Salads should be a major part of your diet. As in kilo's a week. They keep for days, when you use vit. C in the dressing and mix well. If you're not proficient with a knife, learn to be or get a food processor. And don't forget the largest bowl that fits in your fridge.

- Soups. Soups are your lifeline. You don't know how to make them? Learn. There are a million delicious soups waiting to be eaten. Just don't use too many lentils, beans, peas, potatoes or vermicelli in them because remember - no reallty "carby" carbs! You can make great soups with sauerkraut, spices, garlic, onion, a potato and sausage. Or a soup with chicken broth and basically a blend of anything else you've lying around, such as cauliflower, broccoli or leek. Get yourself one of those mixers you can stick into a pan to mush things up a bit.

- Nuts. Very useful for when you're hungry and need a quick fix. Peanuts are not nuts, they are beans. Some nuts are ridiculously fat so I would be careful with cashew nuts, walnuts and pecan nuts. Recommended nuts are almonds and hazelnuts. Those will get rid of any hunger without making you fat. You can also use sunflower seeds for that. Quality nuts don't smell rancid and they should be dry so that they crack when you bite them.

- Fish. Beware of the Fukushima radiation though. Check the source. Fish from the Pacific is taboo. I eat fish straight from the can with a fork. A little tomato sauce doesn't hurt. Canned sardines, sprats, calamari, mackerel, squid, octopus - anything really. When I want to splurge, I eat delicious fat salmon that has been fed something else than dodgy pellets with PCB's. The difference in taste is amazing. One of the best fish is eel.

- Fatty yogurt (4% or so) with blueberries and cottage cheese. I eat this almost daily and it never gets old. Don't eat too much sugary fruit - it's sugar water without much nutritional value. Be aware that in Europe, blueberries can be radioactive due to the Chernobyl disaster. As isotopes decay into ones with a shorter half lfe, Europe's forests are getting more, not less radioactive. I think there is a lot of evidence that the main cause of cancer is internal exposure to alpha-emitters in the form of "hot particles", and I'll write an article about that later.

- Organic eggs of free-roaming chickens that are fed acceptable food. Full of stuff your body needs, including Cholesterol. I make omelettes (with ham and cheese on top) but I also eat them boiled.

- Meat and vegetables. I eat chicken legs from chickens that still taste halfway like chicken because they're not fed used frying oil or whatever it is they give chickens these days. I also found a kind of hamburgers made with 100% real meat instead of pink slime, and I chop them up and stirfry them with veggies. Those burgers contain enough salt for the whole dish, but I add curry and pepper. Never overdo it with salt because salt is addictive. It makes you want to eat more of the food it is in.

- Chocolate milk with stevia. I went cold-turkey from coffee and my only fix of caffeine is that in my morning cup of cocoa.

- Snacks. I like olives with real pimento, such as anchovies. Occasionally, cheese sticks with mustard. If you can find it, get cheese with only 10% fat.

The above list is basically all I ever eat. We have delicious tap water, but you can also drink bottled water. Do as I said and you will never gain weight again. You'll start losing weight very slowly, and this will go so gradually that your body won't get stressed and think it's in a crisis situation, because in that case you will feel permanently hungry and will eventually not be able to resist the urge to splurge until you're back at your old weight. You know that you're doing it right when in bed at night, your stomach makes a some rumbling noises, without being too hungry to fall asleep. When you are approaching your ideal weight - which should be a single-digit fat percentage for men and in the low double digits for women - put the bar high! - physical activity will come naturally and will not be a chore. At that stage you can even slack with your diet every now and then.

Why do you lose weight on this diet and never gain it back?

- Fat deposits are mainly caused by the insulin response to high glycemic food. By greatly reducing your carbohydrate intake, it becomes very, very hard to gain weight. In most cases, you'll start losing weight from day one and that will normally continue until you are slim.

- The diet I proposed is pretty boring. It does not tempt much. This ensures that you won't splurge. Sure you can splurge on a bag of almonds or a large bowl of yogurt with berries, but that is not going to make you gain weight.

- You won't gain it back as long as you stay on it, and you will stay on it because it will make you less hungry and you'll feel better too. The main reason why your weight won't shoot up when you compromise the diet is that weightloss is so gradual that your body is tricked into not noticing it - and therefore it won't make you hungry all the time until you're back at your previous weight.

A final note of warning: Don't overdo it with the protein, especially not when you're female. Women have evolved to be gatherers, they are optimized for eating fruit and roots, meaning carbohydrates. Men are evolved to be hunters and a protein- and fat-rich diet is healthier to them than it is for women, who need more carbohydrates in their diet than men do.


1.  Brandon    Thursday, August 23, 2012

What are your thoughts on fruitarians? All they eat are fruit containing sugar, yet stay very skinny. It is also my understanding that sugars are anti-stress and can be very beneficial (research done by Ray Peat).



2.  Sarah Vaughter    Thursday, August 23, 2012

Fruitarians appear very healthy to me, usually having single-digit body fat percentages.

As long as they make sure they get all nutrients they need (very hard on such a diet, but fruitarians eat sprouted lentils etc. as well, not only fruit) the diet is OK, except that fruitarians need to practice meticulous dental hygiene.



3.  rt    Sunday, April 14, 2013

you're basically promoting the atkins diet then in your comment below you have no problem with the fruitarian diet.

dr morse, who has a big youtube site and clinic in florida says to detox on fruits especially berries and melons. he makes alot of sense



4.  Sarah Vaughter    Sunday, April 14, 2013

I am sceptical about the fruitarian diet, that is why I said it was "very hard" to get al the nutrients they need.

"Very hard" means exactly that, very hard.. Really difficult not to become malnourished on a fruitarian diet. You have to really understand nutrition if you embark on it. But I have read the scientific studies that prove that even crazy-extreme diets can work, and I met the people in some cases as well.

Example: I have linked to the PDF's of the studies that show that if you eat only meat, fat and bone marrow for a year and absolutely nothing else, that that makes a healthy man even healthier. They were old studies but they had reliable test subjects (polar expeditioners). Literally no fruit, diary or vegetables for at least one entire year.

And I have seen Greek-God-like fruitarians that only had problems with bad teeth due to the sugary foods combined with insufficient dental hygiene.

I prefer "Atkins without the loads of animal-derived fat but veggies instead" but I don't pretend to have all the dietary answers..



5.  Catherine Fiocco    Sunday, June 9, 2013

I do a 51% plant based lifestyle. No dairy, wheat, gluten, or processed foods. I eat biodynamically available fruits and veggies from an organic source. I can even "work for my food" meaning, our organic farmers allow us to help out on the farm and we can pick our products to take home. It is really something to experience. They have cage-free organically raised chickens and I take their eggs home. I add chia seeds, goji berries, acai, aloe vera, chlorella and spirulina to my diet as well as a not so over the top vitamin regime. I add salmon, and sometimes chicken. Sardines are great! I have lost 70 pounds, from a size 16 to a size 6-8. I am thinner than I was in college. I feel good. My skin has gotten better. I am 60 yrs, old and look 40. Hopefully, with needling, I can look even younger! Yes, I do cheat every now and then and dig into a burger, but it has to be good quality meat and I can only eat 1/3 of it. I do not crave the fries. Perhaps the most stunning thing is that my body no longer craves bad food. If I crave cheese, I get the organic kind and I put it with organic brown rice cakes, unsalted. If I want ice cream, I eat Rice Dream. If it is chocolate, I reach for dark organic chocolate or cacao nibs. I bake my own organic muffins which take about 20 minutes start to finish! I make my own juices too. Another thing, I have a pretty bad case if Lupus which has gotten better, not 100%, but enough for me to do things I had not done in years, like traveling. I think that we need to think more about where our food comes from and watch what we put into our bodies. I have relearned how to eat. It was not easy, but once you get going, it becomes second nature.



6.  Cathy    Saturday, June 15, 2013

I think if you look around the world, healthy humans eat a vastly varied diet. Some eating more or less nothing but meat and some the other extreme and eating hardly any. Unhealthy humans eat the western diet! Full of refined crap. That is what causes problems.




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