What's the Most Sustainable Diet？
Episode Stats
Summary
Barry Estabrook is an investigative journalist and the author of Just Eat: A Reporter s Quest for a Weight Loss Regimen That Works. In this episode, we discuss what set Barry on his quest to find the best, most sustainable diet.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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If you're someone who wants to lose weight, you've probably spent some time thinking about
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and experimenting with different diets. Browse the literal shelves of bookstores or the metaphorical
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ones of the internet, and you can find thousands of options to choose from, each with their ardent
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fans and supposedly decisive rationales. But which diet really works best? And most importantly,
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given that 95% of people who lose weight on a diet just gain it back, what is a plan that
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as an average human can stick with for the long haul? My guest today is in a distinctively well-informed
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position to comment on this question, having personally test-driven over a dozen diets in
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three years. His name is Barry Estabrook, and he's an investigative journalist and the author of Just
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Eat, One Reporter's Quest for a Weight Loss Regimen That Works. We begin our conversation with what
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set Barry on his quest to find the best, most sustainable diet. We then get into the fact
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that the ideas behind modern diets aren't new in the sometimes weird history of their predecessors.
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From there, we turn to Barry's experiments with contemporary diets, including what happened
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when he tried eating both a low-carb and low-fat diet, joining Weight Watchers, and figuring
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out what he can learn from the eating habits of the Greeks and French. We end our conversation
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with what Barry ultimately changed about his own diet to successfully drop the pounds, and
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what he discovered as to what really works best for sustainable weight loss. After the show
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is over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash right diet.
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So you got a book out called Just Eat, One Reporter's Quest for a Weight Loss Regimen That
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Works. And so you, you made yourself a guinea pig and tried all the diets that are out there
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because you needed to lose some weight. What kick-started you trying all these popular weight
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Well, I guess you could say it was probably a kick in the rear end from my doctor, verbally
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speaking. He sort of, in his quiet way, read me the riot act. I had very high cholesterol
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levels. I had very high blood pressure. And he said, Barry, I can't give you any more meds.
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You're maxed out. The maximum amount I can, I'm allowed to give. And about the only thing
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you can do if you want to get these two factors, both of which are, you know, signs that you're
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headed for a heart attack. If you want to get them down, you're going to have to lose
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weight. And it so happens that I do have a history of cardiovascular disease in the
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family. Most of the men in my family have, uh, have eventually died from it. And I wasn't
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quite ready to continue that tradition. So for the first time in my life, you know, I was
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one of the people who I don't diet. I'd never do that. First time in my life, I, I went on a diet
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and not just a diet. You went on multiple diets, try them out.
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Well, right. I eventually, I, first of all, I went on a diet. It was the fad diet du jour. It was
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called whole 30 and everyone I knew seemed to be on it a few years ago. And so I, I just went on it
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because Hey, that was, that was what everyone was doing. It was a stupid thing to do because
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what I did was I suffered for 30 days deprivation. I proudly dropped 13 pounds
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and then almost instantly gained them all back. So that, that got me thinking, you know, I'm supposed
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to be an investigative journalist who covers food, food, you know, all, all aspects of food and food
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production. And I'd gone and done the very thing that I sort of encourage my readers not to do.
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I went on a diet without thinking, without understanding, just, just because, you know,
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everybody I knew seemed to be on it. I, I had given it no more thought than I do when I go in and pick
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up a bag of yellow onions at the supermarket. And here, you know, I was affecting my health,
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could be damaging my health. I had no, I had no idea of why the diet worked or didn't work,
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who the people were who were espousing this diet, what were their qualifications and what
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medically inside me was happening according to experts. So I decided that I would simply,
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you know, apply my journalistic training, which suggested that I go on these various diets that
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are out there. I ended up going on about 12 or 13 of them over a course of three years. And then I
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would interview the people who, who created them if they were still around. And I would interview
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leading nutritionists and, and medical doctors and find out what was happening to me. Why was I
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taking risks? And ultimately, personally, I would find out is, Hey, can you, can you live this way?
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I mean, the best diet is no good if you can't stick to it. So it was, those were, that's,
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so I embarked on this three-year program of trying, trying any diet that was out there to see what
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would happen and then trying to understand the science behind it. And so, as you said,
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there's a lot of options for people to choose from. If someone is in your shoes and they need to lose
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weight, they just go online, they just go to the bookstore and they're going to find different types of
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diets. There's, you know, the whole 30 that you did, there's cleanse diets, there's paleo, there's
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low carb, low fat. And you think this is a modern phenomenon, but you actually, you do like a
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historical survey and saying these different options for Americans in particular, they've been
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around, it's been around for centuries. So like in your research, like what's the earliest known diet
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A fellow named William Banting, who was a British undertaker of all professions, is credited with,
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with really the first diet book per se. You might call it a diet booklet. It was maybe 30 pages long
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and it was called A Letter on Corpulence and it was published in the 1850s, mid 1800s. And he's
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generally credited with the first actual diet book. I mean, people have been writing about diets since
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ancient Greece, but he's sort of the father of, of what became this industry of diets and diet books
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that we, we live in today. He was a, like I say, an undertaker. He was five feet tall. He weighed well
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over 200 pounds. He'd gotten to the point where he couldn't tie his shoes. He couldn't climb stairs or
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descend stairs. He said he couldn't take care of all the personal niceties, whatever that is. I don't want to
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think about it. And so he, he started eating eventually after trying everything, according
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to the instructions of a doctor who suggested that basically he stopped eating plain carbohydrates.
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He ate very few carbohydrates at all. He went on a pretty much a meat diet. And within a year,
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he had lost 46 pounds. He could do all those things he couldn't do before. He's, and he lived for another
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20 odd years until he was in his eighties and never put a pound back on. And so he wrote this pamphlet
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Yeah. And he's like the father of the low carb diet. And it was such a,
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Yeah. And it was such a phenomenon. Like it was such a thing that people called it when they said they
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were going to go on a diet, they'd say, I'm banting. Like his name became a verb.
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Yeah, it did. You know, I'm banting. I'm going on a bant. I need to bant. It actually entered the
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And then around the same time, a little bit later, you had the origins of the low fat kind of high carb
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diet with, it started kind of with the temperance movement in America and the gram kind of kickstarted
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Well, Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian preacher originally, you know, a very stern
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religious man. And he left that career to become a lecturer on all forms of temperance. And he then
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focused in on diet. And he basically thought that anything, anything a normal person would enjoy
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was sinful. And, you know, it led to, he was very concerned about men's libido. And, you know,
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he said such a diet increased libido, which was bad and led to masturbation and on and on.
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And it was a quasi-religion. But, but it was this, it became very popular, you know, restaurants would
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serve graham fare. We know him today. He survives in the grocery store as graham crackers. Although I
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think he'd probably be shocked about the amount of sugar in the modern graham cracker. But, you know, he
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became very influential. And yeah, preaching the exact opposite from, you know, banting who had come a few
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years prior. Besides those kind of genres, you also highlight along the way, there's been all
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these different weird fad diets in American history. What are some of like the weirdest ones
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you came across? Oh, God. There was a big craze started in the early part of this century of these
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two ingredient diets, I guess you'd call them. You know, for a diet where all you would eat was
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bananas and skim milk. You'd eat about a half a dozen bananas a day and a few glasses of skim
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milk. That's it. And that was, it became very popular, surprisingly. And so, you know, it inspired
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a host of imitators. So you could go on a diet allowing only tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs.
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Or if you didn't like that, how about pineapple and lamb chops? Nothing more. Or baked potatoes and
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buttermilk, nothing more. And, you know, they, people did lose weight because if you're eating
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nothing but pineapples and buttermilk, there's no way you can, you know, consume enough pineapple
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and buttermilk to get the amount of calories you need in a day. So you'll start losing weight.
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And another one that you highlight that was funny is fletcherizing. What is fletcherizing?
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It's amazing. It was hugely popular in its day. I mean, you talk about there were presidents went
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on it. Thomas Edison went on it. Proust went on it. All sorts of famous people went on it. The
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legislatures actually suggested that all children be taught. And what fletcherizing or fletcher
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suggested was that every bite be chewed rhythmically a hundred times a minute until there was no flavor
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left in the food that you were chewing. And it was just a sloppy, you know, goop that you almost
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couldn't help but swallow and just dysreflexively. And, you know, he had different amounts of chewing
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required for say piece of bread, maybe 50 chews, something like an apple, several hundred. And it
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became really popular. I mean, there were parties held in high society where people sat around the
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table, not talking because they were so busy chewing constantly. He thought it would save the world,
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save it from gluttony, end crime, you know, be a great economy because you've got all the nourishment
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you possibly could out of the food. He even, he had a very peculiar fascination with excrement,
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claiming that when you fletcherize, as it was called, your excrement contained no poisons, no,
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no, nothing offensive in the least. He himself used the toilet for that purpose about every two weeks.
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He was known to carry his own excrement around in his pocket if you doubted that it was inoffensive.
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He said, it tasted, it was no more offensive than a biscuit, he said. You got to remember this guy,
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you know, all these famous people, all these politicians worshipped him, basically. They
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thought he had the answer. You got to, the thing about these weird historical diets is we need to
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put them in perspective because it's something we don't have today when we say go on a keto diet,
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that someday, maybe people will think it's as silly as, as Fletcherism or eating nothing but
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bananas and skim milk. Right. Or those cleanse diets where you just, you drink cayenne pepper and
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maple syrup or whatever. I did go on one of those. Yeah. How'd that go?
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I don't, well, let's say, I don't know if you can really describe it accurately in a, in a, in a family
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friendly podcast, but I, I lasted about four days. I had extreme digestive issues, diarrhea, no energy
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after a few days, dizziness. And I finally quit just because I was worried that I was going to
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injure myself. And yeah, I lost eight pounds in a week and instantly, instantly gained them all back.
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Yeah. You probably lost a lot of just water weight and glycogen.
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Yeah. That's exactly it. When you're, when you're, when you're getting absolutely, when you're very
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hungry and you're getting absolutely no carbohydrates or very limited carbohydrates in your diet,
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your body shifts from burning glucose, it's normal fuel, a sugar to burning glycogen. Like you said,
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a compound that's made in the liver and glycogen's always comes attached to a couple of molecules of
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water. So as you burn a molecule of glycogen, that water gets released and you, you excrete it.
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So what you're, what you're doing is just, you know, excreting that water. And then the minute you
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start to eat again, you're, you go back to burning glucose, stop burning glycogen and your liver goes
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into overdrive to build back up its glycogen, which means it needs to start adding water back into the
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whole system. So you're getting it right back. Gotcha. All right. So I think off the, like from
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the top, you can, we can just dismiss these quack stuff like fletcherizing, cleanse diets, the two
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food or single food diets. I remember when I was a kid growing up in like the eighties, nineties,
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like grapefruit was the thing. It's like, you have to have a thing of grapefruit in the morning
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and something else or rice cakes. That's not going to work. It's not sustainable. So basically
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you say, if you look at all the diets out there, there, and we're excluding all the quack stuff.
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There are basically three types. There's the low carb diets or bantinism. There's the low fat
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kind of high carbohydrate. So we're talking about grains, whole vegetables, whole fruits that was
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inspired by gram. And then the third one is you just, you don't even look at carbs or fat. You just
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look at total calories that you consume. And if you burn more than you consume, you're going to lose
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weight. Is that basically the three types of diets out there? Yeah. I think you can categorize almost
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every diet and slip it into one of those slots. The key is people keep reinventing them, rebranding
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them so that they sound new and exciting. If you get a good name and rebranded enough, you're going to
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make a lot of money. Right. But that seems to be the secret. The same formula, the same everything,
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just three different, these three different categories and they're still around. Yeah. So
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you start off looking at the low fat kind of good, high, good carbohydrate diet. And the primary
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predecessor here today from of grammarism, we'll call it, is a guy named Dean Ornish. So what's his diet
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and what does the research say about what he recommends? Dean Ornish is a doctor. He now lives
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in the San Francisco area. And he came up with a diet in the eighties that basically is strictly
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vegetarian for all intents and purposes. And then on top of that, it's less than 10% fat. And that
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includes fat from vegetable sources, olive oil, nuts, things like that. So it's a very, very low fat
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vegetarian diet. He has done research and others have followed that shows that if you follow that
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diet, you not only lose weight, but you can really improve your blood chemistry. Ornish says, although a
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lot of people dispute him, that you can reverse heart disease, or certainly it won't keep getting
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worse. He's got all of these stories about patients who couldn't walk across the street and finally
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went on this program and all of a sudden could become moderately active again. And my finding
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is, yeah, I lost weight, but I was constantly craving, craving a nice seared steak or a plate of eggs in
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the morning. I became almost obsessive about that. So that type of diet is not something that I could
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live with, even with the health benefits. Maybe if I was a cardiac cripple or something like that,
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I would change. But it's just, there's no, there's no real love or a food or pleasure or sensual
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pleasure. The whole thing that makes eating a joy to a lot of people. Yeah. And he's very adamant.
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You have to be very strict with his diet. It's almost, it's like grammism, right? You have to like
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stick with it religiously. You can't deviate at all. Right. I mean, it's, it's interesting you said
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that because it is got religious, these, a lot of these diets have religious overtones, even though
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they're completely secular, you know, it's, it's like you're, you've, you've joined a cult or a
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church or something, a church of very low fat and there are sins and things like that. It's, it's a,
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it's an interesting cultural phenomenon, but you're exactly right. So you, you did lose weight, but it
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wasn't sustainable because the food just wasn't palatable. Like you just stopped enjoying food.
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But the other thing you talk about too, is that it was a lot of work to make the food that lined up
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with Ornish's diet. Like you'd spend hours, hours cooking meals. Exactly. And prepping them and
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cooking them. And, and it would be great if you, if you have a personal, a personal chef on your
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household's payroll, I suppose, but I don't happen to be in that position. So yeah, you know, I don't
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have an hour to prepare lunch during the week. Sorry. And that's the type of thing that following
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the recipes that he provides would require it. I'd be up in the kitchen, chopping, chopping,
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chopping and, and mixing and, and, you know, sauteing in water instead of oil. And, you know,
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sometimes all I want for lunch is a couple of nice slices of bread with a piece of meat in between
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them and eat it and be done. All right. So, okay. Ornish's diet, you can lose weight on it,
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but probably not sustainable for most people. You lost some weight, but I imagine you gained it back
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after you stopped. I went on these 13 diets or so. And, you know, I hate to sound like a broken
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record, but I was, I was a world champion at losing five to 10% of my weight on a diet. Never failed
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and then gained it all back. And that makes me very typical. That happens to 95% of the people
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who go on any diet, according to scientists. So, you know, it, it's, it's the pattern. And I think
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we all know it, that when you go on a diet, you will lose weight. But as soon as you go off,
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you're back to square one or even worse, even a little heavier. Right. No. Yeah. You typically
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gain a little bit more weight. Okay. So after going, you know, visiting low fat kind of high
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carb vegetarian diet land, you went over to the Banting side, the low carb, high fat type of diet.
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So which ones did you experiment? Like, so there's all sorts of different types of low carb diet.
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There's Atkins, there's paleo, there's South beach, there's keto. So which ones did you try out there?
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I tried out keto and South beach. South beach is sort of, it's a milder, friendlier,
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more healthful version of Atkins, who's really the founder of all these modern low carb diets. His
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book, the Atkins diet revolution sort of set the modern phase of these diets in motion. And all the
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diets that you mentioned, keto, paleo, South beach zone, they all, they all emerged from the original
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work by Atkins, which, you know, basically unlimited amounts of fat and red meat. And, uh, in the early
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stages, almost no carbohydrates, you could be living off nothing but T-bone steaks, three meals a day.
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And that'd be fine with, with the early Atkins. Now since then, that's been modified. And then the
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South beach is a, is a much more healthful, sustainable, distant cousin of, of the, uh, of
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the Atkins diet. But yes, you're right. It stresses avoiding simple carbohydrates, white bread, white
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rice, white, you know, anything pretty much other than cauliflower, I guess, but allows you to eat
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lean meats in pretty much unlimited quantities. So I spent a while on that. I found it much easier
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to follow than the ultra, ultra low fat diet. Did have some of the same issues with it.
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Friend of mine went on it and she calls it the chop, chop diet. Cause again, you're at the cutting
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board doing a lot of prep. You know, what are you going to have for lunch today? If you can't have
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bread of any sort, but it was more tolerable. I thought, however, at the end it was the same
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situation. I lost some weight and gained it all back.
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Yeah. And again, I mean, maybe the sustainability there was the prep part was getting in the way.
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And I think with all these diets. So like, I think a lot of people have gone on low carb diets and said,
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Oh man, I've just lost. It's been the game changer. Right.
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But I think what the research says is that pretty much like, even if you go on a low fat diet,
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you're going to lose weight initially. Then it kind of, just like a low carb diet,
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you'll lose weight initially. Then it starts slowing down. And then if you don't keep it going,
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then you're hosed. You're going to gain it back.
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Yeah. There's, there's actually been scientific, good scientific studies that say exactly that.
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They say you can lose weight on low carb. You can lose weight on high carb. People do
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same amount pretty much, but then gain it all back so that both diets, if you stick to them,
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are going to give you the same result, which pretty much for most people is you end up back
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where you were at the beginning. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:23:34.600
And now back to the show. All right. So the low carb diet, a little bit more palatable because I
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mean, who doesn't like to eat meat and T-bone steaks and things like that, but still there's a lot of
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prep there that can get in the way of making it sustainable. So after you tried the low carb
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diets, you did the low fat diet, then you just tried to go, which is almost going to count calories.
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And you did that by joining Weight Watchers now called WW, which I think is the worst rebranding
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in the world. I still call it Weight Watchers. It's like, it's like a Kinko's being turned into
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Fed. I still call it the FedEx store Kinko's. You're always going to be Kinko's. So Weight Watchers,
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what was your experience with Weight Watchers? Well, Weight Watchers is, first of all, it's kind
00:24:21.160
of like a 12 set, 12 step program for overeaters. You're given a daily quota of, they call them
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smart points. And really what they are, are to save you from figuring out the caloric value of,
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of everything. It's a simplification of, they're basically calories or they're based on calories,
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I should say. So you get a certain number of smart points per day and each food item costs a
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certain number of points. And you try to keep below or at your limit of points per day. And to do that,
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you attend weekly meetings with similarly overweight folks and you get a little pep talk and share.
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And the idea is that that helps keep you motivated to stay on the program. And I was at first, I was a
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champion. Yeah, I went in there and the first week I lost six pounds and I got a little star. It's sort
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of childish, but they give you out these little gimmicks. So I got a little star given to me to
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paste into a booklet that comes with your membership. And then the whole group, about 30 people,
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gave me a round of applause. I didn't get that the second week because I only lost a pound.
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And by the fourth week, I had lost a total of two pounds. So I'd come back up from my victory the
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first week. And at that point I resigned, figuring that at that rate of loss, it would cost me
00:25:57.360
thousands of dollars to lose the weight I wanted to lose because it does cost you about 50 bucks
00:26:02.880
a month to be a member. But I should add that for certain people, I'm glad I tried Weight Watchers
00:26:10.760
and I would actually recommend it because for certain people it really does work, which you've got to be
00:26:16.060
one of those people who really get off on group therapy and meetings and peer support and things
00:26:25.020
like that. There's some pretty good scientific work that shows that if it's for you, Weight Watchers
00:26:32.120
can be effective. It ain't for me. Right. And the other nice thing about Weight Watchers is that
00:26:37.920
they don't limit you on what you can eat as long as you stay within those points like you're good.
00:26:42.660
So you could like a, you know, if you wanted a Pop-Tart, like a Pop-Tart is going to have
00:26:46.400
the point count. So you can have it, but it might mean you have to cut back on what you eat at dinner
00:26:51.340
that night. Exactly. Exactly. Nothing is off limit, but the point system is really skewed
00:26:58.880
to subtly steer you in the right direction. You use the Pop-Tart example. For instance,
00:27:06.500
most vegetables, you don't get any points off for those. So you can eat all the vegetables you like.
00:27:13.100
I think some of the leaner meats, chicken breast, you can eat all, you know, so they really try to
00:27:18.300
steer you away from the triple cream, chocolate cake, ribeye steaks and steer you over to things
00:27:27.500
with much lower point values or even no point values. All right. So Weight Watchers, you lost
00:27:34.120
some weight, but then you started gaining a back end. You resigned from Weight Watchers. So after
00:27:40.100
exploring these sort of three main diet genres, the low fat, low carb, just counting calories type diet,
00:27:46.700
then you started like looking, okay, what are people doing in other countries that are known to be
00:27:52.180
relatively thin? What are they doing? And so you looked at something like the Mediterranean diet.
00:27:58.620
I'm sure people have heard of that. And then also the French diet. So let's talk about the
00:28:02.620
Mediterranean diet first. Like what's, what makes the Mediterranean diet, the Mediterranean diet?
00:28:08.180
The Mediterranean diet is really vegetable forward. I think that's the secret. They use vegetables
00:28:12.780
all the time, often have entire meals that are totally vegetable based. They make that palatable
00:28:20.660
by using tons of olive oil, tons of it. It's, it's, you watch a Greek cook preparing, you know,
00:28:28.800
something like a, a ratatouille type stew and she'll stand there and literally let oil glug out of the
00:28:37.500
bottle until you think she's playing a trick on you. But the oil makes the vegetables very palatable
00:28:44.500
and, and gives you enough energy so that you're not starving after you eat it. And, and then the,
00:28:52.240
the third key is really abundant use, fresh herbs and spices, which satisfies the sort of pleasure
00:29:02.660
centers. So you're, you're, you're, you're, uh, it's no hardship to eat that way at all. It's,
00:29:10.900
you're never hungry, you know, and, and, uh, the irony of course is the Mediterranean diet is 40% fat,
00:29:18.680
like an American diet, which is about 35%. So that's a lot fatter, a lot more fat than our diet,
00:29:26.760
but it's almost no animal fat and all fat from olive oil. So that's the difference. And, uh, it,
00:29:37.940
it was, like I say, a surprisingly satisfying way to eat. I, I went to a Greek Island and spent a week
00:29:46.180
there cooking with a woman cookbook author, I know, and ate like a King week's vacation, sort of
00:29:52.560
this first time I've come home from a vacation, three pounds lighter than when I left. So that's
00:29:59.660
the secret I think to the, the Greek diet as, as, as she said, the Greek diet is a fad that's been
00:30:05.620
going on for at least 2,500 years. Were you able to keep, you know, sustain it when you got home?
00:30:11.380
Did you try to do the Mediterranean diet when you got back to Vermont? Well, what I was able to
00:30:16.160
maintain, I took away from that is have a lot of vegetable, a lot of meals that were the main dish
00:30:25.380
is, is the vegetables and, and satisfy yourself with, with herbs and olive oil. So I don't say
00:30:34.280
that I live on a Greek diet, but there's sure a lot of that influence in what I eat now because I enjoy
00:30:40.480
it, say it's no hardship, it's filling. So it's, it's certainly a big component of, of the way I've
00:30:48.120
eaten now. It's a lesson I learned while in Greece. Well, then you look, explored French cuisine. And I
00:30:54.620
think there's even been books about this. Like, so the French cuisine is known to be very rich,
00:30:59.260
very tasty, and yet French tend to be not overweight. So how are the French able to eat this
00:31:06.920
like really rich, delicious food, but not gain weight like Americans? Yeah. If you look at the
00:31:13.120
facts, it just doesn't seem fair. I mean, these, these guys, they, they eat plenty of fat and it's
00:31:21.240
not all olive oil like the Greeks. They, they eat great cheeses. They eat, you know, whatever they
00:31:28.940
pretty much want. They don't ever diet. And yet their rates of heart attacks, strokes, and obesity
00:31:35.800
are a fraction of ours. And they're eating all this, this, you know, this stuff, you know, fried
00:31:43.100
in butter, heavy creams, so on and so forth, and wine, of course. And so it didn't seem fair.
00:31:50.860
But I know a French chef in the States here, well-known television chef named Jacques Pepin.
00:31:56.440
And he, I went to talk to him about it. And he's, he was a good example. Here's a man,
00:32:00.800
he's in his eighties. He eats everything pretty much. He's never been on a diet. He's, he's a
00:32:07.200
professional cook and he's, he's maybe moderately overweight, but certainly nowhere near obese.
00:32:14.860
And so I sort of took eating lessons from him. You know, how do you do this? And, and the French
00:32:20.440
employ some, they're not really tricks because it's ingrained in their culture, but for us,
00:32:26.720
it'd be tricks. They take very, very small portions of everything. There's no, you know,
00:32:34.180
10 ounce rib steak on their plates. They take small portions of everything. They rarely go back for
00:32:42.660
seconds. They almost never snack between meals. And importantly, meals are meals. You don't find
00:32:50.120
the French eating on the run or dashing in, into a fast food place to grab a Hamburg and eat in the
00:32:57.800
car. They view meals and mealtime as kind of sacrosanct. You don't eat at your desk at work.
00:33:04.940
You go out with a group of, of friends, of, of colleagues. You sit down at a restaurant and have a
00:33:11.260
meal. So conviviality and community becomes part of eating. You're not just filling your face.
00:33:17.560
You're socializing. French go for quality foods over quantity, which does satisfy your hunger in
00:33:27.680
a better way. You know, you can eat a lot of junk food, a lot of calories of junk food and still feel
00:33:32.740
hungry. But if you're, if you're taking a very high quality French cheese and just have a nibble of
00:33:39.080
it, your, your senses are satisfied. And so what really what they do is they put the joy back in
00:33:46.520
eating, which is something that's really missing from almost every diet book I encountered that,
00:33:52.460
Hey, eating is a joyful experience. The table is, is a sacred place. Shock said to me, you know,
00:33:58.280
he said, people fall in love over the table. Wars are avoided over a table. It's a whole different
00:34:03.440
attitude toward, toward what food is and, and, and, and, and what eating means.
00:34:09.940
Were you able to incorporate some of those, that idea or that sense of food being joyful into your
00:34:17.720
I did. I did. I found it very easy to avoid snacking. I used to snack, but it was really just
00:34:24.640
almost unconscious. Didn't give much thought. I mean, I wasn't starving hungry, but I passed by the,
00:34:30.100
the fridge and grabbed something or stuck my hand in the cupboard and pulled out some peanuts or
00:34:35.420
something like that. So that helped keeping, you know, meals sacrificed as much as possible
00:34:42.680
helped. I find it doesn't take a lot of discipline, not to go back for seconds to take small, just be,
00:34:49.780
just as a little mindfulness, not discipline, not to head back for seconds automatically to take
00:34:56.120
smaller portions of good food. It's more expensive, but you eat less and you're more satisfied.
00:35:02.920
So after you did this, you know, world tour and looking, you're exploring diets here in America,
00:35:08.500
you actually wanted to explore, okay, like what works? Like what, do we have any record of people
00:35:13.020
who have lost weight and have kept it off? Because you said basically it's like 95% of people who go
00:35:18.160
on a diet, they'll, they'll lose weight, but they gain it back. But then you uncovered, there's actually
00:35:23.120
a scientific registry of people that some researchers keeping track of, of people who've lost at least 30
00:35:29.720
pounds and have kept it off for five and a half years. So tell us about this registry, who's keeping
00:35:34.400
it and what have they found about, you know, what these people who lose weight and keep it off, what
00:35:39.180
are they doing different from all the 95, 95% of Americans who lose weight and gain it back?
00:35:45.200
Yeah, it's, it's, there is actually such a place and it's got many, many tens of thousands of members,
00:35:51.660
surprisingly. I mean, the 95% gain it back, but that means there's 5% people out there who somehow
00:35:57.260
figured a way through it. And it's called the National Weight Loss Registry and professors
00:36:03.660
at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island oversee it. And then, like you said, to make it
00:36:10.540
into the registry, you have to lose 30 pounds and keep them off for a period of years. And there are
00:36:16.120
tens of thousands of people. And so what they've done, I mean, they started the registry back in the
00:36:22.020
90s because scientists, nutritionists weren't convinced that it was possible to lose weight
00:36:27.140
and keep it off. So the first, the initial purpose of the registry was let's see if there are people
00:36:31.880
who've done anybody out there who's done this. And sure enough, they found several thousand people who
00:36:38.040
did. And then they realized, Hey, we've got this, this group of people who are weight loss,
00:36:42.420
you know, proven weight loss experts. Let's, let's see what they did. Why, how, how, how did it succeed
00:36:48.540
for them? And here the secret, there's no secret. They all lost weight in slightly different ways.
00:36:57.500
Some would go to doctors and lose weight, you know, under clinical supervisions. Most of them did it on
00:37:02.800
their own. Some did it by eliminating certain things from their diet completely. Others cutting back.
00:37:10.060
It just basically any, they did everything. That's the message. The, the, the one take home is they did it
00:37:17.640
their way. Most of the time they failed a couple of times, but eventually they found out that to lose
00:37:24.560
weight, you don't follow a diet. You look to yourself and you do it your way. In other words,
00:37:31.200
you start with the way you eat now and see what things in your diet you can, you can cut back on,
00:37:38.600
maybe even quit whatever works for you and, and lose weight successfully. Almost none of, none of them
00:37:45.860
lost weight doing anything extreme, you know, going on nothing but keto or, or, or fasting diets or
00:37:54.560
anything like that. They all did it measured and, you know, it was successful, but what was successful
00:38:01.540
for one was not successful for the other. Each had to find their way, sort of the Frank Sinatra approach.
00:38:08.060
They had to do it their way. Right. And when they, when you do it your way, that what's, that's what
00:38:13.180
allows it to be sustainable. Like you're able to keep going for months, years, and able, able to
00:38:17.960
maintain that instead of doing that one-off diet where, yeah, you lose weight. And then like, I just
00:38:21.900
don't like this. And you stop and you gain the weight back. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you may eat
00:38:27.680
too much pizza and you may gain weight from that. But once you recognize, Hey, I eat too much pizza.
00:38:33.880
I eat it three times a week for lunch at the little restaurant down the street from my office.
00:38:39.560
You can say, well, I love pizza, but I'm going to have to cut that three times a week down to once
00:38:46.720
a week. Still have my pizza. It can get absurd. They have research subjects at the Brown medical
00:38:53.180
center, the Brown university medical center. They have research subjects who've lost 50 pounds by
00:38:58.520
shifting from full test beer to light beer. They still got their beer. I must've, they must've consumed a
00:39:06.640
lot of beer, but just that one little shift worked for them. Same thing with people who eat too much
00:39:13.000
junk, fast food, you know, just cutting back a little bit can work wonders. And so it, it led me
00:39:21.620
to believe the big problem here is you, you should not follow a diet. People say I'm following a diet.
00:39:27.080
That's wrong. That's got the cart before the horse. You should lead a diet. You shouldn't, I mean,
00:39:32.560
no one likes to be told what to eat, right? Nobody, nobody. Yeah. It's highly personal how we eat,
00:39:38.020
what we eat. You know, it's right up there with sex. No one, it's just too personal. Thank you.
00:39:42.600
I eat in a different way than you. My family eats in a different way than you. I don't want you
00:39:47.400
telling me that you have to have some sort of chopped salad every day for lunch. Sorry, no dice.
00:39:52.500
It's not my style. I don't want you saying you must give up eggs for breakfast. I love eggs. I
00:39:58.720
have a flock of hens. I wouldn't give those up for the, those eggs up for the world. So if you have
00:40:04.500
someone saying, I've discovered the perfect way to eat, you must follow my template. You can't do
00:40:10.660
that. That doesn't work. What you have to do is lead the diet and say, well, here's how I eat.
00:40:15.020
I'm the boss and here's where I might need to make some adjustments that I can sustain and that
00:40:23.000
will help me lose weight. You should start by looking at the, you know, these, there's three
00:40:29.980
things that I think everyone I talked to would agree with that are kind of big sins. So if you eat a lot
00:40:37.840
of sugar or sugary drinks or sugary snacks, you got to look, you know, that's a good place to cut
00:40:45.180
back. If you eat a lot of highly processed carbohydrates, the white flowers, the white
00:40:50.600
breads, the white rice, the, the, you know, grains that aren't whole, if you eat a lot of that good
00:40:57.340
place to start cutting back. And I hate to break the news, but, but alcohol might be a good area to
00:41:05.180
look at cutting back on. There's a lot of calories in alcohol, more than you think. And alcohol affects
00:41:10.840
you both your mentally and hormonally in ways that cause you to eat more, you know, so not only do you
00:41:17.960
get the calories from the drink, you eat more on days that you drink. It's again, scientifically
00:41:23.260
validated that people eat much more in addition to the alcohol. So you can look at areas like that
00:41:30.320
and see where there are things that, that you can, you can, you know, cut back on. You might not go from
00:41:35.860
regular beer to light beer, but maybe when you stop in at the pub, you only have one, or maybe that bag
00:41:43.540
of potato chips you have every so often is really not necessary. It's got a lot of calories. Do you need
00:41:49.420
that? And you can go through your own, your own diet and find out your own big sins and, and atone for
00:41:58.640
them. And then what happens is without effort, you start losing weight without effort, without
00:42:06.620
willpower, you start losing weight. So basically just find what works for you. Don't do extremes,
00:42:12.440
make small changes and basically just do something you like. We've actually had a psychologist on the
00:42:17.120
show to talk about the same thing with exercise. There's no one true exercise you need to do.
00:42:22.260
Basically her, what she found is find exercise you enjoy doing so that you'll keep doing it for as long
00:42:28.280
as possible. And if that's hiking or walking fine, if it's CrossFit, great, do that, but just do it
00:42:35.220
works for you. So it's sustainable. Exactly. It, you know, nothing is going to work ever if it's not
00:42:44.040
sustainable. And that's the same thing. These, um, these people in the weight control registry found
00:42:49.400
out that, that if it wasn't sustainable, they didn't lose weight that simple. So what have you settled
00:42:55.340
on after all this, you know, three-year experiment? Well, my big sin, it turned out was booze.
00:43:04.320
I mean, I wasn't by any means, uh, you know, uh, an extraordinarily heavy drinker. There was always
00:43:12.540
someone who drank more than I and was skinnier than I, which didn't seem fair at all. But I quickly
00:43:19.040
realized that, you know, my two glasses of wine or my couple of beers at the local brew pub added a
00:43:28.600
tremendous amount of calories. And I also realized that, and again, you might not be this way, but
00:43:34.960
I'm one of those people who finds it easier not to take the first drink of a day than not to take
00:43:41.360
the second and the third. You know, it's easy for me to say, forget it and not worry about counting how
00:43:45.500
many shots I've had or measuring out, um, you know, my cocktails. So I dropped that. And then
00:43:52.000
other things, I had this weird habit of, um, we have a little deli nearby here and you can get a
00:43:58.340
lunch sandwich there. And a few times a week I'd go out and do that. And the sandwich came with a
00:44:03.720
bag of chips, the same price. And then I looked and those chips were like 400 calories. And I, I
00:44:10.200
didn't, I didn't need that at all. I didn't want it. I didn't need it. I took it. I'd munched them out of
00:44:15.040
habit. So, so that was one other thing that I was able to drop. I certainly took up what I learned
00:44:22.580
in Greece. And now we have several meals a week where there's not a scrap of meat, you know,
00:44:29.460
thoroughly satisfying meals, vegetarian chilies, ratatouille, um, stews of eggplant and things like
00:44:36.300
that, that we learned in Greece. And so I'm, I'm eliminating a lot of calories that way, a lot of
00:44:42.000
meat. I, I certainly try for the very best food I can buy and smaller quantities of that. I go for
00:44:51.380
pastured pork, very expensive, but very tasty. And like I said, one chop will more than satisfy you
00:44:58.860
instead of two, the same with grass fed beef. I was able to deal with snacking without too much pain.
00:45:06.260
And that's, that's the major, those are the major changes I made, but I really hasten to add,
00:45:13.180
that's not what's going to work for you. You're going to have to look into your own diet and where
00:45:19.200
you can make changes. I'm, you know, I'm very lucky. I don't have, I have whatever the opposite of a
00:45:24.360
sweet tooth is, but in Weight Watchers, there were a lot of people in my group that just did,
00:45:31.000
had to wage serious battle with sugar and sugar cravings and all of that. That was their sort of
00:45:38.260
big sin. I have a friend who lives in New York city in a neighborhood that is just blessed with
00:45:44.840
incredible pizza parlors. And he took to grabbing a slice of pizza every day as he, as he went out
00:45:50.880
for lunch. And by giving that up, you know, he lost a tremendous amount of weight and kept it off.
00:45:58.380
You know, another friend of mine simply limits herself to one glass of wine per day period. And
00:46:04.680
it's, it's worked. So like I say, everybody's going to take a different path, but you know,
00:46:11.100
if you're mindful and follow some very basic principles, you'll find where, where you can,
00:46:17.060
you can get the job done once and for all. And I imagine you've lost some weight since you adopted
00:46:23.220
your, the, the Barry Estabrook plan. Well, yes, I revisited that same doctor who gave me the kick
00:46:30.420
and the, you know, where to start this off. And my blood pressure had gone into a very healthy level
00:46:37.960
no, and without medication. So I was off medication that I'd been on for since the 1990s. My cholesterol
00:46:45.720
had settled into perfectly normal ranges gone from, you know, too high. And despite the fact that I'm,
00:46:52.300
you know, I was a notorious flunker on all these formal diets, I'd lost 26 pounds of the 40 pounds
00:47:01.980
that, that was my goal, 40 pounds. I will no longer be overweight as it is. I went from being obese to
00:47:09.260
being not obese at 26 pounds. And you know, I, I, I'm still losing. So I think I'm going to get
00:47:17.820
there. And another important thing is as my cholesterol and blood pressure shows, you don't
00:47:25.120
have to lose a ton of weight to get a big health benefit. 5% of your body weight, you can see some
00:47:32.260
remarkable health benefits according to the people at the weight control registry.
00:47:38.340
So you, you know, I, I've come to the conclusion that I, I'm never going to be a skinny man.
00:47:43.760
You know, you'd have to repeal some of Mendel's laws of genetics to, an inheritance to do that.
00:47:49.420
If you look at my family, the men in my family, we all err on the chunky side. So I'm going to be skinny,
00:47:56.420
but I think I can be much less heavy and much healthier and much more physically vigorous
00:48:06.300
than I was when I started out on this journey three years ago, four years ago now.
00:48:12.140
Well, Barry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:48:15.260
and your work? Well, the book is available through all of the, um, you know, the regular outlets,
00:48:22.400
Amazon independent stores, any place you normally would buy books, you would be able to obtain a
00:48:29.560
copy there. Fantastic. Well, Barry Esterbrook, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:33.840
It's been my pleasure. Thanks an awful lot. My guest today was Barry Esterbrook. He's the
00:48:38.820
author of the book. Just eat one reporter's quest for a weight loss regimen that works. It's available
00:48:42.600
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is
00:48:46.920
slash right diet. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:48:52.400
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:49:01.860
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00:49:05.460
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00:49:34.980
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