That’s the bit I don’t get about these crazy diets. Why put yourself through purgatory? Why not just eat a proper diet that’s inherently unlikely to make you fat? The changes required are quite minimal and you can keep it going for, like, forever. It seems like some people just enjoy making themselves suffer, as if they think they should be punished for being fat.
I have an acquaintance who’s endlessly going on diets of her own invention, mostly completely ridiculous. Predictably enough she either gets fatter or loses nothing. If you can’t eat your cabbage diet forever then it’s pointless, because six months later you’ll be fat again on your “normal” diet.
It took me a long time to figure this out. The mythology is very pervasive: even the scientific research has only recently validated this idea.
No, it doesn’t. It’s complete and utter rubbish invented by people who failed high-school biology and physics. For 50 years that “energy balance” nonsense has caused endless misery and suffering. It appalls me that a science teacher, of all people, should be perpetuating this myth. It’s true enough that if you consistently under-eat (ie., starve yourself) you will lose weight, but it’s inefficient, it hurts, you will either lose muscle mass or have trouble gaining it, and you will plateau at a (relatively) high BMI … as in fact Cisna appears to have done: the guy looks like shit in that ‘after’ picture.
Anyway, the vast majority of people simply can’t starve themselves because it doesn’t feel nice. Statistically, only about 3% of low-calorie fans manage to keep it up long-term, and for many people it doesn’t work even when they stick to it religiously: genetic variation is a big factor in how well it works.
I realise that Cisna is not suggesting that people should eat McDonalds all the time, but it seems to me that McDonalds are cynically spinning his experiment to ensure that people keep eating crap so that they can keep making profits.
You really don’t need to do this. You’re from the Philippines, right? Just ditch the rice at breakfast, lunch and dinner and stick with the extra veggies. Eat lechon and crispy pata if you want to - you need that fat for energy and for various other metabolic essentials.
50-60% of middle-aged Filipinos are diabetic or overweight because they’re endlessly eating rice. There’s nothing wrong with rice in moderation, but the way Filipinos eat it is like drinking water from a fire hose. It really annoys me that little kids are taught to eat this way in school, so they never question it.
