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The Diet That Shrinks Smarty Pants
Intellectuals and wonks have finally found their version of the Atkins: a diet complete with history, biology, psychology, and Harvard’s seal of approval.
America’s brainiacs are slimming down, and that might be because many of them are on the same diet—one that hasn’t been chatted up in the pages of Us Weekly, but has instead infiltrated the intellectual circuit. Call it the high-brow diet.
The creation of Susan Roberts, a professor of both nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University, the diet’s real name is the Instinct Diet, and it combines both areas of Roberts’ expertise in an attempt to retrain dieters’ brains. Perhaps it’s this neurological element that makes the diet appeal to highly intelligent people. It’s been endorsed by Kelly D. Brownell, the director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity; F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, professor of medicine at Columbia University; and Walter Willett, chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
“I’m a sweets fanatic,” says bestselling author Joseph Finder, “but I don’t crave them anymore because I’m reprogrammed.”
Roberts’ philosophy of eating tackles the two main reasons why dieters fail—hunger and deprivation—and is credited for expunging many calorie-heavy cravings. As for the reprogramming, the diet’s devotees say it recalibrates your tastebuds by introducing healthy food that tastes good. Instead of Pop-Tarts and mozzarella sticks, Instinct Dieters say they now crave baked apples with figs, Tuscan beans with olive oil and rosemary, and Tanzanian chicken kabobs.
Maria Lewis Kussmaul, co-founder and partner in the investment-banking group America’s Growth Capital, has lost 20 pounds on the diet and says her tastes have been drastically reoriented. “All that fried, really heavy, sauce-laden food just stopped looking appetizing,”
You won’t see Harvard faculty member turned bestselling author Joseph Finder trolling bakeries anymore, either.
“I’m a sweets fanatic,” says Finder, who’s also dropped 20 pounds since starting the diet on December 26. “But I don’t crave them anymore because I’m reprogrammed. As long as I’m able to buy Fiber One, vegetables, and yogurt, I’m fine.”
The old saw of dieting was calories in versus calories out. Roberts, however, focuses more on the former—the calories we consume. While she believes in exercise, Roberts doesn’t proselytize about it in her book because of what some studies have shown about the small effect of exercise on weight loss. She cites research that normally sedentary people who add an hour of exercise to their daily schedule might be able to lose about six pounds of body fat, which she considers a nominal amount.
The Instinct Diet functions at the nexus of biology, psychology, history, and nutrition, and deals with the sine qua non of successful dieting—we don’t want to feel deprived and we don’t want to feel hungry. Using her background as a foodie and her philosophy that a diet must address our five basic food instincts—hunger, availability, calorie density, familiarity, and variety—Roberts’ dieting program is focused on reprogramming hunger away from the needs of our early ancestors (who ate whatever they could get, whenever they could get it) and toward the reality of modern life (the constant availability of tasty, fatty foods). In this way, the diet addresses the fact that feeling satiated is a complex brain function, and that food instincts are really just an outdated survival mechanism that makes us fat. This is the Instinct Diet’s Darwinian element—helping us evolve to meet the reality of supermarket aisles packed with 36 varieties of cookies.
“I’ve done a lot of research, and [the Instinct Diet] is the most scientifically based diet out there,” says Finder, who tried South Beach and Atkins and felt deprived on both of them. He compares people on the Instinct Diet to early adopters of new sophisticated technologies.
Venerated literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who was told about the diet by his fiance, Angela De Leon, a PhD student in the nutritional biology department at UC-Davis, concedes his new lunches may not be quite as pleasurable as the Indian buffet at The Bombay Club, but he likes the diet’s scientific approach. “My caloric intake is based on my resting metabolic rate, so I know that my diet is supplying fewer calories than my body needs,” says Gates, who’s also the director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. So far, he’s lost 10 pounds on the Instinct Diet.
It’s not a diet for the kitchen-shy. Roberts was a bistro chef in France, and her program bears no resemblance to Jenny Craig or Lean Cuisine. Cooking for oneself is so instrumental to the Instinct Diet that Gates hired a personal chef to make foods like “I” Diet Soda Bread—the 72-calorie bread (per slice) that Instinct dieters say is delicious by non-diet-food standards.
Nor is this a diet of austerity or one that requires the tenacity of a pre-med student. “The margin of error on this diet is very high,” says Roberts. “If you follow the diet really carefully, you can lose about three pounds a week, but if you only follow the diet half the time, you are still losing a pound a half a week, which is a big amount of weight.”
Roberts is her own best pupil. Overweight as a child, she has been able to keep her weight stable for 15 years, and not by eating celery sticks. “I went down to New Orleans to receive an award for being a creative force in nutrition, and rest assured, I was not eating Fiber One that weekend.”
Hannah Seligson is a journalist and the author of New Girl on the Job: Advice From the Trenches. Her second book, A Little Bit Married, will be published by De Capo this spring. Her Web site is www.hannahseligson.com
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If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Overweight people are addicts. Addicts will try every trick in the book to keep using, so anyone who promises a new way that still allows them to keep using will appeal to them. Just as an alcoholic cannot have any alcohol without having an overpowering craving for more, food addicts cannot eat sugars and refined carbohydrates without overeating them. The solution is to eliminate them. I haven't eaten sugar for over 24 years or white flour for 15. I maintain a healthy weight effortlessly. I don't feel deprived and I don't go hungry. Once you go through withdrawal (which only takes a couple of weeks), you don't miss it any more. Try it! You'll be amazed!
Concordian, I appreciate your thoughts but you paint with a broad brush. Not all overweight people are food addicts who cannot eat any sugar or refined carbohydrates. I know plenty of people who have lost weight by modifying their eating habits - while not completely eliminating sugar or refined carbohydrates. I'm glad it's worked for you but it's not necessary for everyone.
congratulations on being someone who can process calories more efficiently. a lot of people who are overweight aren't food addicts, they either don't have the option of eating well (due to cost/time constraints, etc) or they don't get enough exercise. some people just retain fat easier than others.
i'm sure there are people in your life that eat whatever they want and are thin as boards... they don't do anything different. all i'm saying is there are lots of different reasons why people gain weight...its not just because they love snickers too much.
And, truly, what is the specific relevance to this article? It would be one thing to soapbox at will, but I don't see where you're tying what you have to say to the specific content of this article.
Concordian,
While you may have a food addiction, not all over weight people are addicted to food. Many are poor people who can only afford to eat the generally unhealthy foods given out by charities and food banks: refined sugar, white bread, white pasta, white rice -- all the foods you eschew.
Because of the lack of choice in their diets, poor people are often overweight -- and as a result suffer the stigma and unexamined assumptions of persons such as yourself.
What a truly obtuse generalization you make about folks who are overweight. Why don't you educate yourself a little? To quote you: Try it! You'll be amazed!!
Everyone's points are well taken, and please let me add a few more of my own:
Find me one normal person in the entire world with good exercise and eating habits who is truly overweight. Television and the movies are full of thin actors and actresses playing thin people who eat like overweight people. They then go on talk shows and say they're just one of those lucky people who can eat whatever they want. It's make believe. There may be very rare exceptions, but it's overwhelmingly about our practices.
Concordian,
Are you willing to modify your position? -- that overweight people are [all] addicts?
I'm an aged chef (French) who talks about nutrition and diet on Air America. I am in agreement with eliminating carbos from the diet. I avoid them. There are so many more healthy, wonderful foods to replace them with. The key is learn how to cook well in a way that brings out the flavor of those things that ordinarily would become bland and tedious over time. Variety, the French concept of 'equilibre', and a new mindset towards eating are the key to good nutrition and good health. Once in the groove, you'll never go back. And introducing red wine (moderation) into ones diet is crucial to maintaining a healthy heart and plaque-free arteries. I am a man of little discipline who gobbles salt by the pound, but over time I've been able to settle into a rhythm of eating (6' 1" 175, 112 / 58 at 70) that is both exciting and nourishing. There is a way to do it.
I went from lifetime skinny athlete to huge in six months. How? Horrendously inappropriate, dangerous drugs which were also horrendously expensive.
Big Pharma is like Big Tobacco. They don't care what they do to people as long as they make lots of money. And there's lots of fat people with no clue what a medication may be doing to them.
So keep the preaching to yourself, Concordian. Ditching white flour meant ditching a lot of pastry and such probably- you just don't want to look at the real changes.
I have to agree with part of Concordian's experience. I stopped eating refined sugar and white flour and lost all of my excess weight. It kind of fell off. I think that some people are addicted to these things, perhaps people who genetically predisposed to alcohol (the family gene pool). Why is it that some people can leave half a piece of cake on a plate and others need to eat the whole cake?
I think the word addict is misused a lot too.
Of course people leave half a piece of cake for many reasons, maybe they are full, maybe the don't like it. Maybe they are not that hungry. I never eat desert.
This article is useless. You failed to answet the basic question: what exactly are the fundamentals of this diet?
You forget there are books to sell. This is 'editorial content as a commercial'.
Veronicaxy is correct that this was a bit of an advertisment, but that said I think the principles were reasonably clear: stick to well prepared healthy food that tastes good and you'll find it easier to avoid cheap fattening food. As with any diet, its not exactly revolutionary. Recent research has shown that all diets work. The key is how long you can stay on a diet and it make sense that a diet that focuses on things tasting really good will be easier to maintain.
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I only recently started looking into this diet (I'm in a health care related field--I research all new diets).
Best tip: Breathe through your mouth when passing a bakery, pizzeria, etc., so the scent doesn't trigger cravings.
Oh, please! How smart can these brainiacs really be? They should put away the traumatized dead animals and all their secretions and go vegan. That way they'll be healthy, slender, green, and savvy.
I travel too much to go vegan or have any special diet. Common-sense healthy eating habits work anywhere. I was vegan for 1 month in university. I won the bet.
OK, interesting, now please, what is the diet? Counting calories with a new name?
I started counting calories just before the new year and I am slowly losing weight and I LOVE my new way of eating. It doesn't feel like a diet at all. It is just a sensible approach to choosing foods.
I have budget of a certain number of calories. Do I want to blow my whole budget on a high-fat, high-calorie muffin in the morning? Absolutely not. I have found low-calorie substitutes that I am very happy with. I start every day with steel-cut oatmeal (sweetened with Splenda, so as not to raise my blood sugar and cause hunger). Soups and salads are the key for lunchtime. At night I eat a light dinner. Snacks are frozen fruit bars (80 cal.), Trader Joe's chocolate meringues (120 cals. per 13). It is doable, but the article is right, it is helpful to be a good cook.
In my experience, exercise makes me more hungry, so I don't strive to do much of it. I have a 15 minute workout in the morning-- my goal is Michelle Obama arms!
But call it Instinct or calorie counting, it is great and it works!!!
Where is your protein? are you a vegetarian. Don't skimp on exercise because it makes you hungry - that means you are burning calories. If you want Michelle Obama arms - you have to feed your muscles.
I didn't say I don't eat protein. Soups and salads can contain meats, beans, rice as well as vegetables and water. I eat meat at dinner often. I skimp on exercise because I hate it and have bad knees. But that's just me. Exercise burns some calories, but not as much as most people wish, AND it makes you hungry afterwards.
But my main point is that counting calories works wonders, and that seems to be what the Instinct diet is really about when all is said and done.
Muscles/health is more important than weight. If you're musclebound and can lift things, nobody cares how much you weigh. And if they do...well, you're musclebound and can lift things. I hate the weakly thin.
By the way, I'm not particularly musclebound, but I'm working on it.
You had me at baked apples and figs...
Me too! Baked apples and figs, yum.
The bottom line is eat tasty and healthy foods that are good for you in moderation. Plus, take a walk or two while you're at it.
My rule of thumb besides being active as much as possible is to make sure the distance from garden to plate is very short for all things. Of course I violate that rule all the time but I come back to it.
Exercise is the best thing we can do for our bodies. Regardless if it aids dieting (I think it does) a body looks better if it has muscle.
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i thought this was going to be interesting. false.
This sounds like a common sense diet. I think I accidentally started following it on my own while living in Japan, which blasted my previous sedentary fast-food diet to smithereens with walking and access to cheap vegetables. Now I still eat meat, but I go for lean meats and add vegetables. I'm not a foodie, though.
My father was lean, muscled and ripped his entire life, and he lived to eighty. My mother died at eighty-five, never having lost her near-perfect "figure" ( as it used to be called). Neither of them exercised much, but they ate and drank only moderately. In contrast, I hit the gym three days a week and am cycling, swimming or playing tennis the other two, have followed a low-carb diet for twenty years and down twenty vitamin pills a day. I look better than 95% of the guys in my gym, most of them alot younger, but I don't look that much better than my parents did at my age, particularly considering the effort I put into it. Genetics play a huge role. Some of us just lucked out, others didn't.
Harvard Yale.... So who paid HARVARD or YALE for this study? Does anyone really respect an Ivy league school after BUSH.
I would find it more trust worthy if the Girl Scouts did the study.
Cut out all prepared food especially anything with MSG. and drink water instead of soda. JUST SAY NO. Mostly respect yourself..
Aww, I like MSG.
So many people are commenting that exercise makes them hungry. That's not my experience at all. Exercise suppresses my appetite. I thought that was the common reaction.
Skip Gates has a fiance? A grad student? What? So disappointing...
It seems most people aren't addressing the glaring snobbery of this advertisement. This is a diet designed for people with time to cook, and the money to hire private chefs. For the majority of people this is simply not an attainable reality.
And further, by claiming this is the "intelligent" diet, are we implying that people who are unable to adhere to it are somehow not "intelligent"? It would be less unfair to claim it as the "independently wealthy" diet instead of insulting all of those who are unable to contort their lives to its (only vaguely mentioned) standards.
Thank you Tyus!
Finally, a critical perspective tied to class analysis.
Please keep writing.
I don't have time to cook. Between work and commute time my days are 11 hours long. I come home and throw something reasonably healthy together for my mom and myself. The trick is to buy healthy ingredients and learn to love steamed broccoli you cook in a microwave. Throw some Mrs Dash on it. You have to learn the fine art of leftovers too - cook alot of rice on Sunday and use it a couple times during the week. I ask you, what is so snobby about a baked apple with a fig? You could make that in a campfire.
Insulin -> Fat
Insulin = Fat
How is it that I can eat breadstick upon breadstick at Olive Garden (in perpetuity), when after one dumb palm-sized chuck eye steak I yield?
I find it interesting that people have overlooked the snobbery of this advertisement. It seems that this diet is designed for those who have the free time to spend a little more of their energy in the kitchen, or the money to hire a personal chef. Unfortunately this is simply not the reality for most people.
Further, by claiming this as the "intelligent" diet, is there some assertion that people who cannot adhere to it are not "intelligent"? It would be more honest and less insulting to simply call it the "independently-wealthy" diet, as opposed to calling the lower income folks who may find it more difficult to follow the (vaguely mentioned) strictures of this "new" weight loss concept stupid.
If I had a personal chef cooking for me, I'd lose weight too. I'm a single guy in New York City and I hate cooking for one. It's boring and time-consuming. Who are these people who grow their own organic food/shop daily for fresh produce and spend hours in the kitchen? Do they not sleep? I, on the other hand, have to work for a living.
I cook for myself, but I only have time for it now that I'm unemployed. I guess I can't have everything.
What I don't see mentioned here is the emotional component, especially stress, which very often leads to over-eating, and I am not talking about over-indulging in carrot sticks. Many of us insist that if only we had a personal chef to make us healthy, delicious food, or if only we could afford a personal trainer then it would be so much easier to get and stay slender. And yet look at Oprah, who is wealthier than God and can certainly afford chefs and trainers; she has admitted often that when she is stressed she reaches for her favorite food. Quite often it's not so much what you are eating but what is eating you. And since we live in an era of such abundance, it is very difficult to resist comforting oneself with food. Haven't we all been there?
It's only "difficult to resist comforting oneself with food," if you have enough food. Many people in the States live in poverty and don't have the luxury of comforting themselves with food. They have to make choices like paying the rent or utilities and putting food on the table for their children. Often, poor adults will skip meals in order that their children may eat.
Ironically, this skipping meals thing, doesn't necessarily lead to weight loss. In cases like this, the body goes into starvation mode and hangs onto fat. As a result, you will see poor adults who are overweight. It doesn't help that the food poor people can afford are often loaded with sugar, trans fat, and chemicals.
Some communities have started community kitchens: programs where poor people can pool their food money, buy nutritional food in bulk, and then come together to cook healthier meals. Meals are made in big batches and folks take them home and freeze them. Food banks are also becoming more aware of, asking for and collecting foods that have a higher nutritional value than the typical staples more well off people contribute to food banks -- pasta and rice.
May I suggest, that if you are concerned about whether or not folks in your community are properly nourished, spend some time at your local food bank. Lend a hand. See what goes on. Work to educate folks about the issues of food security. In other words: Look up from the weigh scale and see the world around you.
"...Cooking for oneself is so instrumental to the Instinct Diet that Gates hired a personal chef......"
Dieting out of both sides of her mouth?
Well to do people and expensive food. I want to see this woman do this diet for four on $60k a year in Wal Mart. Both spouses have exhausting jobs, one has two. So she's going to bake bread instead of sleep?
Yeah, right. What BS.
Oh, and fit people have a higher metabolic resting rate because muscle eats fat. Exercise does help. I bet this is just Sugar Busters recycled.
I think being fat or skinny has to do with surplus calories, so you have to know how you burn to maintain your healthy weight, and have that as your goal.
I think having to rely on charity to live takes away choices for sure, and obviously does damage to your future expectations, so people let themselves go if they give up ad stop caring or believing in luck or god or positive probabilities or whatever you want to call it.
I agree with respecting yourself, and of course people jump on the bandwagon to destroy another self esteem to save them from "narcissism". All of these articles seem to have a similar tone.
Thank you.
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