Can stealing scientific discoveries outside the diet industry help you lose weight?
The science archives are full of hidden weight loss gems that no one seems to know about. In Grand Theft Weight Loss, health writer Michael Alvear pores over hundreds of peer-reviewed studies by leading neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and behavioral psychologists, ‘steals’ the most important ones and shows us how they can be used to quit sugar, stop overeating, and eliminate unhealthy cravings.
Evidence-based Strategies from Disciplines Outside of the Diet Industry Can Help You Finally Break the Weight Loss Code.
No more yo-yo dieting, no more endless cravings, no more restrictive eating plans.
Instead you can rely on concrete, specific, evidence-based strategies discovered in disciplines outside of the dieting industry to…
Cut your hunger in half using a neuroscientist’s discovery of The Meal Recall Effect.
* Quit sugar using a behavioral psychologist’s prize-winning research on addictions.
* Eat smaller portions using a psychophysicist’s breakthrough research on the brain’s visual cortex.
* Develop cravings for fruits and vegetables with the help of a physiologist’s pioneering work on habituation.
* Manage your cravings for unhealthy food with a social psychologist’s trailblazing work on delayed gratification.
Can stealing scientific discoveries outside the diet industry help you lose weight?
The science archives are full of hidden weight loss gems that no one seems to know about. In Grand Theft Weight Loss, health writer Michael Alvear pores over hundreds of peer-reviewed studies by leading neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and behavioral psychologists, ‘steals’ the most important ones and shows us how they can be used to quit sugar, stop overeating, and eliminate unhealthy cravings.
Evidence-based Strategies from Disciplines Outside of the Diet Industry Can Help You Finally Break the Weight Loss Code.
No more yo-yo dieting, no more endless cravings, no more restrictive eating plans.
Instead you can rely on concrete, specific, evidence-based strategies discovered in disciplines outside of the dieting industry to…
Cut your hunger in half using a neuroscientist’s discovery of The Meal Recall Effect.
* Quit sugar using a behavioral psychologist’s prize-winning research on addictions.
* Eat smaller portions using a psychophysicist’s breakthrough research on the brain’s visual cortex.
* Develop cravings for fruits and vegetables with the help of a physiologist’s pioneering work on habituation.
* Manage your cravings for unhealthy food with a social psychologist’s trailblazing work on delayed gratification.
It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.
—Jean-Luc Godard
“Somebody else has solved your problem.”
This is the unofficial slogan in the small but growing field of cross-industry innovation experts. It’s the belief that somebody somewhere has solved a similar problem and your job is to leap over your industry’s calcified mindset, find out who did it, draw analogies, transfer the approach, and adapt it to your needs.
Hotels didn’t come up with Airbnb, taxis didn’t invent Lyft, and bookstores didn’t envision Amazon. Candlemakers didn’t produce the lightbulb, carriage manufacturers didn’t create autos and the post office didn’t invent email.
Orthodoxy doesn’t produce disruptive innovations. After decades of writing about health for WebMD, Salon.com and The New York Times I can tell you there’s nothing but orthodoxy running through the diet industry.
The diet doctors, weight loss authors, medical academies, and research institutions that make up the diet weight loss industrial complex look only to each other for inspiration. Thus, they end up copycatting ideas with the same massive failure rate. Depending on which of the last three systematic reviews of dieting studies you believe in, the failure rate is 80%, 90% or 95%.
Clearly, the dieting industry is not going to innovate weight loss. For that, we must do what many business leaders, scientists and medical professionals do—look outside of their industries for inspiration.
Start With A Question
How do we even begin searching for, identifying, and then applying cross-industry innovations to weight loss? I asked several innovation experts and they all gave me the same answer: You start by asking what problem you’re trying to solve.
Conventional thinkers in Diet World roll their eyes whenever I mention this. “Isn’t it obvious?” They say pedantically. “We’re eating food that makes us fat! We make the wrong choices! We’re ignorant of what’s healthy and what’s not!”
Because orthodoxy has defined the problem as faulty decision-making born out of ignorance, it is obsessed, fixated, on educating us. That’s why almost every book answers some form of this question: Which foods make us fat and which ones make us healthy?
Each year this orthodoxy produces a firehose of new diet books that sprays the public with contradictions. Fat makes us fat. No, sugar makes us fat. Actually, it’s carbs. Screw it, eat Keto. No, go vegan. Watch out for wheat! Try Atkins. No, Mediterranean!
Every diet book is a different version of “eat this not that.” Noting dieting’s massive 80-95% failure rate, the innovation experts I talked to say the orthodoxy in weight loss is making a classic mistake: It’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
Meaning, we can’t get to our destination (an innovative weight loss solution) if we’re perched on the same hill (the current perception that a lack of knowledge is the cause of our weight problem).
“How do we find a new perch?” I asked one expert. “Ask different questions,” she said, referring to an Albert Einstein quote favored by cross-industry specialists:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes to determine the proper question to ask. Once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.”
Let’s Go With Einstein
What if we’re asking the wrong questions about weight loss? Should we only be asking which trans fats we should eat? Or which foods have the lowest glycemic index? Or if they’re GMO? Or if keto is better than counting calories?
It’s not that these questions aren’t useful, but are they the ones we should be asking? Perhaps we’re better off redefining the problem so we can ask better questions. Here’s an example: What if the problem isn’t a lack of education but a lack of know-how?
Don’t most of us already know we should avoid fast food, processed foods, sodas, and juice drinks? Don’t we know we should be eating more fruits and vegetables? Don’t we know we should choose an apple over a donut?
What we don’t know is how to overcome the forces that prevent us from applying this knowledge. If we pursue this new line of inquiry then a slew of questions awaits us:
● How do I stop craving foods that are bad for me?
● How do I cut back on sugar when it’s in everything?
● How can I eat smaller portions of food without feeling deprived?
● How do I neutralize triggers to emotional eating?
● How can I get myself to like healthy foods?
● How do I say no to sweets without feeling cheated?
● How do I deal with overwhelming hunger pangs?
● How can I stop overeating?
● How do I resist unhealthy foods when billions are spent marketing them to me?
● How do I stop impulse eating?
● How can I more accurately gauge when I’m full?
● How can I change my body’s weight set point?
● How do I stop eating to comfort myself?
● How do I motivate myself to cook something healthy?
● How can I control my stress eating?
● How do I make myself eat an apple when I want a donut?
● How do I control compulsive eating behaviors?
● How do I stop using food as a coping mechanism?
● How do I tell the difference between cravings and hunger?
Clearly, these questions can’t be answered by what the diet industry specializes in: A list of foods to eat or avoid.
How in the world is eating more vegetables going to help you get control of emotional eating? How is going vegan or eating keto going to help you say no to desserts you’re dying to have? How is avoiding wheat or cutting out trans fats going to help you avoid a panic attack when you see what a small portion the restaurant just served you?
Knowing what to eat doesn’t help when you’re being trampled by The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Stress, Mood, Craving and Compulsion).
The emotional, psychological, physiological, and biological forces pressing on our food decisions are enormous. Yet the best advice the dieting world can give us is “eat less, exercise more”?
Tell that to the Four Horsemen galloping toward the blinking “HOT DONUTS” sign.
Our New, Redefined Problem
Going forward, we’re throwing our lot with Einstein’s observation that a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.
We’re abandoning the orthodoxy’s insistence that the problem is one of education. Instead, we are defining the problem this way: How do we stop what we already know we should stop and how do we start what we already know we should begin?
When my innovation consultants looked at the list of questions you see above, they rubbed their hands with glee. “These are terrific questions,” one said, “Not just because they seem to get at the heart of the matter but because they’re telling you where to look for innovative solutions.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” she said as she ran her finger down the list of questions, “A common thread seems to be the inability to control addictive cravings. Who, outside of the diet industry, deals with addiction?”
“Drug rehab specialists,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “Why don’t you start there?”
Answering New and Better Questions
The cross-science solutions you’re about to read are easy to implement but they do require effort. The good news is that you won’t suffer. You won’t obsess. You won’t be anxious. It won’t hurt. You won’t feel cheated or deprived. Or that you sacrificed too much.
You won’t have to shut your eyes and brace for impact every time you cross paths with a bucket of fried chicken. You won’t deprive yourself of favorite foods or white-knuckle your way through 5- alarm cravings.
But applying these cross-science solutions does require patience, a willingness to rearrange your thinking and create new eating habits.
The Immediacy Trap
The weight loss industry promises quick results the way Lucy promises to hold the football for Charlie Brown. Like our loveable cartoon character, we go for glory only to end up on our backs.
Why do we believe in quick fixes to problems that took a long time to form? According to epidemiologists at the CDC, Americans gain 1 or 2 pounds a year from early adulthood through middle age, with much of the increase concentrated in the 20s.
This means if you’re twenty pounds overweight it took an average of 10 to 20 years to get there. Why would you think you could shrink in a few weeks what took decades to expand?
To succeed you must come to terms with the fact that you won’t lose weight quickly. Got an upcoming event you want to slim down for—a high school reunion, a weekend at the beach, a keynote address? Forget it. Not going to happen.
Cross-science innovations don’t offer quick fixes; they offer gradual adjustments that lead to permanent change. It is here however, in the realm of permanent results, that you can find solace. For it is here that a bargain can be struck: A quick but temporary reduction in weight for a slow but permanent one.
If you’re willing to trade speed for permanency then it’s time to begin our journey. The first step is to heed innovation managers who insist that somebody else has solved our weight problem.
Let’s find out who.
A book about giving up diets and replacing them with methods stolen from different fields of science to ensure weight loss and sustaining it.
The book guides the readers into letting go of past beliefs, setting new intentions, being self-aware, making their own rituals, changing the perception of pleasure, managing cravings, getting off food addictions, controlling the brain, learning to crave better, healthy food, and eating less without feeling like it.
The book has a bit of a contradiction as it begins by assuring the readers that they will not have to give up on their favorite foods, then spends chapter after chapter teaching them how to give up on said foods. The book also suffers from a lot of repetition that take away from its directness.
On the other hand, the book backs its theories up with scientific explanations, statistics, and easy – to - follow formulas. The book is very detailed in exploring what is wrong with diets and why they do not work. The replacement is several methods that combine to form a new habit or way of thought and, ultimately, a healthier life style.
The author has clearly done a lot of research, and gives enough examples to make the ideas and methods in the book seem plausible. In fact, they appear to be simple and logical and fool – proof. Definitely worth trying!
This book will not only be found helpful by those wishing to lose weight, but also those aspiring for a better quality of life and healthier bodies. The methods and science explored can also be modified and used on other aspects of life.
I recommend this book to anyone who has ever struggled with diets and food and wants to try something new that promises the pleasure of both good food and a good body.