I have been a lifelong student of nutrition, dieting, and trying to be healthy. And if I learned anything, it’s the cynical fact that the diet that works is:
- Pick any diet that makes sense to you.
- Deceive yourself into thinking it’s the right way to go.
- Follow the diet with strict discipline.
However, if you lack discipline, but need to lose weight fast, I have a revolutionary new diet for Americans:
- Change the setting on you bathroom scale from pounds to kilograms.
- Convince yourself that there are approximately 2 lbs in 1 kilogram.
- Boom! You just shredded 9% of your body weight! That’s 16 lbs lost if you weigh 180 lbs, and it’s 36 lbs lost if you weight 400 lbs.
The idea of this diet came from a talk I heard from the Nutrition Studies Research Center at Stanford, where the speaker converted from kilograms to pounds by multiplying by two. It wasn’t important to be accurate in the point he was making, so he just did what I find a lot of people do: round off the 0.2 in the interest of time.
So that’s where this new diet comes in. We first switch to the metric system and then rely on our general inability to multiply numbers by 2.2 and instead multiplying by 2.
While this “diet” is tongue-in-cheek, I think two things are true… First, so much of our relationship with food and weight loss is a sink for emotional issues from other aspects of our life. Second, Americans are getting fatter. While we’ve grown by 1 inch in the last 40 years, we’ve gained 25 lbs. But don’t worry that’s only 10 kilograms.
