The Diet That Won’t Die (The “Diet” Goes On Forever but the Weight Never Goes Down)
The dreaded permacut…
Permacut is a term we use to describe a diet that goes on for what seems like eternity while forever failing to produce the desired results.
There may be spots of success and there might be spectacular progress at one point or another but it’s rarely permanent.
In our experience it usually goes something like this: you embark on an ambitious plan to make a change in your weight and body composition and you’re pretty good at it for a while but it’s a “diet” or “program” and not based on reality so it becomes difficult to stick with and, after a bit, you start to cheat your way out of it.
As a result, you decide you’re just going to have to keep dieting and, sadly, the cycle repeats, often for years.
We all know someone who’s always on a diet and, honestly, it doesn’t look like it’s been working for them.
It’s not that they don’t try hard or that they don’t want to lose weight. In most cases, they desperately want to but just can’t seem to get it done.
It’s not their fault.
In reality, the vast majority of diets (and programs) fail people because they’re unrealistic and not based on the normal ebb and flow of everyday life.
Here are some statistics about weight and weight loss:
75% of people in the U.S. are overweight or obese.
80% of people who shed significant weight can’t maintain the loss for twelve months.
Obesity has tripled over the last sixty years.
In fact, those figures are a comment on health in general. You don’t need the studies listed at the end to know the three bullet points above are true.
Just look around.
There’s no need to go on about “diets,” “dieting” or the lack of success that goes along with it. It’s not working and we need to find a way to make sure it does.
Most of us - probably all of us - have “dieted” and been unable to keep the weight off. At a minimum, we’ve known someone like that.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to lose some weight, look and feel better or improve your health. However, the ways we’re told to go about it don’t work in real life and they’re impossible to keep up over a long period of time.
We can discuss things like set point theory, genetics, hormone levels and a host of other factors – and they’re all important – but it misses the most fundamental point: you have to build a system that allows you to function on a day-to-day basis while producing the results you want to see.
Losing weight is hard enough to do on its own without using a plan that’s restrictive and fails to take your life into account. If you’re in a calorie deficit your body is going to try every trick in the book to get you to eat more. The human body is God’s greatest creation and it’s, above all, a machine that’s designed to survive. It’s not going to let you eat less and less without putting up a fight. It’s going to down-regulate your metabolism. It will delay or put off many of the day-to-day functions like joint and tissue repair, it’ll slow down blood flow to your extremities and you’ll become more and more lethargic as it seeks to conserve energy.
Of course, you’re going to feel hungry – or “hangry” – at times and that’s not the best feeling in the world either.
The constant barrage of TV ads telling you that you can’t have great friendships, good times or a fulfilling life unless you pound drinks and throw down endless amounts of food is throwing gasoline on the fire. A slip up or treat here and there and the ensuing – and very normal – spike on the scale only compounds the feeling of helplessness.
If you’re trying to do this with a “diet” or “program” based on restrictions or thinking “I’ll never have dessert again” or be allowed to make a mistake, it’s a guarantee failure is right around the corner.
Principle 3 in our article My Middle Age is Spreading says:
We need to arrange our eating and exercise so they’re compatible with our lifestyle and can be easily executed over a long period of time.
That means we have to learn to deal with family, business travel, holidays and spending all day on the weekends at football, Little League or gymnastics and still be able to handle it. We have to learn to have treats and indulge ourselves because that’s what life is made of – great times with family and friends.
James Clear said it beautifully, “Goals are for people who want to win once. Systems are for people who want to win repeatedly.”
You can go on a “diet” or “program” with the goal of losing lots of weight and getting jacked and it’ll only last as long as you can keep a death grip on the diet or program, itself.
That’s a goal and you’ll win once.
However, if you take the time and put in the effort to build a lifestyle (system) that produces those results, they’re an automatic outcome of the process and the end result is they become “sticky,” which means they’re here to stay.
That’s a system and it produces results (wins) repeatedly.
Life is a journey and a lifetime of healthiness is just that – a lifetime of healthy habits.
Our goal is to make an ongoing series of small changes to the way you see and think about food, exercise and health. Those small changes will produce results automatically and, over time, add up to progress that lasts because it’s not the result of following a “program” but carefully building a system designed to produce it.
No one said you have to eat food you hate or avoid the ones you love. You just need to eat the proper amount.
Creating your meals from foods you enjoy eating, that are whole and healthy, eaten in the correct amount and with the occasional sinful indulgence will last a lot longer than a diet you can’t stand.
Almost everyone feels better after they exercise but going to the gym and working out isn’t always our first choice.
I mean, really, does anyone get off of work on Friday, call their friends and say, “The weekend is here, let’s hit the gym for some lifting.”
For most, like going to work, it’s a situation where the pros outweigh the cons. I’m fortunate and love what I do but if I won the Powerball this would probably be the last line I write and the odds of you hearing from me again would be similar to the odds of me winning the Powerball in the first place.
If we could be shredded without a lick of exercise you could probably count the number of gyms in the world on one hand.
We all agree exercise, especially weightlifting, is good for you. Read our article Go Heavy or Go Home (Lift Weights to Lose Weight, Look Good and Live Long) if you want to learn just how beneficial it is for your health. Of course, we all love looking good and there’s nothing better than nice definition and a lean body and that comes from weights and exercise.
Still, we need to make the exercise program palatable while producing fabulous results and all the health benefits that go along with it.
If you’re stuck with an exercise program you hate, it’s a guarantee you won’t do it for long.
Here’s what we believe:
A lifetime of looking good and being healthy comes from a lifestyle built of healthy habits.
Small, progressive changes to your lifestyle and habits bring about huge changes over time.
Slow and steady progress based on those changes is permanent.
The foods you eat on a daily basis have to be enjoyable and something you would eat whether you were “dieting” or not.
Exercise has to be palatable, work within your schedule and make you look and feel good about yourself.
Sleeping well and managing your stress are integral parts of losing weight, building muscle and a healthy lifestyle.
All of the above needs to be easy to do over a long period of time and with the normal distractions of everyday life.
Without them the “diet” or “program” eventually falls apart and you end up where you started or, in many cases, you’ll go a little bit past it.
It’s to your credit that you continue to try – because it’s important – but doing so just leads to the permacutting situation we’re writing about.
That’s when set point theory, hormones and plain old psychology comes into play and it becomes even more difficult.
If life is a journey, then let’s also take health, looking good and the loss of weight as a journey where we value progress over perfection and unrealistic outcomes.
It’s okay to have a misstep. Just keep going moving forward.
Everyone falls off the wagon. Get right back on it. Do not run out in front of it and throw yourself under the wheels.
Most of all, understand that there’s no magic diet or workout program that will allow you to shortcut the process. The body models we admire and the people we envy who are lean and healthy are that way because they work at it and they have a system that produces those results.
As Arnold the Governator himself says, “I’d say 90 percent — and probably more — of being healthy and fit comes from doing the basics.”
Workout, eat real foods that you like, do so in a quantity appropriate for you and what you want to achieve, get plenty of sleep and don’t sweat the little things.
That’s as basic as it gets.
Shockingly, this is the sage advice our grandmothers having been giving us for generations. It’s more and more difficult in this day and age but it’s true nonetheless.
Let’s carefully build a lifestyle that focuses on healthy habits where we eat foods we enjoy, have a great time with family and friends, go on vacations, enjoy holidays and also learn that making mistakes with all of this is part of life.
Give yourself a break when things don’t go right but most importantly, give yourself a chance by setting up a plan that will help you make small, incremental changes to your habits, allow you to eat foods you enjoy, deal with the variability of everyday life, has an exercise program that works for your schedule and produces measurable results in how you look and feel and that’s simple and easy to do now and for the foreseeable future.
You’ll end up with a foundation of healthy habits that automatically produce all things you want to see in the mirror and feel in your body as the normal result of your everyday life.
There’s a certain confidence that comes from knowing you have the ability to deal with business travel, going out to eat, weekends watching the kids play sports, vacations or the holidays.
Build slowly and carefully and you’ll have something beautiful and permanent and it’ll be a lot better than the dreaded permacut.
Regards,
Henry
Stierman B, Afful J, Carroll MD, Chen TC, Davy O, Fink S, et al. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2017–March 2020 prepandemic data files—Development of files and prevalence estimates for selected health outcomes. National Health Statistics Reports; no 158. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2021. DOI: https://dx.doi. org/10.15620/cdc:106273.
Fryar CD, Carroll MD, Afful J. Prevalence of overweight, obesity, and severe obesity among adults aged 20 and over: United States, 1960–1962 through 2017–2018. NCHS Health E-Stats. 2020.
Engber, Daniel. Unexpected clues emerge about why diets fail. Nature Medicine. Vol. 25. November 2019. 1632-1639.
Adult Obesity - A Global Look at Rising Obesity Rates. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Medicine.
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