The Art of Manliness - What's the Most Sustainable Diet？

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.920 If you're someone who wants to lose weight, you've probably spent some time thinking about

00:00:14.140 and experimenting with different diets. Browse the literal shelves of bookstores or the metaphorical

00:00:18.740 ones of the internet, and you can find thousands of options to choose from, each with their ardent

00:00:22.460 fans and supposedly decisive rationales. But which diet really works best? And most importantly,

00:00:27.180 given that 95% of people who lose weight on a diet just gain it back, what is a plan that

00:00:31.800 as an average human can stick with for the long haul? My guest today is in a distinctively well-informed

00:00:36.040 position to comment on this question, having personally test-driven over a dozen diets in

00:00:40.180 three years. His name is Barry Estabrook, and he's an investigative journalist and the author of Just

00:00:44.320 Eat, One Reporter's Quest for a Weight Loss Regimen That Works. We begin our conversation with what

00:00:48.720 set Barry on his quest to find the best, most sustainable diet. We then get into the fact

00:00:52.620 that the ideas behind modern diets aren't new in the sometimes weird history of their predecessors.

00:00:56.740 From there, we turn to Barry's experiments with contemporary diets, including what happened

00:01:00.420 when he tried eating both a low-carb and low-fat diet, joining Weight Watchers, and figuring

00:01:05.160 out what he can learn from the eating habits of the Greeks and French. We end our conversation

00:01:08.840 with what Barry ultimately changed about his own diet to successfully drop the pounds, and

00:01:12.460 what he discovered as to what really works best for sustainable weight loss. After the show

00:01:16.680 is over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash right diet.

00:01:26.740 Barry Estabrook, welcome to the show.

00:01:34.060 Well, thank you for having me.

00:01:35.540 So you got a book out called Just Eat, One Reporter's Quest for a Weight Loss Regimen That

00:01:40.740 Works. And so you, you made yourself a guinea pig and tried all the diets that are out there

00:01:47.320 because you needed to lose some weight. What kick-started you trying all these popular weight

00:01:51.680 loss programs out there? 0.64

00:01:53.680 Well, I guess you could say it was probably a kick in the rear end from my doctor, verbally

00:01:58.720 speaking. He sort of, in his quiet way, read me the riot act. I had very high cholesterol

00:02:06.140 levels. I had very high blood pressure. And he said, Barry, I can't give you any more meds.

00:02:13.400 You're maxed out. The maximum amount I can, I'm allowed to give. And about the only thing

00:02:19.280 you can do if you want to get these two factors, both of which are, you know, signs that you're

00:02:24.780 headed for a heart attack. If you want to get them down, you're going to have to lose

00:02:28.020 weight. And it so happens that I do have a history of cardiovascular disease in the

00:02:34.640 family. Most of the men in my family have, uh, have eventually died from it. And I wasn't

00:02:40.120 quite ready to continue that tradition. So for the first time in my life, you know, I was

00:02:45.640 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

00:02:52.180 and not just a diet. You went on multiple diets, try them out.

00:02:56.220 Well, right. I eventually, I, first of all, I went on a diet. It was the fad diet du jour. It was 0.75

00:03:01.800 called whole 30 and everyone I knew seemed to be on it a few years ago. And so I, I just went on it

00:03:08.960 because Hey, that was, that was what everyone was doing. It was a stupid thing to do because 1.00

00:03:16.300 what I did was I suffered for 30 days deprivation. I proudly dropped 13 pounds 0.99

00:03:24.540 and then almost instantly gained them all back. So that, that got me thinking, you know, I'm supposed

00:03:31.860 to be an investigative journalist who covers food, food, you know, all, all aspects of food and food

00:03:38.040 production. And I'd gone and done the very thing that I sort of encourage my readers not to do.

00:03:46.420 I went on a diet without thinking, without understanding, just, just because, you know,

00:03:53.180 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

00:03:58.400 up a bag of yellow onions at the supermarket. And here, you know, I was affecting my health,

00:04:03.820 could be damaging my health. I had no, I had no idea of why the diet worked or didn't work,

00:04:10.920 who the people were who were espousing this diet, what were their qualifications and what

00:04:17.120 medically inside me was happening according to experts. So I decided that I would simply,

00:04:23.460 you know, apply my journalistic training, which suggested that I go on these various diets that

00:04:29.840 are out there. I ended up going on about 12 or 13 of them over a course of three years. And then I

00:04:35.760 would interview the people who, who created them if they were still around. And I would interview

00:04:40.480 leading nutritionists and, and medical doctors and find out what was happening to me. Why was I

00:04:47.880 taking risks? And ultimately, personally, I would find out is, Hey, can you, can you live this way?

00:04:55.200 I mean, the best diet is no good if you can't stick to it. So it was, those were, that's,

00:05:01.460 so I embarked on this three-year program of trying, trying any diet that was out there to see what

00:05:07.560 would happen and then trying to understand the science behind it. And so, as you said,

00:05:13.400 there's a lot of options for people to choose from. If someone is in your shoes and they need to lose

00:05:17.760 weight, they just go online, they just go to the bookstore and they're going to find different types of

00:05:23.220 diets. There's, you know, the whole 30 that you did, there's cleanse diets, there's paleo, there's

00:05:27.800 low carb, low fat. And you think this is a modern phenomenon, but you actually, you do like a

00:05:33.620 historical survey and saying these different options for Americans in particular, they've been

00:05:39.200 around, it's been around for centuries. So like in your research, like what's the earliest known diet

00:05:44.940 book that you came across in your research?

00:05:47.480 A fellow named William Banting, who was a British undertaker of all professions, is credited with,

00:05:55.420 with really the first diet book per se. You might call it a diet booklet. It was maybe 30 pages long

00:06:02.820 and it was called A Letter on Corpulence and it was published in the 1850s, mid 1800s. And he's

00:06:11.500 generally credited with the first actual diet book. I mean, people have been writing about diets since

00:06:16.960 ancient Greece, but he's sort of the father of, of what became this industry of diets and diet books

00:06:23.980 that we, we live in today. He was a, like I say, an undertaker. He was five feet tall. He weighed well

00:06:31.960 over 200 pounds. He'd gotten to the point where he couldn't tie his shoes. He couldn't climb stairs or

00:06:40.080 descend stairs. He said he couldn't take care of all the personal niceties, whatever that is. I don't want to

00:06:46.760 think about it. And so he, he started eating eventually after trying everything, according

00:06:52.780 to the instructions of a doctor who suggested that basically he stopped eating plain carbohydrates.

00:07:01.400 He ate very few carbohydrates at all. He went on a pretty much a meat diet. And within a year,

00:07:11.580 he had lost 46 pounds. He could do all those things he couldn't do before. He's, and he lived for another

00:07:18.840 20 odd years until he was in his eighties and never put a pound back on. And so he wrote this pamphlet

00:07:25.260 to show others how he did that.

00:07:28.100 Yeah. And he's like the father of the low carb diet. And it was such a,

00:07:31.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:07:31.940 Yeah. And it was such a phenomenon. Like it was such a thing that people called it when they said they

00:07:36.080 were going to go on a diet, they'd say, I'm banting. Like his name became a verb.

00:07:41.540 Yeah, it did. You know, I'm banting. I'm going on a bant. I need to bant. It actually entered the

00:07:47.720 language for, for a period of time.

00:07:51.280 And then around the same time, a little bit later, you had the origins of the low fat kind of high carb

00:07:58.460 diet with, it started kind of with the temperance movement in America and the gram kind of kickstarted

00:08:04.840 tell us about that.

00:08:05.840 Well, Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian preacher originally, you know, a very stern

00:08:12.400 religious man. And he left that career to become a lecturer on all forms of temperance. And he then

00:08:23.500 focused in on diet. And he basically thought that anything, anything a normal person would enjoy

00:08:31.460 was sinful. And, you know, it led to, he was very concerned about men's libido. And, you know,

00:08:45.680 he said such a diet increased libido, which was bad and led to masturbation and on and on. 0.93

00:08:52.840 And it was a quasi-religion. But, but it was this, it became very popular, you know, restaurants would 0.57

00:09:00.060 serve graham fare. We know him today. He survives in the grocery store as graham crackers. Although I

00:09:09.160 think he'd probably be shocked about the amount of sugar in the modern graham cracker. But, you know, he

00:09:14.620 became very influential. And yeah, preaching the exact opposite from, you know, banting who had come a few

00:09:21.580 years prior. Besides those kind of genres, you also highlight along the way, there's been all

00:09:27.400 these different weird fad diets in American history. What are some of like the weirdest ones 0.91

00:09:31.940 you came across? Oh, God. There was a big craze started in the early part of this century of these

00:09:39.580 two ingredient diets, I guess you'd call them. You know, for a diet where all you would eat was

00:09:46.040 bananas and skim milk. You'd eat about a half a dozen bananas a day and a few glasses of skim

00:09:52.040 milk. That's it. And that was, it became very popular, surprisingly. And so, you know, it inspired

00:09:57.120 a host of imitators. So you could go on a diet allowing only tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs.

00:10:03.340 Or if you didn't like that, how about pineapple and lamb chops? Nothing more. Or baked potatoes and

00:10:09.800 buttermilk, nothing more. And, you know, they, people did lose weight because if you're eating

00:10:16.500 nothing but pineapples and buttermilk, there's no way you can, you know, consume enough pineapple

00:10:21.620 and buttermilk to get the amount of calories you need in a day. So you'll start losing weight.

00:10:28.500 And another one that you highlight that was funny is fletcherizing. What is fletcherizing?

00:10:33.120 It's amazing. It was hugely popular in its day. I mean, you talk about there were presidents went

00:10:40.040 on it. Thomas Edison went on it. Proust went on it. All sorts of famous people went on it. The

00:10:47.400 legislatures actually suggested that all children be taught. And what fletcherizing or fletcher

00:10:54.060 suggested was that every bite be chewed rhythmically a hundred times a minute until there was no flavor

00:11:04.980 left in the food that you were chewing. And it was just a sloppy, you know, goop that you almost

00:11:11.320 couldn't help but swallow and just dysreflexively. And, you know, he had different amounts of chewing

00:11:17.800 required for say piece of bread, maybe 50 chews, something like an apple, several hundred. And it

00:11:26.080 became really popular. I mean, there were parties held in high society where people sat around the

00:11:31.420 table, not talking because they were so busy chewing constantly. He thought it would save the world,

00:11:38.700 save it from gluttony, end crime, you know, be a great economy because you've got all the nourishment

00:11:45.020 you possibly could out of the food. He even, he had a very peculiar fascination with excrement,

00:11:52.820 claiming that when you fletcherize, as it was called, your excrement contained no poisons, no,

00:11:58.900 no, nothing offensive in the least. He himself used the toilet for that purpose about every two weeks.

00:12:07.180 He was known to carry his own excrement around in his pocket if you doubted that it was inoffensive.

00:12:12.160 He said, it tasted, it was no more offensive than a biscuit, he said. You got to remember this guy,

00:12:18.980 you know, all these famous people, all these politicians worshipped him, basically. They

00:12:25.060 thought he had the answer. You got to, the thing about these weird historical diets is we need to

00:12:30.280 put them in perspective because it's something we don't have today when we say go on a keto diet,

00:12:35.960 that someday, maybe people will think it's as silly as, as Fletcherism or eating nothing but

00:12:41.340 bananas and skim milk. Right. Or those cleanse diets where you just, you drink cayenne pepper and 0.95

00:12:47.900 maple syrup or whatever. I did go on one of those. Yeah. How'd that go?

00:12:54.780 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

00:13:01.020 friendly podcast, but I, I lasted about four days. I had extreme digestive issues, diarrhea, no energy

00:13:10.620 after a few days, dizziness. And I finally quit just because I was worried that I was going to

00:13:18.460 injure myself. And yeah, I lost eight pounds in a week and instantly, instantly gained them all back.

00:13:25.580 Yeah. You probably lost a lot of just water weight and glycogen.

00:13:29.820 Yeah. That's exactly it. When you're, when you're, when you're getting absolutely, when you're very

00:13:34.740 hungry and you're getting absolutely no carbohydrates or very limited carbohydrates in your diet,

00:13:40.660 your body shifts from burning glucose, it's normal fuel, a sugar to burning glycogen. Like you said,

00:13:48.000 a compound that's made in the liver and glycogen's always comes attached to a couple of molecules of

00:13:55.880 water. So as you burn a molecule of glycogen, that water gets released and you, you excrete it.

00:14:03.200 So what you're, what you're doing is just, you know, excreting that water. And then the minute you

00:14:09.580 start to eat again, you're, you go back to burning glucose, stop burning glycogen and your liver goes

00:14:15.660 into overdrive to build back up its glycogen, which means it needs to start adding water back into the

00:14:21.140 whole system. So you're getting it right back. Gotcha. All right. So I think off the, like from

00:14:26.220 the top, you can, we can just dismiss these quack stuff like fletcherizing, cleanse diets, the two

00:14:32.160 food or single food diets. I remember when I was a kid growing up in like the eighties, nineties,

00:14:36.920 like grapefruit was the thing. It's like, you have to have a thing of grapefruit in the morning

00:14:40.440 and something else or rice cakes. That's not going to work. It's not sustainable. So basically

00:14:46.100 you say, if you look at all the diets out there, there, and we're excluding all the quack stuff. 1.00

00:14:51.160 There are basically three types. There's the low carb diets or bantinism. There's the low fat

00:14:57.820 kind of high carbohydrate. So we're talking about grains, whole vegetables, whole fruits that was

00:15:02.380 inspired by gram. And then the third one is you just, you don't even look at carbs or fat. You just

00:15:07.800 look at total calories that you consume. And if you burn more than you consume, you're going to lose

00:15:14.020 weight. Is that basically the three types of diets out there? Yeah. I think you can categorize almost

00:15:20.220 every diet and slip it into one of those slots. The key is people keep reinventing them, rebranding

00:15:27.400 them so that they sound new and exciting. If you get a good name and rebranded enough, you're going to

00:15:35.820 make a lot of money. Right. But that seems to be the secret. The same formula, the same everything,

00:15:43.040 just three different, these three different categories and they're still around. Yeah. So

00:15:47.760 you start off looking at the low fat kind of good, high, good carbohydrate diet. And the primary

00:15:54.120 predecessor here today from of grammarism, we'll call it, is a guy named Dean Ornish. So what's his diet

00:16:01.980 and what does the research say about what he recommends? Dean Ornish is a doctor. He now lives

00:16:08.160 in the San Francisco area. And he came up with a diet in the eighties that basically is strictly

00:16:15.740 vegetarian for all intents and purposes. And then on top of that, it's less than 10% fat. And that

00:16:24.260 includes fat from vegetable sources, olive oil, nuts, things like that. So it's a very, very low fat

00:16:32.560 vegetarian diet. He has done research and others have followed that shows that if you follow that

00:16:39.580 diet, you not only lose weight, but you can really improve your blood chemistry. Ornish says, although a

00:16:48.200 lot of people dispute him, that you can reverse heart disease, or certainly it won't keep getting

00:16:54.720 worse. He's got all of these stories about patients who couldn't walk across the street and finally

00:16:59.840 went on this program and all of a sudden could become moderately active again. And my finding

00:17:10.120 is, yeah, I lost weight, but I was constantly craving, craving a nice seared steak or a plate of eggs in

00:17:21.560 the morning. I became almost obsessive about that. So that type of diet is not something that I could

00:17:30.080 live with, even with the health benefits. Maybe if I was a cardiac cripple or something like that, 0.91

00:17:39.200 I would change. But it's just, there's no, there's no real love or a food or pleasure or sensual

00:17:46.900 pleasure. The whole thing that makes eating a joy to a lot of people. Yeah. And he's very adamant.

00:17:53.260 You have to be very strict with his diet. It's almost, it's like grammism, right? You have to like

00:17:56.940 stick with it religiously. You can't deviate at all. Right. I mean, it's, it's interesting you said

00:18:03.680 that because it is got religious, these, a lot of these diets have religious overtones, even though

00:18:09.140 they're completely secular, you know, it's, it's like you're, you've, you've joined a cult or a

00:18:15.200 church or something, a church of very low fat and there are sins and things like that. It's, it's a,

00:18:22.540 it's an interesting cultural phenomenon, but you're exactly right. So you, you did lose weight, but it

00:18:28.820 wasn't sustainable because the food just wasn't palatable. Like you just stopped enjoying food.

00:18:33.500 But the other thing you talk about too, is that it was a lot of work to make the food that lined up

00:18:39.900 with Ornish's diet. Like you'd spend hours, hours cooking meals. Exactly. And prepping them and

00:18:47.820 cooking them. And, and it would be great if you, if you have a personal, a personal chef on your

00:18:53.060 household's payroll, I suppose, but I don't happen to be in that position. So yeah, you know, I don't

00:18:59.080 have an hour to prepare lunch during the week. Sorry. And that's the type of thing that following

00:19:04.940 the recipes that he provides would require it. I'd be up in the kitchen, chopping, chopping,

00:19:09.480 chopping and, and mixing and, and, you know, sauteing in water instead of oil. And, you know,

00:19:16.460 sometimes all I want for lunch is a couple of nice slices of bread with a piece of meat in between

00:19:22.660 them and eat it and be done. All right. So, okay. Ornish's diet, you can lose weight on it,

00:19:29.920 but probably not sustainable for most people. You lost some weight, but I imagine you gained it back

00:19:33.940 after you stopped. I went on these 13 diets or so. And, you know, I hate to sound like a broken

00:19:40.680 record, but I was, I was a world champion at losing five to 10% of my weight on a diet. Never failed

00:19:50.840 and then gained it all back. And that makes me very typical. That happens to 95% of the people

00:19:57.780 who go on any diet, according to scientists. So, you know, it, it's, it's the pattern. And I think

00:20:03.820 we all know it, that when you go on a diet, you will lose weight. But as soon as you go off,

00:20:10.200 you're back to square one or even worse, even a little heavier. Right. No. Yeah. You typically

00:20:15.600 gain a little bit more weight. Okay. So after going, you know, visiting low fat kind of high

00:20:21.300 carb vegetarian diet land, you went over to the Banting side, the low carb, high fat type of diet.

00:20:29.540 So which ones did you experiment? Like, so there's all sorts of different types of low carb diet.

00:20:33.760 There's Atkins, there's paleo, there's South beach, there's keto. So which ones did you try out there?

00:20:42.200 I tried out keto and South beach. South beach is sort of, it's a milder, friendlier,

00:20:51.900 more healthful version of Atkins, who's really the founder of all these modern low carb diets. His

00:20:59.600 book, the Atkins diet revolution sort of set the modern phase of these diets in motion. And all the

00:21:06.940 diets that you mentioned, keto, paleo, South beach zone, they all, they all emerged from the original

00:21:14.360 work by Atkins, which, you know, basically unlimited amounts of fat and red meat. And, uh, in the early

00:21:23.480 stages, almost no carbohydrates, you could be living off nothing but T-bone steaks, three meals a day.

00:21:30.860 And that'd be fine with, with the early Atkins. Now since then, that's been modified. And then the

00:21:36.280 South beach is a, is a much more healthful, sustainable, distant cousin of, of the, uh, of

00:21:43.460 the Atkins diet. But yes, you're right. It stresses avoiding simple carbohydrates, white bread, white

00:21:51.600 rice, white, you know, anything pretty much other than cauliflower, I guess, but allows you to eat

00:21:59.180 lean meats in pretty much unlimited quantities. So I spent a while on that. I found it much easier

00:22:08.860 to follow than the ultra, ultra low fat diet. Did have some of the same issues with it.

00:22:15.600 Friend of mine went on it and she calls it the chop, chop diet. Cause again, you're at the cutting

00:22:21.540 board doing a lot of prep. You know, what are you going to have for lunch today? If you can't have

00:22:26.840 bread of any sort, but it was more tolerable. I thought, however, at the end it was the same

00:22:33.460 situation. I lost some weight and gained it all back.

00:22:36.840 Yeah. And again, I mean, maybe the sustainability there was the prep part was getting in the way.

00:22:41.300 And I think with all these diets. So like, I think a lot of people have gone on low carb diets and said,

00:22:45.520 Oh man, I've just lost. It's been the game changer. Right.

00:22:48.120 But I think what the research says is that pretty much like, even if you go on a low fat diet,

00:22:52.720 you're going to lose weight initially. Then it kind of, just like a low carb diet,

00:22:57.820 you'll lose weight initially. Then it starts slowing down. And then if you don't keep it going,

00:23:02.440 then you're hosed. You're going to gain it back.

00:23:05.020 Yeah. There's, there's actually been scientific, good scientific studies that say exactly that.

00:23:09.960 They say you can lose weight on low carb. You can lose weight on high carb. People do

00:23:16.900 same amount pretty much, but then gain it all back so that both diets, if you stick to them,

00:23:23.820 are going to give you the same result, which pretty much for most people is you end up back

00:23:28.660 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

00:23:40.620 mean, who doesn't like to eat meat and T-bone steaks and things like that, but still there's a lot of

00:23:46.900 prep there that can get in the way of making it sustainable. So after you tried the low carb

00:23:52.840 diets, you did the low fat diet, then you just tried to go, which is almost going to count calories.

00:23:58.600 And you did that by joining Weight Watchers now called WW, which I think is the worst rebranding

00:24:05.800 in the world. I still call it Weight Watchers. It's like, it's like a Kinko's being turned into 0.85

00:24:11.300 Fed. I still call it the FedEx store Kinko's. You're always going to be Kinko's. So Weight Watchers,

00:24:15.600 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

00:24:29.200 smart points. And really what they are, are to save you from figuring out the caloric value of,

00:24:35.820 of everything. It's a simplification of, they're basically calories or they're based on calories,

00:24:42.520 I should say. So you get a certain number of smart points per day and each food item costs a

00:24:48.520 certain number of points. And you try to keep below or at your limit of points per day. And to do that,

00:24:56.480 you attend weekly meetings with similarly overweight folks and you get a little pep talk and share.

00:25:04.940 And the idea is that that helps keep you motivated to stay on the program. And I was at first, I was a

00:25:12.840 champion. Yeah, I went in there and the first week I lost six pounds and I got a little star. It's sort

00:25:22.060 of childish, but they give you out these little gimmicks. So I got a little star given to me to

00:25:25.960 paste into a booklet that comes with your membership. And then the whole group, about 30 people,

00:25:32.040 gave me a round of applause. I didn't get that the second week because I only lost a pound.

00:25:40.500 And by the fourth week, I had lost a total of two pounds. So I'd come back up from my victory the

00:25:49.540 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 0.99

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 0.90

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 1.00

00:31:06.920 like really rich, delicious food, but not gain weight like Americans? Yeah. If you look at the 1.00

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

00:34:15.660 own diet?

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

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The Art of Manliness - June 09, 2021

What's the Most Sustainable Diet？

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