The Idiot Diet

Recently, America has been hit by the Atkins Low-Carbohydrate Diet. This is merely the latest version of the idiot diet. A sensible diet is the one your mother told you to eat: eat your fruits and vegetables, and lay off the junk food. The idiot diet “works” on the theory that if you eat only the “approved” foods, you can eat as much as you like and not gain weight. It can work, but only for a silly reason: the “approved” foods are so limited you lose interest in eating.

Let me make an analogy: suppose you spend too much money and desire financial help. The planner tells you can spend as much money as you like as long as you spend it on the approved things. When you find out what the things are on the approved list, you understand why you won’t overspend: you can only spend money on things you didn’t want. You can only visit places you really didn’t want to visit (East St. Louis, Jamshedpur, etc.), you can only buy a make of car you really don’t like, and you can only live in a house you don’t like. Basically it is like forcing yourself to live in the old U.S.S.R. in the middle of the U.S. Why would you want to do this?

One reason the idiot diet works is that it makes eating very inconvenient: you can never find the approved foods in the vending machines, or at your local restaurants. After restraurants and snack food makers hopped on the Atkin’s craze, a funny thing happened: the diet stopped working so well. It turns out you can easily gain weight by eating dozens of low-carb brownies a day, (who would have thought?). This gets back to the ideas I presented in my post on the Economics of Obesity: weight gain is largely a result of the low cost of pre-prepared food. You make it easier to overeat and obesity happens.

The key to weight loss and weight management is to understand that the daily calorie constraint is just like a budget constraint, and you have to spend this “money” wisely. You have to decide which foods are worth the caloric cost and which ones aren’t. I always avoid deep-fried foods, not because I don’t like them, but because I don’t like them enough to give up other foods I like. If I eat donuts, I cannot have chocolate. And we need to understand that we need to eat smaller portions of the foods we like, even it they are not really high fat. Over time, we might get used to eating too much food per meal, and calories are calories.