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Weight-loss diets boil down to one thing, and it’s not science jargon - The Washington Post

Unearthed: Weight-loss diets all really boil down to one thing

January is<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/01/03/ultraprocessed-foods-fiber-healthy-carbs/" target=_blank> peak diet season</a>, and if it has you reaching for the latest weight-loss regimen, you’re not alone. But how do you know if that choice is just another crank diet?

So what exactly is a crank diet? Here’s what I think: It’s a way to eat less, cloaked in a sciency explanation of why the particular combination of foods being prescribed works metabolic magic. If the diet just says, “Eliminate high-carb foods and you’ll end up eating less,” well, that book wouldn’t sell many copies. There has to be a reason, and that’s when its lips start moving.

Let’s be clear: You absolutely, positively can lose weight on a crank diet. If you have lost weight on a diet eliminating fat, or carbs, or gluten, or plants, or meat, or sugar, you’re not alone. But the dirty little secret is that, if you’ve lost weight at all, it’s because you’ve found a way to eat fewer calories than you expend. Eliminating categories of food is one way to do that. A good way, for lots of people, at least for a while.

We should eat more plants. Here’s which ones are best for the planet.

Okay, so now maybe you’re thinking that, if those diets work, why write a whole column about their crankness?

Truth, justice and the American way, of course. But also maybe empowerment. Because people should know when they’re being sold a bill of goods.

Let’s look at some fun examples of diets that fit the crank model:

The grain-free diet, a la “Wheat Belly,” holds that wheat digestion yields polypeptides that bind with opioid receptors in the brain, which makes wheat an appetite stimulant.

The carnivore diet claims to decrease hormonal fluctuations, because the insulin spikes associated with carbohydrates create a “<a href="https://www.doctorkiltz.com/carnivore-diet/" target=_blank>cascade of other imbalances</a>” of hormones associated with hunger and fat storage.

<a href="https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/good-food/intermittent-fasting-benefits-how-it-works-and-is-it-right-for-you/2022/02" target=_blank>Intermittent fasting</a> holds that restricting intake for an extended period of time gives your body no choice but to tap fat stores, so you lose more than if your body has continuous access to blood sugar.

The blood type diet says that your blood type tells you your ancestry, and we thrive on the food our ancestors ate. And there are plenty of other ancestral diets that double down on this idea.

And of course low-carb/keto, which holds that, because insulin is key to fat storage, if you don’t eat carbs, you don’t release insulin and you store less fat.

To be fair, there are a couple of diets that tell you flat-out they’re essentially a strategy to eat less. A primary rationale of the low-fat diet is that one 1 gram of fat has 9 calories and 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein has 4, so if you sub in more lower-calorie macronutrients, you consume fewer calories overall. And the Volumetrics diet posits that if you eat food that’s less calorie-dense, you end up consuming fewer calories.

While some diet rationales are pretty silly, they’re not all false. Insulin, for example, really does facilitate fat storage. But there’s one nutrition fact that trumps all the others, and it’s really the only thing you need to know about food and health: What we know is absolutely dwarfed by what we don’t know.

The simple diet swap to help you lose weight and lower health risks

Remember the parable of the <a href="https://americanliterature.com/author/james-baldwin/short-story/the-blind-men-and-the-elephant" target=_blank>blind men and the elephant</a>? Six blind men got to “see” an elephant by feeling a part of it, and they each came away with vastly different ideas of what an elephant was. The guy holding the tusk thought it was like a spear; the guy with the trunk thought it was like a snake. You get the idea. They came away with inaccurate ideas because they couldn’t feel the whole thing.

That’s what’s going on with diets. Nobody can see the whole elephant. Science hasn’t painted it (yet). So each diet guru latches onto some piece of human metabolism and decides that it’s the key to health and weight loss — but really, it’s just the toenail. Sure, digesting wheat yields polypeptides! But there’s so much else going on in the human body that it’s very hard to know how that plays out.

There’s one way to find out, of course: actual trials. And — surprise, surprise — the ones we have (and we have a lot) show that, long-term, no diet works for weight loss. The trajectory — subjects lose weight for a while, even up to two years, and then regain — is similar for all.

But let’s go back to that part where people actually lose weight on crank diets. Why is that? Because, after we peel back the sciency stuff, there are usually some pretty decent strategies for doing that thing that’s at the heart of weight loss — eating less.

So how about this: Ignore the sciency and cut right to the strategies. Sure, intermittent fasting doesn’t outperform other diets, but that doesn’t mean closing the kitchen after dinner is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a damn good idea.

Then look at low-carb. No, insulin doesn’t correlate cleanly with subsequent eating and weight gain, but that doesn’t mean cutting out sugar and refined grains is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a damn good idea.

To lose weight, you don’t have to understand the nitty-gritty of human metabolism; diet isn’t a knowing problem. You just have to figure out workable strategies to eat less; diet is a doing problem. So think of the onslaught of crank diets as a smorgasbord of strategies, and pick and choose the ones that can fit your lifestyle.

I’ve been overweight, but I’m not now, and I’ve used ideas from different diets to keep it that way. I don’t do intermittent fasting, but I close the kitchen after dinner and put off breakfast until I’m quite hungry. I don’t follow a low-fat diet but limit added fats in dishes I make. I’m not low-carb, but I don’t eat many refined grains. I bulk up dishes with vegetables (Volumetrics). I eat almost no ultra-processed foods (every diet known to man). I don’t keep easy-to-eat foods that call to me in the house (common sense), and when we have to buy Girl Scout cookies for neighborhood harmony, I make my husband stash them somewhere (okay, nobody recommends that, but it works for me because <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/02/06/the-best-and-worst-girl-scout-cookies-ranked-by-our-panel-of-pastry-chefs-and-scouts/" target=_blank>Thin Mints call my name</a>).

What I hate most about crank diets is that they prey on people who want, often desperately, to make a change. The metabolic rationales offer a lifeline — all I have to do is this one thing! — and then the ultimate failure feels like your failure. But anyone who’s ever tried it knows that weight loss is hard. There is no one thing. And only you know where your diet goes off the rails, which foods are your undoing, how changes fit, or don’t, in your life.

My hat is off to the people who are comfortable at whatever weight they are and focus on other aspects of their health. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them; being fat made me unhappy. And maybe that’s why the false hope that crank diets traffic in drives me nuts. But I also think weight loss is not just possible but completely straightforward — at least in principle.

It’s not a knowing problem, so forget about the polypeptides. It’s a doing problem, and only you know what to do.

Tamar Haspel is the author of "To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard." An oyster farmer on Cape Cod, she writes Unearthed, a monthly commentary in pursuit of a more constructive conversation on divisive food-policy issues.

Tamar Haspel

washpost

Weight-loss diets boil down to one thing, and it’s not science jargon

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[Voraciously | Perspective] Weight-loss diets all really boil down to one thing

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Coconut Seafood Soup With Soba with feature on grief in Voraciously

for The Washington Post

When grief recedes, ordinary joys return. Like soup. - The Washington Post

I want to tell you about a soup, too, but the soup is important only because my mom, the most un-momlike of moms, died a few weeks before I made it.

My sister-in-law called her “the mom who fell to Earth.” She was born before the autism spectrum was a thing; she just realized, early on, that her mind worked differently from other people’s. She told me stories of figuring out, by rote, how other people expressed emotions, and how to respond appropriately.

It didn’t always work. When I was a kid and experienced the inevitable kid tragedies, she was always there with some godforsaken constructive suggestion. It was maddening. And since she could remember, verbatim, everything she read, her suggestions often took the form of an obscure poem.

<a href="#recipe">Jump to the recipe</a>

I knew, even when I was young, that my mother had some kind of special quality that I didn’t quite understand and definitely didn’t share. It would have been intimidating if she had ever wielded it as a cudgel, but she never did.

She had deliberately shaped the kind of person she wanted to be, and she made it clear to me and my brothers that anyone could. “Life is theater,” she used to say. What you think and feel don’t matter much. You become the sum of what you say and do, and you have control over those. You get to decide. It wasn’t an idea I fully grasped as a kid, but it took hold with a vengeance when I was an adult.

Sometimes, though, what you feel bleeds through. Like when someone you love dies.

My mom had been ill for a long time, and at the end of October I got a call from her caregiver that her condition had deteriorated suddenly and markedly. My brother Aaron was on a plane to Miami Beach two days later, and my husband, Kevin, and I were a couple days behind him. Aaron found her very debilitated but with cognitive faculties intact. They talked about poetry. Kevin and I were too late.

Most of us, sooner or later, experience the death of a parent; it’s an ordinary event. And many of us know <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/12/05/when-my-father-died-i-discovered-unmentionable-stage-mourning-relief/" target="_blank">the kind of mixed-up grief, edged with relief</a>, that comes when the misery of someone very ill finally ends.

But grief defies its own ordinariness, and it sets about taking over your life. It becomes your cognitive wallpaper, there when you’re not actively thinking about something else. It catches you off-guard at weird and inconvenient moments — in the elevator, at the bank. I got scatterbrained and stupid; I fumbled little things like my schedule and my shopping list. I kept thinking of things I wanted to ask her. And in a sign that things had really gone haywire, I stopped thinking about food.

Okay, I didn’t completely stop thinking about food. I stopped thinking about it as much as I usually do, which is basically all the time. I was still cooking, but it was things Kevin and I could make on auto-dinner. A pantry pasta sauce, a roast chicken, chili.

All my adult life, I’ve cooked most every day. My mother did, too. She didn’t make a fuss about it, she didn’t even talk about it, she just put good-tasting food on the table every night. She didn’t teach me how to do it, and she didn’t invite me — or anyone else — to participate. She cooked solo. I internalized the ideas that cooking was an ordinary daily activity and that it was something you did alone. It took Kevin many years of patient, gradual encroachment to show me that people could cook collaboratively, and like it.

I was grateful for the collaboration in the wake of my mom’s death, when meals were an afterthought and Kevin and I shared what little work went into what we ate. And one of the first signs that grief was waning was when I found myself, one day just after breakfast, thinking about dinner.

“I want to find a fish market,” I told Kevin. “I want a Florida fish, and I want to cook something new with it.” We found a market in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami, but my pathetic Spanishlessness wasn’t a problem; I just pointed to one of the shiny, clear-eyed yellowtail snappers nestled in ice. Oh, and some of those shrimp over there, too, please.

I made stock with the fish rack, and turned it all into a soup with coconut milk, green curry paste and soba noodles. That’s not original or even imaginative. It’s a flavor combination as old as the hills — as long as the hills are somewhere in Southeast Asia. But it marked a return to the daily routine. The ordinary daily routine.

When the tide goes out, what’s revealed is exactly what was there before. A little roughed-up, a little damp, but the selfsame sand. When grief ebbs, life’s small daily joys resurface. And I — a little roughed-up, a little damp — take new pleasure in them.

It’s a good soup, honest. But the night we ate it, seasoned with re-entry, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Not for the soup — although it really is a good soup — but for a life where good soup is an ordinary daily joy.

My mom would have loved that soup. But she also would have wondered why I’m making such a bloody fuss about it.

Make Ahead: The soba noodles can be cooked and refrigerated up to 3 days in advance.

Storage: Refrigerate for up to 3 days; gently reheat over medium-low heat. The soup will separate as it sits; this is fine — just stir it to recombine.

Where to Buy: Thai green curry paste and soba noodles can be found at well-stocked supermarkets, Asian markets and online.

NOTE: If you’re not planning to eat all of the soup at once, you may want to reserve the noodles and soup separately. If left in the soup, the noodles will soak up the broth and become gummy.

Want to save this recipe? Click the bookmark icon at the top of this page, then go to <a href="https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026975592-Saving-stories-to-My-Reading-List">Saved Stories in My Post</a>.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/coconut-seafood-soup-soba/18510/" target=_blank>Scale this recipe and get a printer-friendly, desktop version here.</a>

1 tablespoon neutral oil, such as vegetable or grapeseed, plus more as needed

4 ounces sliced fresh shiitake mushrooms

1 medium yellow onion (8 ounces), chopped

5 cloves garlic, minced or pressed

1 thumb-sized piece fresh ginger, finely grated

6 cups fish or seafood stock (may substitute chicken or vegetable stock)

One (13.5-ounce) can full-fat coconut milk

1 tablespoon Thai green curry paste

Juice of 1/2 lime, plus more to taste

2 teaspoons maple syrup (may substitute brown or white sugar)

8 ounces firm, white fish, such as cod or hake, cut into 1-inch cubes

8 ounces peeled and deveined shrimp, cut into bite-size pieces if big

Chopped fresh cilantro, for garnish

Set a medium pot with water over high heat and bring to a boil. Add the soba noodles and cook according to package instructions, until al dente. Remove from the heat, drain and rinse under cold running water until no longer hot. Drain and set aside; you should have about 8 ounces of cooked noodles.

Meanwhile, in a large pot over medium heat, heat the oil until shimmering. Add the shiitakes and cook, stirring and drizzling with a little more oil if needed, until they begin to soften, about 4 minutes. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until translucent, about 4 minutes. Stir in the garlic and ginger and cook until fragrant, 30 seconds.

Add the stock, coconut milk and curry paste and bring to a boil. Decrease the heat so the soup is simmering, taste and season to taste with salt, followed by the lime juice and maple syrup. Add the fish and shrimp and simmer until the fish is just cooked through, about 8 minutes.

Add the soba noodles and cook until heated through, about 2 minutes (see NOTE). Taste, and season with more salt and/or lime juice, if desired.

Ladle the soup into bowls, generously top with cilantro and serve hot.

Calories: 438; Total Fat: 19 g; Saturated Fat: 12 g; Cholesterol: 64 mg; Sodium: 881 mg; Carbohydrates: 41 g; Dietary Fiber: 2 g; Sugar: 5 g; Protein: 30 g

This analysis is an estimate based on available ingredients and this preparation. It should not substitute for a dietitian’s or nutritionist’s advice.

From Unearthed columnist Tamar Haspel.

Tested by Olga Massov; email questions to <a href="mailto:voraciously@washpost.com">voraciously@washpost.com</a>.

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Tamar Haspel

Massachusetts

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